It’s better to tell these stories with the tunes playing, so hit play…

A lot of the music that happens in my life comes from down at our amateur mechanic shop at the Recycling Center in Heber City, Utah. This is where we spend a lot of our time working on old Toyota Land Cruisers and other misc vehicles. We do all sorts of interesting work: major modifications, engine swaps, modernization of old vehicles, and other crazy fabrication. We’re down there for hours and hours upon a time and usually the music is very loud and the music is sort of our essence and the soul of our time and essence down there. We have a pretty sick old stereo, interestingly the same old stereo I’ve had all the way since high school and some parts (the receiver) since middle school. It is an old school 400 watt JVC from the early days of compact disks, back when their players were called “DADs” or “digital audio devices.” I bought it from my friend Sam Spiegel for $25 in I think 8th or 9th grade, who is now a famous DJ and music producer in L.A. I’m sure he’d be psyched to know I still have it and am using it and the direct role this receiver has had in my life. Through out the night we basically just turn it up and last night we found ourselves listening to the album you hopefully just hit play on (above) – “Secrets” – the famous old album by Herbie Hancock from about 1974, so I thought I would post it for your enjoyment in its entirety…

This is the album that followed the Head Hunters’ famous self titled album with “Chameleon.” My best interpretation of it is Herbie Hancock and his group really progressed heavily from the Head Hunters album. Herbie also had a lot of new, neat interesting toys that were coming out at the time and was getting really good at using them. For example he started using a machine/synthesizer called an “Arp Odyssey” and a few others. Yes the name is an accurate representation of it’s sound.

“Secrets,” to me, is a way-more advanced read than “Head Hunters.” Simple and tuned down, a little more poppy and generally catchy-er. But it also wasn’t “new” and “out there” like Head Hunters so this is why Head Hunters was always their best selling album, whereas I remember the first time I bought “Secrets” (its been purchased several times, LOL) I remember it in the discount bin for $8 in Tower Records at the bottom of Central Park in New York. Here is the album cover…

Herbie Hancock Secrets

I think this picture says a lot about Herbie and sort of the era there. If you look at photos of Herbie these days you’ll see he is pretty sharp and clean cut. And that really about-describes Herbie and the mantra of this site spells out, the old school jazz and bebop movement was largely dead with the rising shortly-lived popularity of avant-garde jazz music and the increasing popularity of increasingly complicated rock music, such as the progressive rock band Yes, and even the Beatles. For many Americans, it wasn’t too odd by then, I figure (though I wouldn’t have been born until 6 years later) to see Yes and the My Favorite Things album occupying the same milk crate.

So the interesting thing is that this is probably when it really mattered to Herbie, he had a good past that he could ride out, but so did his competition like Miles Davis Guitar Player John Mclaughlin who beat him to the punch with this killer album (earlier post on this site). Herbie really had no idea what the outcome would be and what his future would be, he had no idea he would go on to basically always have and audience and put out God-knows how many Grammy-winning albums.

Down at the shop I was going to say that our environment is sort of “young” and I realized that I’ve been really clinging onto my “twenties” possibly as a method that I believe I “still appeal to young people,” college kids etc. I was right about to write that “we’re all a bunch of 20-somethings” but I realized that as of last November I turned 30 and in fact none of us are 20-something now.

It’s also funny for me to think of myself as the youngest guy in the shop as well. The good news is we’re all at least pretty “mentally” young. Bill is a pretty hardcore adventurer. His facebook profile picture is a bumper sticker that reads “My vacation is your worst nightmare.” Right on Bill!

Scotty and I, I feel like, are tremendously close these days mostly revolving around life at the shop. He has this absolutely bitchen’ old 4WD ’77 Dodge Van that he bought for $500 that he is sooping up to be a sweet lean mean shaggin’ machine in true 70′s style (and bare min it has a bar and tons of shag carpeting to be installed), he even has a plexi-glass mirror for the ceiling. He’s been doing tons of bondo and fiberglass (and minimal rust work as its just too far gone) to make it a fun-ass vehicle to drive till its death, put a month of work into, and get a good 5-10 years of ever-rotting enjoyment until it finally dies. His goals this year are bare min, the Desert Rocks Music Festival (in Moab Utah in just over a month away – gulp!) and Burning Man. How sick is that.

