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When your brain is 18 and the rest of you is 56 . . . and something makes you think of Mike Douglas.

File under: "Things you'll have to explain to your kids."

3 Chords & the Truth: The spirit of '76

There's no percentage in the present, so let's try the past.

Does 1976 sound good? Sounds good to me -- '76 was a very good year to be young and in love with music.

So it's settled . . . and the spirit of '76 it is! And it's all goin' down on the Big Show.

Now fasten your seat belt for a journey to the center of the Seventies. Stay tuned for complimentary 8-track tapes and some really cool tunes.

Right on, man!

Next stop: Recaptured youth and another crack at high school.

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

BRRRRRRRRAAAAAAP!!!

I love this newspaper ad for one of the radio stations I listened to during my misspent youth in Baton Rouge.

Look closely, though, and connect the dots on the ol' schematic.

Isn't this really a very 1970s-cool advertisement for some rock 'n' roll electroshock therapy? Inquiring minds -- what's left of them -- want to know.

On the other hand, I was told by a Republican presidential candidate that it's not really torture unless the radio is playing "Muskrat Love" by the Captain & Tennille.

Decent people's mileage may vary.

Where have all Papa's heroes gone?

Ain't there a pen that will write before they die?
Ain't you proud that you've still got faces?
Ain't there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?

One? 

Any more, yeah. Lots.

My generation ain't no young Americans no more, and David Bowie is dead.

"We live for just these twenty years
Do we have to die for the fifty more?"

Vintage LP du jour

 

On the menu tonight at La Maison de Trois Chords is The Friends of Distinction's Real Friends album, a nice 1970 vintage for our listening pleasure.

Not only does it feature one of my all-time favorite songs, "Love or Let Me Be Lonely," it also sounds better than many new albums right out of the shrink wrap, even though this particular LP left its shrink wrap around 1970.

DO YOU THINK I still could get me a "Complete RCA Catalog" if I mailed a quarter to Dept. C, Rockaway, New Jersey 07866?

On the other hand, maybe I can dig out the Complete RCA Catalog that I did get for 25 cents back then.

Once a geek, always a geek.

That is all.

Today's listening

This afternoon's LP listening (and digitizing) -- a 1972 British repressing of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's 1970 debut album.

Though manufactured in the United Kingdom, this album was released for the West German market. If you couldn't figure that out from the album number, it would be hard to miss the German price tag . . . in Deutschmarks.

I'M ALWAYS finding stuff like this here in Omaha, a.k.a., Ground Zero, a.k.a., home of the U.S. Strategic Command. If you have an Army or Air Force base in your town, I'd imagine the used-record pickings are equally good.

What would you say the chances are this will show up on some future edition of 3 Chords & the Truth? Me, I'd put the odds at 100 percent.

Still Shocked after all these years

I'm 11 again.

After 40 years, I'm watching Shock Theater and reveling in the snark and camp that was Dr. Shock, Igor and the merry band of creepy idiots that was must-see TV when I was a kid in Baton Rouge.

Saturday-night routine: Turn on TV set about 10. Adjust the loop antenna during the 15 minutes of the ABC late news on WRBT to get a good picture on Channel 33. Because UHF.

SETTLE IN for a couple of hours of the oddball antics of Dr. Shock, along with a classic(ly bad) horror flick.

Wait for next Saturday at 10:15 so I could do it all again.

Truly, Shock Theater helped to make me the (extremely warped) man I am today. Today's kids should have had it so good.

But they didn't. And poorer are they for the absence of bad horror movies and smart-assed, tongue-in-cheek offerings from local TV.

They also would have learned patience from adjusting that #$&*!@%!! UHF antenna.

Bobby Womack, RIP

This, in your Mighty Favog's humble opinion, is damned near a perfect song.

Friday, we lost the great soul singer/songwriter who gave it to us, Bobby Womack. Dammit, we're losing way too many great artists these days, and Bobby Womack is near the top of the list.

Again . . . dammit.

From the obituary in The New York Times:

Bobby Womack, who spanned the American soul music era, touring as a gospel singer in the 1950s, playing guitar in Sam Cooke’s backup band in the early ’60s, writing hit songs recorded by Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones and composing music that broke onto the pop charts, has died, a spokeswoman for his record label said on Friday night. He was 70.

Sonya Kolowrat, Mr. Womack’s publicist at XL Recordings, said further details about the death were not immediately available.

Mr. Womack, nicknamed the Preacher for his authoritative, church-trained voice and the way he introduced songs with long discourses on life, never had the million-record success of contemporaries like Pickett, Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Otis Redding. His sandpaper vocal style made him more popular in England, where audiences revere what they consider authentic traditional American music, than in the United States. 

But the pop stars of his time considered Mr. Womack royalty. His admirers included Keith Richards, Rod Stewart and Stevie Wonder, all of whom acknowledged their debt with guest performances on albums he made in his later years.

3 Chords & the Truth: Nineteen seventy-one

 
¿Quién es más bueno, 1967 o 1971?

¿Quién es más bueno, 1967 o 1971? 

If you're on the early end of the Baby Boom generation, I'll bet you'd say 1967 when you're arguing the best year for music on the radio.

If you're on my end of the Baby Boom -- the late end -- I'll bet you'd argue that, no, 1971 was a better music-radio year than 1967. I don't know about you (and you might be a Millennial and thoroughly confused by the whole question for all I know), but I love me some 1971.

1971 WAS a great year for music -- particularly Top-40 radio. And if you don't believe me . . . brother, you need to be listening to this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

You. Have. No. Idea.

But lucky for you, the Big Show is here to give you one.

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

3 Chords & the Truth: Satisfaction guaranteed

Look at the Big Show as being kind of like the Monkey Ward catalog long ago and far away -- we have a little bit of everything.

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth  will prove that to you. Just like last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, and the week before that, and the week before that. . . .

And we even have a little David Rose off of that 1962 Montgomery Ward promotional LP, in honor, of course, of the ex-department store's 90th anniversary some 52 years ago. So there you go.

Make sure you check out all the other departments in our audio store, though. Lots of good stuff around every corner and down every aisle.

We're sure you'll like what you find on the Big Show, and that's a proposition we stand behind 100 percent. As our slogan goes, "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back."

OF COURSE, every episode of 3 Chords & the Truth comes to you absolutely free of charge, but you know what we mean. When it comes to our hand-picked variety of the world's greatest music, 'satisfaction guaranteed" means just that.

Even if no money changes hands.

Oh, God, I'm rambling. Don Draper, get me out of this!

What?

Oh, right -- brevity. Wrap it up. Gotcha.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: Stacks of wonderful wax

'S wonderful, music is.

That's why yours truly does this little thing called 3 Chords & the Truth.

That's why yours truly also will scour the used-record bins in any thrift shop, antique store, record store -- you name it -- in search of something . . . well . . . 's wonderful. And I bet you wouldn't be horribly surprised to find out how much of the Big Show consists of those estate-sale, used-LP-bin and thrift-store gems, many from years before I was on this earth.

Last time on the program, I asked folks to tell me about their greatest used-vinyl find at a thrift store, the used-record section of their favorite music store or perhaps even an estate or garage sale. (That's "boot sale" for you Brits.) And dadgum if listener Russell Wells of Clarksville, by God, Indiana, didn't tell me about the near-mint, 1950s pressing of Ray Conniff's "'S Wonderful" album he found for a buck in a thrift-shop bin.

Well, your Mighty Favog of Omaha, by God, Nebraska, found himself a near-mint copy of that very same LP . . . and we're playing a cut off of it on the Big Show this week. It may have set your benevolent host back more than a dollar bill, however. That's just how the record spins, alas.

ANYWAY, that bit of the vintage Conniff sound is just one of many memorable musical moments on 3 Chords & the Truth  this revolution around the ol' turntable, and you'll be sorely deprived if you miss a single one.

And can someone please pull me back close enough to the present so I can get the ol' postmodern needle back in the groove and stop writing all aw-shucks glib just like I was stuck in 1953? Pretty soon, somebody's gonna enter me in a jitterbug contest at the ol' soda-fountain hep-cat hangout . . . and don'tcha know . . . I can't bop my way out of the ol' proverbial paper sack.

