30.9.17

All Religions Are One (A Prayer for Co-Existence)


Each day is a birth,
an adventure,
followed by 
the personal apocalypse,
leading to 
revelation ... 
Then we sleep,
and in dream experience
a kind of pyrotechnical death ...
Then we awake
and are reborn ...
hopefully learning from yesterday ...
doing it all over again ...
each day ... each day,
yearning to to fly higher,
than our own minds,
like silly blind birds
soaring up the stairs
and gliding into
an attic of dusty emptiness,
 like the ninety ninth monkey
hiding in a tree,
shaking a blue banana,
calling it a phone,
seeking the one-hundredth human
who also needs love,
singing 
sweet 
electricity
to those 
no longer lonely,
to those 
no longer
alone

M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim
M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim
M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim
M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim
M'Shi Ha M'Shi Shi Melek Shamayiim

26.9.17

TELEGRAM FROM THE GENERAL CROOK TRAIL TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE DISUNITED STATES


First of all, the whole idea about what happens

when the tree falls in the forest and whether or not

it makes a sound: You sent me out for this scientific

question and quite frankly you must be some robot

who only thinks anything happens when a dollar

gets digitized in a bank in the Cayman Islands.

Stop.

Second, there is very little internet access along

the Forest Road on the Mogollon Rim, dude. Stop.

How are we supposed to relay any kind of message

at all if you don't even know that? Stop. You promised

coverage for all, and we were naked to the winds,

thus requiring daily runs to Walmart in Payson,

and I ate red vines that made me sick as a dog.

Stop.

Third, no savages were found in the area other than ourselves,

since there's little water up there, short of what

falls on your head, and rumors of bear

were just wild stories made up to keep

us in our tents. Wood was picked clean

throughout, as the Imperial Cruisers roaming

up and down had run up the dust, down the rest.

Stop.

Fourth, and I mean this sincerely, sir.

No one mentioned your name once

up there, probably due to the lack

of a decent Twitter feed,

as well as a common desire

among those present to get away from any idea of you,

since we are all running from that daily disgrace in the first place.

Stop. End Message.


18.9.17

Nibiru (Without Rulers)


Moving in the void
with no one visible,
colors bleeding
into one, the shift,
neither red nor blue,
no moon, no planet,
errant, static, invisible,
a mistake
by the Creator,
on the edge
of another
dementia,
off-radar,
pings that disappear
into pure silence,
down under,
the fury
of the unified field
just a theory
and a fear
of emptiness,
of seeing
what's on
the other
side:
Oblivion,
draining saturnine
shadows, Egyptian mystics,
pregnant with passions,
beer-gauged Agog men,
gone saintly and sad,
past Sirius and back,
like an ringed orange
winged with fire

12.9.17

American Kristallnacht



"Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun'."

~ Hugh Green, The Daily Telegraph, 1938

They came in
with pepper spray pellets blazing,
triangulating

They came in through the window
with the full blessing and authority
of unhinged might

The numbing fear
that God is right,
right, right ... feel his fright

Let America shake
Hit 'em in the back,
and that girl, too, whack!

Shove her in the car, bang her head against the door,
she might bleed a little, might even leave a scar,
but don't worry, her court-appointed attorney won't get her far

They can't afford legal defense
and no parents will come to their aid,
so shoot up their room with toxic wounds

And then just leave it there
'cause nobody cares as Mr. Nobody stares ...
Let the pepper spray hang in the cavernous air

The gawd general self-appointed Horus
has granted the license to deal with the weak,
the sick, the drug abused, the American "scum"

So then after that bright light white will come
So the purity of the might will reign in the sun
So the filthy trash will all be on the run

This is American Kristallnacht
a renewed tomb's curse worse than Hitler's little minuet
America's Kristallnacht, feel the fact,
Syria's Assad was just the opening act

Of all the things I wish to forget
the burn in the nostrils is beyond neglect
frenzied my brain, not enough rain, the lump in the neck

In addition to your loss of faith in the system,
the chemical weapon pepper spray will swell
 the mucous membranes of your eyes,
 which will cease believing

Your nose and throat, your fleshy moat,
will burn like some 14th century lost castle,
coughing at the charge of the Catholic brigades

