May 8 2008 8:00 PM Raleigh, NC Berkeley Cafe 217 W Martin St (919) 821-0777 www.berkeleycafe.net
May 10 2008 8:00 PM Easton,Maryland Coffee East 5 Goldsborough St 410 819 6711 www.coffeeeast.com
May 12 2008 8:30 PM Arlington, VA Iota Club & Cafe 2832 Wilson Blvd 703 522 8340 www.iotaclubandcafe.com
May 13 2008 2:30 PM SONGWRITING WORKSHOP Larchmont, NY Watercolor Cafe 2094 Boston Post Rd Price ($100) includes lunch w/Peter at the cafe and admission to the show at 8pm. See the full schedule and other details at www.watercolorcafe.net For reservations, email Bruce Carroll at bcarro24736@aol.com or call the cafe at 914 834 2213
May 13 2008 8:00 PM Larchmont, NY Watercolor Cafe 2094 Boston Post Rd 914 834 2213 www.watercolorcafe.net
May 14 2008 8:00 PM New Haven, CT Cafe Nine 250 State St 203 789 8281 www.cafenine.com
May 15 2008 7:30 PM Annapolis, MD Rams Head Tavern w/Jim White 33 West St 410 268 4545 www.ramsheadtavern.com
May 16 2008 7:30 PM Charlottesville, VA Gravity Lounge 103 South First St 434 977 5590 www.gravity-lounge.com
May 17 2008 8:00 PM New York, NY The Living Room 154 Ludlow St 212 533 7235 www.livingroomny.com
May 18 2008 7:00 PM Philadelphia, PA World Cafe Live 3025 Walnut St 215 222 1400 www.worldcafelive.com
May 19 2008 9:00 PM Pittsburgh, PA Thunderbird Cafe & Lounge 4023 Butler St 412 682 0177 www.thunderbirdcafe.net
May 20 2008 8:00 PM Cleveland, OH Wilbert's 812 Huron Ave 216 902 4663 www.wilbertsmusic.com
May 21 2008 8:00 PM Hamilton, Ontario The Lionshead 137 John St South 905 522 7090 www.thelionshead.ca
May 22 2008 8:00 PM Toronto, Ontario The Dakota Tavern 249 Ossington Ave 416 850 4579 www.thedakotatavern.com
May 23 2008 8:30 PM Sudbury, Ontario The Townehouse Tavern 206 Elgin St www.thetownehouse.com
Editor’s note: Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges wrote in a recent essay that leftists such as Tom Hayden had lost their nerve. Hayden sent us this reply.
John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s, should know better than to claim that some like myself have spent our lives wanting to be “players” in the Democratic Party instead of being “outside the system.” In most countries, most activists move between social movements and political parties as the need arises. I have spent 50 years in social movements, 20 of them as an elected legislator who was opposed by the party establishment, which is far from being a “player.” I believe that change always begins with independent social movements, but movements can be expanded by political representation at certain stages. Who, for example, can forget the willingness of Sen. Mike Gravel to read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record at great legal and political risk to himself?
I am saddened by the strange argument of Chris Hedges, who cites MacArthur in his essay “The Left Has Lost Its Way.” Chris says we should “walk away from the Democratic Party even if Barack Obama is the nominee,” and vote for Ralph Nader. If not, “we become slaves,” a truly unfortunate analogy. What Chris misses is that millions of African-Americans and young people generally are throwing themselves into the Barack Obama campaign, and will not take seriously a white writer who preaches that they are marching in the wrong direction. The analogy to slavery is absolutely inappropriate.
My view is to be humbled and appreciative of this unpredicted upsurge of idealistic and fervent activism created in the Obama movement, and to be supportive of the candidacy while remaining independent and critical of the candidate’s moderate views on Iraq and NAFTA. It’s my sense as an organizer for 50 years that we should stand with spontaneous new waves of activism, not demand that they call off their campaigns at the most critical moment. It is possible to do so without having to surrender our independence on the issues we care most about.
For that reason, some of us have created a Web site called Progressives for Obama, including myself, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Danny Glover, Cornel West, Jane Fonda, Jim Hightower, Jean Stein, Andy Stern, Anna Burger, and 300 more.
The social movements have not disappeared in 2008 but follow a logic of their own, like a river cutting its path. If the Clintons steal the nomination, the social movements will return in force. If Obama wins the presidency, the social movements will rise with higher expectations to demand that President Obama end the Iraq war and focus on race, poverty and environmental issues at home and around the world. The left should not be a small elite outside this process.
