2011: GO WEST again

As a lot of you know, I've been thinking about the best ways to keep doing my own music in the current bizarre state of the music biz, where between the recession and downloading CD sales have dwindled down to nothing and the indie music community has been scattered into the tiniest fragments....and also now being a full-time musician, mostly working on other peoples' music, putting time into my own music can take money out of my own pocket.

I've been luckier than most -- I have a little following and three of my albums on Karma Frog actually turned a profit -- but it became obvious earlier this year that I couldn't keep doing things the way I had for ten years.

Part of what drove me to back-burner my own music was in 2009 I released an album called GO WEST. It was a 23-track double album with a continuous theme running through it. I thought then, and I still think, that it's the best work I've ever done, and perhaps will ever do. But it also became obvious that the album as a whole was just too much for a lot of people to take in -- if you weren't ready to dig in for the long haul, or accept the diversity of styles on it, it didn't seem to work for a lot of people. The ones that did get into it were the ones that had the time and patience to listen to it from beginning to end.

That said, even if the album as a whole was too big a pill to swallow, it contains some of the very best individual songs I ever wrote....a lot of them. And to me there's not much point in continuing to write songs if there's plenty of your best work that most people have never really heard.

So after a lot of thought, I've decided that in 2011 I have no plans to do any new writing other than what I'm asked to do for custom songs, the Standells, or whatever. What I want to do instead is refocus attention on the GO WEST album. I was so disheartened year ago by various things that I basically couldn't face promoting it, and I instead put out the HELLO CLEVELAND record as a white flag and pretty much gave up. I basically chickened out on GO WEST, and left the baby to drown. I've decided I can't move forward without first reaching back and fishing it out of the water.

Instead of beating my brains loose on the road, what I plan to do for GO WEST is put out a series of videos, highlighting the best songs on the album, one by one. What I hope is that people that might not have been able to get into the whole double album idea can get to know the album on a song-by-song basis and appreciate what's there. Since the album has a loose storyline, I think the songs will lend themselves really well to visuals.

The second video for the album, and the first in over a year, will debut later today. I am REALLY proud of how it came out. I hope you'll take the time to give it a look, and if you like it, to pass it on. And I hope over time, more and more of you will get to know GO WEST.

Oh...almost forgot. To encourage people to pick up this CD, I've dropped the price on my website for GO WEST to $9.99...and that includes postage. To order, just go to www.adammarsland.com/store.html. Amazon has it, too, and they have used copies going for pretty cheap.

I've got some down time this month and I'm hoping to be able to pick up a number of other threads I dropped a few months ago, including this blog and the bedroom session videos. I've just been so friggin' busy that until now I haven't had the spare creative energy to do this stuff. Thanks all for your patience.

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Almost ready to start this thing back up again...just give me...a few more hours...spare time....

Stand by, I have some good stories to tell...

Whitey go home

My dad -- a cantankerous small business owner who was an old-school conservative, which means back in the day when you could be thoughtful and intellectual without being excommunicated for "not being conservative enough" -- always had a great take on the immigration debate.

He used to say, "my opinion is, let everybody into the country that wants to work...and deport everybody that doesn't." He then went on to extoll the virtues of immigrants as laborers and the overall laziness of native-born Americans.

There's much in that viewpoint to piss off right and left alike, but even though I don't endorse his opinion, I sure find it refreshing. Because it's so...intellectually honest, and personally arrived at. Imagine that. I certainly can't imagine my dad, if he were alive, showing up at a Tea Party meeting and finding much of an audience for that sentiment.

I miss my dad's conservatism. But then, he grew up in a time when taking responsibility didn't just stop at the end of your driveway, and when people didn't have thousands of media outlets telling them exactly what to think.

Daily Snark

Ever post a comment that sums up how you feel so well, that you want to mark it down for future reference?

Here's mine for the day:

To arrive at a fact, you have to attempt to weigh information objectively and fairly. This is a concept that's now completely devalued and ridiculed in our society, which I find absolutely insane.

But I suppose it's BIASED of me to say so.

It's Hard Work

After another supremely irritating encounter with a few dittoheads on Facebook, I've decided I'd like to completely reorder the political divide in this country to what it truly is.

Instead of having a battle against liberals vs. conservatives, I propose a debate against:

1. People who realize the world is a complicated place, with many competing interests and ideas, and that actually solving problems requires real thought, commitment, and decisions that are always going to make some people unhappy; and

2. People who want to piss and moan, and offer simplistic solutions to everything, if they offer solutions at all. (One of the people I went off on actually said something like, "so I suppose if we all raised taxes and regulated everything, it would solve the job problem". I told the guy, accurately, that if I was writing a parody of someone with his viewpoint, that's about what I would have said)

This is what drives me absolutely, completely batshit insane about this country and I will come out and say it: why I still support Obama, for all the mistakes he's made (and I think the biggest one is not communicating better). Because Obama falls in to the #1 category. And from what I can see, all of his most vehement detractors fall into the #2 category. When you actually sit down and look through the situation in the country fairly, and look at how we got here without idealogical bias, it's a lot harder to beat up on the guy. In fact, from what I can see, what he has done has been...pretty much exactly what he said he would do, and he won the last election handily. Funny in all this "discussion" of socialism how no one ever talks about that. It seems like that's sorta relevant to me.

And until someone else steps up that really seems like he or she wants to understand the problems facing the country and not just yell and wave articles of faith at them that, in the real world haven't worked out so simply or easily (lower taxes! Freedom! Rah! OK, how low is low enough? What about ballooning the deficit? What about Clinton's tax hike that was partly responsible for balancing the budget? What about the fact that the Laffer curve has not worked out in actual practice? Reaction: Blank stare, or blanket denial. Because, ahem...low taxes!!! Freedom!!!!), that's the way it's going to stay. Because I don't see anybody stepping up on the horizon to replace Obama that I can take seriously. In fact, the mainstream now is people saying things that 10 years ago would have sounded certifiably insane and/or seditious. It's people who want to sit down and think things through that are the big joke. Or worse, people like me are now the ENEMIES OF THE COUNTRY. Right? RIGHT?

What I find absolutely maddening about the state of politics these days is that people don't even have real discussion anymore. The folks I argued with this morning just threw up straw men and argued with THEM. For my part, I pointed out that they obviously hadn't exposed themselves to any sources of information that didn't tell them what they already wanted to hear.

There are, I hope, millions of people in America that are like me: basically moderate, and fed up with the fact that doing things, you know, rationally and pragmatically, doing things not because we believe in them real hard but because they verifiably WORK in practice, is out of fashion now and extremists are taking up all the air. I tend to take the liberal position in arguments just because most of the time, people are so full up with talking points from Fox News that they've never even heard anything else, but really what I want to hear is the ideas bump up against each other and let the best one win. I started seeking out alternate news sources years ago not because I wanted to be convinced I was right, but because I wanted to hear the debate, and I realized I was being prevented from hearing it!

Nearly everything I saw or heard in the media where two sides squared off against each other was carefully choreographed so that I basically learned...nothing. To actually figure out what was going on, I had to dig very hard to find real logical, rational point-counterpoint that withstood critical thought. And when I did that I realized a lot of things I had accepted because "everyone knew" they were true -- from the "liberal media" thing all the way down...was a pile of unadulterated crap designed to keep us all at each others' throats. And after 7 or 8 years of this, with the evidence of it piling up all around us, I cannot understand why more people still fall for it. The only explanation I can think of is people cannot stand to be wrong (myself, I would desperately love to be wrong about this, but nearly all the evidence so far points the other way, unfortunately). And all I can say to that is, I wish more people spent some time alone thinking trying to disprove their own point to themselves, before trying to prove it to someone else.

I know, what? Who does that?

Now we're a nation of people that bemoan how polarized we've become, while at the same time trashing the very ideal that enabled us to come together in the first place; the idea that diversity and tolerance are good, and that the other guy might have a point, and by considering that person's unique perspective, we make the country stronger. That's how we GOT here, people. It wasn't from all getting in our little idealogical teepees and closing our ears and crying, like Eddie Murphy in TRADING PLACES, "yah, yah, yah, I'm not listening to you!"

Here Comes The '70s Show!

Next Tuesday I, with the help of the Chaos Band, am going to be putting on the fourth installment of "Adam's '70s Show" at the tiny westside Americana joint known as the Cinema Bar.

For those not in the loop, the idea is to bring together various people in the roots and pop communities in L.A. and invite them up with the band to sing a '70s song of their choice. They can pick any song they like, as long as it's not ridiculously complicated (e.g. ELP or Zappa), and provide us with an mp3 if we don't have it.

