Boys of Summer

The Donkeys just have that sound

to make you think of California

The soundtrack for the film "The Endless Summer," released in 1966, has an important place in the hearts of the members of the Southern California band, The Donkeys. First of all, the musical group The Sandals, who did the surf theme for the movie, came from the same place The Donkeys did, Dana Point, California. When the original four members of the indie pop-rockers The Donkeys were growing up, the oceanside city between San Diego and Los Angeles was an idyllic place where you could surf, or just hang out on the beach and breathe in the sea breezes, while their families could live there at a reasonable price. But like so many musicians of their generation living in Southern California, their artistic cravings were fueled by the restlessness of being young in the 'burbs.

The film "The Endless Summer" was about a group of surfers, finding California beaches inhospitable during the cold currents of winter, seeking out warmer climates around the world in order to do what they love around the year, thus making it sunny and wavy wherever they went. It's a kind of gypsy idea, reinforced for the 20th century by Jack Kerouac and his novel about life on the move, "On the Road." Fledgling rock bands, therefore, are perfect extensions of this Kerouac idea: of roving minstrels, of easy riders, of boardmen moving with the currents. Touring musicians perfect the surf-and-travel ethic by getting paid something, anything in order to do so. Indeed, traveling bands are the nuclear families of endless summer.

Captured for a comment for a cell phone interview while negotiating traffic in a van moving north from New York for a show in Canada, The Donkeys are living the dream. They love touring but have families and need to strike a balance. In the tour bus were band members Timothy DeNardo, Anthony Lukens, Sam Sprague, and Steve Selvidge, a stand-in member of the tour who also plays with the band Hold Steady. Asked about why The Donkeys recently released a cover of the theme song for "The Endless Summer," the band's drummer and occasional vocalist, Sprague, says the Sandals' original was a seminal moment in surf music and the California sound.

"The record label was asking us for a cover and the Sandals were from Dana Point, and we wanted to pay homage to that," Sprague says. "We recorded it in Anthony's garage and we didn't get too far out with it. It's hard to compete (with the original). It was a masterpiece."

The Donkeys are most commonly categorized by critics as being a new form of hippiefied beach crew, mostly because of their San Diego performance base. They often feature the vocal oohs and ahhs of the breezy Pacific ease of the Beach Boys, as well as the extended jam techniques of the Grateful Dead. They also share an affinity for another California band, Pavement. But in an interview a few years ago, guitarist Lukens denied any sort of strict Left-Coast musical alignment, stating they could have just as easily come from Iowa. Listening to the instrumentation for any of their four albums and a recent EP, "Midnight Palms," you can easily hear the jangle-rock remnants of a legendary East Coast band, The Velvet Underground.

"I love Pavement, but I really don't feel like we sound like them," Sprague says. "A huge influence was the Velvet Underground, a very big influence."

Their first self-titled album, "The Donkeys" came out in 2004, and was followed by "Living on the Other Side" in 2008, "Born with Stripes" in 2011, and "Ride the Black Wave" in 2014. By the time they had released "Born With Stripes," they were getting raves for being one of San Diego's favorite emerging acts and won a nod from the San Diego Music Awards for best rock band in 2012.

They got a taste from mainstream culture in an odd sort of way. A producer for the TV show "Lost" had heard their music, and wanted to use it on the show. Sections of their music have been used throughout the series. The show created characters for a fictional band called Geronimo Jackson and used a tailored version of The Donkeys' song, "Excelsior Lady." This was done by having the fake band lip-sync the real-band recording. Proceeds from the song's usage on TV helped to pay the cost for another Donkeys album. Lukens recently quipped that the fake band, Geronimo Jackson, was actually more famous than the Donkeys.

Sprague isn't sure about any acclaim to fame for being the players behind a pseudonym.
"We are probably still waiting for that big break," he says.

Unlike the Velvet Underground, The Donkeys don't go much into the harsh light of crunching dissonance. Their recordings are clean, with all members of the band sharing the vocals much as the same way as another immaculate California band, the Eagles. They peruse the pop idiom of relationship songs. Storm and stress is kept at a minimum. As Sprague says, "Writing songs about girls is the classic thing. We are a romantic bunch. Who doesn't like love songs?"

The first song on the new EP, "Hurt Somebody," is an uptempo tune with tinklings of keyboards very reminiscent of Bob Dylan when he moved from folk to rock, and includes the highly affirmative chorus, "It will be all right." It sounds like many neo-classic alt-country bands who themselves were inspired by the Byrds. "Down the Line" could have been a hit on FM radio in the 1970s, with its happy message and simple "do-dit-do-do-does." They honor Grateful Dead stylings with "Hold on to You," a rocker with youthful exuberance. "Day by Day" recalls the solo efforts of John Lennon from say, "The Double Fantasy" period. Then comes "Star Bird," even more dreamy with a live-in-the-studio feel, layers of keyboards, airy background vocals, a sweetly skeletal guitar chime and a soothing melody. It's the standout piece of the EP.

"Born with Stripes," their next-to-last full-length album, is ear candy with bright keyboards harking back to some time way back, not sure when. The track "I Like the Way That You Walk" sounds like bands such as The Feelies, who themselves were inspired by the Velvet Underground, but the sweetness of the lyric, in praise of the feminine subject, is feel-good pop. Other songs on the record sound as if they were inspired by long drives across the California central desert. Their use of farfiza and Rhodes organ sounds, and a simplified sort of rock, really makes you think this music was recorded in the 1960s. Especially when they use the sitar. "Ride the Black Wave," from their last full-length effort, makes one think of another Californian, Chris Isaak, except spacier.

"It's great that it sounds nostalgic, we just don't want to be the Beach Boys reincarnated," Sprague says. "Hopefully, it doesn't sound derivative."

Sprague is the youngest member of the band at 37, so The Donkeys aren't fresh-faced folkies trying to reinvent the wheel with obtuse vocalizations or otherwise tuneless, baroque melodies. And if people think of the Dead due to the unified brilliance of their live shows, that's because the members of the band have been playing together in different bands since high school. The band's hive-mind sound really came together after a previous tour where they performed for 32 straight nights.

"We have been playing together, after being in various bands together, for a solid straight eight years," Sprague says. "Nowadays we are more focused so when we get into the studio we can get it done in a day or two. That tour playing 32 days in a row was really rough ... but we are definitely tight as hell. That's the greatest feeling."

Gordon Lightfoot

A North American national resource

During the days of the 70s when FM radio ruled as the central output for whatever was going on in music, when story-telling Jim Croce had his big bad Leroy Brown, Harry Chapin his cats in a cradle, and James Taylor his fire and rain, Gordon Lightfoot was right alongside them with such hits as "Sundown," "Rainy Day People," "Carefee Highway," "If You Could Read My Mind," and by far the best maritime disaster song of all time, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." They call it easy listening now, many of those FM radio hits that were ballads, but many of the best, in Lightfoot's case, were drawn from gut-wrenching heartbreak and a general appetite for tragedy. Basically, some pretty dark stuff.

In a telephone interview from his home in Toronto, Canada, Lightfoot, now 77, was almost as good at telling the stories of his most famous songs as he is at singing the songs himself.