I pulled some lyrics out of an old notebook, lyrics I have to old blues songs, but I'm just messing around . Nothing in those sheaves of paper really lit me up. I watched a movie of Ray Charles and other piano greats, inclucing Professor Longhair, and Otis Spann, but I didn't couldn't play the piano today myself: my thumbs too messed up to play the piano guitar or type, so I'm hung up. It's killing me chronically, I don't know why and I gotta do something for it but I don't know what. Just doing this, and trying not to use it, is causing horrible shooting pains. I took four advils that didn't touch it, so there you go. Then I went back to the day's ramble.
This is what I do at home a lot of days , kinda hustling around waiting for the Big Phonecall, for LIghtning To Strike, I feel like a detective trying to solve a crime that hasn't happened yet.
Jeez it's hot around here. What's goin' on with the kids? Bills to pay stacked up. Phonecalls to answer. The Plimsouls? The Nerves? Call the Doctor?
WTF?
Zorba The Greek? Purgatorio? The Christopher Hitchins Story? Denise's Crawdaddy Columns. Howie Klein's downwithtyranny.com. Stride piano... Bach? My sister's are in Buffalo, moving everything out of the old house. Do I want this or that old thing?
On top of it all, I feel so old. Or part of me does, while the rest still feels like a dislocated teenager, the one who ran the streets in SF, chasing the songs all day everyday, out in traffic, in the wind, out doors 24 hours, 7 days, years on end. All that does something to you on a cellular level. Laughing out loud, as kids like to say...
Spoke to The Dark Bob on the phone for nearly and hour, catching up. I thanked him for filming at the McCabes show Saturday. He said that he may have neglected to turn the camera on when he was on stage filming me. We talked about Elvis (we always discuss Elvis) the show, my singing, which DB had many interesting comments about, saying there was almost a middle eastern sound in some of it. I wasn't exactly sure what he meant, we look at music very differently, but I appreciated the discussion, you know? He told me that Terry Allen said 'Say Hi to Biscuit Foot for me,' and that he was referring to yours truly. We talked about Walk Hard, The Simpsons, Bob and Bob his old group) The Stones film, and then I got into Kennedy and the Brother Book. I went on about that for 20 minutes, telling him about JFK's acid experience, etc... and the deep politics of the 60's. We talked about the Badger, and about the ill effects the internet has had on the music scene. (There have been some positive effects too, but we didn't talk about them today.)
I'm out of sorts a lot when I'm home, it's very difficult sometimes to get in touch with music. When I'm on tour I'm eating and breathing, sleeping music, but home I get cut off. That said, the road is good for playing but makes it nearly impossible to finish writing anything. It's always time to move on, and I do love that. And/but of course, on the other side, there are responsibilities here, joys too, many things to dig, people I care for, so much to do.
But, to write good songs you need time to question, and hear the answer in silence. It's best to be alone in a room, or in an empty house. Someplace where the arc of your imagination doesn't collide with distractions, someplace where you can stay in the trance, not get woken up by a fool phone call. Some place like....1963!
Unless, of course, on the other side, you're out in a world of chaos and controversey, seeing it clearly and taking it down. That can work, too... you'll get some songs out of that.
Watching that movie today, I saw Willie Dixon playing with Spann, and it made me think of my time hanging with WD in the early 80's. I had a song on the piano he dug the groove to, and wanted to write words for. I went over to his place in Glendale, a little house where he lived (this was before the Led Zeppelin money came through.) He told me a lot of intersting things, and showed me an amazing musical trick as well, but we never finsihed the song.
The music was my track to Deja Blues but that lyric was never right, I needed Willies lyrics and I never got 'em all. I got some of 'em. Maybe I should try and pull it together now.
I don't know what's wrong with me, but I never got it together to go back to his house, when he was still alive! It's a great regret, one I still feel...
Oh well, at least I was there and had my eyes and ears opened.
There's something about life, a sense that seems to floats out of my reach 99 percent of the time. I can reach it sometimes when I'm playing, but so often it feels like its all drifting by me... washing away. The only sure cure I have for this sinking feeling is when I'm making music. Other things turn me on, but music is the deal. I'm never too far off when a guitar or piano is in my hands.