It took people a while to catch on the possibilities of this concept, but they've caught up now. We have something like 20 guests on tap for Tuesday, and most of them have been very -- um, creative about their song choices. Since the band has roughly four two-hour rehearsals to learn 17 or 18 new songs, some of them quite complicated, that along with the heat has created a pleasant little Chaos Band pressure cooker in our little garage, as we blast through these songs as fast we can, making sure we get to all of them before the time runs out. Together with retuning songs from other shows, my solo set, and Chaos-performed '70s covers, we figure there will be upwards of three dozen '70s songs performed.

As I posted on my Facebook page, one guest requested a Steely Dan tune that turned out to be quite simple. Another guest requested a Partridge Family tune that turned out to be ridiculously complex (and never mind those six-part harmonies). In terms of difficulty of the material, this is easily the most challenging '70s show yet, but the band is making a pretty fair first of pulling it all together. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you actually have to.

It always fascinates me the songs people pick out for this thing, stuff I would never think of. There's not a lot of country music chosen...the closest thing this time is a pretty fingerpicking singer-songwritery hit, where I get to further expand my newly developed fingerpicking skills (I learned for the first time at the Alex Chilton show). There's yet another Van Morrison tune, but no one's complaining about that. Shockingly, Supertramp, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones were requested for the very first time. But my favorite of all of the requests, for the second show in a row, came from Brian Whelan. Last time he picked out an obscure Fleetwood Mac tune, "I Know I'm Not Wrong." This time it was an absolute classic of Memphis soul. Every time we play the midsection of this song, everyone in the band smiles and starts to relax. I said to Evie, "every time we hit the bridge I remember why I started playing music" and she grinned, "yeah! Me too!"

I love the challenge of learning new material. It seems all I do these days is learn songs, but I don't mind. I play so much now that I surprise myself at what I can do (and sometimes what I can't...I had to woodshed for a day or so to be able to play one electric piano lick by that great prog rock pianist, Richard Carpenter), and what makes certain songs tick.

In the midst of all the '70s show activity, and me looking with some grimness at my dwindling bank balance, an unexpected though very cool opportunity has come up. Unfortunately, I won't be able to say what it is for about three weeks. But if it comes to pass, I think it will be a surprise to quite a few people.

In the meantime, don't miss Adam's '70s Show next Tuesday at the Cinema Bar....

A Tale Of Two Compliments

I got one of those major confidence boosters in an e-mail the other day. Adam Exler, my last client at the Karma Frog studio, had passed on the CD I produced for him to one of his tennis students, a recent Grammy-winning producer/artist with a lot of highly respected cutting edge work to his credit, one of those heavy hitters who actually makes good music. Adam reported that:

"He said the CD is fantastic! He has it on loop in his car and has listened to the whole CD over twice already. He said the songs, production, vocals, arrangements are great...He said that he usually only likes the music he does, but was more than pleasantly surprised by this CD."

I felt very pleased reading that...this was, after all, the first album I recorded and mixed entirely on my own, as well as playing about 70% of the instruments, and to get that kind of praise (albeit indirectly) from a guy of that stature felt pretty cool. But after the initial reaction, I started to feel a little down about it.

It's just that I've gotten these kinds of props before. I've had all kinds of back-channel communication that has left me feeling validated, knowing that successful and talented people think I did good work, and benefiting from the self-confidence and trust in one's own judgment that that inspires. The problem, though, is that's usually all the real practical good it does. You acquire a sense that you're talented, that your ideas are sound, that you don't suck, and that enables you to move forward.

But the word, at least in my own experience, doesn't tend to spread. It's an idle thought that's there and gone. It's kind of like when NPR/Entertainment Weekly writer Ken Tucker -- a heavy hitter in his field for sure -- told the president of Big Deal that Cockeyed Ghost's "Disappear" (which I wrote) was the greatest driving song ever written. From a writer of that statute and taste, that was a wonderful thing to hear. Except that Tucker never told anybody else, never wrote about it or talked about it on air. So no one ever heard that opinion and I couldn't put it in the press kit. In fact, I don't think I've ever mentioned it anywhere other than this blog right now. What would have been the point? If I say it, it just sounds like I'm bragging on myself.

Now, yesterday the casino tribute gig -- the one I was complaining about last week where I had to work out a song from "Funny Girl" by ear -- came and went, and it was an exceedingly good time, other than having to get up at 7 a.m. to drive to San Bernardino. I was part of a four-piece pit band (along with the ubiquitous track) that backed a succession of tribute artist imitators who ranged from very good to spectacular. In the words of the bass player, "we got derailed a few times but there were no trainwrecks," and a good time was had by all. As for the nature of the gig itself, the quote of the week was the MC's acerbic recap of his own introduction from the stage: "Ladies and gentlemen, Rod STEWART! (pause) O-47. B-11."

Speaking of whom, the Rod Stewart imitator was awesome. For the first time I understood how good a tribute act could be -- the guy was all over the stage, a ball of energy, interacting with the crowd AND the band, looking and sounding so much like Rod the Mod that it really was like having the same experience (until we got offstage, where the incongruous Midwestern drawl of his speaking voice gave the game away).

The best thing about this gig for me was that I was surrounded by people that are working ALL the time, and for someone who's suffering through a slow summer, I was extremely happy to have an opportunity to show off what I could do and give away some cards. Quasi-Rod was highly complimentary about the band, singling me and the bass player out for praise, and in the dressing room he talked excitedly and at length about bringing us into his backing band to replace long-standing members who had decamped for better job prospects in the midwest.

So here's my point. You would think that, between getting props for my production and arrangement work from a Grammy award winning producer at the absolute top of the heap, and getting props for playing along to a track by a Rod Stewart imitator, I'd be more excited by the former than the latter.

But I'm not. Every artist who's been working for a long time knows that he or she may be just one good break, one high profile gig, one big shot of media exposure, from mass recognition. But the basic fact is most of us that are half-decent and have been around awhile have a collection of these "near misses" on our resumes. It's great for your ego and sometimes, it keeps you going a little longer. But 99% of the time, that big break that you know is possible doesn't come to pass, and unless this producer happens to need an apprentice or someone to do demo work for him (assuming he even computes that someone else produced the album), it will probably be the same in this case.

The good words from notRod, however, sound like they may lead to real, paying work. And that's the beauty of becoming a working musician first and an artist second. Knowing you're good, and that people think you're good, is wonderful. But you come to learn that translating that into a tangible payday is the real trick.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

I was never a slut because I didn't want to find the one right person. I was a slut because I wanted to find the one right person, and never could.

...with no apologies to James Joyce. He talked too much.

First Impressions

For various reasons, the last five years have been isolating for me. First I got sick, then there seemed to be a new drama to deal with every ten minutes, and then being a full-time musician meant spending a lot of time alone in my house in the not-so-bustling creative hub of the West San Fernando Valley. The last several months I've been on a tear to try new things, explore socially, and go out of my way to meet new people.

This has mostly been great, and I've got enough new acquaintances from various walks of life that I've become fond of, and don't get to see often enough, that I'm considering starting back up the long-dormant parties at my house. What used to make these so great was bringing people from different scenes and social circles that would have things in common but would never meet each other and getting them in one place to interact. The '70s Shows have been doing this a little, too. It's something I seem to be able to do well and it's rewarding to see people making connections they otherwise wouldn't make.

The thing that's been a bit awkward for me, though, is finding my social groove in a lot of these situations. I'm out of practice and my inner Bill Clinton ("hi how are ya!") doesn't always surface when I want him to, and it doesn't always help that a lot of the places I'm hanging out are full of "normal" (e.g. non-musician/acting/bohemian) people, and my mere presence, a tall, bleach blond guy of indeterminate age, seems to put some of them ill at ease, which then puts ME ill at ease.

I've always been kind of a quirky guy, and I've gotten used to the fact that it just takes a while to get to know me and these things take time...but if you're in a new situation with a bunch of people you don't have a lot in common with you have to take some kind of a tack. Sometimes you get lucky and find your tribe and it's all good, but if not, you're left with an interesting choice: do you just be yourself and let others deal with it as they may, or do you put on your mask and try to fit in and wait 'til people get used to you.

Now, before you give me the knee jerk "just be yourself", think about this a second. Every time we meet new people we don't tell them every innermost secret we have. We say "hi, my name is Joseph Blow" and that's that. There's an expectation in any social situation that you play it cool until you suss out the situation, and then slowly work your way in.

The problem I run into is I can play this game, but after a while it gets so boring. It may just be that I'm hanging with the wrong crowds, but it winds up being really unsatisfactory to play it safe socially a lot of the time. People are afraid to initiate conversations, or get the wrong impression when you initiate them yourself, or when you do get talking, a lot of the time you're not really saying anything (or just listening without being asked to offer much more than a "hmm, OK, I understand"). If you do get down to an interesting topic, it's not long before you're venturing very close to the boundaries of someone's comfort zone...which brings us back where we started.