For example, he says "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," about the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975, started out as a song when, a few weeks before the disaster happened, he remembered a melody from childhood.

"It was an Irish dirge I heard when I was three," he says of the original melody for the song. "It kind of sprung itself all of the sudden."

The details for the "Edmund Fitzgerald" were realized for Lightfoot when he read a story in Newsweek magazine about the 29 crew members who were lost during the severe November storm.
"I remembered that night because there was a very strong wind in Toronto, and I was wondering how my sailboat was doing that night," he says. "After I read the Newsweek article a few weeks later, the melody was already there and I wrote the song."

Last year was the 40-year-anniversary of the tragedy, and Lightfoot has kept in touch with the families of the victims over the years. A year ago he was throwing himself behind a preservation effort for the old church in Detroit referred to in the song. "I had to take care of that," he says.
Lightfoot and Bob Dylan have had a mutual admiration society for decades, going back to when Lightfoot would occasionally visit Dylan at his songwriting office in New York, after Lightfoot got a management deal with Albert Grossman, who also represented Dylan.

"I can remember watching (Dylan) work on the typewriter," Lightfoot says. "He was really large for me. He's the main influence. I got into how he did it. How he got it done."

He laughed about the week of Woodstock and how there were all of these stories about Dylan performing at the show in upstate New York, while Lightfoot knew all of the time he was at the Isle of Wight festival in England. Lightfoot says he was invited to go to Woodstock, to watch, that is, but he didn't go. Playing such a gig was discouraged by his manager, Grossman, who didn't like the idea of his clients playing for free.

"He'd say 'keep it for the concerts, keep your mystique together,' " he says.

Lightfoot grew up as a performing child prodigy, singing in public for the first time in the fourth grade, and he became quite used to being in front of audiences by the age of 10. He loved Bing Crosby and songs by the 19th century songwriter Stephen Foster, who wrote "Camptown Ladies," among other American standards.

"I don't know if I plagiarized him or not," he jokes of Foster's influence.

He got his career start in music in the late 1950s and early 1960s hosting shows featuring country music, first in Canada, then in England on the BBC, and by around 1964 his songs were being recorded by such artists as Elvis Presley, Marty Robbins and Peter, Paul and Mary. His first big American hit was "If You Can Read My Mind" in 1970. From that point on, Lightfoot was a heavyweight on the radio playlists.

"There was always competition," he says. "There was always the Beatles or David Bowie in your face."

He says it was during his early years that he'd found a way to write songs: finding solitude by asking people with empty homes or apartments in Toronto if he could go inside and play there for a while. With families, kids, all kinds of people in those coffeehouse folk days of Pete Seeger wannabees around him, it was the best way to get quiet and find the folkways going on in his head.

"I found an empty condo fine. You have to just completely remove yourself from everything," Lightfoot says. "I had an odd thing about working in empty houses. They (the owners) would go outside and have a smoke, and by the time they were done I'd have a song," he says.

By the late 1970s Lightfoot was a huge success in Canada and the U.S. with such singles as "Sundown" and "Carefree Highway," the latter inspired when, on tour in Arizona, he came across a highway sign, literally, "Carefree Highway." He wrote the two words down and threw the piece of paper into a suitcase, only to discover it later when he was in the spirit to write. The song is purported to be about a carefree life on the road, but Lightfoot loaded it with its main story about loss and longing. Equally edgy, from a relationship-song standpoint, is "Sundown," about a man suspicious about his lover, a song that cuts so deep Lightfoot has to remind people that, hey, it's only a song.

"I crossed paths with one guy who was totally convinced 'Sundown' was about him," Lightfoot says. "He was so worried about it, I had to stand there and ease his fears."

Sludge, American style

For Melvins' leader Buzz Osborne,

normal is a state of someone else's mind

     The Melvins have a flare for the dramatic, as well as for the bizarre, most certainly in a Frank Zappa sorta way, especially for a band with album titles like "The Maggot," "Hostile Ambient Takeover" and "Everybody Loves Sausages." Appropriately, the masters of sludge rock, longtime members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, are celebrating the month of August by appearing as animated characters in the Cartoon Network series "Uncle Grandpa." You could argue that Osborne's potted-plant hairstyle also inspired another cartoon character, the Simpsons' "Sideshow Bob."

     Living in the sub-cult village of American pedal-to-the-metal, they are irreverent, funny, and, occasionally, exceedingly ambitious.

     For example, the group that usually performs as a power trio once played every night for 51 straight days in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia. The 2012 tour started in Anchorage, Alaska and ended up in Honolulu, Hawaii.

     Band leader and guitarist Osborne says the Herculean effort would have been written up in the Guinness Book of World Records, "but you have to pay for that."

     

     As far as the weirdness goes, Osborne makes no apologies. Being anti-social, most certainly non-commercial, is a an artistic statement opposing the overculture.

     "We're a lot of long-haired kooks, that's kind of the deal," he says in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "There are enough bands already doing the normal stuff."

     Other notable oddities in the history of the Melvins is that in 2011 they were touring in Christchurch, New Zealand at the time of a major earthquake, and then were in Tokyo, Japan for an earthquake and tsunami. He adds they were in Los Angeles for another temblor, but adds he finds no special coincidence regarding these events, even considering the fact that the Melvins play loud and hard enough to set off earthquake alarms.

     What else? Oh yeah, this: The Melvins challenge Neil Young for the title, "Godfather of Grunge." They have also been referred to as "the Gods of sludge." They are most certainly the godfathers of gut-pounding something.

    "One-hundred percent, no question," he says. "Most people give us props for that, for what it's worth."

     The grunge pioneer connection began with Osborne growing up around Aberdeen, Washington, and attending the same high school as Curt Cobain.

     "We did know each other to some degree," Osborne says. "We were all interested in music. (Cobain) had a talent for chord progressions that were good to listen to ... But everything that happened with the way he died replaced all of that."

     When he introduced Cobain and Krist Novoselic to Dave Grohl, Nirvana was born. Now a member of the Foo Fighters, Novoselic recently proposed to Osborne that he and the Melvins join together for a series of shows performing Nirvana songs, but the idea fell through.

     Nevertheless, they will be always connected to the birth of grunge and the fabled "Seattle sound," even though they have been based in Southern California for more than 20 years. The band's first album "Gluey Porch Treatments" in 1987 led to a few more independent releases and then, just as Nirvana was taking off, the Melvins were signed to Atlantic Records to produce "Houdini." But in the time since the group has spun out of the "grunge" universe, creating a ferocious, disassembling hodge-podge style fusing Black Sabbath to the furies of all forms of guitar noise.

     The Melvins are touring after releasing two albums this year.

     The first, "Three Men and a Baby," is a project that originally began in the late 1990s, but was abandoned when the drummer had to be fired "due to extracurricular activities, if you know I mean," Osborne says. After he returned, they completed the record.

     "I had put that (project) completely out of my mind," he says. "I completely forgot what they sounded like. He came back we finished it and now I'm really proud of it."

     The main focus of the band, though, is to promote "Basses Loaded," which includes a rambunctious cover of the Beatles' "I Want to Tell You," as well as an eclectic mix of buzzing guitar, jazzy interludes, off-color joke tunes, a cover of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and more than one track calling back to the early days of grunge. The record features six different bass players (hence the album title), including Novoselic, Jeff Pinkus of the Butthole Surfers, Mr. Bungle bass player Trevor Dunn, Jared Warren of Big Business, and Steve McDonald of Redd Kross, who is the bassist on the current Melvins' tour.

     Osborne says the use of so many bassists was due to a feeling of complete insecurity about how many band members have come and gone over the years. He is the lone original member.

     "It's so discouraging to have all of my musical hope pinned on one guy," he says. "So I use a lot of people. Every version of the band (on the album) is different sounding. We hadn't done anything like this and it seemed like a good idea."

     At the end of it all, the Melvins are the avant garde masters of the unconventional.

     "I don't think it sounds odd," he says. "There's not much I can do about what people think is experimental or odd. It sounds normal to me. All things are relative."

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Thievery Corporation: 

Two Decades of Downtempo

  At the nadir of the alternative scene of the 1990s, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton were looking for something different. Based in Washington, D.C., they had met in 1995 at a popular lounge co-owned by Hilton, an entrepreneurial sort who had been producing parties for the hotspot known as the Eighteenth Street Lounge, which was located in an old mansion with three floors renovated for DJ-driven music events. The duo decided to use the venue, drawing from the musicians it attracted, to create a collective entity that has been known for 20 years as Thievery Corporation. 

    What they were looking for back then, recalled Garza during a telephone interview from his home of seven years in San Francisco, was something new to inject into the electronic dance music scene. New hip-hop acts and ultra-hip sampling processors such as Fat Boy Slim and the Chemical Brothers were replacing the heroes of Pearl-Jam-landia. Digital drums jumped to the front like mighty hammers, smashing the primacy of grunge and noodling guitar solos to bits. The appropriation of beats and found sounds was all the rage, and Garza and Hilton, after rummaging through the record stores in Baltimore, bought old bossa nova albums, dub records and soundtrack music, and began incoropating those inspirational elements into recordings made at Hilton's studio.

     Garza says it got to the point that they realized their love for Brazilian bossa nova from 30 years before might be updated with the new production values and the trance-like electronic vibe of the emerging age.

     The duo drew attention with their first two 12-inch offerings, "Shaolin Satellite," a dark, intense, bass-driven and danceable electronic track, and "2001: a Spliff Odyssey," where dub meets a kind of spacey, atmospheric jazz. With their 1997 debut LP, "Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi," the duo showed a desire to break into more and more of what had at that point been known as world music.

    "In '95 we were really just doing it for the fun of it, but then people really responded to the music," Garza says. "After the first two singles, people from all over were into us. It was at that point that we decided to create a business that was sustainable. The music we were creating had a trippy quality where you couldn't be sure if it was from the future or the past."

     What they were doing has since been labeled "lounge" or "downtempo," but Garza says at the time the easy listening labels of those early years were just fads. What they wanted to do was put some old roots music on steroids, borrowing from Bollywood to Buenas Aires, especially from the bossa nova movement in Brazil in the 1960s, "and get a different take of some of this different music," Garza says.

     Those early efforts were basic experiments. In the years since Moby's "Play" became a permanent monument on the radio and television landscape, beyond the go-go internet days of 2000, electronic dance music has taken over the night club scene in urban America. The recordings of this century by Thievery Corporation have shown the willingness to move into undefinable directions of sound accompanied by the voices of many nations. And more than having fun with samples, which got them into the game to begin with, their music has taken on themes of political and social immediacy on a world-wide scale.

     Playing dub, acid jazz, space rock to the chill side of Pink Floyd, as well as a fusion of reggae, Indian classical, and Middle Eastern styles, all to the predominant, insistent beat of hip-hop, Thievery Corporation is a politically progressive act intent on opening listeners' minds to foreign sounds so they no longer feel foreign. Remarkably during their career, they have created songs with lyrics in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian and Hindi. Ranging from a kind of romantic elegance to dark and perilous tracks full of intricate details caught in a minimalist web, each album is a kind of urgent trek across many musical horizons, often to a dub or bass beat, then jumping into reggae or a cosmic jazz suite: music that can be played at low volumes but still make you feel like you are living on the edge.

     "Having music that is coming from a global perspective opens people's minds, gives them a broader view of the world," Garza says. "It makes you think a little bit. I don't think our music is necessarily political. It is inspired by music from bands like Public Enemy, Fugazi, the punk stuff, bands like the Clash. There's something liberating about being able to say anything."

     If recent records have contained, from track to track, multiple styles of music, the most recent album, "Saudade," released in 2014, sticks to the Brazilian and bossa nova side of things. Garza says it was a way of going full circle after 20 years.

     "For us, we have always been influenced by Brazilian music and for that record, rather than jumping from style to style, we would take a break, choose one particular form," he says. "With the next album we are going to release later this year, we recorded it at Point Antonio in Jamaica. There's a Jamaican theme throughout and we are very excited about it."

     Of course, to keep all of those musical influences under one band's roof, Thievery Corporation has grown beyond Garza and Hilton into a larger band of supporting musicians including Rob Myers, Loulou Ghelichkhani, Natalia Clavier, Frank "Booty Lock" Mitchell, Mr. Lif, Jeff Franca and Ashish Vyas.

     "We have great musicians from all over the country, people from Argentina, Iran and Jamaica," Garza says. "It really feels like a circus with a great cast of characters."

     But don't ever think it's chill or downtempo or lounge music, he adds, if you come to see it live.
     "I hope people see it as Thievery Corporation music," Garza says. "A lot of songs might seem chilled out when you play them at home, but get it pumping into a live sound system, really gets the heart going."

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A lifetime of walking down

 Edward Abbey's road

    The first time I met Ed Abbey, he monkeywrenched a perfectly good draft beer, a Heineken, by taking the light and dark versions and pouring the two bottles into one glass. In my view, one of the more unnecessary acts of eccentricity I'd ever seen him perform ... and it's a long list. I had met him in Tucson, Arizona, for an interview for the UofA campus newspaper, The Arizona Daily Wildcat, where I was a reporter who preferred to ditch a class than miss a story. Abbey's included. We met at The Big A, an off-campus burger joint that he always used for interviews. A strange fact by itself, in many ways, since it was a sports bar and he thought football was a pox on the earth (but then, what wasn't a pox on the earth, as far as Abbey was concerned?). Yes, he'd done many, many interviews at The Big A, and I can't tell you how many times I cringed whenever the next reporter described Abbey's iconoclastic persona with the following observation: mixing light and dark drafts of Heinekens.

     I had just discovered Abbey's "The Monkeywrench Gang," a fictional story about a group of misfit sabateurs operating in the Four Corner's region, while working the previous summer at the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon Village. I read many chapters with my feet hanging over the edge of a cliff while I drank boda bags of wine. I had already read "Desert Solitaire" and made a habit of bringing a notebook with me on hiking trips.