I'm not complaining. I go through a lot of changes, but I love what I do, and all that. I just want to do it mo' better.
I'm so sick of the political hype this year. Change sounds good, and we'll see what happens. I'll do whatever I can to work on some change around here. Change begins at home, and moves down yr front steps and into your neighborhood.
I gotta million ideas to put into play, just gotta get my hands on 'em. The day drifts bye and I knock out this kinda stuff. Time to get down on it.
So much to do, not that much time, a feeling of urgency, and the road hovering a week or so down the line, waiting to take me away again.
The corporate state is our shadow government. Candidates who aspire to higher office get corporate money if they promote corporate interests. They are shut out of the national debate—look at Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader—if they do not. Defy the corporate state and you get handed a ticket to oblivion. You become invisible. Work for it and you are showered with tens of millions of dollars and the possibility of political power.
Barack Obama’s campaign message, filled with lofty promises of change and hope, is also filled with repeated reassurances to the corporate elite. Pick up a copy of Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.” The subtext is clear. It is a steady reminder to corporate America, a reminder bolstered by Obama’s voting record, that corporations would have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency.
“Of course,” he writes, “there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or a DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some of their more radical ideas into law. The prevalence of regional, ethnic, and economic differences within the party, the electoral map and the structure of the Senate, the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections—all these things tend to prevent Democrats in office from straying too far from the center. In fact, I know very few elected Democrats who neatly fit the liberal caricature; the last I checked, John Kerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary Clinton believes in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of the Congressional Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins.”
He praises the “recognizably progressive” Bill Clinton, whose disastrous welfare reform he lauds, for showing that “government spending and regulation could, if properly designed, serve as vital ingredients and not inhibitors to economic growth, and how markets and fiscal discipline could help promote social justice. He recognized that not only societal responsibility but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty.” Obama excoriates “those who still champion the old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from the liberal interest groups. But these efforts seem exhausted, a constant game of defense, bereft of energy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of globalization or a stubbornly isolated inner city.”
“Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty,” he writes. “Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material reward. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make—the immigrant who comes to this country with nothing and strikes it big, the young man who heads West in search of his fortune. As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.”
The corporations have gotten the message. The same Beltway lobbyists, corporate donors and public relations firms, the same weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, nuclear power companies and Wall Street interests that give Clinton and John McCain money, give Obama money. They happen, in fact, to give Obama more. And the corporate state, which is carrying out a coup d’état in slow motion, believes it will prosper in Obama’s hands. If not, he would not be a viable candidate. We have come full circle, back to the age of the robber barons and railroad magnates of the late 19th century who selected members of corrupt state assemblies to be their pliable senators and congressmen and sent them off to Washington to do their bidding.
There have been some important investigations into Obama’s links with major corporations, including Ken Silverstein’s November 2006 article “Barack Obama Inc: The Birth of a Washington Machine” in Harper’s magazine. Newsweek has also detailed many of Obama’s major corporate contributors. Obama’s Leadership PAC includes John Gorman of Texas-based Tejas Securities, a major supporter of Senate Democrats as well as the Bush presidential campaigns. It includes Winston & Strawn, the Chicago-based law and lobbying firm. It also includes the corporate law firms Kirkland & Ellis, and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fundraisers for Obama as well as donors. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Henry Crown and Co., an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense, are all funding the Illinois senator.
Individual contributors to Obama come from major lobbyist groups such as those of Jeffrey Peck (whose clients include MasterCard, the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and Rich Tarplin (Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers). Exelon, a leading nuclear plant operator, based in Illinois, is a long-time donor to the Obama campaign. Exelon executives and employees have contributed at least $227,000 to Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fundraisers. Obama has also accepted more than $213,000 from individuals (and their spouses) who work for companies in the oil and gas industry, and two of Obama’s bundlers are senior oil company executives who have raised between $50,000 and $100,000. I could go on, but you get the point.
(Page 2)
Obama, as you will see if you examine his voting record, has repeatedly rewarded those who reward him. As a senator he has promoted nuclear energy as “green.” He has been lauded by the nuclear power industry, which is determined to resume building nuclear power plants across the country. He has voted to continue to fund the Iraq war. He opposed Rep. John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal. He refused to join the 13 senators who voted against confirming Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He did not support the single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supports the death penalty. He worked tirelessly in the Senate in 2005 to pass a class-action “reform” bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama’s second-biggest single bloc of donors. The law, with the Orwellian title the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. This has long been a cherished goal of large corporations as well as the Bush administration. It effectively denies redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges. It moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges. Even Hillary Clinton voted against this naked effort to allow corporations to carry out flagrant discrimination, consumer fraud and wage-and-hour violations.
