Flying by Night

Sting Stinks (Again)
I just watched what could have been an interesting teevee show on Stax Records and their fabulous studio backup band Booker T & the MGs, Booker T Jones, Al Jackson, Donald "Duck" Dunn, and Steve Cropper, whose big hit "Green Onions" put Stax on the map. Here's a very good history of Stax Records--it's an interesting story--a brother and sister in business together and the mess that can cause--white folks taking advantage of the local color, and, yes, I mean that literally.

http://www.history-of-rock.com/stax_records.htm

I was getting into Duck Dunn talking about their playing and backing Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Fontella Bass (check her out with Lester Bowie later on down her line) and then suddenly that piece of crap Sting came on and started pumping up the legend that the Brits dug American blues and learned it better than American white boys--hell, these F-ing Brits in some cases thought they were better than the black musicians they stole all their music from and I mean the Police, too. Sting is a neurotic musician at best; at worst he's a total piece of crap because he doesn't understand the rhythms and backbeats and open measures and shit that comes to American musicians naturally (OK, I'm an ethnocentric wolfman) because of their hearing this music many, many years before the Brit boys could afford record players and buying records from the USA (the very brilliant white bluesmen like Lonnie Mack and Charlie Musslewhite were already in Memphis long before Sting discovered Stax Records). Britain then took over our music and now on most of our Rock stations when they do a retrospective of Rock & Roll they inevitably start their retrospectives with the Brit invasion as they love to call it--and that doesn't piss young Americans off because the America they know is corporate America, the bastards who confiscated our culture and put it up on the market to the highest bidders and back in the 80s they sold to the "new" entrepreneurs, the Japanese (remember the US "bridging the gap" corporate bullshit in the 80s that said we were all going to have to learn Japanese in order to do business in the world of the future? remember that? and how Japanese schoolkids were so much brighter than our kids who the Japanese considered dumbasses?), and we sold the Japanese all our films and film vaults, all our recording companies and all their vault materials, all our recording equipment inventions, our amp designs, all our guitar designs (Leo Fender sold his whole company to CBS who sold all the Fender-Rhodes interests to the Japanese), all of our electronic instrument industry (Korg keyboards were invented on Long Island yet Korg of Osaka, Japan, manufactures them and holds the patents on them), and our whole camera and video industry (RCA went to Japan and became JVC (Japan Victor Company and not "Japan's Victory Over Columbia (the Gem of the Ocean) as cynics like me claim)), what of our culture haven't we sold to the highest bidders?

I remember when Sting decided he knew more about jazz than jazz greats and of course I think he got one of those commercially hip Marsalases, Branford wasn't it?, to help him put together a super jazz group centered around, of course, the great Sting. It was a flop; not even Brits fell for it. And remember when Sting decided he was so pretty he had to be a great actor (and that is all it takes in most instances to become a great actor or actress) so he became an actor. It was one of the worst films I've ever tried to watch--and I had no choice since I was spending the weekend with some of my hip music friends and this chick singer was dying to see Sting's film. I puked all over my mean thoughts all during it it was that sickening.

Then Sting decided he was bringing back lute or lyre music, which was it?, in an effort I guess to prove jazz, blues, r&b, boogie-woogie, ragtime, gospel were all invented back in the early days of English folk music--by God, I think Sting discovered that all those slaves Britain brought to the American hemisphere heard English folk music and that's why Brits took to American black music because they recognized...see how ridiculous the Brits are? As Imperialists, they never developed a culture of their own; natural-born absorbers of cultures they impose their Imperial occupation on.

So there was Sting talking about Stax Records and Booker T. and the MGs (Memphis Group and not Morris Garage) and Wilson Pickett and then he starts singing over Otis Redding singing "My Girl." What a piece of crap. I turned on the Yankees game on the radio. F the history of American black music according to Sting. (By the bye, Sting, what have you and your wife done with all that Rain Forest concert money you guys scrape up every year at Madison Square Garden? You certainly haven't saved one inch of the fastly being burned off rain forests in all these years of these trendy social-event concerts. Last year's Rain Forest bash was a bust wasn't it? Poor old Sting, he's gettin' old--he has to organize Police reunions now in order to make a living and support all those castles and properties he and his blessed wife own--once English commoners and now look at 'em--has old Queen "Where's My Scotch?" Lizzie knighted old Sting yet? Sir Sting. I like that. What tommyrot. What absolute NONSENSE, right Raphael Nonsenso?

It's bad enough we have to endure Ozzie Ozborne, who I kind'a like, and give him a friggin' comeback and a new life and save the asses of his worthless children and save the ass of his wife, too, Sharon, from being eaten alive by cancer--by the bye, did she kick cancer? I never heard after her talk show flew the coop early.

And yes those Stax stars and recordings were some of America's most inventive music, also thanks to the presence in Memphis, Tennessee, at that time of the best music makers to ever roll out across America up the Mississippi from New Orleans, the Delta, and into Memphis and Saint Louis, halfway to Chicago, hanging on the edge of the South just before crossing over into that sweet home called Chicago. "Come on, baby don't you want to go, to that State of California, Sweet Home Chicago."