Well, that's about it for the ol' blog scribblin' about this latest episode of the show. Check it out, to hear your host with the most patter between the platters with the best stacks of wax in the ol' US of A!

Enough ramblin' for today, kiddos . . . I'll be diggin' you on the flip side Daddy-O!

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: The spectrum of sound

Way back when we started this podcasting enterprise, there was one basic truth that was the guiding light, to get all clichéd about it.

It went something like this. OK, it went exactly like this:

3 Chords & the Truth exists in many realms as Revolution 21's flagship program. We rock. We roll. We're blues in the night. We play with a twang . . . sometimes.

Listen to 3 Chords & the Truth enough and you'll discover that we like old-school punk rock. That we have an attitude. That we can be ornery -- and thoughtful, too.

You will discover that we like to put together oddball sets of all kinds of music that somehow, someway make thematic sense. You will discover that we can be artistic and cultural bomb-throwers, because we think our society is complacent and self-centered . . . and entirely too self-satisfied with the violent and vapid societal space Americans have created for ourselves. . . .

In short, here's what your host and potentate, the eccentric but benevolent Mighty Favog, is aiming for with 3 Chords & the Truth: A mix of thought-provoking, challenging and sometimes just plain fun music, both Christian and mainstream, covering a wide variety of genres -- rock, hip-hop, punk, techno, folk, blues . . . you name it. You can’t put it in a neat little niche.

Kind of like life, ain't it?

THAT'S IT. That's what we do on the Big Show.

Boy, do we do that hoo doo dat we do this week. This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is pretty close to the epitome of the Big Show's creed -- that there's only two kinds of music, good and bad. And the bad, we don't mess with.

Let's just say we start out with the early-'60s incarnation of (swing and sway with) Sammy Kaye 's orchestra, and then we veer into some major lounge music . . . and then we end up somewhere far, far away from that. And it's all good.
Boy, is it good. (He says humbly.)

NOW, if you want to know how good, you have to listen to the program. That's how it works.

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

3 Chords & the Truth: Thinking of radio

We're chilling out again on the Big Show.

We're getting mellow. We're doing music best listened to in the still of the night.

Think of an old radio, vacuum tubes glowing in the dark. Think of a lone DJ in a studio across town . . . or halfway across the continent.

Think of a couple of turntables, a classic microphone and timeless music, carefully selected by the lone disc jockey.

Think of yourself in a darkened room, with the radio, the announcer and the records keeping you company through the long night.

Just think.

YOU THINKING about that? Well, then you're thinking about this episode of 3 Chords & the Truth.

And I'm thinking you're going to love it.

I'm also thinking it'll be good for your nerves and good for your soul.

I'm thinking this is how radio used to be -- when radio was still radio and people still cared about radio.

Some things ought not be forgotten or abandoned. This goes for radio, which is not lost but merely relocated. To the Internet.

ENJOY the Big Show. Enjoy radio once more -- radio done with a little class and a lot of love. That's what we do here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

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

Real radio, real gone

Don't bug me. I'm busy being 15 again.

This truly, for me, is a blast from the past -- an aircheck of a radio station that's lived only in my memory since 1979. Stumbling upon this snippet of "Real Radio" WAIL from 1976 on YouTube, I am transported. Transported to my youth, and to a time when AM daytimers -- those stations that run down at sundown -- kinda still mattered.

Still played the hits.

Still had actual humans on the air.

These were the days when, sadly, WAIL was struggling. Soon would come the brief time when WAIL was kinda cutting edge (but still struggling). Too soon came the time when WAIL's struggle was over.

WHEN I was two months from emerging from the womb, Mama won a General Electric table radio from WAIL. When I was a child, WAIL (then a full-timer at 1460 on your dial) was the station that often came from that GE table radio that lived on the kitchen counter.

Mama loved her some "Pappy" Burge. Mama also loved to bend the ear of the receptionist, Marge.

When I was a preteen and then a teenybopper, WAIL got drowned out by the Big Win 910, WLCS. When I was a teen suddenly too cool for Top-40, WAIL was the "backup" station to "Loose Radio."