Obama likes to paint himself as an opponent of the war. He reminds voters of his one—and only one—speech opposing it. But he swiftly changed his mind. Obama told the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that “there’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” Obama added that he “now believes U.S. forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation, ¬a policy not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration.” Obama wants to leave an estimated 50,000 troops in Iraq to protect our superbases and the Green Zone, our imperial city; to fight terrorism; and to train Iraqi forces. He traveled to Connecticut to campaign on behalf of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a leading proponent of the war and an advocate of airstrikes against Iran, when Lieberman was challenged by the anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. And when Obama talks about the Palestinians he reads dutifully from the script handed to him by Lieberman and the Israel lobbying group AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Obama’s policy director is Karen Kornbluh, who as a senior aide to Robert Rubin, the head of the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, pushed through NAFTA and other free-trade policies that unleashed the assault on organized labor and devastated the country’s manufacturing sector. And Obama’s senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago, privately assured Canada’s consul general in Chicago in February that Obama’s NAFTA-bashing “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,” according to a leaked memo of the meeting. Most of Obama’s senior advisers, including Penny Pritzker, a member of one of America’s richest families and the current finance chair of the campaign, have a long history of oiling the government apparatus for corporate interests and personal enrichment. Pritzker was the chair of Superior Bank of Chicago. The bank collapsed in 2001 with over $1 billion in insured and uninsured deposits, and 1,406 people lost nearly all their savings. The bank owners, who fabricated profit reports, made much of their money promoting risky subprime home mortgages. Those around Obama are as wedded to corporate interests as those around Clinton and McCain.
Obama is an articulate, intelligent and attractive politician, but he is also a corporate figurehead. A vote for Obama is a vote for the corporate state. Under an Obama administration, the corporations would continue their ruthless drive to disempower the citizens, to protect an entrenched American oligarchy and to subvert what is left of our faltering democracy.
It's always a trip playin' in town, very different from being on the road. Maybe I should try and play like a stranger tonight, like LA's just another stop on the road. Could be the only way to give it the shot it needs.
I mean there's somethings beautiful about playin' for a home town crowd, too... on the other hand.
Paul Curreri is on the show tonight, and he's really good, people... I wouldn't kid you.
Hope to see you tonight... and if you're in Europe reading this: I'll see you in October!
This message deleted.
Thanks to Scott at EZ NET for the rescue job.
The show this weekend is at McCabes Concerts in Santa Monica, Saturday, 8 pm, I'm doing my thing with Paul Curreri opening.
See the show that wowed'em in Paris! Songs! Stories! Surprises!
I've been writing, working on part 2 of 'Passport.' Diggin' a stack of various old time records: hey, if it don't hiss, it just don't sound right.
Dig this article from the Philadelphia paper by Chris Hedges, I'm beginning to think along similar lines. What do you think Woody would say?
BTW, LA needs a new Ashgrove... I'd set it up but I need a few bucks. Considering the situation...
The Left Has Lost It's Way By Chris Hedges
This column was originally published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The failure of the American left is a failure of nerve. It has been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of its refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupation of Iraq to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.
Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If the left wants to regain influence in the nation’s political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the nominee, and back progressive, third-party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.
Political and social change, as the radical Christian right and the array of corporate-funded neocon think tanks have demonstrated, are created by the building of movements. This is a lesson American progressives have forgotten. The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.
“The mistake of the former left-wingers, from Tom Hayden to Todd Gitlin, is that they want to be players in the Democratic Party and academia,” said John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, speaking of two prominent 1960s activists. “This is not what the left is supposed to be. The left is supposed to be outside the system. The attempt by the left to take control of the Democratic Party failed with [Eugene] McCarthy and George McGovern. The left, at that point, should have gone back to organizing, street protests, building labor unions, and the mobilization of grassroots activists. Instead, it went for respectability.”
The rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations, is as much a part of the Democratic agenda as the Republican agenda. Sure, every four years Democratic candidates pay lip service to the old values of the party, but then they head off to Washington and do things such as ram NAFTA down our throats, throw 10 million people off welfare, and peddle health-care proposals acceptable to the HMOs, huge pharmaceutical giants, and for-profit health-care providers who are, after all, the very sources of our health-care crisis. What we as citizens need and work for in a corporate state is irrelevant.
