MINE YOURS & OURS: That Christmas shot above is a far cry from
what is presently happening in the streets of Cairo, Greece, and even
Sweden. Here is a plea for a global reset narrated against the awful
news that has become the soundtrack of our lives. PLEASE PLAY LOUD
ENOUGH TO WAKE THE NEIGHBORS.
NO MATTER WHAT
SHE SAID:We have this cat, a Snowshoe Siamese, who my wife
named "Magnolia Thunder Pussy" after a '60s San Francisco radio spot,
and who came to us as a replacement for our dear deceased cat "Gary
Gilmore", also named by my wife. (One can imagine the psychological
damage or purr enlightenment the children have endured.) Anyway,
"Maggie" was a rescue cat, plucked from the Stanford University
campus by a student who found her injured, starving, alone; a refugee
from God knows what. Maggie grew to the size of a house living in the
student's apartment, but upon graduating Maggie's student-savior had to
give her up to move wherever Stanford graduates move to, so she put
Maggie on Craigslist and my wife brought this fat cat home. She slimmed
down, given some room to roam, and is now a much different cat from that
which she was when she came to us - accept for her monotonic meow.
I have no idea what this cat is saying. It may be "hello"; it may be
"there is a tarantula on your head", I don't know, it all sounds the
same. I assume her issues in this song. PLEASE PLAY LOUD SO I CAN CLAIM
THIS ON MY RESUME AS A BROADCAST PRODUCTION.
New Releases on RARadio: "Natural
Disasters" by Corey Landis;
"1,000 Leather Tassels"
by The Blank Tapes;
"We Are All Stone" and "Those
Machines" by Outer
Minds; "Another Dream" by
MMOSS; "Susannah" by
Woolen Kits;
Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson
and other dead celebrities / news by A SECRET
PARTY; "I Miss the Day"by
My Secret Island, "Carriers
of Light" by Brendan James; "The
Last Time" by Model Stranger; "Last
Call" by Jay; "Darkness" by
Leonard Cohen; "Sweetbread" by
Simian Mobile Disco and "Keep
You" from Actress
off the Chronicle movie
soundtrack;
"Goodbye to Love" from
October Dawn; Trouble in Mind 2011
label sampler;
Black Box Revelation Live on
Minnesota Public Radio;
Apteka "Striking Violet";
Mikal Cronin's "Apathy" and "Get
Along"; Dana deChaby's progressive
rock
Interscope Records CEO
JimmyIovine
was featured in a recent piece in Rolling Stone, and it was one
of those rare celebrity interviews that actually yield insight and
useful information for people interested in music production and
engineering. READ
MORE...
The Boulder Arts Commission's video on
the history of music in Boulder, Colorado is a real gem that contributes
in all kinds of ways. Not the least of those is that it perfectly
captures the zeitgeist of an era, through the lens of a unique
university town, at a hinge-point in musical time after which
nothing would ever swing that same way again.
By RAR
In
2001 the
Boulder Arts Commission sponsored a documentary written, directed &
produced by Don Chapman and Leland
Rucker
titled Sweet Lunacy. (You can watch it below - it
is posted on YouTube.) The project was no doubt intended to capture on
video the rich history of the Boulder community as it pertains to the
university town's live entertainment venues.
Speaking as one who
lived in Boulder and executed music journalism regarding this
local music scene in the '70s and '80s, this documentary seems just perfect at capturing the
energy, enthusiasm and camaraderie that existed in that period of time.
There are some truly great characters featured, most notably saxophonist
Fly McClard, who has spent his
entire life as a sort of a gift to the humanities. In this video he
embodies the best of what Boulder was in those years, which was a
community of people in love with music itself.
This video traces the
beginnings of that feverish devotion to music to the 1960s surf band
The Astronauts, who broke big out of
Tulagi's On the Hill, a club nicely
situated at the edge of the University of Colorado campus. As a kid in
Englewood, Colorado at the time, the look back at The Astronauts feels
particularly satisfying because all of Colorado felt like a special
place to me in those days; probably a memory made special through the
filter of youth. The Astronauts, Bryan Highland, The Beach Boys, Del
Shannon, Terry Stafford, Roy Orbison - these are the names that waft
back over me from those early '60s years before The Beatles vanished
most of that crowd in 1964.
This video jumps from
The Astronauts - including interview sequences with Astronaut
Rich Fifield, who looked in 2001
exactly the way he looked in 1978, go figure - to the marvelous
Harold Fielden confection
Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids.