When I was younger sex used to be one of the main ways I connected with people. Don't get me wrong, I still like sex, but sex without a connection of some kind gets old and feels weird. And I find making a connection can be a lot harder than getting sex ever was.

What do you think? When you're plopped in a crowd of strangers, what's your play?

A Whole New Reason to Hate Barbra Streisand

I may be, according to some of my lesbian friends, "queer," (personal to straight folks and gossip hounds: it doesn't mean what you think it means) but ambiguous definitions of sexuality notwithstanding, I can't get in touch with my inner gay man in one key respect: I am hating me some Barbra Streisand right now.

It's a slow month, and one of the gigs on the calendar is with a show band at a casino. This means I have to come to grips with something I've managed to dodge 'til now: show tunes.

I like most kinds of music, but show tunes -- or basically anything that reminds me of the post-Vaudeville Dixieland stuff I was forced to watch as a tyke in an endless stream of '70s variety shows that aired in prime viewing time -- leave me as cold as an icicle. Still, a gig's a gig.

But that's not what's irritating me about ol' Babs, nor is it her making liberals look bad or that she beats up on her maid or her duets with Barry Gibb, or whatever her sin du jour is these days. It's the simple fact that her songs are all almost impossible to work out by ear. Nine zillion piece orchestras, key changes, songs that have so many discrete sections you just about use up the alphabet trying to keep track of them, not a single instrument playing the fundamental or even being able to discern what the hell the root is. I don't feel particularly bad about admitting this because even the musicians who played it were reading sheet music. They didn't know it either! I can barely read, but even I would prefer the little back dots on a page to trying to reduce this mass of blowsy counterpoint to something resembling a coherent piano part.

Not that it matters anyway...at this gig we're playing to tracks, so it's really a cut above lip syncing...but even so, I have to be able to get through the song if the tape takes a crap, and I have to play something that's not going to clash with what's there. So it just means the stakes are lower if I screw up. But it's not any less work.

At least Liza Minelli has the decency to pick songs with a discernible repeating chord pattern. Ah, but Barbra, it all has to be larger than life with you, doesn't it?

It may get me banned from some of my favorite haunts on Santa Monica Blvd., but Babs, I hate you.

OH. MY. GOD.

You know how someone else just completely sums up something that you've experienced so perfectly, you don't have to say a word?

Behold:

Hey Mr. Bass Man, Now I'm A Bass Man Too

So last night was the big British Invasion shindig down at the Cinema Bar. This is one of those nights where a bunch of musicians get together and trade off on a particular thing at this musician-friendly dive bar on the west side, and after spending a lot of time watching the musicians from the audience, it was cool to be invited to be a part of it. In fact, much to my surprise, I think I wound up playing more than anybody else did with the exception of the drummer and guitar player (the very talented Stephen Patt, who was the de facto music director for the evening), I got to do a couple of songs on my own (two Elton John numbers, since I knew the dearth of keyboard players meant no one else was going to go there), played some mellotron patches for Mark Davis, did guitar for Rich McCulley, and played bass on a very cool freakbeat number for Susan James by a '60s artist I'm not familiar with named Sharon Tandy, with a very impressive backing by Les Fleur Des Lys, British contemporaries who I had heard some stuff by. Check this out:



Anyhows, my little turn on the bass went fine I guess, because after I'd done all I was scheduled to do Steve came up and asked if I was going to be hanging around. I said sure, and he asked me if I could play bass for the closing set. I did, and it was a blast. I wound up being up there for about an hour, functioning as house bass player for the remaining acts, following the changes, reading charts, and just holding things down, even adding a harmony when I knew the tune. I haven't played much bass live over the years for various reasons, and in fact I only just learned how to play with my fingers during recording for GO WEST, and I played bass on most of the Adam Exler album. Since going pro, I hadn't really tried very hard to get bass gigs for myself just because I'd never actually sat down and done it...there's a lot more to being a good bass player than just playing the notes in time. There's also the ability to b.s. well when you get lost, because if the bass drops out the entire band falls apart. You don't know how good you are at making a vague rhythmic sound on the bass while you're trying frantically to find the root until you're onstage in the thick of it and you absolutely have to do it.

Anyway, I had plenty of opportunities to test these skills last night and I found out I'm just fine at it. It's the first time I did a whole set on bass in years (Nelson Bragg: "I've never seen you play the bass." Me: "I know how. Just no one ever asked me before"), and it is so much more fun to play bass with your fingers than with a pick. It really locks you in to the music, and roots you...you're not a guitar player playing bass anymore, you're playing bass. It's also good that I've been doing so much bass in the studio lately, because that's a much more exacting environment than playing live, so it was a lot easier than I thought.

Bass also suits how I feel about music really well, because it's such a fundamental, background instrument. It's the "do your duty" position in the band. If you have a huge ego, chances are you will be a bad bass player. If you want to be a bass player, you have to care about the groove and the music first and foremost. And that's the right mental place to be.

And as a pleasant reminder of my four-stringed excursion last night, my right forefinger has a huge blister on it. But seriously, I live for this stuff now. Making a living as a full-time musician has forced me to step out of my comfort zone and try my hand at all kinds of things, and I love the challenge and the learning of it. There's nothing I like better than being onstage with a bunch of seasoned musicians and my job is to keep up. And the best part is, it gives me one more potential avenue of work, and I need all of those I can get!

It was a great night of music -- kudos to Bill for setting it up and all the acts that played and made it such a friendly and fun evening -- and lots of fun for me getting to try out different roles and also helping other people sound better. That's my favorite thing about sideman work -- focus on the fundamentals and on the music and on the communal part of being a musician, and ironically, I got way more props from the crowd for just doing my job than I usually do when I'm the front guy. I think that's really cool. Having said that, ironically, the one instrument I didn't wind up playing last night was the drums, and the only potential work to immediately follow out of the evening was a possible fill-in drumming gig! How weird is that?

#1,000,000 With A Bullet

I just made a new video for the HELLO CLEVELAND album! And it's pretty funny!



I'm glad Teresa and Jon look so good in this video, because I look like shit...we did it the last day of tour in March and I had about ten pounds of road fry and paunch, which I've since shed, thank heaven. Vanity aside, though, isn't this cool? We did it on location, as they say, in beautiful Bethlehem, PA, as is appropriate for such an east coast-centric album.

This is the second official video from HELLO CLEVELAND, and the fifth song from the album to be represented on youtube. Despite this, the album is now ranked at #1,000,000 on amazon. (I'm serious! Check it out!) The irony is you'd think an album with a song called "A Town Called Asshole" on it would fly off the shelves, but I've learned since then that a lot of people didn't realize I had another album out after GO WEST. Not surprising since it appeared out of nowhere and it's not like I did much to promote it...I wrote all the songs in the van while in a pissy road mood and we recorded them all in a studio in the Ohio 'burbs in the space of eight hours...but it's gotten pretty high marks from those folks that possess it, somewhat to my surprise, but I don't argue with what people like.

I've been thinking about new ways to get my music out there, and I'm thinking that once I get the hang of the video thing, I'd like to do film of the whole GO WEST album. Like, a video for each song. Just start at the beginning and work my way to the end. There's not a song on the album I can't get behind, and I feel like when that album came out, it was just too much for people to process. If I made 23 videos for the album, and they were good, that would give people a chance to take it one song at a time, and it would keep the album alive for a long spell. What do you think?

To dry run this theory, here's a playlist of songs from HELLO CLEVELAND I just put up on youtube. If you feel motivated to pick up a copy, I offer you the choice of two websites:
Adam Marsland website
amazon.com

End of shill. :) Hey, I do have a job besides blogging.

Dr. Nu, I Hate You

Dr. Nu, I Hate You
Dr. Nu, I Hate You
Dr. Nu, I Hate You
I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
I Do, I Do, I Do
---Dr. Nu, Martin Luther Lennon (2000)

Those folks that know me well know that I've been battling a mysterious, ill-defined medical problem for the last five years. It's a problem that affects my neck, sinuses, ears, jaw and throat to varying degrees -- I know more or less what happens, I just don't know exactly why or what's a cause or an effect. It affects my hearing, my ability to sing, and sometimes my ability to breathe. From 2005-2008 I went to about two dozen doctors of various specialties, had three surgeries, and generally became fed up with the diagnostic abilities of the entire medical system. The longer I lived with this thing and the more I was able to track down what it was, the less the doctors actually listened or believed me, until it got to the point where this was the standard exchange:

"What seems to be happening is this, this and this," (me)

"What you're describing is medically impossible," (doctor)

"Well, that's what it feels like. Give me a better explanation." (me)

"I don't want to argue with you..." (doctor)

I finally shined doctors entirely, decided to ignore everything a doctor ever told me, and just focused on doing what my body seemed to respond well to. And guess what? I got a lot better. I still had to spend a lot of time managing the problem, but it became a nuisance to work around rather than something that was ruining my life.

