You Busted Jesus on Alcohol Charges???

Mypal Rodney Sutton, one of the original Green Grass Cloggers of yore, sent me the following. I'm hoping the links work:

Date: Feb 27, 2010 12:02 PM

Thought you might like to hear this. Here's the latest from one of my cousins in Duplin County who sent this about Senator Charlie Albertson's song. I've known Charlie since high school. He's a few years older than me and is the uncle of my of my closest high school friends. Here's a YouTube of the song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjsjOrFqMh4
Rumor has it that Willie has said that he will never perform in North Carolina again! Pity! You can read what went down the night of the bust at
http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20100224/ARTICLES/100229835?Title=State-senator-records-song-about-canceled-Willie-Nelson-concert&tc=ar

Love,
Rodney

Hello!  I'm sure most of you saw the news articles, etc., regarding the fiasco of Willie Nelson's band when they were supposed to perform in Duplin Co. in January.  We just thought you might like to hear this song that N.C. Senator Charlie Albertson, also a musician, performer and song writer, wrote regarding the bust.  To me the sending of 13 Alcohol Law Enforcement personnel to this performance was somewhat suspicious.  Willie also canceled the performance that he was to give in Asheville in the next day or so after this.  It not only gave Duplin County a bad name but also North Carolina.  The events center was one way to draw people to this county and bring in revenue and jobs but now is having a hard time booking groups to perform because of it.  Vince Gill and Amy Grant were tentatively scheduled to perform sometime next fall but they now are not coming either.  What a shame this dama
ge has done to our county.  The Duplin County Sheriff's Dept. is noted in this e-mail as participating but they had nothing to do with the "Operation On The Road Again".  They were only at the events center, as they always are, to provide security.  Enjoy Charlie's song.  Judith  

Willie Nelson's January 28, Kenansville, NC concert was cancelled after the NC Alcohol Law Enforcement (ALE), Duplin County Sheriff's Department and Kenansville Police busted members of Nelson's band and crew in what law enforcement officers called "Operation On the Road Again".
Duplin County's state Senator Charlie Albertson (910) 296-4413) has written a song about last month's aborted Willie Nelson concert at the Duplin County Events Center.  Albertson, who is a country musician and singer himself, has played at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and is locally well-known for his singing, offers his perspective on the incident.

LEAVE THE MAN ALONE
by Senator Charlie Albertson

He came from Abbott Texas all the way to Caroline
A place called Duplin County where we grow and drink the wine.
The law converged when they heard, the outlaw was in town
"Operation on the Road Again" would bring the whole thing down.

More than a dozen ALEs seems much more than enough
It was cold, guess they took turns sniffing around the bus.
Inside the people waited, some had a cool one in their hand
It was over before it started, the law had busted Willie's band.

Some say he's an icon, we've watched him make it to the top
One thing he's never tried to be is somebody that he's not.
The songs he's wrote are part of us, they'll keep living on
Why don't they leave the man alone, let him write and sing his songs.

The fans were disappointed, some say it was a shame
We lost more than the revenue, it hurt the county's name
How could a night that seemed so right, turn out oh so wrong?
They should have left the man alone, and let him play and sing his songs

He's wrote a lot of songs we love, The Night Life and Crazy come to mind
Family Bible on the Table, today songs like these are hard to find.
He sings for family farmers He's On the Road Again in a busted bus thats home
Why don't they leave the man alone, let him write and sing his songs.

Which Digit Do You Prefer, Sir!

I know you can say that the coming digital revolution with our teevees is sorta like the coming of the automobile with our formerly four sure-footed mode of transportation. You can sneer, “What about the buggy-whip industry?” You can even talk about how wonderful the new high-def clarity is, although I don’t really know how wonderful it’s going to be to actually see what these talking heads really look like—sheesh, Lehrer, what happened to the guy, he’s suddenly 85 years old, and Fred Thompson, cripes, he’s 107 at least, glad we aren’t going to elect him!

