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.

Miles Ahead

We went to my brother-in-law’s last evening to watch the Super Bowl and spend some time with their shiny new boy Wyatt, who’s just past one-year-old and as yet shows no interest in football but definitely likes music and also beans and green beans. The game was pretty fun—that is, it was close, and both teams were good, and the burgers and fries Libby brought back towards the end of the first quarter were a treat, as was my Heath Bar Milk Shake. She went to get the grub at a little place called the Cook Out, a small (I guess) chain, with branches here and there in the upper South (there’s one in Mt. Airy) and no ads as yet at the SB.

I thought the game turned out good for everyone but Rex Grossman, who is going to get rapped as having played up to his potential unless and until he pulls a Big One out, never mind that his team did make it to Miami. Manning, who’s carried his own monkey, flicked that sucker right off his shoulder, and I don’t think it will return. I hope he gets a few more big games in his career. It’s probably too bad it rained, and I was a bit afraid that Prince was going to be electrocuted by his axe, and I know I would have been demanding a plastic fiddle to think of doing that gig. What a bind for a musician—who plays in a downpour? Maybe Prince’s good sportsmanship to do that will save him from the Super Bowl curse that has afflicted so many other acts who’ve played the event thinking it was some kind of culmination of their career.

The ads, as has been pointed out here and there, were weird in their violence, and not just one of them, but a whole passel. Think about it: a personable robot who commits suicide, a guy who hits his friend in the head with a rock to get the last beer, a bank robbery somehow about E-trade Corporation (we already suspected they stole our dough), a snowman run through a shredder to make Coke. What’s going on? It struck me, before the big Event, that the SB has now peaked and is on the downslide. Walmart offers to stock your whole Super Bowl party in a thousand ads in the days before the game. How drear is that? Thank gawd the game was good and not a blow out.

And then there was the post game show. I know it takes something of a zealot to even watch the post-game stuff, but I enjoy seeing the interviews sometimes. This time, towards the end, there was a short commentary by some 40-something guy, a 3rd tier announcer I’ve never even seen before, that was really fairly appalling.

You may have heard that this years SB was memorable because it featured, for the first time, two black head coaches, either of which would have been the first black head coach to be in an SB. So it also featured the other obvious first, the first black head coach to have won an SB. All good, right? Not according to this unknown commentator. (And not according to Rush Limbaugh either, who spent last week continuing to grind his racist axe on the issue off and on with this and that sneer about quotas and whether women on the training staffs of NFL teams are being counted, and I don’t know what all as Rush really has become such a weeping sore on the AM dial that I can’t really do more than sample him for a minute or two any more.) No, according to this commentator the fact that these two fine coaches, Smith and Dungy, are black, was pointless and irrelevant, because the fact is, they made it to the SB because of their skills, not their skin color, and the skills of their players, and their great organizations, and etc. etc. etc. So, he concluded, people need to just shut up about the fact that these guys are black, give it a rest, move on, hope for a day when the NFL is entirely colorblind, errr, no, wait… forget that the NFL is still NOT colorblind, and neither is America.

And I wondered, what is this guy’s problem? Because absolutely no one is saying that Smith and Dungy got to the Super Bowl because they are black. The point of noting the fact that they shared this “First Black” moment is that it’s notable in American cultural history, and in Black history as well. Why is it notable—well, duh! Because they are the first, and we tend to notice firsts. And so the question is, why does this yahoo, 3rd string talking sports head, whatever his name is, get so exorcised about this fact that he wants to suppress it? Is he embarrassed for the NFL, that it took so damn long for this to happen, even though some 70% of the players in the NFL are black? Well maybe he should be, but still, I didn’t think anyone was making a big deal about that aspect of the first, that it exposed American racism yet again. Does this guy think we ought to just never admit that there is American racism, alive and well even in this new century. But surely then, this first is progress, at least, another small step, maybe even a giant step, towards a time when we’re truly color-blind about race. Or does it annoy him that a couple of black guys got this first, because it’s a first that has to do with their color and not their abilities? If that’s it, he didn’t have the nerve to just come out and scream it, because putting it that way would probably cost him his job.

Look, no one who noted this first made that big a deal about it, and absolutely no one try to say, as Limbaugh tried to say about McNabb, that either Dungy or Smith got where they are because they are black—that is, through favoritism. There might be some white coaches who’ve hung on too long because they were “made,” but that’s just not true of either of these men. So what’s the announcer’s problem?

I think it’s simple. He is just dumb.

Congrats to Tony Dungy and the rest of the Colts, and to Lovie Smith and the Bears too. Bring on spring training—pitchers and catchers report late next week.

–Bill Hicks

The Generalisimo Swings

It’s a nice global-warming kinda New Year’s Eve morning here on the ranch, with a haze in the tree line and impending warm rain for the festivities of the coming evening. I’m barefooted, with no heat on in the house and none needed. After my morning jog through the blogs and news, some final thoughts for this guttering segment of our most “interesting” times.

As has been remarked, the picture of Saddam being prepared for his hanging by hooded men is a nearly exact parallel to the pictures of beheadings by hooded men we’ve seen since the Iraq War fell into its post invasion phase. As has been remarked, in a simple sense, the hanging of Saddam is our only clear accomplishment, unbungled*, unmitigated, just another execution. Of course it’s also been remarked that this route is littered with aspects of coverup and propaganda, like everything our current Administration attempts. There remain the ghost images, of Saddam as U.S. client, with Rumsfeld shaking his hand with U.S. chemical traces on his fingers, of the Bush I Ambassador’s assurances that, really, sure, Kuwait, noooo problemo. And there are the later images, fading like flesh rotting in the ground: starving children, crooked back-channel oil deals, out of date and missing WMD, the mystery of the banner on the air craft carrier: “Mission Accomplished.”