     The second time I saw Abbey was on the first night of class at the University of Arizona in 1982. The creative writing department at the UofA had snagged the writer to teach his wannabe writer fans how to write non-fiction. A few years after I graduated from the University of Arizona, I asked Abbey about his teaching methods, and his was pretty self-deprecating about the whole topic.

     "It's gotten worse," he said. "I still feel I'm a lousy teacher, but I make the students work hard, so I don't know if they have time to realize how bad I am. I'm a little dubious about this whole creative writing business as something to be taught in college. I'm not sure whether it does more harm than good."

     On that first night in Abbey's non-fiction writing class in the Language Arts Building, he taught me one of the only things I can remember about so many of such classes. Well, actually, three.
They are, as he wrote on the chalk board that first night after being about 10 minutes late: "1) Write right; 2) Write wrong; 3) Write on."

     Short and sweet, it was, and the same could be said for that first night a la Abbey. A few minutes later the grizzled, jeans-clad author was distracted, as we all were, by something going on at the plaza. He rushed over to the second floor window of the classroom, and after seeing a bunch of anti-nuke protesters go by with candles, exclaimed, "Hey, I gotta go see that!" And with that, he rushed out the door and did not return. We wannabe monkeywrenching writers sat there at our desks for just a short, stunned moment.  We were all probably wondering if perhaps a lesson on how to write about cactus and coyotes might be included on the syllabus. But he was in the classroom only a moment, and then was gone.

     We caught up with him at the candlelight vigil in front of the old ROTC building at the center of the University. He was singing with the anti-nuke protesters. That was Abbey, the spontaneous one, holding a candle, and I can still see the light flickering on his beard and in his eyes. He was performing, for us, for his students, for those who had not known he was the latest new campus celebrity. Certainly, no foe to publicity of any kind, Abbey well understood the necessity of being an outlandish personality. His greeting card was his frequent call at public gatherings to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. But that was just part of the performance.

    I believe he took an interest in me. Once we were given an assignment to write something on the "wild side." Everybody else assumed that meant practice writing about cactus and coyotes and the call of the lone wolf student writer. Always one to color outside the lines, I decided to write about downtown Phoenix as viewed from a general walk around the Greyhound Bus station. In the course of my study of the terrain, I went by the Phoenix Convention Center and discovered a couple who had slipped away into some bushes to have sex. This, of course, was too good to be true, considering my idea for the assignment, and I turned it in as a metaphor about Eden and life in the city.

     Nobody in the class believed that it happened, though. My classmates, during another one of those awful round table critiques (always to be taken with a grain of salt), told me it was non-fiction we were supposed to be writing, not fiction. But Abbey believed me. He even came to my defense, saying, "This is all just an exercise. All of this is."

     There was, in fact, one item distributed at his second class in mimeographed form that proved to be a great boon. The Edward Abbey reading list: Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Two nature-loving Luddites, a city slicker, and the patron saint of the New Journalism. But there was one other name that took me years to appreciate: 16th century author Michel de Montaigne. The French writer was one of the first to try to express himself, via highly literary means, by writing about himself, and it was he who popularized the term essayer, as in essay. It means "to try."

     In hindsight, remembering those classes with clarity, still, after 30 years, I'd have to say Abbey was a better teacher than he knew. The benefit of being his student wasn't just getting a chance to rub elbows with a literary legend at regular intervals. He was a true authentic. And it was more than the after-class get togethers at the local pubs, or the parties at his home. He was, in fact, a rigorous critic when it came to grading the essays written for the class. In that regard, he was as tough of a teacher as they come. I can remember one particular essay I'd written as a kind of imitation of Abbey, about a hike down Hermit Trail, in which the teacher had eviscerated my copy with red ink. Indeed, he wanted students to write like themselves, not their hero. He frequently made all kinds of interesting comments on assignments that were turned in. Once, I wrote an essay about how the right wing and the left wing could come together on the political spectrum, and he had penciled in, "Hey, I believe that, too!" But another essay on the anniversary of the death of John Lennon was ripped apart for its sentimentality. His classes were a mix of vindication and shame. He wanted people to be real, just like he was. His favorite student, I recall, was a man who lived part-time in a cave who wrote with a rugged honesty.

     The last time I saw Abbey was in Prescott, where I was a reporter for The Courier. The novelist had been invited to read from his upcoming novel, which would eventually be published as "The Fool's Progress." Reading from his opening chapter, Abbey set the packed house at the Hassayampa Inn into roaring laughter with his incredibly honest tale about breaking up with a girl and, in anger, shooting his refrigerator with a shotgun. Afterward, someone called the reading "portrait of an artist as a dirty old man."

     Just a few years before his death in 1989, Abbey was still game for making outrageous statements. Among American authors he, like Norman Mailer, knew the importance of being a notorious character in real life, keeping his name out there. By then, perhaps, he had mellowed. For example, during that trip to Prescott, I saw him tell a little old lady that he was sorry about his legendary threat to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam because people might get hurt by the act. Then, he said, "All environmentalism is a defensive action."

     And one might wonder how he might fit in with today's political divisions. Perhaps his beliefs these days would be called libertarian. To call him a bleeding heart liberal would be a mistake.
At our last meeting, he said, "On many issues I'm on the same side as [Arizona Governor] Evan Mecham and Sam Steiger [a conservative Arizona congressman], I suppose.That puts me in some pretty unpleasant company. But I never felt I joined any particular group or faction. If they [the right wingers] started welcoming me with open arms or inviting me to conventions, I might get a little worried. I might think, 'God, maybe I have gone too far the wrong way.' "

     In the time since his death Abbey's legend has only grown and the appreciation of his writing has blossomed. In the time since his death, I can't count the number of times I've met people in the Southwest who had met him and remember him well. By my own evidence collected as a student, I would have to say he wasn't all that comfortable in the university laboratory of civilization.

     “The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book,” he once said. But I'd also say the best thing about having a class with Abbey was the profound memories that linger. Many times over the years, especially in terms of where and how I have decided to work and live, I have asked myself, "What would Edward Abbey do?" There are teachers and then there are those who teach. Abbey was the latter. Who knows how many people have dangled their legs off a cliff with a notebook in hand because of him. Considering this has led me to realize how so many of us are walking on Abbey's road.

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Psychedelic Furs with The Church is a revenge of the post-punks

     When Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols broke upon the music scene with a ferocious guitar assault, screaming about the queen and how there was no future, the whole question of artistic integrity in rock was revived. If anything, punk was about opposing authority. The pre-existing rock stars in Britain had become, in the punk view, too much like a form of aristocracy.

     Growing up in London in the 1970s, brothers Tim and Richard Butler, the first in secondary school and the second enrolled in art school, loved the intensity of the Sex Pistols. The example of Johnny Rotten (Johnny Lydon) starting a cultural revolt by only knowing three chords on his guitar was a revelation.

     "A whole new world opened up," says Tim Butler from his current home in Kentucky. "Music was the only way out. There was mass unemployment. As soon as you left school, you were immediately unemployed. Kids didn't have any hope. When we formed, we were influenced by the energy and the attitude of the Sex Pistols. But everyone was playing three-chord, three-minute songs, and we started to look for something else."

