3 Chords & the Truth: In the name of love

Forty years ago, I had no clue.

As a 7-year-old, I knew that a bad, bad thing had happened to an important man. I knew the man was dead. I knew people were rioting because he was dead.

BUT AS A Southern child growing up in a working-class, white and illiberal milieu, the only thing I knew about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was that he was not afforded the commonly benign label of "colored" and certainly not the formal moniker of "Negro" -- which you only heard on the TV and radio, anyway.

I had heard that he was something called a "communiss."

What I would find out later -- as I grew in knowledge and as my world grew in size and scope -- was that Martin Luther King Jr,. died not only so that African-Americans could be free in this "land of the free," but so that I might be free, too.

We may not be totally free yet, but we're getting there. And because one man obeyed his God all the way to his own Calvary, we -- all of us, black and white -- are a lot closer than we would be otherwise.

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is dedicated to remembering and mourning what happened in Memphis, Tenn., four decades ago Friday. America is a much changed country for the assassinations of King and, a mere two months later, Sen. Robert Kennedy.

That change was a profoundly tragic one from which we've yet to recover. All these years later, the wounds still bleed.

But the Big Show also celebrates a momentous life -- and the profound difference it made in this country and in the world.

On this week's program, you won't hear me getting in the way of the music . . . or the message. Thus, I'll publish this week's playlist below.

Enjoy the show.

Say It (Over and Over Again)
John Coltrane Quartet
w/ McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass),
Elvin Jones (drums)
1962

It Feels Like Rain
Aaron Neville
1991

Help Us, Somebody
Chris Thomas
1990

The Sky Is Crying
Elmore James
1960

Keep On Pushing
Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions
1964

Redemption Song
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros
2003

Memphis Blues Again
Bob Dylan
1966

Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Green Day
2004

Inner City Blues
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
2006

Don't Burn Baby
Sly & the Family Stone
1968

We Gotta Live Together
Jimi Hendrix
1970

Motherless Child
Hootie & the Blowfish
1994

Nothing Lasts
Matthew Sweet
1991

Faithful To Me (Reprise)
Jennifer Knapp
1997

Lay My Burden Down
(feat. Mavis Staples & the Dirty Dozen Brass Band)
Dr. John
2004

Forever Young
Joan Baez
1974

3 Chords & the Truth: Squiggles in the smoke

Inspired by the unveiling Friday of the oldest known sound recording -- dating back to 1860 -- I decided to record this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth with a phonautograph, just like the one French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville used to make those first "records" of sound so long ago.

ALL IT TOOK was a functioning phonautograph, "borrowed" from a museum, and 3,000 feet of soot-covered rag paper. What you hear on the Big Show this week emanates from only the finest scratchings onto the sooty medium, faithfully reproduced by a top-secret laboratory process.

I think it came out all right, if I do say so myself.

You be the judge. It's hip, it's now, it's happenin' . . . and it's historical, too.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, is what it is. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: Money, honey?

Money.

What's it to us? Does it define us?

And who are we, then, if the economy goes in the crapper?

A musical monetary meditation, this week on 3 Chords & the Truth -- an audio service of Revolution 21.

Listen now or download for later. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: Just playin' the tunes

Today on the Big Show, there are no big themes or intricate thematic sets of music.

Today on 3 Chords & the Truth, it's one of those shows where we just play the damn music and kick back. Because that's the kind of mood we're in aujourd'hui. D'accord? Bien.

As usual, though, the tunes are tasty and we cover a lot of territory on the continuum of good stuff. Yes, we do.

YOU'LL ALSO NOTE that your Mighty Favog has made some adjustments to the 3 Chords & the Truth formatics, giving an aural feel that's a lot closer to the spirit of the program and, we're hopeful, a lot less stereotypically "radio" in its sound.

After all, it's a new age of media, and new ages require new ways of thinking about how you do this mass communication thing. The rub, however, is unlearning what we old farts have learned over a lifetime.