The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not, despite what the well-heeled Democratic and Republican apologists for the free market tell you, commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.
“The other side has religion, and we need some,” said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary. “We need a more robust understanding of the role of religious values, values that prevent us from compromising the sanctity and dignity of human life. The left, because it is largely secular, did not do enough as the working class was finished off. And now the same thing is happening with the middle class. It is the loss of the left’s spiritual resources that has crippled the movement. The left forgot that nations, like individuals, have souls. Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back. History is not linear. History is about constant struggle. It is the struggle, if you come out of faith, which matters.”
The failure of the left is the failure of well-meaning people who kept compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few scraps of influence until they had neither. The condemnations progressives utter—about the abuse of working men and women, the rapacious cannibalization of the country by an unchecked arms industry, our disastrous foreign wars, and the collapse of basic services from education to welfare—are not backed by action. The left has been transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. They have become hypocrites.
“The loss of nerve by the left comes down to this lack of faith,” Thistlethwaite said. “Having a soul means there is coherence between our actions and our values. The left can no longer claim this coherence. It has no moral compass. It does not know right from wrong. It has, in its confusion, lost the capacity to make moral judgments.”
Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage to challenge the corporate state that is destroying our nation, we will have squandered our credibility and integrity at the moment we need it most.
Chris Hedges is author of “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” and “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” This column was originally published by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Ron's one of our favorite artists: watch the videos, buy the cd, folks. Ron's vids:
http://www.youtube.com/cooleygrand
Hope you enjoy these.
In other news, the Ashgrove gig on Saturday was a gas, even though Dave couldn't make it. He had to go help the Gaffneys with their arrangements for Chris's Funeral, down in Orange County. A very sad time for everybody that knew him.
The poetry workshop on Saturday was inspiring, with Jack Hirschman, Linda Albertino, Michael C Ford, and Mel Weisburd. I can't tell you now, but it was something else.
I've been diggin' the set 'Goodbye, Babylon,' that my friend Mike Minkey loaned me, all pre-war gospel recordings. It's big time great. Any of you heard that?
Don't forget, my McCabes show is on Saturday night at 8pm... there are still a few tickets left, they say, but going fast. Hope to see a lot of you there.
Talk to you again soon...
I knew he was sick, but I'm shocked that this happened so quickly.
A lot of people are going to really miss him. I know I will. He was an amazing guy, a great singer and songwriter, and just one of those people that I'd always be glad to see, whenever and wherever I ran into him.
Here's the obituary from the Orange County Register:
Thursday, April 17, 2008 O.C. music community remembers Chris Gaffney Obituary: The singer-songwriter, who died of liver cancer at 57, touched people with his songs and personality.
Chris Gaffney, the Orange County singer-songwriter whose country and roots rock-tinged music earned him a small but fervent following in barrooms and concert halls around the world, died Thursday after a brief battle with liver cancer. He was 57.
For years, Gaffney gigged constantly around Orange and Los Angeles counties, playing the Swallow's Inn in San Juan Capistrano with his band the Cold Hard Facts on a Saturday night, then moving up the highway to the Blue Café in Long Beach for a show on Sunday afternoon.
While he might not have found the fame his fans – including many fellow musicians – felt he deserved, in recent years, as part of the Hacienda Brothers band, Gaffney expanded his touring beyond Orange County, to cities around the nation and in Europe.
"In a lot of ways, he was the sort of guy who music critics dream of walking into a bar and finding their whole lives," said Jim Washburn, a former Register pop music critic who befriended Gaffney and say him play scores of shows. "Someone who's just there and is undiscovered and phenomenal.
"It gets kind of grating when the decades pass and he's still undiscovered, but that was also part of Chris' charm," Washburn said. "On any night, you could go into a bar in Orange County and see one of the best shows you'd ever seen in your life."
His knowledge of music was seemingly unlimited. Though he specialized in what today might be called alt-country or roots rock, he knew, loved or played everything from Duke Ellington to Louis Prima, Porter Waggoner to the Specials.
"I met him in the early '80s, in a bar, where he was in the band," said Julie Gaffney, with whom he would have celebrated 25 years of marriage next month. "He was the guy I knew I needed to be with all of my life – and all of his."