Irony? Robert Johnson the inventor of the blues that would eventually put Chicago on the blues map never made it to "Sweet Home Chicago"--nope, he made it over to Dallas, Texas, where he recorded facing into a corner of the recording studio because he was so bashful--is that a true story?, that's what the guy who recorded him in the Dallas hotel room said. And Robert never got in his magic Terraplane, with his .44 by his side, and made it to that sweet home, nope, he didn't, and one X-mas I got a cassette tape from a bass-player friend of mine, a man who once farmed a field of rye in Queens, New York; this guy had made a tape for me of all his Robert Johnson 78 rpm originals; he had finally bought them all, 18 of them (I may be wrong on that number), and here they were, I had them, and on the cassette you could hear the the sounds of Robert and his guitar being dug out of those old rusty grooves by the diamond needle on the tonearm--and I had a copy of that only photo of Robert ever found and owned by a dude in New Jersey, the photo with the cigarette dangling out of his mouth--and I pasted my copy of it, I'd gotten it from that same bass player on my Korg Poly 800 that I used to use on my gigs--I was in a band called the...well, I'd better keep this fiction, but it was a great band, a band that got its name from us knocking off a bottle of 100 proof Old Grandad before every gig--and what a sight and wonder our lead singer was when he was totally sloshed--what beautiful blues came out of his disgusting state--I wasn't that singer; like I said, I played keyboards in that band--once a grand piano, at a New York club called Tramps, and during a hellraising version "Good Rockin' Tonight" the piano started rolling off the stage, rolling to my left, headed right toward the edge of the stage. I never missed a beat, as I wrestled with that bulky grand; I left the bench, stood up, and started playing and holding back the big Japanese behemoth, yep, it was a Yamaha grand, on stage as best I could, ending the tune just as the left side of the piano went over the edge--and I was left holding it on the stage while a couple of drunk Japanese men rushed up and helped me push it back on stage where I was able to position it back up where it belonged at stage right. It was sitting on a roller device so you could move it easily on and off stage and the wheels of that device had accidentally become unlocked thus allowing the big musical vehicle to start its migration to the south of the stage--and off the stage was about a six-foot drop--why it'd'ud been a disaster had that big piece of Japanese plywood hit the tableful of Japanese businessmen that were in the vicinity of where it would have crashed, though they thought the incident was just part of the act and they roared with big smiling Japanese yucks and threw dollar bills and spare change up on stage at us.

I've often wondered what Robert Johnson thought of Japan and the Japanese.

So Sting stunk up my morning and if the Yankees hadn't of beaten the Tampa Bay Rays this afternoon--oh HELL! (the Rays used to be the Devil Rays but Tampa is a Christian city so the Christian hypocrites thought it be better if the team were simply the Rays--like maybe they were named after Ronnie Raygun). And what an erratic game it was, too, a bash, 7-6 Yankees, though Tampa Bay got 15 or 16 hits off Yankees pitching (even-steven Mike Mussina, an old has-been whose best years he's 14-14, losing as many as he wins; yet, he's a millionaire several times over--but there I go, going off growling about the best offensive team in baseball--that they have lousy pitching has to do with their general manager, an accountant who knows nothing about baseball but thinks he knows everything about it--really making guesses based on scouting reports, and George Steinbrenner's disposition...and shit, I don't want to write about baseball (we have our own marvelousmarvinbackbiter who's an absolute Yankees nut but he won't appear on the blog until the Yankees are in a dead heat with the Red Sox, which he's always certain will happen just like it's happened since Joe Torre took over the sagging and turmoiled Yankees and made them winners. The BoSox start losing games, like they're doing now, their pitchers are as unreliable as any team's pitchers (look how Roy Halliday got his butt reamed the other night by the Red Sox--and on the other hand the Red Sox's best pitcher, Josh Beckett, got his ass reamed today), and the Yankees will start winning games and soon, by the end of August, the Yanks and BoSox will be going for it--and it will be decided when the Yankees meet the Sox later in the year--this is Yankee surety. So the Yankees win got me off Sting. If the Yankees had of lost--and every Yankee game starts off the same with the opposition belting the hell of the Yankee oldtimer pitchers, scoring 3 or 4 runs in the first two innings and then the Yankees start their dog-fighting comebacks--one run at a time; the Yankees have to score 7 runs in every game in order to win--that's how bad their pitchers are--that's how bad all over the league pitchers are--Japanese pitchers, big tall lanky white boys, and the hoard of Latino pitchers--(where are the great black pitchers these days?--where're today's Bob Gibsons; Oil Can Boyda; Ferguson Jenkinses; Don Newcombes? F baseball; it's time for Pastor Melissa Scott, The Daily Growler spiritual guide and pinup girl--God she's fascinatingly beautifully intriguing to me--I'd love to subject her to the most pleasurable of sins; I'm sure she could handle them and forgive me of them in the aftermath, that purgatory between the heaven and hell of sex.

Did you know Japanese baseballs are smaller than US ones? I'd never heard that. Heard it this afternoon on the Yankees radio broadcast. Susan Waldman said it was a Japanese infielders on US teams problem--they were used to feeling for smaller balls in their gloves and had to get used to the US bigger balls. Does that sound like buncomb? Excuses for these exaggerated Japanese baseball players and pitchers that have been coming like Vietnamese boat people over here since the Dodgers first went to Japan--is that right; I tend to blame everything bad in the National League on the Dodgers--and by the bye, the Vietnamese are great folks; I know, I live in a building full of young Vietnamese, one of whom told me one day on the elevator that he was one of those Vietnamese boat people who risked everything to get out of VietNam after the US had screwed up what the French had first screwed up trying to run VietNam as a French colony--Saigon the Paris of the Orient! I kid you not that's what it was called until we fucked it up--now it's Ho Chi Minh City, though the Vietnamese in my building still refer to it as Saigon.

I just remembered, Pastor Melissa isn't on tonight. Shit; and I'm so full of a need for forgiveness.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler