moon traveller herald

The fiddle breaks into the intro. We walk into the eternal honky tonk. James Hand is singing In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox. In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox My favorite mourners and I talk about these old hard knocks our lives are measured there by the bars clocks In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox So step in side where live has died and you'll sure find me with sadness and a haunted face that's bound to be Hidden behind the door that sorrow locked In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox. Do you know a place like that? Where people start out young honkytonkin and then retreat backwards into the old shadows? James Hand nails this like Poe in his Rounder record debut. He's past football playing age, James is. Comes out of Texas and says Willie: "James Hand is the real deal." It is that simple. Waterfall tradeoffs on pedal steel and guitar. James Hand sings from deep down within. And he is trying as h...

Everyonce and a while I pull something over from a former blog. Here is such an occassion..bunch of notes on Cyber. Wiener - The efforts of Norbert Wiener’s biographers always will be shadowed by I Am a Mathematician. This, his own biography, is likely to overwhelm other attempts to write his story - He was able as a writer, engaging personally, and he ably perceived threads of significance as he viewed his own life. A fair helping of subdued vanity aside, the threading never seems overstressed. This is important because, on the face of it, Wiener’s work, which ranged from estimations of Brownian motion to artillery shell trajectories and beyond may appear disparate, even topsy-turvy, in the light of history. Wiener’s life was both blessed and vexed by the fact of his prodigiousness, which he handled in greater depth in another autobiographical installment. As much as he finally was to become the iconic image of the absent minded professor, he had a grounding in real life. That, he ...

Maybe you can point to Link Wray or someone else. But there is a certain fuzz bass sound that I associate with Chicago, especially a period of Muddy Waters’. It was a raunchy discovery of electronic music, and it was taken from the Chess labs and leveraged by – made them, really - the Rolling Stones in the Triad of Last Time, Satisfaction and Get Off my Cloud. So it is weird but it is this type of sound that animates this year’s Checking on My Baby by Mick Jaegger. It’s on a greatest collection, and I believe, just laid in the vaults for a dozen years. – but it is great stuff, and makes you wonder what could have been if the Rolling Stones had missed the stadium and arena era and remained a bar band. Mick pays homage to the original Sonny Boy on this. I think he did this with some L.A. blues band in the ‘90s – hell if I know. Perfect slurs and careful misdiction and stutters. It is out there! I hope he didn’t bust a button on his trousers during the making of this small epic. http://ww...

Sad to report that Jeanne of Jeanne's Greens, our long-time flower person, passed over this year past. Her store was a small cavern shop of wonders. She was a rainbow. Here above is her Christmas design from circa 1997 which graced the depared SoftwareMag.com at Christmas. Best Christmas and New Year to all. It is a time of year we walk in darkness, and I time of year to, like Isiah, see a great light. There follows a poem [Kenosha Kitchen Band Christmas [First Hack]] this memory that came back to me of a Christmas party with all handicapped kids many moons ago. i. Weight of a million years and there is a hole in what I called time Voidoid climbed into my life when I was just being there burdened and blind. Grabbed me by the throat and took the air out, man It was all the Lutheran mothers in the Kenosha kitchen band. Took the stage again in the glare at the bell school the Special Ed place before they called it that when the Edsel was a flop and the hit was a power windowed Cadil...

Mary Weiss . Name don’t ring a bell? How about: The Shangri-las? Okay now I got your attention. Bad birls, chewing gum – a girl group, but with the long-straight hair look. Not bouffants. Maybe black leather. And not New Jersy. No, Staten Island. Dark eyed girl children of the damned that paved the way for…oh.. I don’t know…let’s say The New York Dolls. Mary Weiss was the singer. And she has come back. Little Steven [ of Little Steven’s Underground Garage] hipped me to this one. Enter a pool parlor of youth. Racing nights. Figuring out the rules of love. Wondering about Juanita and saying why not. The record plays. My Heart is Beating. Big chords and castanets. Brill Street beckons. But this is now and that was then! When you held me close That’s when I knew Chilled me though and through I couldn’t let you go I couldn’t let it show Got a buzz guitar. A doo-wap chorus bit sound. Her voice has the same plaintive tone. Her teen self sings through the filter of adult pain. And this whole ...

Had occasion writing about Zappa and was trying to visualize the young Capt. Beefhart. Remember the lyrics sheet on Trout Mask Replica? With Don young in school portrait looking like Jerry Mathhers? That’s the guy! Took a look at that and realized again what a blues surrealist he was – cause I read through some of those lyrics here’s a sample from She’s Too Much for My Mirror . Ole Chicago she’s uh woman thata Make uh young man uh bum She howls like the wind Make m’ heart grow cold Make me long for that little red fum! She make things fly ‘n she makes things roll She got me way over here ‘n I’m hugry and cold I remember m’ mother told be I oughta be choosey That was way back when I thought she was m’ friend Now I find out she’s uh floosey - Portion of She’s Too Much For My Mirror by Don Van Vliet.

Read along...Take care of your servantyour floor cleaning servant,lordthe world is grinding -grinding me downpolishing your childsand on the shoreI cry and no one hearsI always was I always amnewin town andnobody knows meand nobody caresI am being ground downcleaningthe baptist linoleumthe ritz linenthe old pasadena ceramic tuba young washer woman, your servant,listening, and prayingwatch overprotectmy babes. Or Read the poem at its text page home. http://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2007/12/grandmothers-prayer.html

Waiting for bread on bakery road of dust. Zappa the boy grows up out in the Los Angeles dessert. His buddy is Don Van Vliet . They dream while they are driving the in Don’s father’s bread truck - the one welcomed by the housewives on the dusty bakery road. This is a truck which Don will drive for a while. Zappa is a lonely boy. They are buds and they dream on. Incessantly play R&B. Dwell on things. Imagine a homemade movie, Capt. Beefhart and the Clay People. Zappa is a lonely boy whose father works in the electronics world. The aeronautics world. The Lockheed-Martin-American part of it that world that is at cold war. Move 95, 100, 145 miles at a clip three or four times while zappa is growing. From San Diego to Lancaster, back, and beyond. Like American Graffiti, but more dusty.Zappa is growing so Zappa gets the growing lonely boy in the L.A. dessert blues. And he doesn’t go out for sports. Instead he is about Savoy 78s. The cutting guitar of Johnny Guitar Watson. B...

“It feels like 1960.” That’s not me talking, that is Mavis Staples on her 2007 record, “We’ll Never Turn Back.” She’s running. She’s trying to make 100 – percent, you know: complete and total inspiration – religious, that and more - in the middle of any day. Not a portion. Not an almost full portion. It is a full monte portion of God stamping on the serpent’s throat. This is a startling voice, one that found you when you were addling moronically through the supermarket. The voice is Mavis and it describes a God that wilo smite and smote and that’s what He wrote down a God that is about justice now. God’s characteristics.. such as Freedom God, conceptually mirror the Freedom movement. It’s also about Gospel crossing over to Soul. With a little Japanese guitar, and a marching male and female chorus . . this is a hit! First heard the mix from Wilson Picket, but of course it has roots in the Highway Travellers [friend of the Moon Travellers] and this is a new take, a new song, the song is ...

Take care of your servant your floor cleaning servant, lord the world is grinding - grinding me down polishing your child sand on the shore I cry and no one hears I always was I always am new in town and nobody knows me and nobody cares I am being ground down cleaning the baptist linoleum the ritz linen the old pasadena ceramic tub a young washer woman, your servant, listening, and praying watch over protect my babes.