She said his music was what attracted fans to his shows, but his personality is what turned fans into friends.
"He was genuine, and he was also just a really funny guy, who could talk to anybody about anything," Gaffney said. "When he played and I was with him, he never even came and talked to me, because he always went out to talk to people at the show."
His music, like his personality, was the real deal: down to earth, honest, and grounded that part of America where hard-working people gathered to sing songs about life and share a beer or two.
"I think he does the country best," Julie Gaffney said. "The George Jones – I loved when he used to sing 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' – and the 'Cold, Hard Facts of Life' by Porter Waggoner.
Last year, in Nashville for a tribute to the late Waggoner, Gaffney sang that song on stage, alone with his acoustic guitar, she said. "And it brought down the house.
"You could tell that that was what he really liked to do – and he was lucky he got to do it."
His illness was diagnosed earlier this year, and the cancer attacked him aggressively. As news of his death filtered out into the world of those who knew him, friends – including fellow singer-songwriters Dave Alvin and Jim Lauderdale – started calling the house to express their condolences, Julie Gaffney said.
Walter Clevenger, whose band the Dairy Kings now includes former Cold Hart Facts' keyboard player Wyman Reese – says he spent Sundays at the Blue Café for a few years, soaking up the cheap Dixie beer and the inspiring Gaffney music week after week.
"It was pretty much a religious experience for me," Clevenger said.
Later, Gaffney played accordion on a few songs for one of Clevenger's albums, and he and the Dairy Kings returned the favor for a song Gaffney later recorded.
Fundraising efforts to help with his medical costs include a tribute CD with musicians such as Clevenger, Lauderdale and Rosie Flores covering Gaffney songs. A concert at Linda's Doll Hut in Anaheim was scheduled for April 27; details on its status now were not available Thursday night.
A Web site – www.helpgaff.com – also had been set up to help with expenses, and will continue to do so to help the Gaffney family medical and other bills, Washburn said.
Gaffney is also survived by Erika Gaffney, a daughter from a previous marriage. Services are pending, Julie Gaffney said, with a memorial to be planned to celebrate his life and music.
"We need to have something," she said. "There's going to be a lot of people who are going to want to come and say goodbye."
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
(This chapter has been returned to the shop)
For an interesting rejoinder to this, see:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-cooper/hillary-and-the-commies_b_97131.html
It seems nothing can stop this self-destruction now, until the Dems settle the nomination.
Meanwhile America cozies up to McCain, a very backward looking, dangerous advocate for continuing Bush's polices.
The Boss weighed in for Obama,,, think that'll help this time?
We'll see.
Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? ? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.
Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing—an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals—must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.
If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation’s widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein?
To be sure, as a senator, McCain has exhibited flashes of independence on behalf of taxpayers, as in his support of campaign-finance reform in which he partnered with Democrat Russ Feingold. McCain’s investigations of the military-industrial complex’s shameless exploitation of terrorism fears set a high standard, as in exposing the air-tanker scandal that dispatched a Boeing exec and a former Pentagon employee to prison. But his political ambition is showing. Although he previously harshly criticized the enormous waste in the Iraq occupation, today, as a presidential candidate, he opens the door to a hundred years of taxpayer dollars tossed down the drain in Iraq. The man who was tortured now hugs a leader who authorized the same.
By so unabashedly embracing the most glaringly failed U.S. president ever, McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing religious bigotry, imperial arrogance and corporate greed that he had stood against in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election when he challenged George W. Bush, but to which he now has capitulated.
Too harsh? Then consider just how tight the space is between the rocks of our failed Mideast policy and the hard place of our impending financial disaster. The sudden out-of-control spike in the cost of oil—the key short-term market variable, the specter that stokes inflation fear and limits moves to avoid recession—is not a natural disaster or in any realistic way the result of inefficiency in the use of energy. What more than doubled the price of petroleum in the short run was not that too many of us bought Hummers, but rather that the political stability of the region that contains the bulk of that oil was deliberately and recklessly roiled.
In the name of fighting the 9/11 terrorists, the Bush administration overthrew the one Arab government most adamantly opposed to the Saudi financiers of that son of their system, Osama bin Laden. Instead of confronting the royal leaders of a kingdom that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers, we invaded a nation that supplied not a single one. While Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein, who had no ties to the hijackers, he embraced the leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the only three nations in the world that had diplomatically recognized and supported the Taliban sponsors of al-Qaida.