Some years back I watched, by accident, the execution of the Ceausescus on television. They were mad as wet hens when the men dragged them from their beds and out into their own back yard. They were shot dead still raging, and then became rumpled old rags hanging from their poles, faces slack, power vanished utterly. There was a certain clarity to it even if we’ve heard precious little of beautiful Romania since. Is Bucharest still sleeping on the Danube? How are things? Probably I’ll never have the chance to go back again; that strange concert trip will only come around once. (Bizarro update—after writing this I turned on NPR and discovered that Romania and Bulgaria are being admitted to the EU today!)

Shooting Saddam in his spider hole might have been somehow better. The fatal military assault on Uday and Xnay had at least the clarity of the riddled bodies and smoking shell holes. Summary justice is justice I believe, unless it turns out like Mystic River. One last quote from the peanut gallery: Sooo, Manuel, not feeling so bad about your 40 year sentence this morning?

When I was a kid I read lots and lots of War Comics, and listened to the news of Stalin and the myth of Hitler, and imagined that if some brave character could just go over there and shoot Uncle Joe, that would be so simple and clean and then we’ll all live in a happy better world. Instead history just unfolded as it did, and the closest we came to the ultimate abyss was perhaps the Cuban Missle Crisis, which I don’t think anyone just watching TV realized was nearly the end of the world as we knew it, the world that lead instead to Vietnam, to the assassinations, to Nixon and Watergate, to a modest, flawed glimpse in the Carter years of what a democracy might be like, before the oily surface closed back over and we returned to the universe of Republican Power. The most remarkable historical fact of this New Years Eve morning might be the talisman of Don Rumsfeld’s presence appearing and reappearing through the march of time—there he is with Nixon, and again with Jerry Ford (who gets a postal holiday on January 2 for some bizarre reason, and a second funeral—was he briefly born again?), and there Don is, now with Saddam, big smile, big glad hand, and now with his pals Cheney and Dubya, and, oh dear, Bush has fired him—but did he get to be one of the hooded lads adjusting the noose?

Who knows. Don, like Saddam and Uncle Joe, is ultimately just a man. The deeply creepy part is the question behind these people, and this never ending succession of mysterious events that substitute for something more constructive. The polar bears swim on until they drown, but it’s time for the next glittering “event,” we’ll get back to the polar bears later, when we have more time. Meanwhile, there is certainly the question of Diebold, and whether we actually get a vote, but I’m concerned that even when and if we manage to fix Diebold, far too many of us are far too in need of the kind of leadership that dismisses our concerns part and parcel with its assertion of power. It may come with the psychology we all live out, and that’s a pretty scary thought.

Consider that we all do start as children, dependent on adults, pretty much clueless as to what’s safe and what’s dangerous, learning the world to some degree with each bump and stumble. For nearly all of us, our first experience of leadership is authoritarian. This is true of our understanding of what being a leader is, as well. And one of the fundamental rules of parenting is to keep a united front. In a sense, Bill Clinton’s greatest mistake was to reveal that Presidents are actually just adults, with flaws and human failings just like all the rest of us. Beyond their usual craven pandering to power, the Republicans who tried to evict Clinton from office were surely afraid in their souls that government might be truly democratized by Clinton’s disregard of the façade of power. The laughable succession of Republican House leadership italicized the point to absurdity: anyone remember the Right Honorable Mr. Livingston, I presume? Surely his surprise when the trap door opened was nearly as great as Saddam’s, and lingers still. And the press pretty much agreed—whatever happens, do not show them the man behind the curtain.

Just as Carter was defeated by a collaboration between Iran and Reagan, so was Gore defeated by a collaboration of the press and the Republicans. Even the fundamental Separation of Powers was allowed to be winked at, just for a moment, to assure that the page be safely turned once again, and the country be set once again on the authoritarian path. Jerry Ford gets a postal holiday, and no one mentions his complicity in the slaughter of some 200 thousand East Timorese. Even the evidence—Ford and Rumsfeld in the same photograph—is ignored. Let there be holidays.

We, the people, have not developed a sense of adult responsibility strong enough to actually live in a democracy, that is, reality, for more than a few brief moments at a time. That’s what I see in the history of my lifetime. The press tells us only what we want to hear, like the boy who tells the girl he loves her as he slides his hand under her skirt, farther and farther up her thigh. Neal Cassidy wrote the book on this seduction, and he was only living in a world of bus stations and railroad tracks. He coulda been President! Because the fundamental truth is that we mostly want to live in denial, with a Leader. Our system produces “leaders” as incompetent and unthinking as George Bush because we don’t want a system that gives us power. George said “I am a War President,” and he thought that meant we would have to salute—and we did! We all believe we’re children—that’s our fundamental denial. And starting from that state of affairs, it is a fairly simple matter for those folks who understand how to lead flocks of deniers to keep the reins of power in hand. At least until we are really and truly in trouble.

Well, dang, New Year’s Eve again. Here’s the magic formula, so listen carefully: Nice I don’t need so much firewood, as I’m tired of the rattle of the saw, and I need to protect my hearing. Next summer there’ll be more ticks, and blue water to the pole. It’s a tradeoff, and somebody’s gonna make some money sailing those polar routes.

–Bill Hicks

*Oops, wrong—the hanging was definitely bungled, because it was transformed into a lynching according to information available after this posting. Bush continues to bat .000