3 Chords & the Truth: A little night music

This week's edition of the Big Show is best heard on something running on vacuum tubes, in the dark.

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is best heard in the middle of the night, where magic dwells.

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth features night music -- jazz music -- the way it used to be.

Come with us to yesterday, to the night, to a faint glow in a dark room. Come with us to find where magic hides itself amid blues in the night.

I HAVE THOUGHTS on this subject, and I'm not shy about sharing. Here's an excerpt from something I wrote a while back about magic, and music, and glowing vacuum tubes in the dark. Yeah, this is what this week's show is about:

Today, an iPod will give you music. Yesterday, this old Zenith filled your house with magic.

I know. I sound like a broken record (another lost metaphor only fossils like me get). But if you ask me -- and you didn't . . . tough -- one of the tragedies of our age is the absence of magic.

Where is the magic in an iPod? Where is the magic in YouTube? Sure, YouTube is a great tool . . . and, in some cases, a forum for all manner of tools.

And sure, You Tube can offer up stuff you never could have imagined -- or perhaps imagined that you'd never see again.

But it's not magic.

Kind of like the iPod, a zillion websites, Facebook, Twitter and whatever they'll think of next. All useful. All interesting. All with the potential to while away countless hours.

But magic? No, not magic.

Magic is a multicolored dial glowing in the dark. Magic is the five tubes inside an old Zenith tombstone radio casting a backlight glow, silhouetting the angles and curves of a wood-veneer case.

Magic is the rich sound of a six-inch speaker fed by heavy metal and hot filaments.

Magic is the smell of ozone wafting through the room

Magic is sitting by yourself, listing to mellifluous voices on distinguished radio stations in distant cities, each with its own distinctive "sound." Each beaming the life of a far away place, a distinct local culture into the ionosphere and then back to earth, into a long-wire aerial, through the circuitry and out the cone speaker of a 1936 model-year Zenith radio set.

Made in the U.S.A.

Sitting in a darkened room. Singing into your ear and speaking to your soul.

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

The Plaquemine ferry, then and now

Here's how Louisianians rolled on the river -- the mighty Mississippi between Plaquemine Point on the east bank and the town of Plaquemine on the west -- back in 1982 on the ferryboat.

Here's how we did it a couple of weeks ago.

Back in 1982.

Today, in 2011.Things change, but not always by that much.

What a difference three decades made

Looking north across Baton Rouge from atop the
Louisiana State Capitol, summer 1981.

Looking north across Baton Rouge from atop the
Louisiana State Capitol, autumn 2011.

P.S.: The blight of 1981 was brought to you by the failure of private enterprise and a non-profit hospital's move to the suburbs.

The renewal in subsequent decades was brought to you by the expenditure of tax dollars by state government aiming for urban renewal and seeking to consolidate state offices into a revitalized capitol complex, away from rented space flung haphazardly across the capital city. Even in Louisiana -- freewheeling, Caribbean, politically corrupt Louisiana -- government ain't all bad. Or even predominantly bad.

America's right-wing, blow-it-all-up-for-liberty, anti-government crusaders would do well to remember that and allow a wee bit of perspective to reestablish itself amid all the hyper-ideological fulminating.

Before it was retro, this once was me

There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better

Some have gone and some remain
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection

For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more

-- The Beatles
(John Lennon/Paul McCartney)

Thought I'd just throw this up here

I don't know why. . . .

3 Chords & the Truth: Save the DJs!

I wasn't serious. I didn't mean it.

Back in 2001, as producer of another music show long before 3 Chords & the Truth, I let the computers take over.

The "organic" hosts didn't show up, so I let the computer do it. See, there was this text-to-speech demo on the Internet . . . and with a little creative writing, and a little editing. . . .

It was a joke! I swear to God. I didn't think that. . . .

I mean, why the hell would you want to get rid of perfectly competent people who . . . for going to all the trouble of hiring people to write a disc-jockey script for a computer program to follow . . . so you . . . can fire disc jockeys?

THIS IS America, dammit. We don't have to make sense.

We don't have to employ actual humans anymore, either. We at the Big Show are nervous this week.

From MSNBC:

A non-human DJ will take to the airwaves next week in San Antonio, Texas, in what may mark another step on the path that puts flesh-and-blood radio personalities out of a job.