But when the automobile came down the rutted path making its gawdawful racket, there was nobody running the PR machine in its train, was there? I mean the car wasn’t, at the outset, actually marketed, was it? It was more that people just said hey, I don’t have to feed that thing when it’s not running, and it doesn’t shit or kick you in the head, and it was only after a few years, when there were different car companies and all, that people started actually selling. I mean, I think that’s the way it went back then? The automobile sold itself, so to speak, and nobody knew anything about global warming; they barely knew the Earth was orbiting the Sun and not vice-versa.

We’re being sold on digital. Think about this. We had this rather nice, in place system of mass communication and entertainment, that was free and came into the house without special wires or dishes, or tiered plans, each costing $20 more than the next lower, all of it with an initial installation cost, possibly waived if you keep the contract for two years and sell your daughter to the Shiek of Araby.

Are you aware you are being sold? I’m just asking? I don’t think there’s anything to do about it at this point. In a year plus a couple of months, millions of people are going to turn on the old teevee and it won’t work, and they’ll go “what the hell?” and some of ‘em will get really pissed off, and they’ll mostly eventually go get a cheap set at Walmart, or a fancier set at Walmart. It’ll work out. They set the date the day after the Super Bowl precisely because they didn’t want people to actually burn the cities down. Nothing on on a Monday but Antique Road Show. Let’s just go by a fucking new teevee, Harriet. We can put it on the card.

But are you aware you are being sold? I went to Walmart yesterday and there was a 60 foot display of wide screen flat panel teevees all running an infomercial about how to mount them on your wall for maximum effect, and how incredible the new high-def picture was, and waaaaay down at the far dark end, some boxes with “digital ready” teevees that look like the one I have in the kitchen, 13” screens, plus a DVD player built in, for about $120. But the main deal was $350 to a $K, and this is Walmart. Gawd knows what it’s like over in the big city, at Circuit City or Best Buy. In 1967 you could buy a dang car for $2000, brand new!

Yes, the government is going to give each of us a couple of vouchers worth about $40 each to buy a box that will translate the new digital signals to analog for your old teevee, if you just don’t want to get with the program. It’s something like a billion and a half all totaled, which is what? a couple of days of Iraq meat grinding. But it’s our money, being spent by the government via our hot little hands passing it on to the companies that make those boxes. In China I’m guessing. I mean, we can’t just take the voucher and buy beer and smokes, right?

So why is it the government—our government, allegedly—just took away this pretty great free broadcast system that our free market just evolved for us to enjoy, for free—and substituted this new deal that we have to pay a lot of money to use??? I mean this is just the start, you realize? Seems to me the whole raison d’etre for local teevee stations is pretty much melting away here. All we need is the USA Today equivalent and we’ll be entirely cabled and satillitized, everybody paying monthly (no problem, we’ll just take it out of your credit card) for what had been, oh thank you Jesus for the Unseen Hand, FREE. You have noticed, haven’t you, that there’s nothing on the local news any more but the weather?

Well I guess I have a theory, but it’s just a theory mind you. It’s because the businesses that subsidize our representative government by paying for their fun little in house tournament called The Election want us to start paying for teevee and not getting it FREE. This way, they can make the ad money, and then make the subscription money, and the new gear money as well. Yeeeehaw, ain’t the Unseen Hand a damn good thing that Jesus made for us on the 12th Day of Christmas, right after He turned on the lights and parted the waters and all that. And oh, right, made Eve.

My Eve, Libby, has been noticing all this stuff, by the way, and points it out to me while I’m sitting on the couch watching NFL (for free). She also noticed this big guilt trip thing they’re doing now, about spending ….. gasp…. cash at the store. Have you noticed that? The customer is pulling out a $20, or writing a check (this is between quarters and possession changes), and suddenly everything stops like maybe he or she just shit in his or her pants, and it arrrgghhhhhhhh smells. Boy oh boy that’s a baaaad thing there, to be pulling out cash like that and fucking up the whole economy. It’s as bad as the other shaming thing where the pretty Airline Attendant is primping up in the, oh gawd in heaven, it’s the …. Men’s Room! Cash = BAD. Credit cards = GOOOOOOOD.

