Last week I was standing around with a couple musicians of minimal acquaintance when one asked me what was my favorite guitar. It was a hard question, because I've gone through a period of not playing and because choosing one guitar is like choosing one child over the others.
I have some that are beautiful instruments; some that appeal to my sense of whimsy and experimentation; some that just sound great; some that evoke strong associations; some that...
Well, I should've known that the question was only a preamble to his telling me about his newest acquisition. But today, the answer presented itself: this '20s vintage Regal tenor guitar with banjo tuners.
Regal was a budget brand, and this guitar is pretty basic. Its top has a crack. No collector is going to salivate over it. But it's one of three guitars I keep within reach. Tuned to an inverted D chord — DADF# — it puts music under my fingers in a way nothing else does.
When I first saw this image next to a story about a David Byrne art/music project, I thought: "Oh no! Please don't tell me he needs to label the keyboard."
Expanding the image (click) made it even more disorienting — a Treason of Images image — at least to anyone who ever took piano.
The story explains the project, and the old organ's function as interface to the bones of a vintage waterfront building, but not the notation
system. Perhaps the labels represent the approximate pitches of the actuated columns, beams, radiators and pipes.
They’re driving long nails into coffins
You’ve been having sleepless nights
You’ve gone as quiet as a church mouse
and checking on your rights
The boss has hung you out to dry
And it looks as though
they’ll punish the monkey
and let the organ grinder go
I confess, I've been remiss in tracking a certain prodigal preacher's progress in resisting Sen. Charles Grassley's investigation of the Big Six prosperity gospel televangelists. Once Mac Hammond got his new plane from Kenneth Copeland, I moved on to other things.
But at the start of the week, Copeland — or his Washington tax attorney — responded a second time to the Grassley committee's request for information. The letter was a bit more temperate than Copeland's defiant stance at his minister's conference or in a letter to contributor/partners:
The enemy is not going to steal what the Lord has won
through this ministry, and he is not going to use this attack to bring
harm to the rest of the churches and ministries in America!
The attorney put it differently, but basically reiterated what Copeland has been saying: If you want my financial information, go ask the IRS for what it has. That will protect our rights as a church and safeguard the privacy of our information. Privacy is important, because
the Church is deeply concerned that the information Senator Grassley is
seeking could be used to subject the Church and its members to public
stigma, scorn, and obloquy.
Most obloquy slingers have managed to get along fine without Copeland's tax returns. But Grassley, being more serious than most bloggers, would like to see whether there's actual substantiation for the claims these ministers are enriching themselves in part by skirting the tax code.
You can see here what Copeland considers a stigma-proof level of financial accountability — a pie chart, showing proportional ministry expenditures but no totals, that is less detailed than one appearing on the web site prior to the inquiry. It's meaningless even to the faithful, who don't require even this level of reassurance.
If Grassley were to request the information from the IRS, about all he would see are tax returns, unless the IRS were to launch an actual investigation. Only an audit would have a chance of untangling the various enterprises of Kenneth Copeland Ministries (KCM), and Copeland and his lawyers know it.
In addition to rules prohibiting public disclosure of KCM's tax information there are rules governing the timing and extent of any IRS investigation. The IRS, with a greater workload driven by more complex schemes and fewer auditors, has to prioritize who it goes after, and a church isn't likely to be high on the list — even one running as close to the edge as this one.
The regulations that Grassley himself sponsored years ago were designed to protect legitimate churches from harassment while still being able to root out fake enterprises like a Church of Mortgage Flipping or Sucking Equity
Ministries. (Though a lawyer could contend that the real estate scamming seminars were church services, I'm sure.)
Basically, if Copeland gets his way, the church appears to comply and keeps its privacy. The Grassley inquiry still doesn't get the information it really wants. At least, that's a non-lawyer's reading of the latest legal response.
Lawyers aren't the only advisors who have been busy down Ft. Worth way. KCM has revamped its web site and filled it with some kinder, gentler information, including a little bit about Copeland's short, pre-Christian stint as a teen idol.
In 1957 at 20 years of age, with a hit album [sic; it appears to have been a single only], Pledge of Love, at
#14 on the national charts and #1 on the local charts Kenneth looked to
be on his way to a successful singing career appearing on American Bandstand and featured next to Ricky Nelson in Dig Magazine.
Copeland had a good voice. But the record was a reverb-drenched, do-wop-choir-backed, plodding pop ballad. It met the basic one-hit-wonder requirements of the era: A simple tune that can be learned on first hearing and sung by even the most musically challenged, coupled with lyrics that express obsessive longing. Lacking any specific description of the love object, it allowed the projection of universal, deeply sublimated, teenage sexual desire.
His attempt at Rockabilly with a Jimmy Lloyd tune went nowhere, and Copeland soon turned to God and gospel music. That's where his real pop idol success eventually came — translating the faithful longing theme to a different stage, and this time, singing of fulfillment instead of waiting.
Blowing into a 12 oz. Cold Hop beer bottle produces an F#. An empty 1 pint, 9.4 oz. Hennepin bottle blows an A. (I've noticed the Hennepin label also states two different alcohol/volume numbers — "Cellared at the brewery 7.5%" and 8.5%.)
However, striking the Cold Hop with a mallet gives a G#, while the Hennepin delivers an F. A Flying Dog Dogtoberfest 12 oz. bottle has a slightly different shape than the Cold Hop. It's difficult to distinguish a difference between the two when blown, but to my ear, the Dog is a 1/4 step or so lower when struck.