So about six weeks ago I started getting massive drainage out of my left ear. The whole thing had started with an ear infection that didn't get treated, and one of the theories of mine (not the doctors', because they were never very good at diagnoses that actually fit the symptoms) was that the infection had gotten holed up in some obscure place around the ear and never got out. Now it looked like it was getting out, which was good, but it did require me to go back to the doctors for antibiotics and try to explain the whole damn saga again. I did get the antibiotics, but the drainage went on for three solid weeks before it finally stopped. By that time I'd gone through the usual course of events with them: initial optimism, then doubt, then that glazed look in their eyes as I told them more about the problem and they referred me to the House Ear Clinic ("the finest ear specialists in the country" who did a craptastic job treating me in 2005 and by refusing to believe there was an infection were one of the main reasons the whole thing snowballed), or the UCLA TMJ Clinic to get further evaluation.

I had always had UCLA's TMJ Clinic in the back of my mind as a place that MIGHT actually get to the bottom of the problem, since they're supposedly used to thinking out of the box, but I booked the appointment with a great deal of trepidation. Just thinking about trying to explain this to doctors stresses me out. It always goes pretty much about the same way:

1. The doctor asks you what you're there for. Since the problem extends over five years, a whole bunch of crazy symptoms, and things that correlate that I already know the doctor won't believe have anything do with one another, it's nearly impossible to get it down to a nice little soundbite.

2. You try to explain it as much as possible. The doctor interrupts you with a few questions, gets a dubious look in his eyes, then cuts you off at about the three minute mark.

3. Physical examination, or a checklist. The doctor has his or her usual shtick that they go through.

4. "Everything looks OK except ____________." The doctor then fixates on the one thing he sees that is wrong, and offers up a preliminary diagnosis based on that one isolated symptom. At that point he starts talking about a test for this one thing, or referring you to someone else that specializes in that. He will at no point attempt to correlate that to anything you've described yourself, nor will he accept that any two symptoms that you have described are in any way related to one another.

5. I shoot down the doctor's theory as something I've already looked into and ruled out, and give him a few more factoids to try to get him back on track to what I've come in for. The doctor starts to get that glazed look in his eyes.

6. The doctor basically says he can't treat anything he can't see, and everything he sees looks fine. You ask how you are supposed to proceed. He says dubiously that there's this other doctor you could see, and they might be able to help, but there's basically nothing he can do.

I'm posting this because this is exactly what went down today at UCLA. I wonder if these guys have any idea how similar they all are, how they all have the exact same myopic approach to a problem, how little information they actually gather, how much they will rely on tests and personal observation without giving the patient report much thought at all, and most of all, how little imagination any of them actually have. I understand all the reasons for this -- honestly, I do -- but it's like each one of them thinks they invented the wheel. I actually told the guy today, dude, you guys are all the same. I've been down this road already. I need an investigation, a diagnosis, some thought put into what would account for all the myriad symptoms I've tried to lay before you. What I got was a shrug.

When you deal with something for a long time, you really get tired of it. Not just living with it, but talking about it, having your friends roll their eyes any time you talk about it (and who can blame them), but even more than that, you feel like everyone is judging you for not having taken care of the problem already. "You STILL are having those problems?" someone will say, and I know they're thinking I'm one of those cranks that won't take care of themselves.

Well, I tried, repeatedly, and I never had significant improvement until I started abandoning, even ignoring, doctors' advice. Because the fact is, I have met very few doctors who are worth a damn diagnostically. They're great at setting bones and prescribing antibiotics, but they are piss-poor detectives. I might try eastern medicine at some point, because systemic approaches have worked really well, but I have no further plans to see any western doctors for this problem. It has been a waste of time and money and more than that, I've gotten much healthier on my own than I ever did when I trusted them. And I've been on a particular upswing the last few weeks, so who knows, maybe I'll take this thing out on my own? Screw 'em.

Whenever I hear of a friend that has a non-specific condition that they're trying to track down, I always wince inwardly, because I know that, like most sensible people, they will lay the problem before their doctor and trust them. As far as it goes, that's fine. But I also know that for far too long, if their body tells them one thing and the doctor tells them something else, they will keep trusting the doctor. And I have learned that is a bad move, and sometimes, a fatal one.

Down On Jump Street!

Being the pop culture Luddite that I've been lately, and wanting out of that, I've gotten into the habit of finding one show on the 'net and following it from beginning to end (or until I get bored) in the wee hours of the morning when I'm winding down with a glass of wine, yoga stretches or an ice pack. I tend to alternate between current shows (Bones, superb) and old shows I missed the first time around (I Spy, Robert Culp was a fucking genius). The latest one I've been watching, on hulu.com (and, for the fourth season, youtube), is the '80s crime drama 21 Jump Street, which is slated for a big-screen reboot in 2011 with Jonah Hill at the helm.

Jump Street is notable for launching, from humble beginnings, two of the great media giants of the new millenium: the Fox Network and Johnny Depp. It's remembered vaguely for the glittery, scrubbed look of its stars: a sort of younger, prettier version of Miami Vice. I myself had never watched it in its heyday; I didn't have cable then.

In fact, I had only ever seen one episode front to back, quite by accident, and it was the memory of this episode that peaked my interest, because it was a jaw-dropping hour of television, one of the best single episodes of any show I had ever seen, not to mention an acting tour de force by Depp. It was this one ep -- more on this later -- that prompted me to start watching the series last month, as well as maybe wanting to cure myself of any lingering '80s nostalgia for my teen years.

The pilot episode introduces us to the Jump Street quartet -- fresh faced, naive Tom Hanson (Depp), big lug Doug Penhall (Peter DeLuise, Dom's son and now Stargate director), African-American preppy-hottie Judy Hoffs (Susan Robinson [Peete], later of Hangin' With Mr. Cooper), and Asian pretty boy Harry Aoki (Dustin Nguyen, now a martial arts star here and in his native Vietnam). Mentoring them all for the first five episodes is an annoying ex-hippie type played by film actor Frederic Forrest.

The Jump Street program is supposedly a pilot program run out of an old church that puts young-looking police officers into undercover situations in an unnamed American city that seems to hop from the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast and then into some kind of alternate-universe annexed part of Canada (the show was actually shot in Vancouver and there are endless, obvious shots of British Columbia licenses plates throughout the series' run).

The city itself seems to have an unlimited number of school districts so that our heroes can "transfer" in, make friends with the students in an impossibly short span of time, crack the case and get out...something the series begins to address towards the end of the second season, by which time our crew has been in, oh, about 40 school districts.

The above paragraphs sum up the premise, and the inherent flaws in it, pretty well. And the pilot episode, shown in two parts, was absolutely godawful. Imagine if you will a Johnny Depp that cannot act his way out of a paper bag, and who gets no help from the rest of the cast, nor the hackneyed TV-movie script. The opening and closing credits were cheesy beyond belief (this was Fox's first hit show, and the money presumably wasn't there for something better) and as for the music -- I know that much of the original, period music was changed out for the DVD version, but enough remains for me to tell you that the guy that did the music cues for the show definitely owned a Roland Juno-61. The opening theme song did give us an admirable display of team spirit -- Robinson sang the idiotic lyrics, with Depp and DeLuise doing an enthusiastic job on the backup vocals. The theme song, along with a lot of other things, got revised in the second season with a better vocal and the most egregious lyrics dropped.

The series limped along for its first few shows, with Depp still not being Depp and Robinson's extreme cuteness being the only really watchable thing going among all the cheeseball afterschool special-ness. I wondered how this could possibly be the same show that spawned the one episode I'd remembered seeing years ago -- had I been drunk?

And then, a funny thing happened. Six episodes in, in an unexpected show of chutzpah the series was to display more and more frequently, they killed off one of the main characters. Forrest's annoying ex-hippie was worm food, and in comes temperamental badass (and much more believable undercover cop) Adam Fuller (Stephen Williams) to clean house, and the tomb-like Jump Street chapel that previously housed just the five main characters becomes a bustling hub of activity for all manner of kiddie-faced teens in blue. The four well-scrubbed cops who up to this point had lived a pleasant, poorly-written idllyic existence were about to come face to face with gritty '80s reality.

No sooner had they heaped dirt on Forrest's tie-dye T-shirt than Hoffs and Hanson (and later Penhall, who gets inside by delivering pizzas!) had to contend with being undercover in an entire school being taken over by gang members. The still-green Hanson blows his cover almost instantaneously and is reduced to making tut-tut platitudes to wear at the increasingly frayed nerves of the gang leader, and it's up to Hoffs to hoochie him up and get herself into the getaway car, where she makes the bust on her own. (Robinson is the most consistently watchable part of the first season...unfortunately, she's also the first of the characters to wear out her welcome, and she's the only person in the series for the entirety of its five-year run) It all felt pretty contrived, but even so, the spectre of the virginal Hoffs character having to play a game of sexual chicken with the loony gang leader to maneuver herself, and then him, into a vulnerable position is pretty gripping stuff.

