No Internet!

We’ve been without internet for 8 days. Wow! My blog will probably be pretty sporadic this summer anyway. I’ve been pretty obsessed with assembling the Wax Theatricks film.

A lot has happened in 8 days.

First, Tracy and Marion are in the middle of the Colorado forest fires. They’ve had to stay with friends and won’t know until Tuesday if they lost their home. They had to give their cat to the local Humane Society. We’re all thinking about them.

Our friend Jon who drafted us into the Banana Bike Brigade was hit in front of his home by the TKOs.

The Technical Knock Outs are a group of young boys whose mission is to literally knock someone out in a single blow. Jon says they know what they’re doing. They hit him in his jugular vein and he went right out. They got his wallet and 3 beers. This was 3 blocks from our apartment.

Jon has had run ins with them 4 times. One time he was riding his bike. They threw half a brick at him, but his back pack stopped it. They often use half a brick because they’re easy to throw.

Last year there was a girl who could positively identify 7 of them. She didn’t show up in court and they had to let the jerks go. She had obviously been threatened.

They killed a Vietnamese man on Grand. Francis Slay, our mayor, found a victim by our library on Grand. He was one of Joanie Thomas’ employees. He suffers permanent damage.

Needles to say, Valerie and I are very concerned. She pointed out that all the victims seemed to be men over 50.

How can anyone be so removed from empathy? We see it all around us. Our current politics are a symptom.

On a lighter note---

Valerie, Dylan and I went to McGurk’s Wednesday for a book signing by our buddy William Stage. We got our autographed copies of Not Waving Drowning. He’s funny as ever! His wife Mary is pregnant with their 9^th kid. All but the first are girls. I think baby girls were the majority of the audience.

We met Bill McClelland and partied with Rommie Martinez.

Valerie, Chloe, Dylan and I were in a parade with the Banana Bike Brigade in Marissa, Illinois last Saturday. The largest float was the Marissa chapter of the Tea Party. There was also a giant blue float with a portrait of Jesus that read, “Jesus walked on water!”

I think I scared some of the other bikers when I said very loudly, “I wonder what they think of us homosexual communists!”

One of the girls asked, “Are you homosexual?” Another blurted out, “I must be communist!” She was dressed in a red tutu that matched her cardinal bike.

Dylan and I are looking forward to a parade in Red Bud, Illinois this afternoon. It will be 100 degrees.

Valerie escaped it with a family reunion and Chloe’s in Florida with a friend.

The pics are all with camera phones, so they're not very good. Jon with bikes after a Cinco de Mayo parade we were in a couple of years ago. William reading at McGurk’s. The kids and me last weekend. No one got a good pic of Valerie.

Delay Tactics

One of the few nice things that happened as a result of our friend Danny’s passing was getting back in touch with old friends.

I was contacted by both Walt Whitney and Carl Weingarten. After a lot of catching up and nostalgia, we decided it was time for a new Delay Tactics release.

Unlike Wax Theatricks, Delay Tactics focused on instrumentals. I was very proud of the sound of the recordings. I blame Walt for that.

He had a 4 track Scully recorder. Wax Theatricks was recording on 16 and 24 track decks and getting nowhere near the sound. I kept thinking about Sgt. Pepper being recorded on a 4 track Studer machine.

Carl is sending a 10 minute piece he and Walt have been working on. He asked what format I would like it in.

This brought up an old lament of Danny’s and mine. The current format of music favors convenience over quality. Even the best 192k MP3 is no match for a CD, although it beats the hell out of tape or even FM radio.

I told Carl to send it to me 44.1k/16 bit because that’s what CDs use. The problem with that is the Recording Industry Association of America ( RIAA) announced Cds will end next year. I think it has more to do with how easy it is to steal than obsolescence.

I guess unless it’s a band promoting itself with sales at the venue, we’ll be downloading everything.

Walt has been mixing everything at 48k/24 bit in surround sound. That’s what they use for DVDs and unfortunately, it’s complete overkill in this day and age for music.

Last Christmas I gave my son a stereo with a turntable because he’s into vinyl now. Having grown up with boom boxes and ear buds, he’s amazed by the sound. He likes to turn the bass all the way up and blast. The house shakes, the dog freaks, and my ex’s screams can’t be heard over the din. It’s great! The music sound’s terrible though.

What will be the new standard?

If you haven’t already seen it, check out this 1985 PBS show about Delay Tactics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZbAyCfjRSM

 pic is from a Delay Tactics show in the early 80s.

Birth to Earth, Womb to Tomb

Yesterday was one of the milestones in my life. My son graduated from high school. His class was so large, the event was held at the Family Arena in St. Charles.