A wine bottle from Chateau La Gorce produces a jug band B. The struck note, though not as clear as I'd like, is also a B!
It's been a while since my piano was tuned, but I'll stand by my field observations until proven otherwise.
Musicologists and design engineers are hereby free to steal this idea for their thesis. From the rest of you, I expect sympathy or advice, but no interventions, please.
Five years ago, I sat alone in Grumpy's bar on Washington Avenue, scratching down some words:
If you're a bird you could do worse than Eveleth
The tamarack, it runs for miles
The water's clear since the mines ran down
And the sky...
Well, let's not talk about the sky
Cause the fire's still burning
A fire's still burning
Maybe I knew I was writing a song, but I rarely start lyrics without an instrument at hand. I think I was just trying to hold myself together.
I had known Paul Wellstone as his student in a Carleton American Government class, as a war protestor and activist, then later as a fellow marathon runner. When he ran for state auditor, I pretty much figured it was hopeless, but when he announced for the Senate race, I wrote my first check for a political campaign.
I tried to push back the choking feeling with an ironic tone:
There's never been much cause to go to Eveleth
Bob Dylan nearly came from there
But he left and you know you don't look back
If you're going now...
Well, let's not talk about going
Cause the fire's still burning
A fire's still burning
Wellstone didn't have to go to Eveleth. He was diverting from his Senate campaign on the day of a debate with Norm Coleman and skipping his own fundraiser in Minneapolis, to attend the funeral of state Rep. Tom Rukavina's father. What was really important to him wasn't always what the consultants said.
Maybe if he hadn't flow to Eveleth
Maybe if he hadn't tried so hard
Maybe if we knew what we all know now
Maybe...
Oh, let's not talk about it
Cause the fire's still burning
A fire's still burning
There's a very fine line between searing intensity and self-absorption. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish passion from ambition. There were times Paul could grate even upon his friends and colleagues, but there was no mistaking his caring and purity of spirit.
As a recording, "Eveleth" could've used revising and polishing after the fact, and the vocal track should've been recut. But I wanted to preserve the pulsing roughness, the tension between knowing/not knowing. This was a gulp of emotion, of trying not to dwell on what couldn't be changed and looking for what could.
As I wrote in a bar five years ago, the fire was still burning in TV footage from that obscure, lonely swamp.
I'll either be Dancing With Werewolves or reenacting Lord Grizzly today, but while I'm taking one for the team, you can be advancing the cause of citizen journalism.
*****
I'll head up to the blogger raku do bearing a quiver of Avery's Kaiser Imperial Oktoberfest, the best thing to happen to the cause of peace since the cultivation of tobacco.
*****
Went to the Annie Lennox concert at the State Theatre Thursday night. Although she and the Eurythmics provided significant cuts to my life's '80s soundtrack, I don't think I was square in the target demographic.
Not once did we feel compelled to cry "We love you, Annie!" Nor did our domestic partner arrangement have quite the same configuration as most. Also, we brought a little less enthusiasm for costumery, big screen close-ups of eye makeup and diva choreography.
It would probably also be wrong to note the occasional flap of Annie arm skin or that Liza Minelli self-absorption came to mind more than once.
Still, what great pipes and great songs. Lennox is a riveting stage presence with choreographed expressiveness that still seems to flow from the songs and the singer's emotional response. Britney should take Annie lessons.
Carina Round was the opener and hers was the disk I bought. Made me want to pick up guitar and sing kinda weird again. She'd fit right in at a 331 Club gig.
It was just one of those inane shout outs to the performer that some audience members feel compelled to interject into quiet moments. But something about it struck Patti Smith wrong.
The voice rang out as she was midway through her State Theater performance last night. Patti had been clutching the hands offered up from below the stage. With wailing clarinet and a six-decades howl, she'd put new depth into her cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?"
Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have
No longer about a world seen through drugs, she made the song about wisdom and survival. George Harrison's "Within You, Without You" spoke from the same place. So maybe Patti thought the woman wasn't paying attention.
Do I wanna rock & roll? You're watching me like a movie. I'm up here doing the best I can. If you wanna rock & roll, then rock & roll, but don't ask me if I wanna rock & roll.
Then she walked off the stage as the band played.
But soon after, she appeared down in the pit, surrounded by fans and dancing with them until it was time to climb back up on the stage and she did indeed rock & roll, turning the whole thing into a unifying, healing moment. We all stood for the rest of the concert.
She brought on local blues harp icon Tony Glover, then later was joined by Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner (sporting way too much butt crack) and Dan Murphy, plus a banjo player named Dave who Patti said they found playing on the street. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," like many of the night's covers, could just as well have been a Patti Smith original.
A punk poet my age doing covers dating back to the '60s and her own hits from a distant heyday may not seem a likely voice of the times. But Patti, wisely keeping any bridge collapse commentary out of her stage patter, wove the themes of unity and love in the face of decay into her anthems "People Have the Power" and "Rock & Roll Nigger," her final encore number.
She was one of my favorite artists in the '70s. I think she's better now.
Last week I was standing around with a couple musicians of minimal acquaintance when one asked me what was my favorite guitar. It was a hard question, because I've gone through a period of not playing and because choosing one guitar is like choosing one child over the others.
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