Scotty Ray's Mean, Bitchen '77 4WD Dodge Van

The story of the shop is pretty neat. I was fresh out of college in about 2002 and took on my first attempt at doing something “crazy!” with a vehicle: restoring an old ’71 Toyota Land Cruiser from the ground up. Previously I’d never attempted anything remotely similar. I was doing it in the basement garage of a hour I was sharing with a bunch of guys and I managed to kill the furnace from all of the airborne dust that came from removing literally pounds and pounds of bondo-dust from the 30-year-old vehicle. So after that of course, I needed to move operations…

Shortly after my neighbor revealed had an extra bay in a shop he owned down in neighboring Heber City, so I ended up down there. A couple years later I became good friends with a new transplant to here in Park City Utah from Kentucky named Damon Leake and maybe a year later we ended up sharing the shop. One year after that I was recycling one day and I met Dirk Spangenberg, the owner of Curb It Recycling, and we ended up moving into his larger shop on the rear side of his facility. One after that our friends Scott Ray (also from Kentucky originally, one of Damon’s good friends from home who is just awesome) and our friend Bill Hartlieb who I met through the world of biodiesel have also moved in.

We have a pretty good environment where its a lot of fun and we do a hell of a job pooling tools and resources and really with I think all of ours only complaint being a lack of cleanliness and too much clutter unfortunately..

We’ve done some pretty neat things. At least two full diesel engine conversions, some WVO conversions, several major rust removal projects, a full motorcycle restoration, countless suspensions installed, fabrication of potato guns and bicycles, and absolutely huge amounts of fabrication in general – definitely a fun place to be… I’m liking it so much these days that perhaps sometime in the future will be to create a site for the shop for the 4 of us where we constantly update all the fun stuff we’re doing…

This all leads me to last night where Scotty, who’s really into the Jam Band scene and all the bands from there (and I’m sort of into a lot of those guys too), are listening to the album you’re listening to right now. Except it was really really loud and on our amazing sound system. This era of Herbie Hancock was probably cranked in thousands and pot-smoke-filled vans, just like the one he was working on, through the 70s and everyone knows who Herbie Hancock is but I find not a lot of people have listened to his tunes… I think we were both likening it to a lot of the music we’re going to see down in a month and a half at Desert Rocks, but I described it to him as “real early – 1973. You have to imaging a room full of the darkest soul brothas just getting down and funky. Listen to the congas!” I did point out that there was a white guy with an afro in the band though. Mike something-aruther, who was the drummer… Cool, funky stuff… Scotty was down….

If you’re done with the tunes and want to get a visual of it all. I believe I’ve posted this earlier on this blog but here is a good 17 minute (you can skip through it of course) video of Herbie playing “Chameleon” from his famous Head Hunters album which was the one that lead to this album. I hope you enjoyed this…

Cheers,
Andre

Herbie Hancock – Chameleon Live 1974 from Andre Shoumatoff on Vimeo.

In typical format I was just cruisin’ along the other day and low and behold Delta Nove’s latest album ‘the future is when’ comes on my iPod and it is just crankin.’ I’m not really sure why I remembered their album isn’t “polished” as these three songs just kill it. Track 1 is an intro for Track 2 which is just a killer song.. Track 3 sort of shows some of their diversity and ability to throw up some killer songs… And again, that Brazilian flair. You should hear the whole album. It is really, really Brazilian. Again for friends, I have a few extras copies of it from when they played at Club Suede a few years ago who’s website I managed before they were forced out of business by the Utah DABC for “excessive liquor violations” (hehem hehem loudly — the state of Utah put them out of business on purpose – it is really messed up).