When I was finally old enough to vote, WAIL was gone, replaced by middle-of-the-road WTKL -- "Tickle." Yeah . . . right.

And now, here's a slice of unexpected bliss -- a song for the September of my years on a chilly October day.

Hello, old friend,
It's really good to see you once again,

Hello, old friend,
It's really good to see you once again.
(Cue Eric Clapton guitar solo.)

Nerve, defined

The headline on NPR's Planet Money blog sums it up so well, it leaves one with little else to say:

Robin Thicke's Song Sounds Like Marvin Gaye. So He's Suing Gaye's Family.

WELL, that about covers it. All I have to add is Robin Thicke's actions here pretty much define "nerve."

In this new age of the barbarian, the future belongs to the plunderer.

Why I'm not the next Jack Germond

The great political reporter -- he hated being called "journalist" -- and columnist Jack Germond has died at 85.

He'd been covering politicians and the messes they made from the 1950s until he retired in 2001, first with Gannett and then the Washington Star and later The Baltimore Sun. He was a fixture on The McLaughlin Group on public TV, got parodied on Saturday Night Live and wrote a bunch of books.

Not bad for a member of the Baton Rouge High Class of 1945.

I'm a member of the Baton Rouge High Class of 1979, but I am not now nor ever will be as accomplished as the late Mr. Germond. I do like martinis as much as he did, though.

THE REASON why I'll never be as accomplished at, well, anything as Jack Germond was at committing journalism . . . er, reporting is that I was committing smart-assed crap like the drawing above when I ought to have been studying or paying more attention in class. I found this, as I found all kinds of other stuff that has been or soon will be featured in this cyberspace, when cleaning out the home of my misspent youth in Baton Rouge.

The above drawing, however, may have been a little clue to my later avocation. In other words . . . get the net!

I suspect my mom never threw it out because she wanted evidence to back up "I told you so!"

Rest in peace, Jack. Your stellar legacy will face no competition from this fellow Bulldog alum.

The keys to the kingdom

 

Salvation can look like a Gideons' Bible.

It can look like a legal document, with a governor's signature and an embossed seal, commuting a condemned man's sentence.

Salvation can look like a beautiful woman with a pure heart, here to save you from your sorry self.

Salvation can look like a life preserver floating next to you in a choppy sea; it can look like an outstretched hand just before you slide off a precipice; it can look like the cover of your favorite record album.

Salvation, for me, looks like a brochure from the spring of 1976, one advertising this strange, unbelievably cool thing the East Baton Rouge Parish school system was calling a "magnet school." Inner-city Baton Rouge High -- venerable and grand and buffeted by the forces that had turned a small town divided by race and "the tracks" into a middle-sized city atomized into warring neighborhood enclaves -- was being remade into a school focused on academics and the performing arts, and not just anybody could get in.

THE SCHOOL'S new principal, Lee Faucette, was making the rounds of high schools and junior highs to make his best pitch to those schools' best students. And . . . sweet Jesus! Not just anybody could get in!

If you've ever been to junior high and hated it -- especially if you've been to junior high and absolutely hated school because you were somewhat good at it. . . . Well, if you have . . . and did . . . because you were . . . you know.

You know what a salvation Baton Rouge High was for kids like me -- for kids like us -- precisely because it was made for learning and not crowd control. Because there, you didn't have to be ashamed of learning. Because everyone there was there because there is where they wanted to be.

WHERE I didn't want to be come the fall of 1976 was at Belaire High, a soulless monolith that looked more like a maximum-security facility than an educational one. And to me, those magnet school brochures Mr. Faucette passed out looked like a Gideons' Bible, a commutation, a beautiful woman, a life preserver, an outstretched hand and a Bruce Springsteen album rolled into one glorious package.

I found this when my wife and I were in Baton Rouge cleaning out my elderly mom's house -- the home of my youth.  I saved it, and then she saved it, and then 37 years later, there it was stuck in a box jammed on a shelf. Sometimes, the only thing between you and a flood of blessed memories is cardboard, one-eighth-inch thick.