The series ups the ante again very soon afterward, with "Blindsided" -- a good title because throughout the first half of the episode I couldn't believe they were going to go where they went with it. Hanson, undercover as one of the "McQuaid Brothers," amusing JD personas Depp and Deluise would reprise regularly throughout the show, gets approached by a female high school student to kill off her dad. Depp, incredulous, begins to do some background checking, and it slowly becomes apparent that her father is both a highly-ranked police officer but is also molesting her. The show slowly ramps up to a gripping conclusion where Hanson goes to bust the dad, and winds up in a struggle where he accidentally shoots him. Depp's character starts to get interesting at this point...his Tom Hanson had started his metamorphosis into the highly conflicted, deeply compassionate but rigidly stoic character that Depp's portrayal would make so fascinating as the series progressed.

The show steadily improves for the remainder of the first season and into the second, but remains incredibly uneven...almost every show had moments of greatness that alternated schizophrenically with moments of head-slapping cheesiness. One early highlight was the Depp showcase first season closer "Mean Streets and Pastel Houses," where Hanson goes undercover to investigate the punk rock subculture, and finds himself strangely drawn to it and genuinely curious about the motivations of the people in it. The plot is crap, but the tonality of the scenes and shots and the slice-of-life interactions between Depp and the other punks feels more like a low-budget indie film than a prime time TV show. Agent Orange even did the music...and we for the first time start to glimpse the alienation and nascent disillusionment that would make the Hanson character more and more interesting, even as Depp's interest in the part waned.

Indeed, as the series starts to deepen, moral choices become murkier, and the actors find their feet in the middle of season two, the genuine strength of 21 Jump Street begins to manifest. All four of the main characters seem pleasant, vacuous and well balanced on the outside -- but they all are basically products of dysfunctional or non-existent family environments (only Hoffs had an intact family unit; all the others had experienced a violent death of a parent), and for all their '80s preening and glitter, they really were just very moral, fundamentally lonely people who wanted most of all to believe in and work towards the best of humanity and create a new, stable family unit for themselves.

That's what makes the 21 Jump Street brand of grittiness in its own way as compelling as, say, NYPD Blue or one of its brethren. You have these four kids who want to believe the world, and the people who live in it, are better than the circumstances they grew up in...and as their job proves them wrong, time and time again, you see the initially spunky, playful characters -- the kind of people who you would expect nothing bad to ever happen to -- wear down before our eyes.

No one epitomizes this better than Depp's Hanson character, and the series -- and Depp -- rocket into greatness in the middle of season two with the show I had accidentally witnessed years earlier, "Orpheus 3.3." The show had already aired several strong eps that upped the characterization ante, including "Christmas In Saigon" (where Ioki was revealed to not be Japanese [duh] but Vietnamese, with much of the show flashbacking his experience as a refugee). There was also "A Big Disease With A Little Name", a deeply affecting episode about AIDS which surprised me by revealing, midway through the episode, that its sympathetic main character had contracted the disease through gay sex and not through a blood transfusion. At that time, this distinction was a big deal -- setting us up for a Ryan White situation, cutting it out from under us, and then daring us and Depp's character, to draw a moral distinction between the two -- which makes the final man hug between Depp's somewhat homophobic Hanson and the dying teen one of the most moving things I have ever seen on television. "Orpheus" was immediately preceded by "I'm OK, You Need Work," where Hanson goes undercover to help one of his early busts that's now locked down in an abusive teen rehabilitation clinic. In what would soon become a 21 Jump Street hallmark, there is an unhappy ending for all and Hanson once again wonders how much good he's really doing.

But "Orpheus 3.3" tops them all, an absolutely stunning piece of television and Depp's debut as a major actor, with solid support from the entire cast, especially Robinson (only the role of the villain is a trifle overplayed). The setup is that Depp is ready to ditch his girlfriend (introduced, in another example of the series' surprisingly good continuity, several episodes before and appearing in the background in the interim, thus building rapport and sympathy with the audience), but doesn't want to be the bad guy. Penhall, now Hanson's partner and BFF, advises Hanson to behave like a jerk so that his girlfriend will dump him. Hanson doubts this will work, saying "she's too even tempered" and then, in a funny scene inside the car on their way to a dinner date, proves himself right.

After bickering, the couple decides to pick up food to go at a local convenience store. While the girlfriend is in back picking out munchies, Depp and the clerk are suddenly confronted by a tense, gun-wielding robber. In a teeth-gritting scene, Depp's eyes dart from the gun to an overhead mirror, where he sees the girlfriend happily picking out groceries, as oblivious to the robber's presence as he is to hers. Just as the robber is about to bolt with the money, the girlfriend comes up to the line and calls Hanson's name. The robber whirls around and shoots her dead on the spot, to the impotent undercover cop's horror.

The remainder of the episode is a study of the initially stoic, but deeply guilt-ridden, Hanson character coming apart at the seams as he obsesses over the murder. He betrays the trust of his friends and captain and trashes his own career, unable to lose the grip of the event on his psyche, all the while existing in a state of utter denial as he becomes, undeniably, insane -- in a truly demented sequence he even hallucinates himself, gangsta revenge style, into a Run-DMC video. There are a few plot contrivances along the way, but the show is so incredibly well-acted that it just doesn't matter. When the show finally reaches its inevitable conclusion, at first it seems a little too much like a happy ending, until the final bit of dialogue between Hanson and Fuller, where it becomes clear that Depp's character will never be the same.

From this point until the beginning of season four, the series is simply oustanding. Depp pulls off a similar spiraling tour de force in "Swallowed Alive" (3x9), where Hanson and the rest of the crew are undercover in a juvenile detention facility. One by one, all the other cops are removed from the picture, leaving Hanson to contend with the Lord Of The Flies situation completely on his own. Depp's portrayal of the stone-faced Hanson coming apart from within as he contends with the threat of death, prison rape (yes, they go there), and the guilt at seeing the final, violent, hopeless outcome for many of the people he and the Jump Street officers had incarcerated, is another watershed.

It was about this point that Depp began to chafe at the restrictions of being a teen idol and acting in a cop show, but the writers had now hit their stride and were able to channel Depp's increasing ennui into the Hanson character's more and more open questioning of his own purpose. Depp may have been increasingly bored with the show, but his acting skill manifested that boredom as an initially idealistic, gung-ho character who was more and more disillusioned and struggling with a deep, undiagnosed depression, which gave the series both some of its most poignant moments and its funniest (as Depp pulls some great physical humor out of his character's don't-give-a-shit-anymore apathy in many of the later episodes).

I've spent most of my time writing about Depp, but the ensemble cast is solid, and you can make the argument that the series is as much DeLuise's as Depp's, particularly as Depp began to pull away from the show and there were more and more episodes centered around the rest of the cast. Indeed, DeLuise's Penhall character undergoes even more changes than Hanson's, though while Hanson's trajectory is more or less straight down, Penhall's travails are more like real life -- deep tragedy that spurs gradual growth.

Indeed, the two most heart-rending episodes of the series focus on Penhall's character and again show the series' increasing propensity to think out of the box and to deliver shockingly gritty realities inside its gilded frame. These both come late, in season four. The first is "Come From The Shadows," where Penhall is undercover investigating a priest suspected of selling babies from El Salvador, then racked by civil war. Penhall meets, suspects and in quick order falls in love with a beautiful young refugee named Marta. As is not unusual in 21 Jump Street, he inadvertently helps seal her doom by mistakenly arresting her just a few days before a deportation hearing. In a plot progression that sounds hard to believe but is so appealingly acted that it totally works, Penhall courts and then marries Marta -- not just to save her from deportation but because he genuinely loves her. It's all for naught, however, in a gut-wrenching courtroom scene where Marta is literally dragged away to an almost certain death.

Penhall seems OK after this episode, with Marta not referenced much again for about half the season, but this show is all about continuity, and ironically after one of the most lighthearted episodes of the whole saga ("Spring Break," featuring a suitably creepy cameo by John Waters, who was filming "Cry Baby" with Depp at the time), the show segues into its darkest, "La Bizca", where Penhall, with Depp in tow, decides to go to El Salvador himself to learn Marta's fate.

To say the trip does not go well is an understatement. The harrowing hour that follows does not flinch in the face of unrelenting confusion, fear, pervasive misery, torture, and sudden and violent death. Even Depp, who's basically been sleepwalking through the whole season, looks deeply freaked out, particularly in the scene where a bloodied man lays dying on a stone slab as a rebel leader tells him to check the man's boots after he dies, because they might fit him. The closing scene, with Penhall at his wife's graveside, had me in tears at Deluise's skillful, understated performance. You have to see it to understand.