     A few years later, on the other side of the world, in Sydney, Australia, Steve Kilbey formed a band with a bloke from Liverpool, England -- Marty Wilson-Piper -- originally calling the band The Church of Man, later shortening it to The Church. By that time punk had led to new wave, but neither Kilbey nor Wilson-Piper wanted anything to do with such fashionability. By that time many of the new bands had eschewed the whole idea of a guitar solo. The Church pursued a twin-guitar sound, creating a kind of post-rock psychedelia with extended instrumental sections.

     "We were deliberately trying to buck the trend," Kilbey says over the phone line from Sydney. "We were classicists trying to find our way back to Yes, Genesis, to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. We kept playing the guitar solos, doing the long hair, even to the point of wearing paisley shirts."

     Considering their different attitudes about how to approach music in a post-punk world, it's ironic that the Psychedelic Furs and The Church have become a successful double bill for nearly two years.

     The Psychedelic Furs had disbanded in the early 1990s because, according to Butler, they were tired of playing such hits as "Love My Way" and "Pretty in Pink." The Butler brothers then formed a new band, Love Spit Love, and the pressure was off. "Nobody knew who we were and we could play what we wanted," he says. But in the late 1990s, they got invited to play a short set for a punk and new wave era nostalgia show.

     "We had an offer to play with the B52s and the Go Gos. They asked us to do a 50-minute set," Butler says. "We did that and found out that people remembered us, that people needed to hear us. We started to hear how younger bands were influenced by us. We were finding we were getting the respect that we had sort of lost."

     The Church never stopped making albums, but at around that same time in the late 1990s, they were ready to break up the band. But the popularity of a farewell concert tour caused them to change their minds.

     "We were always going in and out of fashion," Kilbey says. "There was always something that would wipe us out, and then we'd decide we'd keep on doing shows. We had lots of times when we almost called it quits. Everyone has that frustration, whether it's in a marriage, a business relationship or a band. And then after that, we would say it was a mistake. It becomes a little embarrassing to say you are going to call it quits and then come back. We kept deciding that we still had more music to contribute."

~

     The Psychedelic Furs responded to the three-minute blaster style of punk by trying to do something different. Instead of raging for three minutes, they would just play one song with ferocious energy for 10 minutes.

     "When we started out, none of us could really play," Butler says. "We would go into the studio and just jam and say, 'Everybody play at once.' Our first album ... someone (a music critic) called it 'beautiful chaos.' It was cacaphonous but it seemed to draw an audience."

     Butler says the band had the good fortune to get teamed up with a hot young producer, Steve Lillywhite, who had already produced one of the early solo albums for Peter Gabriel, as well as U2's first album, "Boy."

     "He was the first person to help turn those jams into songs," Butler says. "Richard would be singing with a ton of anger and he (Lillywhite) would say, 'Try singing it more and calm it down.' "
That first self-titled Psychedelic Furs album, as well as their follow-up also produced by Lillywhite,

     "Talk, Talk, Talk," features washes of dissonant guitars, straight-ahead drumming, brash bursts of saxophone and Richard Butler's growling vocals, with his skill for finding a kind of roundabout melody above the din. The noise-drenched cacophony was still there. So was the anger.

     The song "Pretty in Pink" caught the attention of director John Hughes, who used the track for a hit film of the same name. But Butler says the original song isn't about a girl who was pretty but didn't know it. He says it was about a girl who "slept around and didn't respect herself" and "nobody wanted to know."

     The success that the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack brought to the band was a bit problematic, however.

     "That was a blessing and a curse," he says. "We got more of a following but we lost some of our hardcore fans. There were all of these young girls showing up in 'Pretty in Pink' t-shirts. The old fans left us as we gained a huge audience, but it was a very fickle pop audience. In that respect it was a downside."

     But as the Psychedelic Furs rode the MTV generation into international fame with a sort of new wave pop laced with cynicism, The Church spent the early 1980s pursuing artistic integrity while fighting the trends. This made them something of a rock critic's misfit. Their songs were ethereal, cerebral, tending toward mysticism. Not the "dumb rock" of AC/DC, says Kilbey.

     "The source of that was my study of Greek and Egyptian mythology, a study of ancient history. I even studied Latin in school, things like art movies," Kilbey says. "I just wanted to get all of that into rock'n'roll."

     But it wasn't easy. They weren't punks but the attitude was anti-social, and very anti-commercial. They were signed to Capitol Records, only to find that the record company executives didn't like the brainy sort of art-rock they were doing. Kilbey recalled the day one record company official asked them to sound more like another Australian act, the Little River Band, an easy listening sort of group.

     "It's always a struggle," he says. "It was in the early days, was in the middle days, and still is now. All the record companies do is sign you up, say they like you how you are, then try to do everything they can to change you. They want you to wear different clothes. Different hair. They will say 'I love you, now change.' "

     Even during their most successful days, the members of The Church were anti-authoritarian, an attitude usually expressed in the form of resisting the advice of their handlers and their record producers. After some up-and-down experiences with producers and record labels, the band was able find its signature sound on Arista Records with "Starfish." The album's spacious sound has arching, twining twin-guitar interplay with a shimmering sort of chiming, chimerical brilliance. The track "Under the Milky Way" became a hit. That was followed up with another successful album, "Gold Afternoon Fix," which includes several other pieces that are still part of their regular set list. This was recorded during a period of their regular rebellion against their producer Bob Clearmountain and their settings in Los Angeles.

     Disenchantment became a kind of artistic muse. As Kilbey stated at the time: "The Church came to L.A. and really reacted against the place because none of us liked it. I hated where I was living. I hated driving this horrible little red car around on the wrong side of the road. I hate that there's no one walking on the streets and I missed my home. All the billboards, conversations I'd overhear, TV shows, everything that was happening to us was going into the music."

     Throughout their career, The Church has remained out of sync with their generation of MTV bands from the 1980s. For example, prior to touring with the Psychedelic Furs, they were teamed up with a reunion of Duran Duran, perhaps one of the most beloved and hated pop groups of their time.

     "That was terrible. That was the worst tour ever," Kilbey says. "They were the worst band in the world. I hated touring with them. What an absolutely hopeless bunch of girlies. It makes my skin crawl just listening to them ... That's one of the reasons I really like touring with the Psychedelic Furs. It's a much better fit."

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Blues-punk The Yawpers are the best new thing I've heard in a year

A standard conversation with someone espousing a lifelong passion for guitar-based rock'n'roll might go like this: "What do you think of music today?" says the first, with the response being "it sucks," or, "I can't think of one good new band today." As long-time Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau recently put it, while espousing the primacy of hip hop and world music, if you are into guitar-based rock, which is to say, the blues turned up, then you are "shit out of luck."

 And this is more than American Idol disease. If you scan the zeitgeist of such modern music web outlets as Pitchfork.com, you might learn that all music began with David Bowie and was perfected by Sonic Youth. The site's collective vibe about a miraculous number of new performers, none of whom you've ever heard of (for one pretty sure that all rock began with Robert Johnson and was then appropriated by Elvis and Mick) pretty much eschews the blues. Steve Earle, after releasing the album "Terraplane Blues," said recently he couldn't understand why some critics said it was "derivative." How can an approach to expression that snaked its way into the 20th century to change the world's tune, well delivered on a raw Dukes' recording, be derivative, instead of traditional, Earle asks. One wonders: like Fox News Papa Bill O'Reilly's mournful "War on Christmas," is there a war on the blues?