He graduated Cum Laude which is a miracle considering he totally gave up on school the last semester. I guess that’s not totally true. He gave up until we started getting notices that he was failing and not even bothering to hand in assignments. The last couple weeks of school he got serious and pulled off a sleep deprivation marathon that pulled his grades back up. We were really worried he was going to lose his scholarship to Webster University.

While all this was happening, I’ve been editing the band’s reunion concert DVD. They’ve given me a deadline of June 25^th which is the year anniversary of the show. My friend Tom asked what the big deal was. It made me realized how unappreciated editors are. On top of the video, I have to mix the music too.

You find yourself in a control-freak situation. Dominic would love to take on some of the workload, but I have a vision of how it should turn out.

Fojammi started the video part of all this and would only let me work on the audio part. Now I understand. Even when he was too sick to work on it, I didn’t dare take over until he was gone.

The point of all of this is the strong sense of rebirth I’m feeling from all of these endings.

When my girlfriend got pregnant there was a mad dash to get married. I met her skydiving and we had a freefall wedding. It turned out she was from a huge Catholic culture, so we had to do the church thing too.

I was also in the middle of a music project with Margaret Bianchetta and Stephen Martin. Margaret came up with the name MSD (Margaret-Steve-Dave) which I though was brilliant. One of our largest utilities in St. Louis is the Metropolitan Sewer District.

Margaret agreed to sing One Hand, One Heart from West Side Story at the ceremony. I though it was a totally original idea but I’ve since learned everyone has used it.

Margaret was in a band with Mary Dee Brown and Monica Casey called Hot Club Canary. As a wedding present, they agreed to play at the reception.

Originally we were going to have the party with a bonfire at a friend’s property on the Missouri River. Unfortunately it snowed and the party was moved into the church’s gym.

I got a great pic of the girls playing under a basketball hoop. They really made the big time. I sent them each a copy as a Christmas gift but I don’t think they thought it was as funny as I did.

This swirl of activity was all centered around Dylan, who wasn’t even born yet. It’s been insanity ever since.

My daughter Chloe has probably been even more intense.

On our way to the graduation, Dylan and I stopped at Monica’s to get the pic for my blog. It was the first time they’d actually met. Monica is leaving for Africa for a couple of years. I think she’s going to be a teacher. I can’t believe I didn’t bother to ask her.

Coincidentally Steve called me yesterday just as the ceremony was ending. He wants to sift through all the tapes from those sessions. He didn’t even know Dylan was graduating.

By the way, Steve was best man at the wedding.

Everything seems to be coming together.

Tommy Bankhead

Valerie and I are going to a blues festival downtown this afternoon. We’re going to see Dave Black, Leroy Pierson and the St. Louis Social Club. They are all friends of ours, and all were part of the great Broadway Oyster Bar 80s music scene.

The place was half as big as it is now.

There was no heat in the winter. We had two fireplaces and threw sleeping bags over the doors. Stains on them gave an uncomfortable impression. If you brought a log, you got a free drink.

There was no AC in the summer. I used to set a bus pan full of ice on the bar with a fan behind it. We had to close for two weeks every year when the heat got unbearable. That’s when I went on some of the greatest travel adventures of my life.

Thursday nights was Tommy Bankhead and the Blues Eldoradoes. Tommy was a legend.

He had backed musicians such as Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James (his cousin), Joe Willie Wilkins, Robert Nighthawk, and Joe Hill Louis.

My first encounter with Tommy was when I was 17 at a small bar called Sadie’s Personality Lounge on north Union. I told the story in one of my first posts.

Sadie’s was part of the actual Chitlin’ Circuit. The place was so outside of the law, cops wouldn’t go near the place. No one even blinked at the fact that my friends and I were obviously minors.

I had to get over my uptight, repressed bullshit as soon as I walked in the door. A three hundred pound Vietnam vet, who had lost both arms, grabbed me with a claw and pulled me into the dance floor. I looked around the room and decided, “I’m gonna dance!”

My friend Freddy talked us into coming. He was jamming with the band. At one point, he handed me his guitar and said, “Play with Tommy.”

I was playing away when I looked over at Tommy. He asked, “You went to music school, didn’t you?” I was crushed. I couldn’t get off the stage fast enough.

I haven’t had the balls to jam spontaneously since. I really regret it because I was asked to sit in with Chuck Berry once at the Oyster Bar.

Years later I told Tommy the story. He didn’t remember it at all, but he thought it was funny. I used to change the name of the bands. I called them Tommy Bunk Bed and the Blue Avocados. Tommy didn’t think that was funny.