After its uneven beginnings and somewhat clumsy Afterschool Special-ish approach to current events, the show consistently surprised me with the depth and thoughtfulness with which it examined difficult questions, many of which had never been fully aired on prime-time TV before. It's been said that this was the first television show to really look at teenagers as real people with real concerns of their own, but I would go further and say that, while its underlying view of humanity was deeply and deceptively pessimistic, it did an excellent job at portraying the complexity of the gray areas of human behavior. I was particularly impressed by its complex, non-exploitative examination of homeless teenagers (3x17, "Blinded By The Thousand Points Of Light") and lesbianism (4x14, "A Change of Heart"), both of which prominently feature Robinson ("A Change Of Heart" actually had a girl on girl lip kiss, the first instance of this I'm aware of, and Robinson's amusingly mixed reaction is both priceless and extremely well-acted).

Robinson also shines in the episode where her already tightly-wound, control freak-y character is raped, "Stand By Your Man," (4x8) though I found this episode extremely difficult to watch and some of the set-up hard to believe (it seems like Hoffs, with her police training, could have kicked the guy's ass). The most interesting thing about the episode was the complexity of the characters' reactions, particularly that of the rapist, who until the end is all wounded self-pity because he honestly doesn't realize he's done anything wrong -- a bold move for the writers to make considering our deep sympathy for the Hoffs character, but again, very true to the complexity and rationalizing nature of the human psyche -- particularly the young.

Nguyen's presence is more subdued -- Ioki's character has all of Hanson's stoicism but none of his patience, meaning he spends a lot of the series in chafe mode while his partners misbehave -- but he is featured in one of my favorite episodes of the series, "The Things We Said Today" (4x12), where we see a smug, younger rookie Ioki in flashback saying "I'm so glad I got to make a difference in one kid's life" after which we see that, following that bad advice, the kid's life completely and irrevocably falls apart, along with the lives of his entire family. Shannen Doherty (I was in a movie with her! Three degrees separation from Jump Street!) is in this one.

I've gotten as far as the final episode of season four, Depp's last, "Blackout," which is widely regarded as a weak episode but is just an intriguing premise (a mob of high school students take over the school in a blackout, echoing the first post-Forrest episode in season one and thus a fitting wrap to the original series and goodbye to Depp and Nguyen, who were gone from the for-syndication only season five) that was unevenly executed -- again, much like season one.

Some other episodes I would highly recommend are (all shows available to watch on hulu.com):

"Best Years Of Your Life" (2 x 20) -- a no-answers examination of suicide with a brief cameo by Brad Pitt;

"The Currency We Trade In" (3x3) -- Penhall ruins the life of a prominent writer by arresting him for a false charge of child molestation;

"The Dreaded Return Of Russell Belkins" (3x12) -- a light-hearted change of pace with Hanson playing romantic foil that will have Depp fans in ecstacy;

"Nemesis" (3x14) -- a showcase for Richard Grieco's widely-hated (I didn't mind him) third-season-only Booker character, who is the show's one true "bad boy" cop and brings a darker dimension to this story of self-recrimination when the wrong person gets killed as a snitch than I suspect Depp (who refused it) would have -- again, a TV show that feels like an indie film; and

"2245" (4x14) which features Rosie Perez as a guest star and brings back one of the more interesting villains from an earlier season, this time facing his own execution, which they show in excruciating detail on camera.

In one way 21 Jump Street did come out as I expected; it cured my nostalgia for the '80s. Yes, there were some pleasantly common-sense social attitudes that have since been discredited by a thousand talk show hosts demonizing perfectly reasonable ideas as being somehow too liberal, but having said that, God, I forgot how much the '80s sucked. It was like Cusack's character said in the recent Hot Tub Time Machine film -- "We have to get back...we had AIDS, we had Reagan..." not to mention the Cold War, covert ops in South America, the Iran-Iraq bloodbath, rampant gay bashing, and Vanilla Ice. But there was one thing going on in the '80s that I did not appreciate at the time...a glitteringly packaged, but surprisingly brave, moving and thought-provoking television show called 21 Jump Street.

Orpheus 3.3:



La Bizca:

Why Pop Culture Sucks?

Pre-coffee thought for the day:

One of the reasons pop culture -- even something as asinine as Gilligan's Island -- is important is, in the 20th century, it was a unifying point for our society. Even if we didn't agree on much else, we could discuss and find common ground about what we saw on TV last night. It was a basis for shared experience and discussion.

Nowadays, like everything else, most pop culture is niche marketed. Music, TV, and to a lesser extent films, all have smaller and more select audiences. Pop culture isn't something we can all discuss anymore.

I'm not blaming anyone for this, but it's interesting that most people, even the people that are supposedly being targeted, find the current state of the media, all media, unsatisfactory. And I'm asking myself if it's because it no longer a unifying force in our culture? There's no question that a lot of the decline in the quality of the media has to do with (a) needing to appeal to the widest slice of a declining audience and (b) failing that, making a product that's as inexpensive as possible.

There are times I try, for the sake of being in touch with what's around me, to engage more fully in new music...but so much of pop radio now is either recycled ideas from the past (taking an old song and laying a beat or a rap over it), or recycling itself (using one beat and one chord sequence and just varying the dynamics or the melody). And you can call me old school, and that's fine, but without saying "it sucks" in a knee-jerk way, if there is an audience for that, it has to say something about how much people engage in what they're listening to anymore.

I'm not trying to grind my own axe here, because I was thinking more about TV than music when this thought hit me. I'm just thinking out loud.

Adam's Ghost Story

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Politically Not Incorrect

Can we have a moratorium on the use of the words "politically correct" when having a discussion?

Look, when Andrew Dice Clay (who? Exactly) started doing his anti-PC shtick back in the '80s, it meant something. There really were certain mass unspoken thoughts that needed to be vented that people were uncomfortable saying because of prevailing social pressures. There needed to be some sort of counterweight to that. (Just like there probably was a real liberal media...as opposed to "liberal" holding the conveniently circular definition as "anything that doesn't support a conservative worldview"...in 1988. Don't get me started on that topic. We'll be here all day, and I'm planning to go hiking later)

These are now different times, and partly due to the influence of hundreds of media figures who've made their living taking Clay (who was a comedian, gang) to further and further outer extremes, the words "politically correct" (like the word "liberal") have become so toxic that it makes anybody who would dare defend the concept out to be a nutball.

And so I'm going to defend it right now. Look, anytime I hear someone go "this may be politically incorrect to say, but..." what I hear is "I am going to say something that normally would reveal me to be a bigoted asshole, but by invoking the words 'politically correct' I am going to put anyone who would might call me on it on the defensive by pre-emptively implying them to be thought-policing, rigid, humourless jerks."

I have zero -- zero -- respect for this. It just makes me roll my eyes. If you have a controversial opinion, if you think it's going to offend somebody, don't be a pussy. SAY it, have the courage of your convictions, and take your lumps like everybody else. Because here's the thing: the root of the whole anti-politically correct ethos isn't just about free speech. It's also saying people who get offended should just lighten up and take a joke. OK, that's a valid viewpoint as far as it goes, BUT at the same time, if you go there and then won't stand for the payback, you're just a bully. In playground terms, if you can't dish it out, don't take it. And the funny thing about people who like to sling the words "politically correct" around: they're usually people that have the power to throw these ideas out there, and then walk away without any accountability. Once again, I have zero -- zero -- respect for that.

But the original "politically correct" movement went too far, right? Sure, probably...but it's 25 years since Andrew Dice Clay, PC has gone from being a target deserving of the ridicule to a tired toothless whipping boy, and still folks invoke the phrase in an era where I hear people becoming more and more openly bigoted every day, and when called on it, often accuse the other people of being racist. To me it's like beating up on your sister when you're 33 because she stole a cookie when you were 12. When I hear folks talking about "politically correct" I hear people that want carte blanche to say whatever they please about anybody, but then go hide behind a rock when they're called on it. What a load of crap. In what way is that a dialogue? In what way is that constructive? How is that going to lead to any kind of understanding or solution? Oh yeah, that's right, that's not the point anymore...the point these days is just to complain and let everyone know we're unhappy...I forgot.

PC-bashers like to think of themselves as being on the cutting edge of free speech, even though this has become as vapid and mainstream as, I don't know, cable news. I like hearing ideas that are truly out of the box, myself. Here's one to consider: I once expressed my concerns about the oppressiveness of the politically correct movement (this was in about 1992, OK?) to a liberal friend of mine who said, "to me, 'politically correct' just means good manners."

I hadn't thought of it that way before, but the more I did, the more I thought she had a really good point. With the debatable exception of hate crimes, "politically correct" is not enforceable law. It's simply an idea that suggests that if a certain group of people is going to be offended by being called something, then we should respect that, or at least have to think about it. As individuals we have a choice whether to observe that or not -- e.g., I generally call black people black, not African American, because when I was a kid that's what we were taught and the new phrase is a bit unwieldy -- we're perfectly free in this country to express just about any idea we please.