Anyway, enjoy. These guys just rip…

I thought I’d do some recollection on a band we’ve seen a couple times now called Delta Nove from Long Beach, California. Live recording from 2006 (details below):

Mostly testament to the despicable music industry (as it really is sad – so many good artists and such utter crap on the radios most of the time), I’d bet, being that these guys are from Long Beach, that many a record label guy has seen them play live. When I first saw them, at 2006 Desert Rocks Music Festival in Moab, these guys just killed it.

According to me, of the 20-something bands that played that festival, they were definitely the best out of the whole damn festival. Fresh, diverse, basically looked like complete and utter rock stars. Some sick Brazilian Samba flair. That, and they are just killer live performing artists.

I have a couple of their albums but I hate to say it, the albums according to me sort of lack that ‘polished album flair” where maybe someone like Rick Rubin says, “play that rip 8 beats longer” and “turn down the distortion on this measure but come back harder next rif..” Things like that. So admittedly their (at least this album) “The Future is When?” recording is a little bland. What happens when you’re self produced. That said, I have maybe 3 or 4 extra copies of it brand new in the wrapper, if anyone local wants one (or shit, shoot me an email, I’ll mail it) let me know. And they’re still pretty good.

But because of this, I’m going to play a live recording of theirs from 2006 from sounds like their resident location off of archive.org called The Blue Cafe in Long Beach. This is a killer recording, probably one of many…

By the way, did I mention that archive.org rules? Here is the link to the recording if you want to download it (for free). Choose your format. FLAC is really high quality but a bitch to deal with (at least for me) over MP3 so I download MP3.

Enjoy!

By the way, this post goes out to all my children… (Really, I don’t think I have any children, except for maybe Rebecca, though she’s a couple years older than me)…

First, I thought I’d post for a few guys out there who should dig these songs.

The first is Scott Amendola Band. Scott Amendola is the pretty f’n killer drummer in the first song (wait until about 6-7 minutes in — this guy just rips). I heard this song via the Pandora music player. Turns out he plays drums heavily for Charlie Hunter, which when you listen shouldn’t surprise you a bit… The rest of his songs are so-so (a little too new-school jazzy) but this one is pretty damn good…

The second song is qued up for “the tenor man,” who is some guy out there on the Internet who’s about to drop everything from his life in California and sell his house and relocate to work minimum wage in the dust and heat and beauty and mountains of St. George, Utah. More power to you man, sounds like a blast and way to follow your heart…

Tenor Man by the Greyboy Allstars is just a simple old song but it’s good, long and soulful.  If you’ve ever seen or met Karl Denson from Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe he is the nicest guy in the world…  And a hell of a saxophone player of course.  The original Tenor Man, I suppose.  For me this is one of the big hits by the Greyboy Allstars; the song that really ‘does it’ for me from these guys and one more of the instrumental bands I’ve liked for a long time but never got a chance to see.  They finally reunited maybe 2 or 3 years ago and came through our local venue, Club Suede (no longer in action unfortunately – but click this link for some more funky tunes) who I was doing the website marketing for at the time.  I was really psyched to see them and of course they rip.  It was a random Tuesday night though and one of those nights where hardly anyone comes out, everyone was just too busy.   I was excited to hear them maybe play this song but it turns out it’s a real classic and as it was a reunitement tour they’d actually forgotten how to play it – totally understandable considering all of their killer tunes…   But as mentioned, Karl Denson & crew were the nicest guys in the world about it.  Including his Hammond/Keyboard player, Robert Walter (and his band, 20th Congress).  These guys are pretty good.  Walter lives in New Orleans and is pretty funky but he’s still pretty damn while actually (in his style and feel) but is still pretty good:

I actually had a couple posts about a week ago but managed to have not 1, but 2 MYSQL databases crash in a two day period (a MYSQL database is what powers this site and most other php based web sites) so those posts disappeared. Doh But fear not, those posts weren’t that important other than a new, halfass, posting category called “jukeboxing” where I basically play music other than to create eclectic playlists (which is always fun) but doesn’t put into the thought and feeling and soul of some of the other, real, ‘jukeboxing’ on this site.   So in one regard it’s always sad to see your stuff disappear but in another regard maybe it was meant for the better…

One thing I forgot to mention in all of these posts is what it was like growing up in the Shoumatoff household…

Really, there aren’t “words that can describe it,” as good friends & fam can testify to…

But one thing was the plethora of guitars that were always floating around the house. Brazilian, old blues guitars from the 50s and 60s — you name it.   The old man was always strumming various songs of all sorts of backgrounds.  Reaslly, this is where much of the oddity & culture of this blog comes from, frankly…

Well, rather than blabbering on I thought I’d just post his full album: “Suitcase on the Loose.”

