Music that changed my life

Over on the Institute of Jurassic Technology, I've made it my business to add a helping of musical trivia every time the blogmeister over there posts a musical clip, especially one involving soul, jazz, or R&B.

Having just made such a post, I got  to thinking that music has always been important to me, and that I could point out specific moments when I heard a piece of music that changed how I thought about music forever.

One of those came the first time I heard Miles Davis. It was in 1968 or 1969, and I had bought my first jazz LPs. Among these was Davis' Columbia Records album Round Midnight. When I hear the trumpet intro to that song, I was hooked, on Davis but more importantly on jazz.

I've always had a strong bias for American roots music, whether it be blues or bluegrass, zydeco or jazz. In 19xx I heard a song on the radio that made me sit up and ask "What the HELL is that?" I'd heard plenty of R&B, but I was not prepared for James Brown's "Papa's got a Brand New Bag."

Even JB did not prepare me for Sly and the Family Stone. Here they are performing "I Want to Take You Higher", mixing funk and R&B and folding into the psychedelic fabric that was popular music in 1969.

Apropos of Woodstock: I've always been a sucker for amazing guitarists and Latin music; Carlos Santana has a wonderful thick sound:

One more, another guitarist. A lot of folks know Eric Clapton from his string of watery pop songs, or his celebrity duo albums of the last few years. He broke big with British blues legend John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. That incarnation of the band released one eponymously named album in 1966. The opening cut on the album is the Willie Dixon/Otis Rush tune "All Your Love", and is followed by Freddie King's "Hideaway" .Clapton's guitar makes it clear why the UK was covered with "Clapton is God" graffiti in the mid '60s.

Funny thing, these blogs, Never quite know where they're going when you sit down to write.

Make a difference

There is a lot being said and written about the current economic meltdown in the US. I have a point of view that I have not heard expressed.

The two party system in US politics is broken; the US economic crisis is not the singular fault of the Bush administration, Wall Street, the banking industry, neoconservatives, Republicans, or careless home buyers.

At its root is is the failure of the US political system.

1. The roots of the crisis can be found in the Reagan presidency and the Republican Revolution of 1994, which pushed laissez faire free markets to the forefront of US political thinking.

2. The Democratic Party enabled Republican dominance by abandoning its traditional roots in blue collar America and becoming increasingly elitist.

3. Power has been shared between the two parties for the last 25+ years, with each controlling the presidency, Congress, or both. Given this, neither party has a legitimate claim to innocence in the current situation.

4. Both parties are subject to the same lobbying pressure. Most major lobbying groups split their money between the two parties to hedge their bets. This includes the financial industry.

Neither party actively represents the interests of the American people. That failure, and the decision to support instead the interest which fund the political machine, accounts for the economic crisis; the lack of inclusive, affordable, high quality health care; the failure to achieve a sustainable energy and environmental policy, and more.

The political system is all about acquiring and maintaining power for the political parties and wealth for their backers. 

We as voters allow ourselves to be manipulated by the political process. Passive participation is a major cause, but not the only cause. We allow ourselves to become obsessed with red herring issues such as gay marriage. We put political considerations such as "electability" before position and policy. We allow ourselves to be distracted by personality; while there are serious questions about Governor Palin's qualifications and positions, most of the discussion is ad-hominem satire and cheap shots -- wasted time, wasted focus, wasted energy.

We continue to accept the mediocre candidates put forward by the parties. We accept the myth that voting for third parties is bad because doing so takes away votes from the two parties. We continue to vote blindly on party lines, and support candidates blindly for their party affiliations, mistaking those for qualification and policy, and we choose candidates because they are "not the other guy".

I do not know what the solution is for this unfortunate situation. I know people, good people, who are involved in the current political process who say that participation is the answer. I can't accept that; participation is surrender.

On the other hand, opting out is also acceptance, and experience of the last 20 years suggests that attempting to create an alternative to the two party system is tilting at windmills. My worst fear is that only cataclysm can break the cycle.

However, the only thing we can each control is our individual behavior. And so I refuse to play the game any longer. I will not play the personality game. I will not vote party lines, or cast my vote against rather than for. I will challenge candidates to explain how they will advocate for the people and not the power structure, what they believe the major issues are that the country must confront, why they believe that, and how they plan to address each. I will listen critically and not stop asking questions until I am satisfied, at least that the candidate has a position and that I know enough to evaluate it.

I will ask each candidate, when they advocate change, how they will resist and overcome the tremendous forces arrayed in favor of the status quo, which amount to a form of active inertia.

I will vote. If I believe that the best candidate is not one put forward by the two parties, if that candidate is a third party candidate, I will vote for them. If that candidate is not on the ballot, I will write them in.