The DJ is an artificial intelligence program called Denise, who was built by Guile 3D Studio to serve as a virtual assistant to answer phone calls, check email, conduct Web searches and make appointments, among other tasks.

Dominique Garcia, a radio personality in San Antonio, purchased Denise for $200 and programmed the AI to serve as a DJ. Denise will hit the airwaves on Aug. 24 from 1 to 4 p.m. CST on KROV.

"A lot of radio DJs are pretty upset with me because it does work," Garcia told me.

For now, Denise requires human assistance to write the script for Denise's talk breaks and slot the voice track into the playlist.

For the most part, the script writer tells Denise exactly what to say, though "she" has the capability to tell jokes when asked, provide the weather forecast and look up things on the Internet. She can't, however, fill airspace by herself.

"That technology does not yet exist in the AI world," Garcia said. "It is not as sophisticated as that; that's the ideal situation."

I AM in trouble, Hoss.

Gotta prove I can do this here show better than my Dell running a $200 bit of software.

Gotta get the ratings up here on 3 Chords & the Truth.

Gotta be upbeat. Bright. Peppy, hip, happening and now.

I HAVE TO ENTERTAIN, DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!! Make people love me. Make them . . . love . . . me.

And that's why this week's edition of the Big Show is going to be the hippest, upbeatest, happiest, high-energy episode of 3 Chords & the Truth you ever did hear. Dammit.

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

Whither 'K&B purple'?

Don't mind me.

I'm just sittin' here in a nostalgic funk, watchin' K&B drug-store commercials and weeping for my lost youth.


And I don't even have a bottle of K&B vodka to crawl into. Damn you, Father Time! Damn you and your smirking emo apprentice!


And don't forget the Alka-Seltzer and disposable douche. Big night.

(Thud.)

Your Daily '80s: Remember Ma Bell?

In 1983, there was the phone company. Singular.

Her name was Ma Bell.

Life was so simple then.

A strange planet, far away

I can't resist these old Bear Bryant Show clips. I can't.

It's just so, so, so . . . quintessentially the South of my youth. Only, back in the South of my youth, I'd have said "my limited vocabulary doesn't permit me to say" stuff like "quintessentially."

But there you go. One . . . two . . . three . . . take a swig off that Co' Cola and sing the praises of Golden Flake corn chips before Charlie Thornton falls silent to make way for the Bear's five minutes of pure stream of consciousness as the coach's cigarette sends clouds toward the ceiling from under the desk.

TODAY, kids would see this and take it for a Saturday Night Live skit. Children, I grew up in a Saturday Night Live skit.

And speaking of that 1979 LSU-Alabama game -- I was there. In the student section. It was miserable.

It was as miserable of a game as I ever stayed all the way through. It rained -- hard. It was cold . . . probably in the upper 30s. I remember huddling under some plastic sheeting that some folks abandoned when they gave up the Tiger Stadium ghost.

And I remember 'Bama winning on a last-minute field goal, the only score in the whole frigid, soggy affair.

Didn't even get any Golden Flake corn chips for my trouble. Or a Co' Cola.

Your Daily '80s: I wanna play fer yew, Bear

Even legends didn't win every week.

Here's a bit of Paul "Bear" Bryant's weekly Alabama football show from 1980. Y'all, this is self-evidently 30 years and a universe away from the world we inhabit today.

I don't know that today is any improvement.

By the way, I think we know what killed the Bear a couple of years after this show -- washing them chips down with Coca-Cola.

Your Daily '80s: Sic semper (Argentine) tyrannis

The spring of 1982: Britannia rules the waves . . . and, once more, the Falkland Islands.


In Argentina, things weren't going so well. Thus always to tyrants, Gen. Galtieri.

Your Daily '80s: Good eggs on breakfast TV

When Australian funny lady (and psychologist) Pamela Stephenson went on Britain's TV-am in December 1986, no one knew eggs-actly what the hell she was doing.

But at least weather presenter Wincey Willis was an egg-cellent ducker.


THAT YEAR, the independent-TV morning show crew got off easy.

On BBC 1, there were firearms. Enough said.

Your Daily '80s: Apathetic in Omaha, 1988

You're a young man in Omaha, it's 1988, and you just want the hell out.

You just want out of Boringsville, where it's just so . . . so . . . so . . . Midwestern. And not cool.

You're a young man in Omaha in 1988, and you want to see the world. Which, coincidentally, is Not Omaha. What do you do?

