3 Chords & the Truth: Getting away from it all

The hippies had their Summer of Love.

We have our Spring of Hate.

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to get away from it all. Methinks the Big Show might be just the vehicle for that. I've got a giant suitcase full of music from happier times, and I'm getting ready to blow this pop stand.

And there's plenty of room for you to tag along. Let's go, shall we?

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

If they're not fired up about grammar. . . .

First Trump, now this.

Can't we Americans get any damned thing straight anymore?

Then again, if newsroom staffers at metropolitan dailies can't be expected to know the difference between "they're," "there" and "their," why should we suddenly become competent at politics? Or anything else, actually.

Joe the Plumber isn't getting paid to understand political science. People at newspapers, on the other hand, are paid to know the King's English -- or at least they used to be.

Clocked cop collars pissed public pisser

You can't make this stuff up.

If you could, the Omaha World-Herald never would have had to do away with its evening edition.

Color me highly amused. Color Omaha the home of some of America's most criminally entertaining drunks, like the gal a few months ago who broke into the zoo in the middle of the night so she could pet a tiger.

That didn't end well for her. And still isn't.

Neither did a Monday misadventure go so well for this guy, who you kind of assume was drunk. Or at least hope had the excuse of being three sheets to the gales of March.

At any rate, he'll have a lot of time to sleep off whatever ails him.

A 50-year-old Omaha man was charged Tuesday with second-degree assault of a police officer, who allegedly was hit in the face by the man’s crutch.

The 30-year-old officer received four stitches at the Nebraska Medical Center for a cut above his left eye, according to a Police Department report.

The suspect was charged with the felony, booked into the Douglas County Jail and ordered held on $15,000 bail. He must pay 10 percent of that, or $1,500, to be released.

The incident occurred at about 2:20 a.m. Monday when officers were called to 24th and Harney Streets to investigate a person sleeping on the ground. Officers said the man awoke, got up, relieved himself and lay down again.

After being cited for public urination, the suspect signed the ticket and again lay down. When the officers tried to get him to move along, he allegedly hit the officer, who has been on the force eight years, with the crutch.

Louisianastan

Do you remember how translators and other locals who worked with and for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a matter of course, went -- and still go -- by pseudonyms and otherwise shrouded their true identities because, for certain other locals, to know, know, know them is to kill, kill, kill them?

As it turns out, you don't have to go all the way to southwest Asia or the Middle East to become familiar with the concept.

No, a mere 1,000-mile drive from where I type can give you a homegrown taste of the concept, where contractors bidding to remove Confederate and white-supremacist monuments from the New Orleans public square, so to speak, won't even tell reporters who they are. That comes after the last guy to get the job, a Baton Rouge contractor, pulled out after receiving death threats . . . and after someone torched his luxury sports car.

It also comes after city government in the Big Uneasy was forced to remove a list of interested contractors from its website after the threats started rolling in, vowing at a minimum to put one firm out of business. The owner contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

FROM the New Orleans Times Picayune:

Speaking at an informational meeting held for firms interested in bidding on the removal job, they also raised concerns about diving into such a controversial job.

One asked city officials whether he would be required to post a sign with his company's name on it at the job sites. Another asked whether his crew could work in the predawn hours, presumably to limit as much public exposure as possible.

Vince Smith, director of Capital Projects Administration, said that the city would work with the winning bidder on a security plan to mitigate any threat. Regarding signage, he said, "Quite frankly, I don't think we are going to make that a requirement," given the ongoing controversy over monument removal.

The city had originally hoped to bypass the traditional public bid process, selecting Baton Rouge firm H&O investments directly from its pool of pre-approved contractors to handle the removal of monuments to Confederates Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis. The owner of the company, though, pulled out, saying he had received death threats after his name was associated with the project. A crane operator, though it had not yet been formally hired for the job, also disavowed any involvement.

The contractors at the meeting did not give their names during the discussion, and one, pulled aside after it adjourned, declined to give his name to a reporter. He said that he had driven by the monuments discretely to get a look at their construction, but he didn't want to go too close for fear of being identified by pro-monument hardliners.

The city did not distribute a sign-in sheet at the meeting.

DONALD TRUMP isn't trying to impose fascism on the United States. Donald Trump isn't introducing the specter of violence to the public square or the political arena. And Donald Trump hasn't started a movement to celebrate racism, bigotry and nativism.