Just as any kind of collective effort isn't the same as socialism, being asked to consider someone else's point of view isn't the same as oppression. It blows my mind that we've gotten to the point as a society where that distinction would need to be explained to anybody. Every social order makes a decision where to draw the line for what is and isn't considered acceptable, and clearly we have moved far, far away from political correctness, to the point where basic ideas about how we should respect and tolerate one another that were just common sense when I was a kid have nearly gone out the window.

We could use a little political correctness right now -- to the degree that it means we remember that the people we criticize are real human beings with real concerns and problems and most of all, feelings, and that maybe, just maybe, we should come to grips with that perspective before we open our yaps. That doesn't mean, say, that one shouldn't come out strongly against illegal immigration -- there's nothing racist about saying people have to respect the law. But if you start throwing around blanket statements about Mexicans being filthy and lazy, for example, you should damn well take your lumps for that. I saw a few people on a message board make this exact same assertion, and when an understandably outraged Latina woman responded, the same people all called her a "hater." I mean, wtf? Again, the first rule of the playground is that if you can't take it, don't dish it out. What deranged universe do we live in where this is considered OK?

Maybe this is the best way I can make my point:

I don't think it's politically correct to say so, but I think people who hide behind this two word phrase in making a point are bullying cowards who are afraid to stand behind and justify their own ideas in the face of real criticism.

But that's just my opinion. Which I now have to defend. And that's how it's supposed to work.

Rockin' for Jesus redux

Interesting couple of days.  Yesterday I put in a lot of work on a custom song project, the one overdue item on my agenda that still was hanging fire from when I was busy producing Adam Exler's album.  "Custom song" can mean just about anything but in this case it was putting music to someone else's lyrics and then making a demo record of it.  I was really pleased with how this came out, partly because it was much more efficient than some of my previous tries, although I made one really comical mistake by accidentally bringing 22 drum tracks into ProTools all playing simultaneously.  It all sounded so cool, though, that I left it in and I had this big thunderous T-Rex kind of thing going.  I layered a bunch of keyboards over it and it wound up sounding a bit Beach Boys Love You-ish. 

I was especially pleased with the harmony vocals...since I've got this new regimen that's clearing out my head, I am really on fire with cutting backup vocals.  I did them all in just over an hour and it's some of the best multi-tracked harmony singing I've ever done.  I, of course, immediately sent mixes off to Alan Boyd and Earle Mankey and said, "check this out, suckers!"  Alan had sent me a working mix of his version of the Beach Boys' "Child of Winter" for the upcoming Steve Kalinich tribute album and I called him and said, "I just one upped you in the Brian Wilson sweepstakes!"  Then I took his girlfriend out and she got me drunk.  (This is actually true...but his girlfriend and I are old pals [I actually introduced them], so it's not as rude as it sounds!  Still, my day was more interesting than Alan's I bet!)

The song doctoring continued today as Jerry White asked me to help him rework one of the songs he'd been asked to polish up and record.  This is the first time I've been in at the ground floor of this process and when Jerry asked me I said, "are you sure you want me to do this?  You hate all my ideas!"  And we did indeed butt heads quite a bit but surprisingly we wound up with something we were both satisfied with.

The song was called "Christmas Has Begun" and it was even more Jesus-oriented than my session earlier this week, but because had more of a traditional Christmas hymn thing going on I resonated more with it, and whereas the old version was a ballad in 3/4, the new version is more uptempo in 4/4.  Jerry sped up the tempo to the point where it was almost an Irish shanty!  It was also kind of cool to have input on the songwriting part of it.  It wasn't something I would have written, but I did succeed in knocking out all the parts of the song that either were boring or didn't work to my ears, and that's plenty.  Once we had it all together, I sat down with the guitar and bashed the thing out, demo'ing it in three different tempos.  And then I was done, not a bad three hours' work. 

At the end I told Jerry I had an idea for another song.  I picked up the guitar and started singing:

To my surprise
One hundred stories high
People, gettin' loose y'all
Gettin' down on the roof...


For some reason Jerry did not rush to record my new Christmas hymn.


That wraps the projects on the table for now.  It's been a slow month, though not as bad as I originally feared.  The one nice thing is it gives me a chance to exercise, drop some more weight, socialize and reach out for some new and different projects.  Nothing's turned up yet, but it's still early days.  I'm enjoying having the extra free time.  I do seem to spend a whole lot of it drinking red wine, though.

I Can't Let Go

Linda Ronstadt's version of "I Can't Let Go" just came up on the IPod.  You might be aware that, um, I know somebody that has a long-standing connection to that song.

Like Bob Lefsetz, this was the first version of the song I ever heard, and the first time we ever worked it up with Evie, I tried to persuade her to use the little blues riff at the end that's unique to Ronstadt's version of the song.

If you've never been on the receiving end of Evie's withering stare, it is something to behold.  I never brought that up again.

I recently did a google search and ran across an entry for "lyrics for 'I Can't Let Go' by Adam Marsland."  This is totally wrong and an accident of databasing, since my only contribution to the version that nominally is mine is bad background singing and worse guitar playing, but even though it's credit undeserved, I can't deny having a little pride at being associated with the song.  I take greater pride, though, at embarrassing Evie every time we play the song by educating the audience as to just WHO is about to sing it.  I think it's my favorite part of the show sometimes, though sometimes I get a little carried away, as was the case on LONG PROMISED ROAD where we had to bury in the mix my introduction of "EVIE M**HERF**KING SAAAANNNNNDDSSSS!"

I'm pleased to announce, by the way, that we're finally going to do an all-Evie Chaos Band show on November 5.

Now if only we could do that little blues riff at the end...

God Was In The Control Room

One of my regular gigs to put food on the table is doing vocals on publishing demos for an older guy who lives in my 'hood.  This irascible fellow, who I'll call Jerry White, has a long history recording in the old school, working with the Four Seasons and the like.  Nowadays he churns out demos and songs-for-hire in a little home studio with a bare bones ProTools set up.  He has a regular cast of musicians he brings in to flesh out the songs he's hired to do.  My brief is vocals.  In a four hour session, I'm expected to learn the song and do the lead vocal and layer all the background harmonies, usually to Jerry's specifications.  If I'm not doing a lead, I usually have to do the harmony vocals on two songs.  I'm expected to instantly arrange the harmonies in my head and execute each one, and double-track it, with a maximum of two takes.  My Beach Boys training certainly comes in handy here.

So does my long years clinging to analog, because Jerry has made a VERY uneasy peace with digital recording.  He has an extreme distaste for using the edit window while laying down tracks, which means no playlists or cross-editing between takes...you get one master take and you have to get it right, and if we run into the next section of the track or miss a punch, we don't go to the edit window and fix it.  You do it again, just like the old days.

What's been great the last few weeks is I've got a new regimen to deal with some old health problems that has cleared up some congestion in my head that's made my singing unpredictable the last couple of years...I've got a lot better control and pitch lately and it's really helped on these sessions, which usually take place in the early afternoon not long after I've gotten up.

The quality of the songs being recorded varies pretty drastically.  Some of it isn't half-bad, though it might not be music I'd choose to listen to, while on the other hand there are some things that would qualify for an "MST3K of music," and it can be a jarring experience hearing my own vocals back on a final mix weeks after I've blocked out a particular song (think Raul Julia in "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank").  Still, this kind of work has a noble pedigree -- Elton John, Lou Reed and Harry Nilsson all did the exact same thing, though at the beginning of their careers as opposed to, um, the mature stage -- and my attitude these days is if you pay me, I owe it to you to do the best work I can do with what I'm given, so I judge my work on how quickly and how well I get it done, and I don't make a distinction between tracks I like and tracks I don't.

And this week I was really smoking, some of the best vocals I've ever done on these sessions.  My brief?  Backing vocals for a clutch of Christian ballads done by a rural Texas minister.  If you're old enough to remember TV commercials for Cleo Laine, you get the idea.  There was one uptempo tune as well -- and by uptempo I mean Anne Murray when she's not in slow dance mode -- and growing up in the '80s with no access to good radio really paid off here.  I stole a few licks from an old Dan Seals record, pulled off a perfect "Good Timin'" Beach Boys on the bridge of one of the ballads, and in general managed to be perfectly slick and purty throughout.  One of the songs had an unexpectedly clever acid-era Beatles reference in the second verse, and I insisted on doing a harmony to that as well, since I wanted the client to know that someone out there got the joke (as I doubted his parishioners would).

I have to sing all kinds of lyrics I would never write on these sessions, and I have to admit that singing "Praise the Lord" at one point gave me pause, and I took a second to mentally analyze why.  After a moment's reflection I realized it wasn't the religiosity that bothered me.  Put me on a mountainside on the east face of the Sierra looking into the canyon below and I have no problem saying "Praise the Lord."  And it occurred to me that it wasn't the sentiments expressed that bothered me, but the simple-mindedness implicit in it.