We also just set him up with his very own blog which is sure to be pretty darn out there and hopefully pretty riveting.   So make sure you check it out. ..

Here’s a good photo of him in rockstar mode when he was playing at Carrie & I’s wedding, ripping on Palin, you know, the uushe….  It was a hell of a weekend as a lot of you probably recall…   Dad, I’d proud of you, Old Man.

 
Sorry, hitting play is mandatory to reading this post…

I thought it would be “mind blowing” idea to post about good hippie rock from the early 70′s that was “complex!”  But now I realize just how retarded that thought is.  Of Course there was good hippie rock in the 70′s. And even stuff that was complex. 

The late 60′s and 70′s is when hippies actually existed…

This said, the stuff me and you and everyone else probably “most remembers” from this period is Creedence and Hendrix and The Yardbirds and The Doors.  It’s not stuff that was overly-complex.  Don’t get me wrong – I love this stuff — I love Hendrix and even happen to be  playing Hendrix, this second, as I type this.   (Look for a post with a little Hendrix coming very shortly, actually).  Two real genres seemed to emerge out of the music from these guys.  The first is a blues/folk/rock orientation (think Clapton, Led Zepplin, etc).   And a Progressive Rock movement.

The stuff you’re listening to right now is definitively in the “Progressive Rock” category, and from the early 70′s if it needs to be stated again.  After I heard the stuff you’re listening to as we speak for the first time, I gained a flair for “Progressive Rock,” and started exploring it deeply. Some of it is pretty good, right?

Prog Rock, as it’s called, is actually an influence I got from listening from regular-old Sirius Satelitte Radio of all places.  When I first got Sirius I was super psyched though I quickly faded out as I realized many of my favorite channels, like Jam On!, were playing the same crap 3-4 times a day just like crappy FM classic rock stations.  However, their station “The Vault” – their deep tracks/non-commercial classic rock station (which is now XM Channel “Deep Tracks” — which is also equally as good or maybe even better ) – turned me on to both artists you’re listening to.

It was actually a song that a DJ from their show “Progressions” took on as pet-favorite song and played a lot.  I’d identify him except I can’t get the damn Sirius Satellite Radio site to load (and would comment in general: Sirius- your site blows.  It’s fancy looking, but it sucks.  It’s not usable and loads like ass.  Also, your password/login aspects also totally suck).

The thing about Prog Rock is it got really dorky really quick into the 70′s.  There were plenty of bands that emerged from it with good mainstream tracks (Genesis, for example), but overall it got complicated and weird, became exceptionally male, and drug induced in a lot of ways. 

It also, I guess much like late-60′s Free Jazz, got sort of hard to listen to.  And finally, it also took an unusually interesting and odd European slant with strong infleunce from classic music of all things.  That’s right, rock meets classical music.   Sounds dorky, right?  Unfortunately that’s the case with these two bands.  But these two tracks from them are breakouts and are a little more listenable but you can sense some classical influences, in particularly the second song.

The first song is by Khan – a British band from about 1971-1972.  I don’t have too much to say about them except read their wikipedia article if you want to explore them further.  Most of their limited amount of stuff is pretty good actually.   I call it “virgin prog rock.”  There was a fine cusp in the early 70′s where the prog rock bands hadn’t gone off the deep end yet and were still listenable, in almost an early Pink Floyd style, before even Pink Floyd themselves Euro-prog-rocked-off the deep end in the late late 70s and early 80′s. 