All these things have been popular forever in this country, and nowhere more than in the South and my home state, Louisiana. Merely to have been black in the South -- within living memory, within my memory -- was just about as dangerous as it is to be Christian in Iraq today or be found out as an American collaborator in Afghanistan.

All Trump is doing is summoning forth the demons, because summoning forth America's demons just might get him elected president. God knows that demon-summoning always has been a booming business in Louisiana, where it's always 1959 somewhere. Or maybe 1861.

3 Chords & the Truth: The Producer

This week's edition of the Big Show can be described in two words.

One name.

George Martin.

If you don't know George Martin, or why we mark his passing by playing the music he touched, shaped, molded for decades, you're about to get an education in sound. If you do know the work of this producer's producer, you mourn the unfathomable loss with us at 3 Chords & the Truth as we celebrate the immeasurable musical legacy.

Sir George was the Fifth Beatle . . . and so much more.

Today, the program is his.

Today, the cultural birthright is ours.

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

Colorfully killed by irony

Remember the old sitcom, Norby?

No, me neither.

Norby, from the creator of the somewhat better-remembered show Mister Peepers,  ran on NBC for exactly four months in 1955. It's notable for being the first sitcom to have every episode filmed in color.

All 13 of them.

David Wayne starred in the show, one of the first regular series in the then-new "compatible color" format on network TV. It was sponsored by Eastman Kodak -- which wanted to sell color movie film just as much as NBC wanted to sell color TV sets for parent company RCA -- and was "Photographed on Eastman Color Film."

Color sitcom on a network that wanted to showcase the newest big thing -- color -- and a photography behemoth that wanted to move Kodacolor . . . what's not to love?


WELL, this is where the irony comes in.

What wasn't to love? The cost. Kodak hated how much it cost to sponsor and film Norby on Eastman Color Film a lot more than it loved trying to sell color film to the 99.9 percent of TV viewers who, alas, could only see the show in lifeless monochrome instead of living color. Remember, in early 1955, an RCA console color TV would set you back $898 in non-devalued American currency.

That would be, not to put too fine a point on it, $7,955.03 in 2016 cash money.

And, friends, there we have it. The first all-color sitcom in TV history was killed by irony -- it just cost too bloody much.

All because it was in color.

George Martin: Genius behind the geniuses

Back at Abbey Road, Martin gave The Beatles the chance to respond to his dressing down. "I've laid into you for quite a long time," he said. "You haven't responded. Is there anything you don't like?" 

"Well, for a start," replied George Harrison, "I don't like your tie." 

The quip broke the ice and The Beatles relaxed into comedy mode. 

"For the next 15 to 20 minutes they were pure entertainment," recalled Norman Smith. "I had tears running down my face." 

Despite his misgivings, Martin eventually decided The Beatles had "the potential to make a hit record" and gave them a recording deal on 6 June (backdated by two days so as to secure copyright to the recording session). 

He later admitted it was their "tremendous charisma" rather than their music that won him over. "When you are with them, you are all the better for being with them and when they leave you feel a loss," he told Sue Lawley. 

"I fell in love with them. It's as simple as that."

3 Chords & the Truth: Schwing states

I messed up.

I watched the latest Republican presidential debate.

Donald Trump made sure everyone knew there was "no problem" with the size of his hands . . . or his penis. This happened.

The candidates also yelled at each other a lot.

NEEDLESS to say, I can't quite get the vision of this out of my brain. Yet I still had to do another episode of 3 Chords & the Truth, and I'm told it's bad to get too political on the radio . . . or the Internet facsimile thereof.

So I did my best.

But . . . GOD ALMIGHTY, A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ALLUDED TO THE SIZE OF HIS TALLYWHACKER ON NATIONAL TV! 

Among other things.

I guess what I'm saying is this edition of the Big Show may have gotten a little interesting. I spin the stacks of groovy wax; you decide.

Whatever.

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

Dropping the needle on another show

Music, the way it used to was and, more and more, still be.

I have records, and I'm not afraid to play them. Now, that's the answer to the $64,000 Question.

I imagine you'd be surprised to know exactly how much of the music on 3 Chords & the Truth comes to you in the the old-school manner, off of old LPs, 45s and even 78s. Welllllllll. . . .

I'd have to say most, actually.

BESIDES, old Zenith "Cobra-Matic" record changers are just so cool. As are old LP jackets. 

I think that about covers it until later, when we'll drop another episode of the Big Show onto the platter and see how it plays.

That is all.