More precisely, the problem is in unlearning the shopworn parts of what we old farts have learned over a lifetime and replacing them with fresh, yet substantive, new parts.

Or something like that.

Give the Big Show a listen, will you? And let us know what you think.

Be there. Aloha.

Cough. Here's the (sniffle) show. Achoo!

Sometimes, you got to suck it up. And offer it up.

Your suffering, that is. Trust that your suffering will be joined to Christ's suffering to make crooked lines straight . . . somehow.

The past week, I've felt like crap. Lethargic, even. I've felt bad enough that I couldn't muster the energy to do Four Songs this week.

But there comes a time when you just have to suck it up. I decided that if 3 Chords & the Truth were worth doing at all, it was worth doing even when I'd really rather just slump in the big blue chair and become a sniffling, coughing, snorting vidhead.

So here you go . . . this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth, which certainly must be the audio version of a viral video.

Cough.

3 Chords & the Truth: Them moods happen

Life is hard.

So sometimes you got to rock. Hard.

I'm in one of those moods. So sue me.

On the other hand, sometimes life can be pretty sweet. After all, we did just get done celebrating Valentine's Day and all that. So we can play around on the lush side of life, too, on 3 Chords & the Truth.

I guess what I'm saying here is that whetever mood you're in, we just might have it covered on this edition of the Big Show. Drop by, tune in and download now . . . won't you?

Really, I'll bet you've never heard anything like 3 Chords & the Truth. In a good way, naturellement.

We're walking to New Orleans

We're doing a little time traveling this week on Four Songs.

So, welcome to New Orleans. It's 1961, and the music is mighty fine. Mighty fine, indeed.

AND WE'LL BE hearing not only from the Soul Queen of New Orleans, but also from the best fender and body man in the Crescent City.

If you want to know who that was, you'll have to download the show, now, won't you?

It's Four Songs . . . and it's four songs. We call it the bite-sized show from Revolution 21.

So pop open a Jax (provided you are of legal age, of course) and enjoy the sweet sounds of a turbulent age.

Technoslaves

Why is it that, amid all the "ease" and "freedom" I'm afforded by modern technology, I've spent massive chunks of the past three days trying to make this blog look like I want it to?

The way it used to look.

HOW COME after Blogger allegedly made a change to how you post blog headers -- making it so simple that anyone can do it -- I can't do it? Because when you try, the header no longer spans the width of the layout.

And that's where the "ease" technology brings to our lives led me to get comfortable enough with CSS to try to figure out where -- and how -- to hack the design template of this blog. If you were wondering about the non-existent posting Monday, that explains it.

Now the header looks like a JPEG blown up just too dang big, even though it's not. But at least it's the right size.

Of course, this being the age of customer antiservice, Blogger never notified anyone about the pending change. We all found out when our blogs started looking funny.

Saturday, folks thought it was a glitch. By Sunday, word leaked out on the "help group" that it wasn't a glitch, it was policy.

To screw over God-knows-how-many blogs out there on the "Internets."

Research, tinker, repeat. Then learn to live with less than what you had. That's "progress" for you.

IT WASN'T THIS WAY in 1979. Back then, if you were a "Jack of all trades, master of none," you were doing pretty good.

Twenty-odd years ago, all I needed to be "expert" at was writing and editing. To achieve a measure of expertise in that, I went to college and got a journalism degree. Then I got a job being an "expert" doing that at which I was . . . expert.

Now I'm doing this. And while I can cover the writing, and the editing, and the audio production and the talkin' into a microphone and playin' tunes . . . I don't know squat about CSS coding when Blogger clobbers the blog half of the Revolution 21 media empire.

Just another thing to learn to fake your way through in an age where customer support -- or even caring about the customer at all -- is just me standing high above Long-Ago Acres, taking in the wistful vista. Now I will add my dubiously mad coding skillz to my computer-networking skillz and computer-retooling skillz.

How life gets complicateder and complicateder the further away I get from 1979 . . . when you didn't even have to know how to use a computer if you didn't want to.