Well, if there is, the Denver-based band The Yawpers might be able to turn the tide. Or, a lot more bands like the power-trio would. Even lead singer and songwriter Nate Cook has felt the sting of the war on the blues on the new record "American Man" released on the Bloodshot label. He says some of the early reviews criticized the new release -- "some bad reviews" -- for some of the same reasons as what Earle yawped about as being "derivative."

"Our music has been a paradigm for the better part of the twentieth century," he says, agreeing that after all that time, there might now be a "backlash."

But blues-based rock, now charged up by a new generation with punk and heavy metal running through the veins, is in good hands with The Yawpers, who are capable of adding a fresh intelligence to the lyrics and, knowing how to build the momentum, to produce mountains of focused and gritty blues-bashed goodness like only a great three-piece can.

The really scary thing about The Yawpers is they do hard-edged Americana with two acoustic guitars and drums. The low grinds of the two guitars make you feel like there's bass there, when there isn't, and cascades of steel pedal riffs make it hard to believe the instrument hadn't been modified for Zepped-up electric amps by R.L. Burnside. The record, produced fully live by Johnny Hickman, the guitarist for Cracker, has a crackling authenticity, with the teamwork for pacing and volume heavy youthful abandon reminiscent of one of their heroes and musical forebears, The Meat Puppets. Reviewers have taken amazing leaps to describe their sound, most of it having to do with dirt, blood, beer, cavernous bars or the 70s bands Mountain, MC5 and Blue Cheer (who knew?). But The Yawpers' Cook leaves all of that journalistic poetry splicing to greater minds, saying reviews of music are "like trying to describe architecture."

Yes, The Yawpers dish out punked up blues with a thought in its head, lyrically speaking. Cook says he wasn't sure about how the band's name aesthetic would work out, but he's now much more comfortable with the fact the name came from a poem by Walt Whitman, from "Leaves of Grass": " “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Linking the pre-literate age of America to the current post-literate, in a world neutron bombed with musical ditties suited for waiting in line at the store to buy the newest smart watch, Cook says the Denver music scene, where waves of folkies had been coming out snack food crisp, is finally breaking away into a more rumbling, rocking era. Great sounds will always float over the land of just plain stupid, and yawping frequently seems to be the cure. Regarding Whitman, Cook now says the band name works because the title, and their music, is about "the blessed individual. The individual as sacrament."

As in: "The death of the individual," says Cook. "It is an intentionally brash record, but it's not outwardly un-PC. It's not a manifesto, but it does draw from a set of guidelines with songs about the state of the individual in the Western World."

The title track, "American Man," and a song about how real freedom comes when you can work "Nine to Five" all feature themes of the vacated belief that not only can a single individual not make a difference, a person cannot even be an individual. Not, at least, in the epic American way of thinking about it. With the tough economic backdrop, he sings of the burned out land: "This is my home but I’m a stranger here / If I had any left I’d cry American tears."

Cook grew up in a small town near San Antonio that he described as a "gun-toting, right wing" dystopia. So he's picked up a few things about how yearning and desperation are two sides of the same coin. He attended classes at Northern Arizona University 11 years ago before moving on to Colorado, where he latched onto the recession era bumcore sound of Denver's Colfax Avenue music scene and such bands as Bluebird Theater regulars American Relay, which blasted walls of Jimi Hendrix style blues with just drums and guitar. "I never met them," Cook says, "but I did see them play."

Another banjo-and-washboard minimalist folk-riot, Reverand Peyton's Big Damn Band, also fits the organic elements inspiring The Yawpers assault on American roots rock. A small band, which didn't evolve with a bass because there wasn't anyone around to play it by the time they were doing shows, is just good economic sense. Cook had adopted his parents love for Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Neil Young, and especially Bruce Springsteen, and now there's a lot of the Boss in the way he creates characters for his common man themes on "American Man."

"I always had an interest in doing proletarian music with more of a literary slant," he says. "We have a twisted take on the blues, a more high-minded approach to the blues. We like recording things totally live, and for whatever reason that has worked out for us."

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Dale Watson thinks country music is a crazy whore and wants a divorce

    So where and when did country music cross the line? Just ask Dale Watson, perhaps one of the leading critics of the genre. With his taste for fine western wear and trademark pompadour, he's a purist, for sure. There was no evolution in Dale Watson's music. He started out thirty years ago as an authentic, and if you want to know what authentic is, you still listen to Dale Watson, with his bass-tenor range and brilliant phrasing of the great American twang. And then, when you ask him what he's doing, he'll say it's something else, not country. Country music, he says, agreeing with Tom Petty, "has become bad rock'n'roll with a fiddle."
     Oh, it's worse. Much worse. Petty was just being polite. Watson is not polite. In fact, his first album produced a bit of an alt-country hit, "Nashville Rash," which only goes to show that Watson has made a career out of being impolite about the whole drift of the country music game. As he sang, in 1995:

Help me Merle, I'm breakin' out in a Nashville rash
It's a-looking like I'm fallin' in the cracks
I'm too country now for country, just like Johnny Cash
Help me Merle, I'm breakin' out in a Nashville rash

Shoulda' known it when they closed the Opry down
Things are bound to change in that town
You can't grow when you rip the roots out of the ground
Looks like that Nashville rash is getting 'round