I will keep hammering on this theme, of which my friends and correspondents are fast becoming weary, in the hopes that enough of us adopt these behaviors that we register on the public opinion polls, that we become a voting block that makes a difference in the narrow margin between red voters and blue voters, which is the part of the electorate that our elections are all about.

I will accept that I may not succeed in changing the system; in fact, I will probably not. 

I will take my satisfaction from my refusal to play the game in which we the people repeatedly are dealt the losing hand.

The problems which confront us are huge and enormously complex. I do not have the answers. But I elect and pay our public officials to solve those problems, and I will hold them accountable.

I will remind those officials, at every critical juncture, of my position on the issue at hand, and that I will remember their actions when the time comes to vote again.

Ally's shrimp: a reflection on autumn

Autumn came to the edge of the Palouse as if on a timetable. The last weekend of summer brought rain, and the first day of autumn was cool and breezy. Dusk and darkness come suddenly now; the slow fade of a summer evening is gone until next year.

We're hoping that the threatened early freeze will miss the valley and that we will enjoy a few more weeks of this year's lovely tomatoes. The perennials are past, and it is time to cut them back and prepare the yard for winter. The apple wood that Eddie gave us needs to be stacked, and the horse's paddock could do with a load of coarse sand to keep the mud down over the winter.

Along with summer's end come building anticipations. For one, steelhead move up the big rivers and make their once-a-year journey East of the mountains. As September wanes the steelhead run waxes. 

I had planned to make the three hour drive to the canyon of the Grand Ronde River today, and fish the seventeen miles from where the state highway crosses up to Troy, in Oregon. Last night I performed one of the rituals that come before a trip like that; I tied some flies.

Steelhead flies are wonderful things: larger than trout flies, and colorful. They are as much the stuff of dreams for me as were topographic maps of northern Maine when I was young. Purple Peril, Black Gordon, Cummings Special; Mooselookmeguntic, Aroostook, Allagash.

One of my favorite steelhead flies was developed by Alistair Gowans for the Atlantic Salmon rivers of Scotland; it is called Ally's Shrimp.  It is an orange fly as tied by Gowan: orange bucktail, orange and black silk, the orange tippet from the neck of a golden pheasant, and orange hackle, with some squirrel hair. Tied in that manner it is a fine steelhead fly, but, like many fly tiers, I prefer to add my own touch.

First is color: in addition to orange, I tie the shrimp in purple, claret, and red & black. Then: flash. I am a pretty traditional fly tier, sticking mostly to fur, feathers, floss, hair, and tinsel. But the extra flash of the right modern material, applied judiciously, makes a steelhead fly more attractive, at least to me if not to the fish. To the tails I add a few strands of a flash material; the bodies are tied with colored, holographic tinsel or iridescent thread.

The dozen flies that I tied last night are in a pile on my desk. Next to them, their counterpart from the fall's other avocation: 20 gauge shotgun shells, waiting for the opening of bird season.

I am not a very good shot, not having hunted as a boy and spending more time with my bird dogs at field trials than I do in the field. When the wind calms down I'm going to take a case of clay pigeons and the spring-loaded thrower I bought last winter out to a quarry by the river, and shoot -- or shoot at -- clays to work on my aim and my timing. 

As soon as I've brought at least a few steelhead to hand, and perhaps one or two hatchery fish to the table, it will be time to take my Gordon Setter, Trouble, out to find some pheasant. 

They say that the steelhead fly fisher is the ultimate optimist. Steelhead are the fish of a thousand casts, and to catch them with regularity you have to believe that this cast is the one, even if the last nine hundred were not. Cast, swing, this is one. Step. Cast, swing, this one. Step. Cast, swing, this cast ... .

A bird hunter who shoots like I do is optimistic at best, approaching delusional, even with an eager, honest, well broke bird dog like Trouble at their side.

Labor Day still brings the twinge of regret that I felt as a boy, endless vacation at an end and  another year of school about to start. As the World Series approaches, though, I feel the same anticipation that the baseball lover does, although I am anticipating the cast, swing, step of a steelhead run or the crunch of my boots as my dog jumps down from the truck on a cool autumn morning.

Friends

The road rose from the slow, sad lakes of the Columbia that drowned Celilo Falls, climbing up and up through the wheat and sagebrush that have replaced bunchgrass as a veil over the volcanic tumult that formed central Oregon. The height of land is seventy miles and thirty two hundred feet of elevation from the river.  After another dozen miles, the road pitches downward, through draws of sage and juniper, towards the plateau of Central Oregon.

I was driving to meet a group of friends who have known each other as much as a quarter of their lives, to fish for steelhead in the eight miles of the Deschutes River below Warm Springs. 

