Wednesday, July 31, 2019

For f***'s sake

You want to know how to get at least one Democrat who loathes Donald Trump and everything he represents to cast a futile protest vote in November 2020?

Nominate Kamala Harris.

In the last debate, she vowed to outdo Trump in the executive order, abuse-of-power department -- right before she vowed to treat states that pass abortion restrictions just like Southern states with a history of voting-rights abuses (Justice Department preclearance of election laws).

Of course, she failed to mention that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that particular section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Now, her campaign has taken to Twitter to combine an unhinged social-justice warrior level of hypersensitivity with a Trumpian degree of pettiness.

If the Democrats don't get their heads out of their ideological asses, the election -- and the United States -- will be lost. If Democrats are insane enough to nominate Harris (for just one), it probably will be lost even in the extremely unlikely event she beats Trump and the Russians.

For what it's worth, I am older than Harris, and if Joe Biden called me "kid," I'd consider it a term of endearment and respond with a sincere smile. Then again, I thanked the last person who ever carded me at a bar.

That reminds me . . . I need a drink.

Saturday, July 27, 2019

3 Chords & the Truth: No static a-tall


Did your old man ever ominously warn you about giving him any static?

Mine did. It usually didn't work. I gave him static.

Well, pally, today we live in a world with nothin' but static. Static here, static there, static static static everywhere.

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, I seek to make static amends by proclaiming this here program a static-free zone. There will be no static here, only good music.

And from the Great Beyond, Daddy now is saying "So NOW you decide to stop being an asshole."

To that, I only can say "Better late than never, Pop. Better late than never."

Enjoy your static-free edition of the Big Show.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Political science

Wife: What's the dog got in her mouth?
Me: (Prying dog's jaws open and grabbing object.) 
Wife: What is it? 
Me: Oh, God. Eww. (Goes to drop object in toilet.) 
Me: (Washing hand with alcohol before sullying the soap.)

There's a political metaphor in there somewhere.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

3 Chords & the Truth: The Big Show has landed


"One of these days, Alice! Pow! Straight to the moon!"

One of these days came 50 years ago today. Pow! We went straight to the moon.

Oddly enough, it wasn't Ralph Kramden's fist that got us there. No, it was three brave astronauts who climbed atop a gigantic Saturn V rocket four days before, blasted off into the heavens and took the whole damned planet with them for a lunar joyride.

July 20, 1969. It was a Sunday. I was 8 years old -- almost 8 and a half. Halves are very important when you're 8.

That day -- POW! -- straight to the moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins got there with Apollo 11. I suspect they kinda knew that I (and a few billion others) had hitched a ride on their rocket ship.

This episode of the Big Show has the moon on its mind, a way to remember the greatest thing mankind has done and give thanks to the three men who did it . . . and all the thousands of men and women who got them there.

In fact, this week's 3 Chords & the Truth doesn't have a single song that isn't a moon song. And they're all good. Fittingly good for an Apollo 11 anniversary program.

Mementos of a grade-school space nut
PUTTING THIS particular edition together put me, in a very real way, back in time. Back in our living room at 10645 Darryl Dr. in Baton Rouge. Back in front of the black-and-white, 21-inch Magnavox television tuned in to CBS and Walter Cronkite. Back to when I was an elementary-school spaceaholic, the one with all the Gemini-mission stickers all over the dresser mirror in my bedroom.

The 1960s were fraught times, like our own today. But a big difference was hope. We had hope. We knew we were better than our struggles and our national squabbles and missteps, and we had hope that, someday, we would overcome.

Someday.

We have yet to overcome and, indeed, we're backsliding. Today, we have a lot more Trump than we have hope.

BUT LOOKING BACK at Apollo 11 and those first glorious steps on a strange world, we know what the better angels of our human nature look like. And when we look up into a moonlit sky, we know that for those better angels, the sky is the limit.

And in an age seemingly bereft of heroes, we only have to look back within the lifetime of your broken-down old radio guy here to see a whole big bunch of them -- heroes who touched the moon, if not the stars.

For that, we give musical thanks.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Tuesday, July 16, 2019

The shack by the track

The shack by the track . . . from above (Google Maps)

I would have thought the "shack by the track" off of "beautiful Choctaw Trail" would have been long gone by now. After all, I've been long gone from Baton Rouge for more than 31 years.

But no. The shack -- a rather forlorn-looking Quonset hut even when it was still home to WIBR radio a half century ago -- still stands at what once was 600 Neosho St. in north Baton Rouge . . . at least according to the latest view available to Google Maps.

Google Maps street view
Back in the day -- my day -- it was hard to miss WIBR when you were driving down Choctaw, about a quarter mile off River Road on the north end of Capitol Lake. You can make quite the impact on a Quonset roof with enough black paint, a giant W, I, B and R's worth of black paint.

Time has worn away the giant WIBR on the roof, revealing the previous "1220 kilocycles" painted up there. To my generation, WIBR always was Radio 13, but when the brand-new station signed on in July 1948 -- Baton Rouge's seventh or eighth, counting all the FM stations its AM predecessors were opening before they closed them in just a few years -- it was WCLA, with 250 not-so-booming, daytime-only watts at 1220 on your radio dial.