Consider that historical marker at a time when the UAE and Saudi Arabia bankers are buying major positions in distressed U.S. financial and other key corporate institutions. I know, it all sounds too conspiratorial, like imagining that we might wake up from this national nightmare and discover that the CEO of Halliburton, who replaced Dick Cheney when the latter selected himself to be Bush’s vice president, now has his headquarters in Dubai, tucked safely into the obscenely oil-revenue-rich UAE that our troops were sent to Iraq to protect.
There is no national outrage, or even seriously sustained media interest, over the fact that Cheney’s old company profited enormously from ripping off U.S. tax dollars going into the Iraq occupation. Nor is there even much curiosity about the shenanigans of Halliburton, which is doing business with Arab oil sheiks at a time when the U.S. banks these Middle Eastern oil interests bought into are moving to foreclose on American homeowners.
It’s just the sort of egregious betrayal of the trust of the taxpayers that Sen. McCain would have gone after, before he sought to don the soiled robes of the Bush presidency.
(These lines were later chiseled on his Arlington resting place.)
I've been up late, reading in the front room, everyone else asleep here. I've got the door open to help cool the place off. It's very quiet outside, reminding me of nights I used to spend in Hamburg as a teen, feeling like the only one awake in the whole damn town, riding on a bicycle on summer nights, tryin' to feel some sort of breeze, sometimes running into some friends on a cruise by the all night.
The nights are great for expansive thinking, and I got a momentary flash of freedom just now when I went out front in the dark, to get something from my car ( a cd set of old-time medicine show music from the 20's and 30's, 'Good For What Ails You.') It's cooler out there, deathly still, the sky seems dark, a cat almost made me jump when it broke out of the bushes and ran.
I stood out front and looked up the silent street towards Pico Boulevard, feeling the coolness on my bare legs and face. The traffic light shining red, two blocks away, hanging over the deserted intersection, tricks me. For a second again I could have been in my childhood home, on Lake Street, looking up towards Main.
A wave of anxiety left me, lifted off. I'm gonna get up tomorrow and get things done, man. First time I felt enthusiastic about that since I got back. I've been tired, not exactly tied in knots or anything, but this moment is a true relief.
I've got some things to try and do, even if they turn out to be impossible.The things we do are the life we lead, they go out from us in waves, good or bad, affecting everybody we come in contact with, just like theirs do us.
Oh, Lord, I do love the night, but I gotta be up in the morning. Catch you later...
Too young not to understand/ I was proud/ I Shook His Hand.
He took command on a winter's day/ & all across the land spring was on it's way/ he struck fear into the hearts of fools/ raking up the gangs, breakin' all their rules.
Too young not to understand/ I was proud/ I Shook His Hand.
Each tongue is a world/ each eye is an ocean/ of every man, woman and child/ here in living motion/ now who will protect us, who will perfect us?/ who will live to see the day when love connects us? Who'll take a step out in this land/ I'd be proud to say I shook their hand.
For years they tried to kill him, he finally died/ I still remember how I felt while my mama cried/ I grew up with a bullet in my breast/ if you know it or not, so did all the rest.
Too young not to understand/ I was proud/ I Shook His Hand.
Each tongue is a world/ each eye is an ocean/ of every man, woman and child/ here in living motion/ now who will protect us, who will perfect us?/ who will live to see the day when love connects us? Who'll take a step out in this land/ I'd be proud to say I shook their hand.
Too young not to understand/ I was proud/ I Shook His Hand.
c1986 ( from the album 'Peter Case,' 1986 produced by T Bone Burnett)
Recent thoughts about Martin Luther King, and the Kennedy Brothers inspire this post. I've been reading the book 'Brothers' by David Talbot about the Kennedy's struggles with the Joints Chiefs of Staff and the CIA during JFK's presidency. It's pretty mind blowing stuff, at least for people of my age generation.
It's an old story but no less relevant now.
I wrote the song on an Amtrak train, when I was heading down to Texas for the Plimsouls last tour, Summer 1984.
More later on this.
Every weekend a new ecstatic response. Pavlovian drools.
Rock: It used to be counter culture, now it's not much more than what the man said: another 'Opiate of the People.'
Life IS about entertainment, consuming, multiple choice, right, folks?
Brand names... form over content.
Too bad the big beat is a lie, the same as television.
Why don't you paint a picture of someone you love?