We launched early, in the near dark of pre-dawn, and started down a river whose every detail we knew from years of floating and fishing together. We stopped at each stretch of likely holding water large enough for four anglers, and spread out to cast with our long, two handed fly rods seventy feet and more into the current. Cast, step. cast, step. Steelhead are called the "fish of a thousand casts" because of the patience required to catch one on a fly. The true steelhead angler lives within each cast: this is the one, the one with the sudden pull at the end of the line, the long run and the buzzing reel. If not this one, the next.

We fished hard and well all morning and into the late afternoon. We had heard reports that the migratory fish had moved early into this stretch of river, but we did not move a fish all day. 

The day ran out before we ran out of casts or of optimism. The boat was loaded onto the trailer, the gear was stowed, and we made the rough and dusty drive back to the top of the float. When we got there,  we each packed up our vehicles and said our goodbyes.

"Hey, Mark, good to see you. Sorry we did not get into some fish."

"I didn't really expect to, this early in the run. But that wasn't the point, we it?"

No, that certainly was not. 

We were four very different men: Al, the family man with two nearly grown children; Brandon, the former electrician and soon-to-be teacher; Mark, the forest service botanist; and me, the refugee from high-tech burnout. With the exception of Al, who had worked with me, we all met via a shared interest in fly fishing, over the internet, and all lived in Oregon.

I had moved from Oregon in 2002, and moved again. When I still lived there, we would drive three-plus hours to the Crooked River to fish for trout in the middle of winter. A weird geometry made the drive home longer than the drive over. There was an easy intimacy in those drives; now we communicated mostly by email or the occasional phone call. 

It was the friendship of those cold winter days and long, quiet drives that brought us back together on the river.

North Umpqua, a book of photographs by Dan Callaghan

I have not written in this blog for almost three months. The summer has kept me busy outdoors, and there was nothing that moved me to write. The world of politics grinds on, the economy sags, and no one wants to read about my gardening project or the departure of my second hive of bees.

This week I came across something worth writing about: a postumously published book of photographs of Oregon's North Umpqua River taken by Oregon lawyer, fly fisherman, conservationist, and photographer Dan Callaghan. I have waited patiently for a collection of Callaghan's photography; this one was assembled and edited by his wife Mary Kay.

I did not meet Dan Callaghan, although I lived in the Pacific Northwest for 15 years leading up to his death in 2006. However, I feel that I know the man through his photographs of the river he loved, a river which enchanted me the first time that I saw it, and that calls me back despite the more than 400 miles and almost 8 hours of driving between here and there.

This is not a fly fishing book, although there are a few photographs of fish, flies, and fishing in it. Even more primal than the urge to fish is the draw of running water, of places unspoiled even though they have been touched by man. The North Umpqua drew Dan to it, and he reflected his intimate love of the river back in his photographs.

The forests west of the Cascade mountains are beautiful places, verdant year round from the rains, and even more beautiful when threaded through by a pristine river. The Umpqua cuts a dramatic groove though columnar basalt as if makes its way from its headwaters near Crater Lake to the Pacific Ocean at Reedsport, Oregon. Much of the river bed is made up of jagged slots in the bedrock, and the bottom drops off precipitously from streamside ledges. The gorge is forested through most of its length with cottonwoods, alders, hemlocks, spruces, and firs. Each season has its own serene beauty.

Since the book and its photos are copyrighted material, I will not duplicate any of them here. You can find reproductions of some of them here

This book resonates with the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with strong, pristine rivers and wild anadramous fish. It's worth a look if those things have meaning to you.

Hello, hello, is this thing on?

BPaul just posted an absolutely amazing clip of BB King and Gladys Knight on his blog. 

I figured he deserved something in return, so here are a couple:

Since BP is into fancy stepping soul performances, here's Archie Bell and the Drell's performing "Tighten Up" live. Yes, they sure do dance as good as they walk:

Fenton Robinson is a hugely under-appreciated bluesman who died in 1997. He recorded "Texas Flood" before Stevie Ray Vaughn had a hit with it. I couldn't locate a clip of him playing that song, so here's another one of his better-known performances. His sound is a little more country and a lot less sharp than a lot of urban blues, but it has an easy swing to it that I like a lot.

Finally, since BB King inspired this post, two 1968 clips from jazz critic Ralph Gleason's TV show "Jazz Casual". Especially noteworthy (along with the performance) is BB's pre-'fro process job.:

Updated on the Sideboard 30 May 2008

In My Ear

On My Desk

Recent photographs

Lavender Iris

Lupins

Purple Iris

Poppies

Cornouiller Japonaise

Cascade Sunset One

Cascade Sunset Two

Best Friends