In that Quonset hut, with a tower plopped down right in Capitol Lake. That right there had to have helped coverage, and with 250 watts, WCLA needed all the help it could get.

Morning Advocate, July 18, 1948

THAT Quonset hut, stuck between a contrived lake, a grimy industrial park and a "Choctaw Trail" that was beautiful only in the supreme irony of the WIBR announcers having dubbed it such, nevertheless was a tin-can incubator of Baton Rouge broadcasting royalty. Pappy Burge. Bob Earle. B.Z. (Bernard Zuccaro). "Ravin' Dave" Davison.  J.C. Politz.

That Quonset hut was the first radio station I'd ever been in -- the first time I got to glimpse what was on the other end of the radio waves energizing my transistor radio. It had to have been 1969, and I was an 8-year-old geek with mad telephone skillz -- mad enough to be quick enough on the rotary dial to score a MAJOR-LABEL LP from the then middle-of-the-road station.


OK, so the record album was Jimmy Roselli's Let Me Sing and I'm Happy and not the Beatles. Or even Bobby Sherman.

But it was a MAJOR AWARD . . . and it wasn't a leg lamp. ("The soft glow of electric sex" would have been lost on my prepubescent self.)

Yes, I still have that LP today.

When I encountered "the shack by the track" somewhere on the cusp of the '60s becoming the '70s, it was a weekend. I'd won this record album from a big-time radio station in a small-time structure in a city that sometimes confused big-time and small-potatoes, my parents had difficulty with the concept of "regular business hours," and so the old man steered the 1967 Mercury Park Lane off "beautiful Choctaw Trail," through the lovely meadow of Quonset, concrete and quiet despair, then up to the gravel parking in front of 600 Neosho St.

There were two cars there -- ours and the weekend disc jockey's.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

A young man answered the door. Long hair, blue jeans, bare feet.

"My boy here won a record album."

OHMYGAWDOHMYGAWDOHMYGAWD . . . IT'S STEVE ST. JOHN! I JUST HEARD HIM ON THE CAR RADIO!

The young man let us into the reception area, from which you could see EVERYTHING through the big studio window. They could launch Apollo 8 from that control room.

If you somehow didn't get electrocuted by all the technology in there, you might could get yourself to the damn moon. I did not say "damn", though "damn" was the least of the colorful language I learned from Ralphie's -- uh, my -- old man. Daddy would have whipped my ass; I would have learned a few new terms for future reference, no doubt.

WIBR handout, circa 1955

THE FAMOUS weekend DJ, Steve St. John, apologized for his casual attire and bare feet amid the musical merry-go-round of Andy Williams, Jerry Vale and whatnot. He explained that things were pretty cas on weekends at WIBR, and he was gracious about our lackadaisical attitude toward Monday-Friday, 9 to 5.

And I got my Jimmy Roselli album, which I expect to fully musically appreciate any year now.

Later, I figured out that Steve St. John (who by this time had advanced well beyond "weekend guy" in the WIBR and Baton Rouge-radio pecking order) was Steven Robert Earle, son of Bob Earle, who ran the joint.

Yours truly, a former "overnight guy" himself, also figured out that radio was one of the coolest things ever, in the sense that one "figures out" what one knew all along. Quonset-hut studios, as it turns out, only add to the mystique.

And they're apparently damned durable -- more durable than the major station that gave out major awards to majorly geeky little kids. WIBR, decades past its MOR and Top-40 heyday, is (at best) an afterthought today, something a major radio chain doesn't quite know what to do with. In recent years, it's been off the air a lot more that it's been on the air.

Now, it rebroadcasts KQXL, the big urban station in Baton Rouge. In my mind's eye, WXOK is the big urban station in Baton Rouge, but that's another memory of faded glory . . . in my hometown.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

3 Chords & the Truth: Cooler than average


Embrace the chill.

3 Chords & the Truth, you see, is cooler than average. Way cooler than average.

Cool music, cool concept, cool production values . . . and a moderately acceptable host. That works out, when you do the math, to cooler than average. If you grade on a curve -- that is, factor in what you hear on the radio in most locales -- the Big Show is way cooler than average.

That's what I'm sayin'.

And that's what you'll hear, right here on this here program.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Tuesday, July 02, 2019

We have reached our sell-by date as a country


Let me try to get my head around this thing: Nike yanked a special-edition Fourth of July shoe because Colin Kaepernick was offended by the Betsy Ross flag "because of its connection to an era of slavery."

Two immediate reactions:

1. Supportive as I was of the kneeling protests during the national anthem at football games and the like . . . Nike and Colin Kaepernick can kiss my red, white and blue ass.


 2. The Constitution of the United States has an even more intimate connection to the "era of slavery." Perhaps we need to just rip up the whole fucking thing and call a merciful end to a country that seems to have attained -- and blown past -- its sell-by date.



We're outta here, bitches. And we're keeping the beef.