Well, you always can put together a punk band and get popular. Make a record album. Get noticed. Go on tour. Get big.

Real big.

Voila!


OR . . . you can become a theology professor. One way or the other, it's all good. And not necessarily in Omaha.

All of a sudden, it's 20 years later. Life is what happens between wanting to get the hell out of Dodge -- or away from cruising Dodge -- and coming back for the reunion show at the kind of Omaha club that was more or less unthinkable in 1988.

Oddly enough, the Omaha of 1988 was the one I came to. Fled screaming in the night to, actually.

It looked pretty good to me at the time -- I'm from Baton Rouge. (Ignatius Reilly may have had a point.) And everybody's always running from -- or to -- somewhere.

Upon the damn . . . oh, damn

Captain Beefheart is dead. Sh*t.

I happened upon the news tonight on NPR. I wonder whether it'll get a mention on MTV. I wonder why I wonder, since even back when Music Television actually played music videos, the Captain wasn't in the mix.

Capitalism is one thing. Genius is another. You don't get to be a good capitalist trying to sell people genius. Usually.


HERE'S SOME of what the NPR story said:

Avant-garde musician Captain Beefheart died this morning in California from complications of multiple sclerosis. He was 69.

An all-time favorite of rock critics — and known to readers of lists of the best rock albums of all time as the guy with the hat and the fish face — Beefheart earned a reputation for making challenging music. But his work was, at its root, well-executed blues-based rock.

His given name was Don Vliet — he added a Van in between his first and last names later. He was one of those musicians who sold fewer records than his best-known fans: Tom Waits, members of R.E.M. and New Order are just a few of dozens. The late British DJ John Peel called Beefheart a true genius, possibly the only one rock ever produced.

Mark Mothersbaugh, of the band Devo, calls him one of the all-time greats.

"The Beatles and The Rolling Stones would definitely be in that group of what turned me on about music," Mothersbaugh says. "But I have to say that he made me want to be an artist."

Born in a Los Angeles suburb, the only child and art prodigy was featured on a local television show making animal sculptures as a child. When he was 13 years old, his family moved to the Mojave Desert, where he befriended a young Frank Zappa.

In 1966, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band signed with A&M records and scored a regional hit with a cover of Willie Dixon's "Diddy Wah Diddy." Pretty soon, Van Vliet was writing original material for his band. In a 1980 interview with the BBC, he insisted he was a composer, not a songwriter. And in his band, he was exacting.

"I play the drums. I play the guitar. I play the piano," he said. "I want it exactly the way I want it. Exactly. Don't you think that somebody like Stravinsky, for instance — don't you think that it would annoy him if somebody bent a note the wrong way?"

DON VAN VLIET is dead. Sh*t.

I miss the days when "avant-garde" rarely was a euphemism for "can't play their damn instruments" or, more simply, "noise." And I will miss Captain Beefheart.

Thank God for record albums.

Your Daily '80s: Miley, listen to this guy

Jon Bon Jovi had something to say about drugs back in 1987.

He was against 'em. After having been for 'em, which didn't work out very well.

Me, I'm against both illegal drugs and cell phones that shoot video. I bet I'm not the only one.

Your Daily '80s: Plus ça change . . .

. . . plus c'est la meme chose.

1989.


2009.

Your Daily '80s: America's Top 10

It's the end of summer and the beginning of fall in 1980.

What was at the top of the pops? Well, let's see here on America's Top 10.


Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.

He's Casey Kasem.

Your Daily '80s: You say goodbye, and I say. . . .

It was 30 years ago today, the world stopped to pray . . . and though I don't really want to stop the show, I thought that you might like to know that the singer's going to sing a song, and he wants you all to sing along:

All we are saying is give peace a chance. . . .

Your Daily '80s: It's the future . . . today!

Man . . . look at this stuff! It's a futuristic wonderland . . . right now in 1983!

Lost in Space has come to pass! Look, it's the Robot!


The next thing you know, we'll have "communicators" and "tricorders," just like on Star Trek!

And huge view screens just like on the bridge of the Enterprise. I wonder what wonders we'll see in 2010?

We'll be getting around in nuclear levitating cars, no doubt.

Your Daily '80s: All the lonely people

The morning after, on Good Morning America.

It's 7 a.m., Dec. 9, 1980. Here's David Hartman.