When we had to head back to Omaha, we filled our Toyota RAV and my mom's compact Kia with the stuff that mattered. My most excellent collection of 1960s G.I. Joes and Hot Wheels sits in the house that's no longer anyone's home, waiting for the estate sale.

The 1976 piece of card-stock salvation came home with me.

Retail bldg. Skylights, indoor garden. Make offer.

Once upon a time, one of the nicest retail spots in my part of Baton Rouge was I.H. Rubenstein, one of a local chain of department stores and one of the anchors of the Broadmoor Shopping Center.

It sat right between the Broadmoor Theatre and the National Food Store. Way back there then -- when dinosaurs roamed the swamps, gas was 45 cents a gallon, you could buy all the 45s you could eat at TG&Y, Buckskin Bill ruled the local TV scene, and I had hair -- the Broadmoor Shopping Center was a happening place.

Then again, that was before my hometown pretty much abandoned my old neighborhood. That was before "my" part of town (and lots of others) turned into a reasonable facsimile of Port au Prince and the hair jockeys at the Broadmoor Barber Shop all started packing heat.

Not an exaggeration -- I was there just last week on a not-so-pleasant trip back home to see my 90-year-old mother in the hospital and clean out her home of 57 years . . . the home of my childhood.

SHE WON'T be living there anymore. I probably won't set foot in it again. It's a hard thing.

Like I said, I.H. Rubenstein was a nice place, and the flea market that took over the space after the department store closed wasn't unfortunate, at least as flea markets go. Then again, both were pre-Port au Prince.

What you see here is post-Port au Prince. And somebody expects to sell or rent this mess.

Somehow, I don't see that happening, though I think it would be a fine spot to relocate the city-parish government. Very appropos, don't you know?

I've written a lot about my hometown on this blog, and I've covered the creeping blight of Baton Rouge on more than one occasion; I don't need to belabor the point here. And when she lived in Red Stick for a while, New Jersey-native Colleen Kane made a vocation of chronicling the abandoned places of my old home via her Abandoned Baton Rouge blog.

She even did a post on the Broadmoor Shopping Center almost five years ago. Yes, decrepitude has been an issue there for some time now.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . . etcetera and so on in "America's Next Great City."

You may be a radio geek if . . .

. . . your ringtone is the late-'60s/early-'70s sounder for ABC radio's American Contemporary Network. If you are of a certain age, you'll remember it. 

Yeah, I'm a radio geek, all right.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. . . .

Thirty-three years later, this still makes me cry.

Somehow, this scene from Archie Bunker's Place seems highly appropriate today.  The New York Times today bears the sad news:

Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 90.

Her agent, David Shaul, confirmed her death.

Ms. Stapleton, though never an ingénue or a leading lady, was an accomplished theater actress with a few television credits when the producer Norman Lear, who had seen her in the musical “Damn Yankees” on Broadway, asked her to audition for a new series. The audition, for a character named Edith Bunker, changed her life.

The show, initially called “Those Were the Days,” was Mr. Lear’s adaptation, for an American audience, of an English series called “Till Death Us Do Part,” about a working-class couple in east London who held reactionary and racist views.

It took shape slowly. The producers filmed three different pilots, the show changed networks to CBS from ABC, and Ms. Stapleton acted in a film directed by Mr. Lear, “Cold Turkey,” before “All in the Family,” as it was finally called, was first broadcast in January 1971.

For three or four months, hampered by mixed reviews, it struggled to find an audience, but when it did, it became one of the most popular shows in television, finishing first in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons and winning four consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding comedy series. Ms. Stapleton won three Emmys of her own, in 1971, ’72 and ’78.

I REMEMBER, during a 1986 visit to the Smithsonian's American history museum,  that one of the biggest thrills for me -- this in a museum filled with amazing things, including the original "Star-Spangled Banner" from the War of 1812 -- was being able to gaze upon Archie and Edith's chairs from All in the Family.

Perhaps it was that I had seen these things every week for years on the small screen. Or maybe it was because they were second-class relics of two of the greatest actors in the history of television.

Whatever the case, I am sure of one thing. No one will ever fill those chairs.