Your eyes will dry like the planetary deserts,
Your eyes will close involuntary against the peace-keeping army,
and you will hyperventilate, burning in their sin

Psychological effects include paranoia, anxiety, panic,
which is just what a peaceful street gathering needs,
See the revolution, see the seeds, you don't bleed:
The imposition of order creates chaos
and that's all you need to read

The Nazi call is here, it's clear
hidden now behind the double-hurricane wind shear
but no one should ever forget, the fear is here

Time and money people
who move just one stone
and call it a day
won't do much to resist
or stop the sway
More than likely
they will be the first to line up
on the day of the big state-sanctioned violence parade

When is the U.S. Supreme Court going to rule that a brick is free speech, too?

American Kristallnacht came this year
watch them drop behind the veil of hell,
no better than any dictator in any era
American Kristallnacht came this year

(With apologies to anyone still living or dead 
who experienced pre-World War II Germany,
 because things aren't that bad here, yet - DLM)

7.9.17

David Bromberg resurfaces after two decades to sound better than ever



If a star quarterback returns after retiring over twenty years ago, there aren't many who would bet on his success. If a world champion prize fighter took to the ring again after two decades, better have the ambulance ready. If Jesus came back from the dead, he might have a lot of catching up to do before he was ready for prime time. But if you found a Stradivarius violin in the attic, chances are it would sound pretty good.

David Bromberg is like one of those fine instruments. As his friend Jerry Jeff Walker stated about him, "The reason man created stringed instruments. David touched them with a lover’s fingers and they moaned that true love right back at him. Wood and wire and flesh spoke.”

So how does one explain the re-emergence of Bromberg? After a dozen albums and constant touring during the 1970s and 1980s with a lot of humor and instrumental verve, this noted master of guitar, fiddle, dobro, mandolin, pedal steel guitar decided he was burned out on the whole business, broke up his band, and retreated into a life of relative obscurity. But alas, that's a media-generated idea: that someone disappears when they aren't in the public life. He was simply off the public radar. But now, at age 70, he's back on the road.

"I was really doing well," he says of that time during the late 1980s when he broke up the band. "I was working too much without a break. I toured for two years straight and never went home. I realized that when I got off the road I was burnt out, but I didn't realize that until later. I came to the conclusion that I wasn't a musician anymore. When I wasn't performing, I wasn't writing, I wasn't playing on my own. I realized I was I-don't-know-what."

There were some studio credits along the way, as he appeared on other people's records here and there. But he says he wasn't really pursuing life as a musician for some time.

"I didn't play much guitar," he says. "The performing I did was very sporadic. I took 22 years off and I didn't realize I could step back in."

What he did instead was learn how to make violins. First, he enrolled in the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making in Chicago. But he wasn't as interested in knowing how to make violins as he was in trying to identify them. Especially violins made in the United States. Something just clicked in his archival mind about these instruments. He became an avid collector and known expert on violins. He now has a collection of 263 violins made in America, which he has offered to the Library of Congress. And when someone had a violin they needed to identify, Bromberg became the go-to guy.

"How do you tell what they are is what fascinated me," he says. "I started looking at violins, learning how to identify the makers, gaining the knowledge of the different makers. Now, in one small area of the violin world, American-made violins, I'm considered something of an expert."

After moving to Wilmington, Delaware, he opened a retail store and repair shop for violins and other instruments, David Bromberg Fine Violins. The business was part of a revitalization of that part of Wilmington, but it also became a place where Bromberg himself became revitalized.

By the next year, after the mayor of Wilmington had mentioned live music had once been a common offering in that part of town, Bromberg was leading what he called a regular "jam session." As it turned out, he didn't have to travel to play. He just stayed home, and people came to him.
"Some very good musicians started to show up, some of them from a long way away," he says.
Thus began the musical re-education of David Bromberg.

"I learned a whole bunch about singing," he says. "Phoebe Snow gave me some very good advice about singing. During the period I wasn't performing, I took some voice lessons. Now I sing a lot better than I did in the 1970s. I don't have the speed on the guitar that I used to have. That part is gone."