The second is the song is from Focus, a Dutch prog rock band.  This song, Questions? Answers!  Answers?  Questions! is actually sort of a long, sweeping, second half of their one and only hit song “Hocus Pocus.”  If you listened to FM classic rock stations, once in a while a song would play where there was a guy yodeling.  You would recognize it if you heard it.  But this song is sort of like a 17-minute second part of it, where it gets a little crazy, long, drawn out, and actually pretty soulful of all things.  Then a sick rock jam, extremely methodic, at the end.  This band also had a weird setup where the band leader, their organ player, also played the flute.  I really dig the organ player.  Particularly his ability to just turn it up, in all the grit of the organ, in almost a John Medeski style.

So we have a little of everything with Focus…   What is most impressive about these guys, though, is their guitar player.  He is just sick.   Timmy Marcus, if you’re out there and are reading this, he actually reminds me a lot of your playing from high school & college, with it’s particularly complex but smooth rock playing…   I also love the style where he goes a little ‘surfer’ particularly at the beginning of his solo, after the flute solo, for a few minutes.   Shows a real sense of discipline with style and feel..   This is why I chose this live version of the song as it’s much more drawn out surfer style versus their (also awesome) recorded/studio version. 

Does it seem like the music Phish played could be a natural progression for these guys?   The last song is Divide Sky, a signature trippy jam from Phish.  It’s also the best of Phish (and all the other stuff on their Junta album), according to me.  To me, Divided Sky Phish = the U.S. dorky white guy progression of 70’s prog rock in the 80’s and 90’s.  I think that’s pretty cool, personally…    It turns out I might be onto something here: when I google Phish Junta, there are tons and tons of Progressive Rock references.  I like that even the Wikipedia article says “it is considered by many to be the group’s masterpiece.”   Right on… 

I have to say my patience for researching and listening to prog rock diminished relatively quickly once I got into it.  Maybe there are tons of other bands out there I should listen to, but I couldn’t find them.  I downloaded albums from  Egg, Khan(the first of the songs you’re listening too), and the Italian Prog Rock band Premiata, Forneria, Macaroni.   All three of these are all pretty damn good too.  Pretty trippy to listening to decent or even sick prog rock with vocals… In Italian.  It turns out there’s even a whole Italian prog rock genre…  

These guys were all referred to me via social media forums (the new, “mildly trendy” way of saying “chat rooms” or people with similar interests).  I’d asked about bands that were similar to the British band Yes, who I’ve been on & off been listening to since college.  They’re powered by their awesome lead singer,  sick bass player, and their organ player as well.   These three bands are similar because they all have organ players as well (well, four bands, including Focus).   I feel like even in Prog Rock the organ still adds a ton of soul. 

The interesting thing is, if you’ve listened to a lot of Phish (I did, graduating from a New England boarding school in ’97) then you know they take a lot of liberties, particularly musically, but performance wise as well.  Fish (the drummer) would break out a vacuum player and start ‘playing’ that.  Or they’d do an A Capella piece.  On one of their performances on New Year’s Eve they even hopped in a giant hot dog and flew around the roof of Madison Square Garden: 

It’s an extreme case but you can get hear from both the songs and styles one more trait where Phish draws it’s influence from Prog Rock. 

Let me know if you have any thoughts!

This post is sort of like preaching to the quoir.   If you haven’t read the book then these quotes might bounce right off you.  That is -  unless you have a real adventure about yourself; enjoy seeing things not in all of their beauty – as beautiful.  Wanterlust, quirkyness, a love of America…   If you have this and haven’t read it, hopefully you will.  Here is a long set of quotes…  Hopefully they do it justice…

______________________

Quotes directly stolen from:
http://classiclit.about.com/od/ontheroad/a/aa_ontheroadqu.htm

On the Road is an autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac, with a stream of consciousness style. The work is associated with the Beat Generation. Here are a few quotes from On the Road.