The deal with that is that the government probably kicks its collective ass all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue every live long day for starting things off in the first place with something anonymous, namely, cash, as the lubricative force in the economy. Because cash really messes up the process of taxation, adding at the very least a huge amount of otherwise unnecessary overhead in the form of complex surveillance and analysis of spending behaviors, which otherwise the credit card folks would be record-keeping to beat the band for anyways. But of course cash is older than taxes, or at least income taxes.

So your choice, digitally speaking, is a new “Fair Tax” under the Christian Candidate, Mike Huckabee (call this the Forefinger Plan), or a slow incremental shift, already occurring, to an all plastic transaction model (the Middle Finger Plan favored by most candidates at this stage in our democratic evolution), said model being nudged along by a constant but unpredictably occurring (and therefore proven most effective) light twinge of shaming brought to you, digitally, by your credit card industry. And after Feb 17 of ’09, as the first new national Event of the New Presidency that will indeed come next year, this new digital penetration will be complete—high def, high colonic. Poor Democrats.

“Ouch,” or “Ahhhhhh”, sir? Or you could just let the teevee go dark, and start paying cash and looking out the window, thinking outside the box so to speak. Now that would scare the bejesus out of ‘em. Not that they don’t have some more cards hiding behind their diamond cufflinks. Like you do get the precedent don’t you? Cancel a whole technology, or shape it to your larger designs? The slogan was already enunciated by some dick in the Bush Administration, remember: “Reality, we make reality.” Shoes, we don’t need no stinking shoes. So here’s another bit of technology that might need shaping: let’s solve the gun proliferation problem the US has by, voila, changing the calibers! Except this time we don’t give out vouchers, just coupons for Budweiser and Marlboros. Hey, works for me, dude.

See, and you thought I was some Commie Liberul. Merry Christmas, and keep your powder dry.

--Bill

Dead Fall & Banjo FAQs

We got back from the Wild and Wonderful Business Opportunityland to find a decent sized red oak had removed the wires that connect our cabin to the 21st Century—the powerful hot ones that somehow didn’t start a fire in the dry leaves when their naked ends landed therein, and that’s why when we got home there was at any rate the cabin, if not the frozen food we’d left, nor lights to turn on, nor well water to flush and drink. This was of a Tuesday night, October 30, ’07, and we called Progress Energy and damn if they didn’t send out a big strong guy with a ladder who reattached everything in the dusk—Progress indeed--one wire still hot and brushing against his shoulder as he whittled away at the end of another so’s to make a good connection, and we discussed, him on the ladder and me standing in the doorway, the price of putting it all underground from the transformer so as not to have this situation arise yet again, maybe with attending total destruction the next time. A thing to do, and pretty soon.

The tree that took down the power line

The next day, Halloween, Libby was in bed with a banged up hand and a sore back, from the tiny fall up in West Va that she’d had at the end of an incredible hike in the boulders of Bickle’s Knob—a total out of the blue kind of deal to weirdly end a magical afternoon. I did all the accumulated laundry and hung it out, the drought still on even though there’d been a heavy rain whilst we were missing, and ate some of the Halloween candy that no one ever comes down our driveway for. The next day I sawed up the tree, and today, Friday, I just stacked it in a big round pile to dry further (tho it’s ready to burn, the tree’d been dead for probably three years, and I’d flagged it and tried to get the power company to come drop it, but they won’t do that for you although they’ll send a guy around to put the wires back on the house), after splitting it all up for the back room stove, which means mostly quarters. Red oak, god’s gift to back to the land lazy bones like myself, hell with gum and hickory, at least for the moment.

Autumn has come to central Carolina. It was up in WVa last week, turning just as we got there, leaves flying all week, and from start to finish the penultimate week for the Hillbilly Nation. A nice time to go north. Now we get to watch the re-run here, so pretty I can just sit in the kitchen and look out the French doors, watching the rustle and melancholy drift of each bit of color, the shadow of the blazing summer just gone, last of the heat that’s too hot, till next May or June or whenever it cranks back up, captured in a dead leaf, cold heat that won’t burn less you take a match to it, or a down wire. And I watch the leaves, and hope for some damn cold days, and wood fires to enjoy, and maybe even a bottle of good scotch for the fire, to sip in the late afternoon, and the crunch of snow. But it’s been milder and milder winters the last ten years or so, and nothing like the fun we had down here below the crest of the hill, sledding down the driveway with Anna when she was eight or something, heating every room with wood in those days (less rooms then, on the other hand), washing up in a twenty gallon galvanized tub by the chunk heater and hauling water in a bucket from the well just off the porch.