Within five years of moving to Wilmington, and after getting encouragement from the likes of bluegrass players Chris Hillman and Herb Pederson, he was ready to start recording again. He formed the David Bromberg Quintet and returned to the recording world with the 2007 release called, naturally, "Try Me One More Time."

It was nominated for a Grammy.

That was followed by a recording project that started with some playing for fun with John Hiatt, but became a concept Bromberg called "Use Me." He invited a wide variety of artists -- Hiatt, Levon Helm, Los Lobos, Tim O'Brien, Vince Gil, Keb' Mo, Linda Ronstadt -- to suggest songs they wrote for him to cover, and then Bromberg would perform and record them. Then came an opportunity to record with producer Larry Campbell, a longtime friend and former producer and player for Levon Helm and Bob Dylan. The David Bromberg Band emerged with "Only Slightly Mad," which Bromberg says "is an old-time David Bromberg record" since it jumps around from Chicago-style blues to bluegrass, gospel and English drinking songs.

That ability to create shows and records with "too many different styles," as he put it, is why in the past decade Bromberg has earned the nickname "The Godfather of Americana."

"I did not make it (the nickname) up," he laughs. "When I was originally performing, there was no such thing as Americana. Commercial record stores couldn't figure out where to put me. Was I in the rock section, the blues section, the folk section, all the stuff I do. Now all of that is just called Americana, and that's what I was doing for all of those years."

Bromberg is from the generation born at the end of World War II (in 1945 in Philadelphia, later raised in Tarrytown, New York) that was just waiting to discover rock'n'roll by the time he was a teen in the late 1950s. However, he was more attracted to roots music than the mainstream Elvi of his day. He discovered Peter Seeger and the Weavers, and was especially drawn to the blues. A fan of Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, he discovered a now lesser known blind blues player by the name of Reverend Gary Davis, who he asked to teach him to play guitar while living in Greenwhich Village in New York,

He says he enrolled in Columbia University with the intention of becoming a musicology major, but he never got far enough along in his studies to actually study "musicology."

"I never got to the point where that actually happened," he says.

Nevertheless, he says the exposure to the lively Village music scene in the mid-1960s was essentially a study in numerous kinds of music that he was interested in. Now, in later years, his exposure to all forms of folk, blues, country, jazz and so on has led him to being just as undefinable. How does he remember that fabled time scrambling to make a living as a musician in the Village?

"Even when I got to the Village, people were saying it was not the same as it used to be, and they are still saying it now," he says. "What I remember is the joy that we all got when playing that music. We loved that music and we loved each other."

After a time playing for tips, he became a sought-after studio musician and backing musician for Tom Paxton, Jerry Jeff Walker and Rosalie Sorrels. Then he began to flourish as a hired hand for recording sessions, including for Bob Dylan's "New Morning" and "Self Portrait" LPs.

For the next decade or more, Bromberg played with a who's who of musicians. He got his first record deal in 1970 after getting a chance to play as a stand-in at the Isle of Wight Festival. The performance was so well received that Columbia Records offered him a recording contract. In 1971 his debut album included the song "The Holdup," the product of a collaboration with former Beatle George Harrison. Then he met members of the Grateful Dead, and they played on his next two albums.

At that point, his music was deep into the blues and folk, and his nasally voice (somewhat in the timbre of a jazzy Neil Young) wasn't great but it was laced with a lot of irony and sarcasm. That style, featuring horns and all kinds of other instruments with an increasingly large ensemble, developed a hit with a seven-minute version of "Mr. Bojangles," which interwove stories about traveling with the song's writer, Jerry Jeff Walker.

His humor is a trademark. For example, on "Only Slightly Mad," there's a song about how he'll take a lover back when, among other impossibilities, "they find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Even his liner notes on the CD are self-deprecating. He describes the song "Strongest Man Alive," about surviving all kinds of challenges where others have not, as "an old English drinking song that I wrote. Well, I wrote it and it sounds like an old English drinking song."

His shows are now like eclectic journeys into his encyclopedic mind, and the songs he chooses are as eccentric as he is.

"What I like in humorists," he says, "are people who take their subjects very seriously, but don't take themselves very seriously."