• “I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 1
• “They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 1
• “Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 1
• “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 1
• “And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about.
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3
• “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3
• “The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 7
• “They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 9
• “We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess–across the night…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 9
• “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk–eal straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 10
• “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 12
• “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. I smelled mashed beans and chili. The old man growled… A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child, believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome, grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13
• “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 3
• “The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
• “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
• “I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4
• “Life is life, and kind is kind.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 5
• “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 6
• “Why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 6
• “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 8
• “It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 9
• “And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 10
• “I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 10
• “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ectasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 1
• “Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins…”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 1
• “Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 4
• “Our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there–and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5[li”Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “Our battered suitcases were were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “You don’t die enough to cry.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 5
• “Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety — leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10
• “Here were the children of the American bop night.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10
• “Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10
• “Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done–whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 11
• “What difference does it make after all?–anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 11
• “What’s your road, man?–holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 1
• Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 2
• “We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it’s maddest. Hotrods blew by. San Antonio, ah-haa!”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 4
• “Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 5
• “In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God.”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 5
• “I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimmage on foot on the dark roads around America?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 5
• “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it… and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?”
  - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 5

The answer?  20 years after Ronald Reagan famously removed Jimmy Carter’s solar hot water panels, George W. Bush installed the largest solar array on the Whitehouse out of anyone, believe it or not…

Since September 2002, a grid of 167 solar panels on the roof of a maintenance shed has been delivering electricity to the White House grounds. Another solar installation has been helping to provide hot water. Yet another has been heating the water in the presidential pool.

I bring it up because of my buddy Brian Gulatta’s blog post about Earth Days, yet another absolutely killer Sundance Film Festival movie we saw about the history of the environmental movement, and how it was basically shut down at the end of the 70′s with Reagan in office.  He ran on a platform that is alot like what is argued in the famous article Death of Environmentalism, that states that many modern day environmental tactics go against the grain of “what’s American” (which, as an environmentalist, I actually agree with). 

As we know, Reagan really kicked Carter’s ass, largely related to this in my opinion (besides the fact Carter sort of ran the country into the ground):

 
 
Through the early-mid 70′s Congress, under leadership of Nixon (of all people), the country passed some of the most sweeping environmental reform we’ve seen.  Endangered species, establishment of the EPA, etc. etc.   Environmentalism didn’t have it’s enemies like it has now — back then it was a common collective to think who doesn’t want clean air?  It is a long, complicated story why this fell apart (just as much the enviro’s fault as anyone else’s in my opinion).  It turns out the first earth day (April 22, 1970) had over 22 million people come out, for the largest single gathering nationwide in U.S. history.    They even closed down 5th Ave in New York for it:

So it’s funny that solar panels became a White House preference.  Carter invisioned they’d last forever, as a symbol.   Reagan tore them right down…

It is always funny to hear about the little things of the operations of the White House and how different Presidents have different approaches to running it.  This is why there are so many awesome books about life inside the White House, it’s curiously interesting.  This awesome article came out today in the NY Times about President Obama’s method of running things in comparison with Bush.  Bush actually sounds like a real stick-in-the-mud, versus this at least: 

From the article, comparing life at the Whitehouse between Bush II and Obama:

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket.

Thus did an ironclad rule of the George W. Bush administration — coat and tie in the Oval Office at all times — fall by the wayside, only the first of many signs that a more informal culture is growing up in the White House under new management.

And a little more…

Although his presidency is barely a week old, some of Mr. Obama’s work habits are already becoming clear. He shows up at the Oval Office shortly before 9 in the morning, roughly two hours later than his early-to-bed, early-to-rise predecessor. Mr. Obama likes to have his workout — weights and cardio — first thing in the morning, at 6:45. (Mr. Bush slipped away to exercise midday.)

He reads several papers, eats breakfast with his family and helps pack his daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, off to school before making the 30-second commute downstairs — a definite perk for a man trying to balance work and family life. He eats dinner with his family, then often returns to work; aides have seen him in the Oval Office as late as 10 p.m., reading briefing papers for the next day.

“Even as he is sober about these challenges, I have never seen him happier,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The chance to be under the same roof with his kids, essentially to live over the store, to be able to see them whenever he wants, to wake up with them, have breakfast and dinner with them — that has made him a very happy man.”