The best sax player I’ve ever seen anywhere was in Tommy’s band. “Big” Joe Enloe. There’s just no way to describe him. He just made life bearable. If you walked in while they were playing, he made laughing sounds through his horn and you just had to laugh. Out of nowhere he tongued his reed and it sounded like the Roadrunner. The man lived and breathed through his horn.

Dominic asked him for lessons. He said, “Man, you can’t teach this!”

When he died, he had one of the most incredible services I’ve ever been to in East St. Louis. I can’t begin to go through the list of Blues luminaries who arrived. Everyone was there.

Tommy’s drummer Ben Wells cried like a baby. I don’t think anyone in the band ever got over it. They were never the same after that.

Mark O'Shaughnessy (owner of BBs Blues and Soups) told me he got an 8 track recording of the band at Mississippi Nights with Joe. It’s become one of those mythical projects that have disappeared into the ether.

The Blues Eldoradoes came out with an LP about a year later, but they just didn’t capture what they were live. Joe was really missing.

Tommy was a sheriff for the City of St. Louis. He used to transport prisoners. It was strange running into him on the street. A cop’s uniform just didn’t fit his outlaw nature.

When my friend Sharon and I would count our cash register receipts at the end of the night in the back room, Tommy would show up knocking on the window while his Lincoln idled behind him. He wanted to party on the East Side. I was welcome, as long as the girls were with me.

At the end of his life, he became revered as one of the greats. BBs still has giant posters of Tommy papering the walls. Tommy would show up wheeling a canister of oxygen behind him.

He died in December 2000 from respiratory failure due to emphysema. I found out about it on NPR. He had become a national figure.

Food

Dominic just posted a clip on Facebook about a trip he and I took in a VW Minivan to the east coast when we were kids. Coincidentally, I was going to post a story about that trip last week but our internet went down.

Today I want to talk about food.

Being a child of the 60s, my mom had a 50s food aesthetic. Vegetables came out of a can. Remember canned asparagus? I have to admit that, while I don’t indulge today, I do love canned peas. I used to melt Colby cheese in them. That still sounds good to me.

If you want a good laugh, find an early edition of The Joy of Cooking.

With absolutely no guidance, I experimented.

I remember when there was nothing else in the fridge; I would make Wonder Bread, Miracle Whip, and pickle sandwiches. I can’t even think about Miracle Whip or white bread now without gagging.

The last time I intentionally ate meat was in 1979. The only things I miss to this day are fried bologna sandwiches. I used to take 2 slices and put Colby and cream cheese between them. You had to keep flipping it, because the bologna wanted to curl as it cooked.

I used to break my mother’s heart by disappearing for weeks at a time in the county without calling. I had to scrounge for food. I remember eating Cheerios in chocolate milk with scoops of peanut butter and cream cheese.

I think I had a thing for Colby and cream cheese. I used to melt them on pot pies and frozen fish sticks.

A real delicacy for me was baking French fries with hamburger, Colby, cream cheese and catsup. Sometimes I’d throw pork and beans on it. I loved cooking catsup into everything. I wonder when I started eating vegetables.

When I worked at Duff’s Restaurant as a kid, I put catsup on quiche. They say real men don’t eat quiche. They do when you put catsup on it.

Years later my wife took me to Duff’s for my birthday. Chef James Voss placed a huge industrial sized can of Heinz on our table. By the way, they wouldn’t let us pay for the meal.

We all had strange ideas about food when we were kids. I think I was hitch hiking in the middle of the country somewhere when Dominic convinced me that peanut butter and sunflower seeds had all the essential nutritional components.

As recently as the early 80s, when Fojammi and I shared a studio, I’d show up at his apartment at the crack of dawn and start the day with some kind of cereal with a scoop of peanut butter and a glass of orange juice.

My friend Ali taught me frozen concentrate OJ could be eaten like popsicles.

On that east coast trip with Dominic, we were in Maine and hadn’t eaten in 3 or 4 days. We found apples floating in the melted ice of our cooler. I hate fruit, but I still remember it as my favorite eating experience. It’s amazing how much starvation can enhance a dining experience!

I’ve already mentioned in an earlier post what a mistake it is to eat raw vegetables after 2 weeks of fasting. Damn Dick Gregory!

Somewhere around that time period I lived on coffee milk shakes.

It’s amazing that, at this point in my life, I know you need a combination of fresh vegetables, a complicate carb, and a protein with all the essential amino acids including B-12. I think you have to learn those things when you go veg.

I cook every meal for Valerie, my kids and me with those rules and I never cook the same thing. Every meal is an experiment.

For some reason every one of them ends up tasting the same.