     So yes, songs like "Country My Ass" indicate a gift for inspiring the rebel in anyone who prefers George Jones and Johnny Cash to the radio ready salutes found on mainstream country radio. According to the Austin Chronicle, "country music's a crazy, gold-diggin whore, and Dale Watson wants a divorce." Asked if this sensationally colorful line might be included in one of his songs someday, he responded, "I kind of think I already did ..." then taking a pause, saying, "It's not a bad idea, actually."
    Watson says country music went off the rails well before he released his first record, "Cheatin' Heart Attack," in 1995. That was the beginning of his career as an outspoken outsider.
Actually, he blames Dolly Parton, as well as Kenny Rogers. He blames the success of the film "Urban Cowboy," which, if it had been a serious, thoughtful, sociological masterpiece, would have said a lot more about the drift of the population from the rural areas into the cities. Somewhere along the line, country plugged in, and before you knew it, Garth Brooks was leap-frogging around the stage for fully amplified shows before tens of thousands of people, like David Lee Roth with a cowboy hat.
     "Antler rock'n'roll," grouses Watson over the phone from his home in Austin. "It was a bunch of L.A. guys, and before you knew it, we had Hootie and the Catfish. When I came out, it wasn't so unbalanced as it is now. There is just no reverence when you put out fake music. If there is any reverence, it's fake. They'll call some old guys onto the stage during the show, but it's a fake reverence."
     In order to make the art form formerly known as "country" great again, Watson has coined a new phrase, "Ameripolitan," dedicated to themaintenance of four musical styles: "Honky-tonk, western swing, outlaw and rock'a'billy," he says. "I do bits of all four. If you don't want to be associated with country music, then hey, come up to the Museum Club show to hear some Ameripolitan music."
     If honky-tonk music is about a style of music, it's also about a place for music. Watson says his music doesn't translate as well before thousands of people on a big amphitheatre stage as it does in the smaller Museum Club-like venue.
     "Ameripolitan means small cities, small communities, intimate places that exist everywhere," he says.
     Based out of Austin, Watson's "Ameripolitan" movement even has its own rewards show, now entering its third year.
     Watson comes from an Ameripolitan place, Pasadena, Texas, south of Houston. He grew up poor and started sneaking into bars to hear live country music in the area at an early age.
     "I got to hear the good music at the age of 14, when I first started going into honky tonks," he says. "The first show I snuck into was Willie Nelson at Gilly's," ironically, the same citified country bar made famous by a bull-riding John Travolta. "There was still Conway Twitty on the radio. Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard were still on the radio," recalling it as if it were a distant dream.
    He considered the military as a career but an eye injury when he was 12 (since corrected) kept him from enlisting, so he worked for the Shasta Bottling Company in Houston. At the same time, he was playing in local country bands in clubs. "I finally decided I was making more money playing music than working at that warehouse job, so I started playing music full time."
     His first group was called The Classic Country Bandin.
     "We did the shuffles, George Jones, we played Texas honky tonks," he says. "The more time that passed, the more the likes of Merle Haggard became an old timer thing. The neighborhood changed so much. It drove people out that had a different style. It was in frustration to what country music was doing that I went back to driving trucks. I enrolled in truck-driving school but shortly into that the record company called and said they liked the album that included  'Nashville Rash,' and it became the independent album of the year."
     There is a little bit of Hollywood, too, in Watson, he admits. After his first record came out, he moved on to Los Angeles, at the suggestion of Rosie Flores. He teamed up with John Jorgenson of the Desert Rose Band and the burgeoning alt-country scene at Curb Records.
     "That was a really important learning experience," he says. "When I got to L.A., I was able to write my own songs and sing them."
     His new record, "Call Me Insane," produced by Lloyd Maines, remains true to the roots of his rural music heroes. Dedicated to George Jones, Watson says he wrote most of the songs for the album just after Jones had passed away.
     "I miss the presence of George Jones," he says. "What he meant and symbolized. The roots of the music keep dying, and the roots of the country music today are being firmly planted in thin air. It's gotten to the point that now I'm ashamed to be called country music."

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Xenophobia in Iowa

I have a personal dread for the fact Iowa sets the tempo for the presidential campaign by having the first primary, and it really began to sink in during my last visit, well, exile really, to southeastern Iowa, only a few miles from the historic birthplace of the Republican Party, in Crawfordsville, Iowa. There's not much to see now at the original headquarters for the future GOP, mostly a single door, perhaps a historical site in a small white building, at a one-intersection at a crossing for other burghs along the road, miles and miles of barns and farm houses, rolling hills, the great expanse of sky. Maybe 300 people live within a mile of it all now. In 1854 Whig Party defectors meet in a closed meeting to pave the way of the new political party. Fittingly, I found myself, a college-educated professional journalist, looking for a place to fit in among the ghosts of no-nothingism, still alive and well across the county and beyond.

More or less found myself as a refugee of the economic crisis they now call the Recession, but really it was a depression. As I walked among the ruins of a cratered party of the country, with small communities turned into ghost towns, the Walmart economy sucking them all dry, and the good ol' boys, still running things, running the temperature of some of the most hateful people I've ever run across. Yeah, a lot of running. Trying to get out in front of the near medieval hatred out there. Indeed, if they grow anything out there on the farms of Iowa it's xenophobia.

As a refuge while convalescing in an anonymoplace in the corn fields of southeastern Iowa, there was a big barn next to an anhydrous amonia distribution facility. If you drove by it on the highway, the entire civilized area, actually an old broken down railroad stop with an old grain silo and several empty buildings representing days gone by. The barn, more like a large aluminum shed structure with several rooms and open areas inside, a kind of hodgepodge after years of additions and remodels, was filled with all kinds of useful, potentially, items collected from around the region: furniture, farm implements, old tractors, piping, chemicals, paint, wiring, fertilizer, old toys, enough trinkets to fill an antique store. Early in the morning I would go there as I wandered around the remnants of an enclave including maybe a half-dozen residences scattered around a large open field with dozens of wrecked and usually burned vehicles parked on the lawns like trophies. Most of these were fabled demolition derby vehicles.

When the sun came up the big barn was a place to watch the sun rise and fall and stay warm. In all directions were cornfields. This was right smack in the middle of Monsanto's iron-fisted grip on the agricultural life of the region and also a cancer cluster. On windy days methane from pig farms would roll across the earth, making you feel dizzy and a little (more insane). Alcoholism, disguised in the form of football tail-gating style total inebriation, also ruled the countryside. One nearby town, so bombed out by the Walmart sucking action, had no market to sell beer ...

Anyway, one other ringing memory from that period was the night a presidential candidate arrived at the Iowa City airport past midnight, and was then taken away into the city with a full caravan of police cars blaring the sirens. Maybe they were bringing in the big wig to meet with this one farmer (featured in the photo above), some crazy old crackpot hooked up to Fox News and the local Christian cult. That Donald Trump and Ted Cruz lead in this country should be no surprise. The scarecrow is out there for all to see.

Time and Sound

Waking to the working man music,

seeking the shadows in the sounds

of the nineteen seventies,

since we are all churned

into semi-sweet baked cookies

in the summer, flipped on

by the big thaws of winter

The Teflon dons

of the nineteen eighties

are switched on, switched off

Reagan era commands,

the hyper-Gothic rhymes,

the guitar-crunching cries

after the Berlin Walls

all falls down, down, down,

as the angel of lights

floats into the alternating

lime greens as the money

turns into big seas of digits,

feeding the Taurus bull

at the beginning of the new

century, swearing to sea salts

of ubiquitous security

Sure, you tried to turn

your sword of words

into plowshares

looking for a re-boot

and now the black raven

cries over your shoulder

as you spit and cuss and croon

like a barnyard babe, street-tough

as the last-born child,

when you are actually

the first as the second cloud

of the day rises in the sky

But you can stop the insanity

outside your door anymore

than you can disassemble

the arching winds working

on your bunker, Archie,

since the pride of sin

is to admit, at some point,

that we are all overpriced

princes of peace,

at ease, at best, but ill

~

Carry the candle carefully

across the darkened room

to let the drenching of earthly flesh

shine brightly in all cathedrals

curving into a bit of hope,

exchanged for the rope,

a horizon made dangerous

by lakes of ice clear as glass

Pythagoreans, Franklins, Da Vincis,

Miltons and Blakes: Mithras

is a self-made man,

independent of media scams ...

Oh words, words, what were the words?