In the West Wing, Mr. Obama is a bit of a wanderer. When Mr. Bush wanted to see a member of his staff, the aide was summoned to the Oval Office. But Mr. Obama tends to roam the halls; one day last week, he turned up in the office of his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who was in the unfortunate position of having his feet up on the desk when the boss walked in.

“Wow, Gibbs,” the press secretary recalls the president saying. “Just got here and you already have your feet up.” Mr. Gibbs scrambled to stand up, surprising Mr. Obama, who is not yet accustomed to having people rise when he enters a room.

Under Mr. Bush, punctuality was a virtue. Meetings started early — the former president once locked Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out of the Cabinet Room when Mr. Powell showed up a few minutes late — and ended on time. In the Obama White House, meetings start on time and often finish late.

Too funny…

And finally, George W. Bush’s plates:

If there is one thing Mr. Obama has not gotten around to changing, it is the Oval Office décor.

When Mr. Bush moved in, he exercised his presidential decorating prerogatives and asked his wife, Laura, to supervise the design of a new rug. Mr. Bush loved to regale visitors with the story of the rug, whose sunburst design, he liked to say, was intended to evoke a feeling of optimism.

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye.

“He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”

I don’t think I’m much of a “plate guy” either…

It’s official, I’m an internet nerd: “LMAO” stands for laughing my ass off..  

The Noz, this guy is off the hook…  I found this google searching for a blog  post that’s about to appear here about Jimmy Carter’s solar panels…
http://thenoz.wordpress.com/

Trav the Butcher. This is a guy right here in Utah who is actually the son of a friend…  Really really funny, all about meat…  
http://travthebutcher.blogspot.com/

And check out this monster…

FOR a nation seeking unity, a recipe has swept the Internet that seems to unite conservatives and liberals, gun owners and foodies, carnivores and … well, not vegetarians and health fanatics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/28bacon.html

Mmmm, bacon…

 By the way, Bacon fits into the “religion” category…  (at least on this blog).

My buddies the Williams brothers (two awesome, super down to earth white guys from Utah, who own about a dozen Hammond organs, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzers, Clavinets etc – even though they both play different instruments) turned me on to these guys. The Breakestra – who are one of my favorite bands, even though I’ve never even seen them in person. They really only have about one album (which you can listen/download in it’s entirety here).   I took a few of my favorite tracks and posted them here for your enjoyment. I also particularly like the last song, which is an instrumental:

Make sure you turn it up!

Here is a snippet from there blurb/bio on their website:

The Los Angeles based ensemble is based in deep funk, soul, jazz fever and musical friendships. A Breakestra show is about dancing and swinging — eight men on stage getting loose, playing serious grooves. Think James Brown. Watching the Breakestra live is a tour de force. As Miles says, “What are the first three letters of FUNK?”

The Breakestra began as the house band for the legendary club called the Breaks. Egon from Stonesthrow Records further explains the etymology of their name: “Break. As in “breakbeat.” That ten second slice of percussive magic in the middle of a funk song that, when looped together by progressive South Bronx DJs in the 1970s, became the basis of the hip-hop movement. Arkestra. Out-there jazzer Sun Ra’s funkafied concept of the stuffy classical orchestra.” When we combine the two concepts, you have the Breakestra or in other words an orchestra that plays breaks. Back in 1999, Stonesthrow first introduced the world to the Breakestra with a few 12” releases and soon after the full-length album Live Mixtape Part Two.

“The Breakestra should become a class or a 4-year graduate program for funk musicians. Playing with the Breakestra is a great way to get a degree in funk,” says former longtime keyboardist Carlos Guaico. Indeed it is a way to get your degree in funk because the Breakestra have played an A to Z of funk classics. James Brown, Jimmy Smith, all the way to the endless breaks sampled by Gangstarr and A Tribe Called Quest. The Breakestra have played so many covers of the aforementioned grooves that the only way a musician could be in the group is if they really knew how to play.