I’d hate to haul it now. I’m sure the water’s 100 feet down, instead of 35, like it used to be. The drought’s getting the rivers and ponds too, and all the cities and towns are freaking out and making plans for more and more strict conservation, while men who have vision and money are planning how to buy water up just like oil, and sell it back to us at their prices. Which circles back around to that fallen tree, and the thought that maybe instead of burying the power line, I ought to figure out how to pay for some photovoltaic panels and big batteries, and just snip myself and mine plumb off this here grid, ‘cept for the phone line. If we’ll just keep having some winter I can always fill up the old Ford with split oak and drive it out to the paved road, and sell it to the urbanites who want a decorative blaze for Xmas. Do enough of that and maybe I’ll get a tax break on the 35 acres that do nothing at the moment but give the deer and possum and fox and owls and the rest a place to live, including me and mine. There’s usually water in the creek, but not these days. We humans never owned a damn thing but in our minds.

–Bill Hicks

Addendum: While up in West By Gawd I ran into my old friend Dwight Diller. He has a great website about his music and philosophy, and one of the best things on there is his FAQ about the banjo. The banjo needs a FAQ, or two or three, but this one is really a very kindly and wise group of remarks on the banjo as itself and as metaphor for a well-lived life, something we all strive for and struggle mightily at. Anyone who’s got this far should by all means go read the FAQ. And after that, perhaps, consider learning that instrument that burns in your heart, before it gets too late.

Here’s a brief sample of Dwight on the banjo, from the FAQ (now go read the rest yourself, and get one of his CDs too):

Q: Do you have any opinions about banjo inlays?

A: The fancy fingerboard inlay adds nothing to the playing. Side dots do because they show you where the fret you are reaching for is located. If you want inlay, go for it. But is it worth the extra expense? It is mostly for the folks that are watching. Or when you sit around and handle the banjo yourself and dream about being one of the really all time greats. You can't see the fingerboard when you play. One inlay that I prefer is from a 'pen & ink & pastel' that Elaine Diller drew and Jeff uses his version of it for peghead inlay. Comes in 4 or 5 pieces of different colored pearl and abalone. That one I am partial to. I prefer clean finger board and side dots. Anything else is fluff and a waste. Remember, you asked.

Assssscap and other Divigations

It’s too damn hot to lay stone today, and tomorrow Libby and I have a gig at a little country store in Bynum, NC. This venue has been happening for about five years or so—mostly local musicians play Friday nights in the good weather months for a pass-the-hat “gate” operated by little gung-ho kids who spread out through the audience during what the hoity-toity used to call “the interval.” A few CDs also get sold off the stage, and the store—back when it was open—sold plenty of Dr. Peppers and popsicles to the assembled throng, maybe 200 or so folks. The store closed down this past winter, so I’m guessing this time around you bring a cooler. There’s a nice bbq joint at the top of the hill, up on the 15-501, that will send you down to the store with a bag-o-chicken or some Eastern NC Q, which isn’t a bad idea at all. I’m told that a former local musician, Tiff Merritt, who used to live in Bynum while she attended UNC and took classes in song writing from Bland Simpson, helped get the venue going. She was kicking ass around these parts with her band, the Carbines, before heading off to Nashville and success. Pretty cool.

So we get a note from the venue’s proprietor, who does this for the pure love of it, because she lives in Bynum, an old mill town with a burned down mill that had closed long before the fire and a lot of funky wood-frame mill houses that people have bought and fixed up, that we had best avoid any “covers” in our show tomorrow, because ASCAP and other licensing agencies are “on the case.” To which I have to just say Jesus F. Christ, pardonne my francaise.