Judge for yourself, but I would say that this tremendous band of CU
students, more than any other, took Colorado music down the rabbit hole
of innocence lost. They were bridging the gap between '50s-era rock
hooligans and '70's-era punks using unabashed, over-the-top showmanship,
and doing it all while playing the holy hell out of their instruments. I
saw them for the first time in Kansas, where I was going to college in
the early '70s, before I moved to Boulder, and they scared the hell out
of me! I saw them in this way-low-profile and overly-lighted gymnasium
setting, and I was surrounded by sheltered farm kids, and for some
reason we were all sitting on the floor, as if waiting for an address
from the Principal. Then these guys dressed like '50s greasers came out
and just tore the place apart, leaving everyone sort of traumatized,
though while their behavior was more than a little shocking to kids in
Kansas, it was what had become the standard at Tulagi's in Boulder.
Flash Cadillac brought a
lot of attention to the Boulder scene and their success (they were
eventually in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, for Christ
sakes!) greatly encouraged a huge bubble of optimism within the
musicians who moved to Boulder to work its rich club circuit. "Rich" is
a relative term, of course, and in Boulder that meant there were a dozen
clubs in close proximity to one another that featured live music nightly
and a lot of work for club musicians. Boulder also attracted established
musical brands - Stephen Stills, Joe Walsh,
Chris Hillman - who viewed living in the area as an
alternative to L.A. Several recording studios developed and did well
with all of these local aspirants, and Boulder native Jock Bartley
scored big with Firefall, comprised
of former Flying Burrito Brothers
and Byrds members peppered with
talented songwriter Larry Burnett
and the multi-talented instrumentalist David
Muse.
All of that is captured
in this documentary and is interesting in itself, if you like music, and
fascinating if you happened to have actually been there for that
particular Boulder brand of music. People who were there remember it
more than fondly. I got a call recently from a mechanical engineer who
lives near where I live in California, and who went to CU and regularly
saw Tommy Bolin playing to a small crowd at Tulagi's. He just wanted to
talk about it after having been re-enlivened to his music and music
memories by a near-death experience. Boulder music of that era burned
into peoples' consciousness, and this video captures that.
What will be less
apparent to all but the most observant viewers is that almost all of the
Boulder music phenomena depicted in this documentary remained
exclusively Boulder phenomena; a protective layer of debauchery
that even some famous people retreated to for refreshment. I recall
seeing a CSNY show in Denver in 1970 that ended with an open invitation
to follow the band up to Boulder, the impression being that there would
be a wide-open impromptu show up there someplace. Boulder had that sort
of be-in vibe well into the late '70s.
Throughout the '60's and
'70's the city of Boulder was becoming more and more a bi-coastal place,
where east coast business interests were integrating with west coast
creatives, as they are called these days. There was a lot of money
being made and spent on entertainment and by the time I arrived in 1977
Boulder had long been awash with recreational drugs. This fueled a club
scene that not only benefited club musicians' abilities to live as
musicians - there existed a paralyzing fear of day jobs among that group
- but supported hot air beliefs that somehow the whole Boulder community
was going to become the next L.A., where its destiny has been much more
that of Austin's, though minus a good share of the music. Boulder was
recently listed as "the smartest town in the U.S." based on the density
of it's college degreed population, and it has become more of a tech
than a music center, whereas Austin is nine-times as large and easily
supports an expansive live music network as well as a large technology
industry. The
very smallness of Boulder no doubt allowed that sense of large fish
depicted in this video swimming in waters wrongly sized for them, at
least in their minds.
There is the other thing
about this 2001 video: it is a look-back by people of an era who are
reporting from inside a snow globe of alternative reality shared only
with a select slice of humanity who happened to float through at some
point. Colorado has continued to produce the occasional chart topper
act, like The Fray or Big Head Todd, but not at any higher rate than
anywhere else in the U.S.. Nobody outside of Boulder, Colorado ever thinks about the
place being any kind of a special musical locale, and nobody ever really
did other than people living in Boulder during the time depicted in
Sweet Lunacy. While I suspect that this was not
the inspiration for the title of the work it most certainly describes
what the delusions of this varied cast of characters represents.
Still, I suspect the people shown in this documentary
would tell you that nothing felt the same after that golden period of
Boulder music. While a person can recall when it began, it is not
entirely clear when it ended, because nothing really changed in reality.
Exploring the complexities within that conundrum is one of the more
interesting sociological and psychological aspects of my music
historian's life. Why was this particular crowd so utterly committed to
this Sweet Lunacy?
TWO
_________
___________________
FOUR
_________
___________________
_________
___________________
Tulagi's opened in Boulder, Colorado in 1960. It has been
opened and closed numerous times as different types of
operations, but is currently open again as a music venue.
Learning
from Jimmy Iovine