I was even more disturbed when Jerry's devoutly religious wife misheard a vocal and, perhaps sensing some ambivalence I was trying very hard not to put out there, accused me of changing the lyrics to amuse myself.  I hastily assured her that I came from a family of believers (two preachers, a guy who hangs out in Buddhist monasteries, and my late brother who converted to traditional Russian Orthodoxy before he died) and I would never mock someone else's faith.  And I wouldn't.

However, if someone's faith leads them to say or do something really asinine, stupid, intolerant or illogical, I have no problem mocking that.  That is a distinction that is lost on many people.  Believing something really hard, and having a lot of other people believe the same as you, doesn't mean you automatically get a pass for how you perceive that belief leads you to act -- I don't care if you're a Christian, Muslim, liberal or conservative or whatever.  Criticism on the basis of your words and actions is not persecution.  It's holding people accountable for their behavior.  And our moral basis for that is, guess what, rooted in religious tradition.

It occurred to me recently that, ironically, to the extent I have liberal beliefs it's rooted in my Christian upbringing (I'm the only one in my family who was affected this way, apparently, which is interesting anthropologically I suppose).  I'm not a practicing Christian simply because you have to believe in the Resurrection for that, and I don't, but many of the tenets of the belief are very much at the core of who I am.

What bugged me about "Praise the Lord" is that, to me, it reduces the concept of an all-seeing, all-knowing Higher Power who is bigger than the universe, which itself is bigger than anything the human mind can begin to comprehend, to a three word slogan.  OK -- I get the argument that the simple is complex and sometimes that's the best way to express what you can't comprehend, but I really don't believe that's what "Praise the Lord" means to most people.  It's a totem, an easy way to say you belong to the group, that you've found an ordering point for how you view the world.  It doesn't convey the east face of the Sierras to me.  It's something closer to a McDonald's hamburger.  And that's what bugs me about singing it.  It's not because I don't have faith.  It's because on some very deep level, I do.  And slogans cheapen it to me.

There's a reason why people consider the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds -- an album that only peripherally talks about religion, and lyrically is most concerned with romance and personal growth -- one of the most spiritual albums ever made, and that is because Brian Wilson was able to combine sounds in such a way that hinted at the vastness of all-encompassing nature of a Higher Power -- and this was not an accident.  Brian Wilson wasn't God, but he did have, in his own way, a very intuitive and gut-level understanding of what spirituality is.  To have hemmed it in with words would have been to cheapen it.  Van Morrison understood this too...if I had to pick a lyric to express What God Is, "Inarticulate Speech of the Heart" comes pretty close.  The rest of that song, if I recall correctly, is pretty much an instrumental.  And so there you go.

On the topic of cutting God down to a man size (which, unlike Burger King, is to make Him much smaller) I've never understood how religious belief can lead many people -- some of them not at all stupid -- into moral certainty, intolerance and raving leaps of illogic, because the core of Christianity is the idea that we're all flawed before God, and God alone is Absolute Truth.  If each of us is flawed and we can never possibly know the entirety of God's Will, then doesn't that call any practicing Christian to self-reflection, first and foremost?  There's so much in the Bible to underscore this idea...every skeptic who is ready to play "Gotcha" with a religious person knows the "judge not lest ye be judged" bit but I prefer Matthew 7: 1-5, which reads "Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the great log in your own."

Self-reflection is at the very core of Christianity.  The idea that any one human being "knows" the will of God is, to me, deeply sacriligeous.  Again, it's cutting something way, way, beyond all comprehension and not only shrinking it to our size, but claiming it as our own personal property.  The point of religious faith is to clean up your OWN act -- not somebody else's.  Because you DON'T have God's perspective, and to adopt it for yourself is an act of extreme hubris.

There's been something really spiritual for me in letting go of a lot of my artistic aspirations and just focusing on the simple pleasures of making music.  Did I sing in tune?  Did I play in time?  Does the sound I make resonate in a way that moves me, and moves other people?  There is something to me about the dance of a musician with a metronome that is fundamentally spiritual.  You can never completely lock in to the beat, but you can get so close to it that you enter a trance not unlike focusing on your driste (third eye) in yoga, and that I suspect is very similar to the peace that comes with prayer.  You do, indeed, find God in the simple and most fundamental places.  But the minute you start yapping about it, you push it further away.

And so, in my own way, I sang my heart out for Jesus.  The faith being expressed in the lyrics may not have been my faith, but there is a spiritual aspect to giving yourself over to a song, accepting it on its terms without trying to control it, and doing as good a job as you can on it.

Oh, I almost forgot...this week's session wasn't the only time I discovered a hidden ability to really kick ass at an unexpected genre of music.  The last time I was singing high, screeching background vocals on a set of grunge metal power ballads.  And I was scary good at that.

God gave rock 'n' roll to you, indeed.

The Waking Hours

Wow they're good.

The secret life of Kris Kringle

Note:  If you get squeamish about homosexuality, or you're under the age of 10, best to give this blog entry a pass.  Just sayin'...

So I was out on a weeknight hike with the Sierra Club tonight, huffing and puffing up a steep hill behind a skinny Korean woman who looked like she was about to pass out, and in fact disappeared from our group shortly thereafter along with the guy doing the sweep, we assume because she was too tired too continue though I suppose a coyote attack is not entirely out of the question, when I got a call from my BFF Amy.  It took me a long time to realize this, because I just got a new phone yesterday, and the default ringtone is the kind of hip-hop nonsense that you always identify with someone else's phone.  After fumbling with it for what seemed an interminably long time I heard Amy's yo-dude-what's-up voice ring through the line.

"We haven't connected in forever.  I'm going to be hanging out in my 'hood tonight, at a new girl bar I just discovered.  Do you want to come join in?"

Girl bar, for those of you that don't go to girl bars, is a euphemism for a lesbian hangout.  I spent a lot of the last two years hanging out in the gay community and I know a LOT of lesbians.  I like women a whole lot and it's nice to be able to have a conversation with one without the whole "is he trying to fuck me?" question hanging like a damp Southern night over the interaction.  I never know the answer to that question until I've had the conversation, anyway, so the whole thing is just annoying.  So the company of lesbians works out great for me.  I hadn't been hanging out with that crew much lately -- mostly because I had started to miss having sex -- and so I said if she was still around after the hike and my meetup with Tony Perkins (ex-Poptopia, Martin Luther Lennon) that I would swing by.

After a sweaty hike during which I got separated from my group, joined another group, got separated from them too, and then finally stumbled back to my car, I executed a sticky change of clothes in the Astro Burger john, hung out with Tony for a bit, and then headed over to the girl bar where Amy was, as usual, holding court and saying whatever popped into her head and making me laugh.  Amy is a little like Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High, except with an awesome rack.  She is one of my favorite people in the world, because she always is exactly who she is.  No pretense, straight up.

Anyhows, I settled in and before I knew it I felt pleasantly buzzed with the company of witty people who keep me amused (e.g. not the Sierra Club) and we started exchanging stories of our latest personal life dramas.  Amy and I didn't have much to report, but Amy's "lesbro" friend, who I'll call Sherman, was telling us all about his latest fling.

"He was this older guy, and he had this big beard.  It was kind of like having sex with Santa Claus.  It was great!"

Amy and I both have a pretty big bandwidth for odd statements and out-there sexual behavior, but I think we each looked a little horrified at this revelation.  Sherman, generally a fairly unflappable dude, backtracked a little and said:  "I mean, not Santa Claus when he was old.  When he was young.  You know."

Horror turned to befuddlement.

"You know, like, when Santa Claus was St. Nick, he was hot.  Not like the fat old guy with Mrs. Claus and all that.  St. Nick was a hot dude.   It was like St. Nick."

Um....Still flummoxxed.

"Never mind...I didn't mean St. Nick.  I meant Casey Jones.  I was with Casey Jones."

I was still struggling to get the Jolly Old Elf image out of my mind and I couldn't begin to follow this.  Luckily, right about then in her usual way Amy made three new friends to our left at the bar.  Two of them left, but one joined us.  She had just come out recently, into making new friends, and was excited to meet three people that were part of the lesbian community, even though two of us were guys.  Like Amy, she was a very beautiful what-you-see-is-what-you-get type who made for a good hang.  She also was very liberal with the dispensement of the Merlot, buying us all drinks and getting me quite buzzed in the process.  And given that I live in the Valley, that meant another early morning shuffling around Los Feliz trying to sober up when the bar closed.  Which is to say, a pretty typical night out for me.

A good night.  But I don't think I can sleep, because my mind has now assigned a whole new meaning to "ho, ho, ho..."  I need a hug.