We can manage to avoid covers. But this is what is wrong with the music bidness, and it’s really kinda depressing. See, it’s actually run by lawyers who don’t know a pick from an A-string, and couldn’t write a rhyme or a line of beauty if they were monkeys in a Shakespeare experiment. The other day a guy who is an artist on a track-hoe told me it’s lawyers who have fucked every-damn-thing up, and I have to agree, even if I also have to agree with David Childers who wrote that “Jesus is a lawyer”—but David is a song-writing lawyer and I don’t think he’s working for ASCAP or BMI or what ever other acronyms capture the music bidness world. We need the lawyers, but we don’t need to live entirely in their world, do we? (Probably the answer to that is yes, unless you’re Karl Rove.)

Ok, the idea—the concept—is that since someone wrote a song and copyrighted it, it’s intellectual property, and so if anyone else should perform that song for money, then the owner of the property ought to get compensated some for its use. Yes, yes, I totally understand. And these agencies, like ASCAP, came into being to enforce this by monitoring performances, radio, teevee, the internet, your ringtones… whatever the hell else is out there to perform or re-perform music. It’s my understanding that ASCAP does this by hiring people with some kind of musical background, like maybe the highschool band teacher, to go to shows and listen for covers, and if he finds any, to bust the venue if they haven’t paid a significant “cover fee.” There’s a bar in Chapel Hill, the Cave, that has a big sign posted saying “ABSOLUTELY NO COVERS EVER OR YOU WON’T PLAY HERE AGAIN,” which is one reasonable solution to this problem, and the one Bynum is taking apparently. For sure Bynum can’t pay some big fee to ASCAP—they don’t make any money at all on the venue, it’s a gift to the community and to the artists who want to play there.

But it seems to me that there’s several babies squalling out there in the grass with the dirty water. Because music is a language, a living thing, as well as a property. In fact, I’ve always thought that music might well be the language that could even stop war, at least sometimes, when the hearts it reaches out to are not already as hard as granite. Musicians make a piece of music—a song, a melody—live. The good ones bring themselves, their own hearts, into it as well. They interpret, in a million ways, what otherwise might as well be Latin, dead marks on a yellowing piece of paper. And listeners of music, in the act of listening, get to experience its life. Because in a way, those marks on the parchment aren’t music at all, unless you’re the one in a million, like Ludwig Von B., who apparently could actually hear the music when he read it off the page, or wrote it down. The joy of music-making is in this act. We’d do it if nobody put any money in the hat.

Another thing about performance is that music that nobody thought of in 50 years gets revived and remembered. Libby and I do some music that was created in the ‘30s, and ‘40s, and early ‘50s. We remind the listeners of that stuff again. Who knows, they might later go out and buy themselves a CD of Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” because we did it as a kind of surprising encore to our show of mostly fiddle tunes and such. And that would be nice for Bill Haley’s grandkids I’d think. Right now he’s remembered more by Tom Russell’s sad song about his final days, than through his music. He was hot in 1954, but Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Elvis rolled right over his brand of “rock and roll,” which was actually some version of alt. country Texas two-step, a few months after “Rock Around the Clock” faded from the silver screen. Even in his most shining moment, Bill was a chubby red-neck from Michigan with a cute little ringlet that might have been a comb-over if you looked close. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was the B-side.

Now if we ever get back in a studio, and if we happen to record “Shake, Rattle and Roll” for our second CD, well we’ll pay the royalty on that. That’s a straight forward deal then—we’re selling a record of that song. (Actually I don’t think it’s Bill Haley’s either, but somebody earlier, maybe Louis Jordan, who first recorded it—a man named Jesse Stone actually wrote the song, and he died in the late ‘90s at the age of 97.) But we’re not really making money on “Shake, Rattle and Roll” when and if we play it tomorrow in Bynum. It’s just a quote, a nod to music we revere, and to the good old days which aren’t coming back. If the lawyers are going to slice and dice a place like Bynum, here’s what they’re really doing—stopping small venue performances of copyrighted music altogether. And I’d like to know who that is helping? Tiff Merritt climbed from the small venue up to a place where she’s actually making a living playing, which means she’s making real money for the lawyers sitting in the air conditioning on Music Row.

You gotta think it was lawyers who invented the pyrrhic victory. And maybe that’s a problem even with Childers’ notion of Jesus as a lawyer, come to think of it.