If the hand signals to space

hidden from reasonable, orderly beings

were thrashed out of the tides,

to live here, then die,

the call of the crazed daemon

who saw the angels

in the great stadiums

of those profoundly humbled

by the mere disappearance

of one benevolent being,

then the cooperation of choruses,

a music made by band mates

never would have been a throng

But the whistles, the voices,

the bass were all dreamed here then.

in these ears, deadened as they are

from the tone of too many super stars

Surely, the sunlight, cutting through the rain

creating a hole in the sky,

means the game is on, a rapture, a sacred dance

on the holiest of grounds

Goldwater

Institutionalized

Most recent news from Arizona's politics includes bills being discussed in the state legislature to allow guns to be carried on college campuses. The curious irony in northern Arizona is the best-known appearance of hand guns resulted in a deadly shooting on the campus of Northern Arizona University. The basis for this wave of open carry stuff is, of course, the Second Amendment, built upon the premise, among other things, that a militia would be needed to remain armed in case, say, the British came back. And in the case of the shooting right down the street, it turned out it wasn't a British invasion, but a fleet of television trucks to display what, exactly? is the benefit of having guns on campus. But extremism is ... blah, blah, blah ...

If you follow this flintlock musket policy initiative to a few logical implications, all part of a Barry Goldwater meme buried like valley fever in the sands of the Southwest, then the sovereign principality of Arizona should send away all federal employees, including the military and border patrol. Then it can establish its own constitution, supreme court, and enforce what it really has in mind, a rigidly biblical caliphate where everyone should be carrying a rifle to everything.

Arizona voters are the first to blame for the apparent dysfunction of this crew. But rather than voting out the designers of the budget crisis, a governor was put in to reinvent the wheel. And Goldwater Institute goons were brought in to be the "yes" men. Sounds like the crunch over school funds is just the tip of the iceberg since these designers, not being scientists, won't embrace the wheel until more research comes in. It's good advice to keep following the money for all kinds of categories as the radicals seek to privatize law enforcement, prisons, social safety nets or hand over public lands to developers. They seem to be intent on handing over government programs to a legion of mercenaries, reintroducing a system that we haven't seen since the 19th century, or, in some cases, the Middle Ages. It's becoming a cruel world, indeed. Which is why, I suppose, all of these rifles are needed.

The Goldwater Institute, hunkered down in the melted money mounts of Paradise Valley, is a menace to compassionate governance. If we had listened to that bunch, there would be no light rail system in the Valley. It's an anti-union, anti public healthcare think tank for the tax dodging cronies of the New Capitalism, replacing social ideals fought for across the Western World with a new religion called "profit." We haven't seen this wave greed hounds since the Reagan era, and now the fate of the 99 percent is at their mercy.

Paranoia goes pop, again

Anticipating "The X-Files"

I want to believe. Really, I do. Surely, the truth is out there. But I'm wondering if "The X-Files," when it returns to TV later this month, will be able to recapture the pre-millennial moods and mysteries that made it a cult hit in the 1990s.

Should we yearn for the days when an empty factory could be a secret base for otherwordly conspirators, when white unmarked vans were filled with shape-shifting apparitions of unspeakable menace, when that small town in the Midwest was the sinister nest for a psychic serial killer, thus making Area 51 the real dream destination for a millions of fans of the show?

Fourteen years since its last show,"The X-Files" returns to television on FOX-TV on Jan. 24 to re-introduce viewers to its supernatural darkness, with its own mythological arc, kept in the unlit basement of the American psyche. After more than a decade of only having the re-runs, "The X-Files" is ready to spring again like a Jack-in-the-box of ill-fated portents.

While Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) will return for a mere six episodes, they are most certainly doing a victory lap for the two beloved characters who embody the rational and irrational in all of us. One is left to wonder if the show might feel naive, out of place in an entertainment mecca overwhelmed by dangers reflecting a brutal world like in "Game of Thrones," except without the dragons. The sci-fi horror drama will return to a world challenged by fluctuating economic conditions, climate change and terrorism.

And so how can you top that?

Will the return of "The X-Files" really reflect the mysteries for our times?

The world has changed a lot since the show first aired on Sept. 10, 1993. The internet had not yet been popularized, the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were still standing, and the country had yet to face the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The show petered out less than a year after Sept. 11, 2001, as the television universe moved into a more anti-terrorism narrative, with shows like "24," which made it look like the landscape was being taken over by cell phones, or films such as "Zero Dark Thirty," which peered into the behind-the-scenes machinations of torture and military special ops with a patriotic sheen.

But "The X-Files" creator Chris Carter says he sees potential episodes for the show by reading the news every day, and few could argue that the real world is far weirder than it once was. Just look at your cell phone with the app set for panic.

The common view on the show was that it emerged out of the cynicism of the 1990s. However, I believe it really dug further into the roots of national paranoia going back to the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy ratcheted up the Cold War with charges of communist infiltration, when people still believed aliens crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, and then the 1960s, when the unsatisfactory results of the Warren Commission turned theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy into a cottage industry for conspiracy theories. Since World War II and the atomic bomb, politics and fear have become twin sides of the same coin, and if anything, "The X-Files" managed to capture all of it with a slick, post-modern show that turned the relatively calm and seeming stability of the Clinton years into a looming dystopian nightmare.

By tackling marginal FBI cases where the paranomal was involved, agents Mulder and Scully rode the fear wave into the approaching century, that, as some might remember, was likely to begin with all of the computers turning off across the world within the first minutes of 2000 (didn't happen). And yes, by 2012 you might have wondered if the super rich were pilfering the economy to buy tickets for space flights to get off the planet, but four years since then we have realized the billionaire elite were just plain greedy.

For myself, "The X-Files" ended as America's zeitgeist show, with one of the first episodes of the spinoff created about the geeks from X-Files, "The Lone Gunmen," in the summer of 2001. That episode dealt with a conspiracy to crash airliners into the World Trade Center. Shot shortly before 9/11, the episode was certainly prescient, but also more than a little sickening.

The main question is that, in the shadow of all that's happened since "The X-Files" last aired in 2002, is the appetite there for themes that aren't mostly character driven? Without a doubt, the mere appearance of Mulder-Scully on TV is a resuscitation of two of the great heroes in television history. But I have my doubts if all of those sewer monsters and hick vampires are going to scare anybody in an age of anthrax and super storms and Donald Trump. Global surveillance and cyber wars are certainly cause for concern. However, do they make for good "X-Files" episodes?

Sounds like a lot of looking at computer screens to me.

"The X-Files" was certainly a show for its time, but like bringing back the boys for that name brand band to go on tour again, the return of the show may make us feel sentimental for the good ol' days when all that you had to worry about was whether some intergallactic fiend is going to inject you with a black fluid to turn you into some kind of alien-Earth hybrid.

The truth is out there, sure. It's in plain view. It's hanging out with ebola and freaks like Bernie Madoff. Now I wonder if the masses are in the mood for an ever-expanding mystery. This time answers are in need, and somebody needs to tell that uncle who is into conspiracy theories to get real. That UFOs are swamp gas. That flying unidentified stuff tested at Area 51 years ago now flies over parades and football games to heighten the fun and celebration and excitement of modern aviation. That the white unmarked van parked outside the door was always, thankfully, just the caterer. Right?