(from chaskelley.wordpress.com)
It was such a simple story:
I had tickets for the 22 August 1980 “Black & Blue” tour gig featuring co-headliners Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult at Bonneville Raceway, just east of Salt Lake City, Utah. Black Sabbath was a no-show due to the drug problems of drummer Bill Ward. Recognizing the disappointment of the concert-goers, Blue Öyster Cult played a fantastic double set.
Results:
— In recognition of their going beyond the pale “for the fans,” Blue Öyster Cult are heroes forever.
— Bill Ward is a villain, having allowed his addictions and lack of self-control to hurt fans.
— I am a victim here. As a result of Mr. Ward’s sudden departure from the tour, I lost what would be my one and only true opportunity to see Ronnie James Dio perform live.
Perfect! Wrap it in a bow and put it on the mantle. An anecdote for the ages!
HEROES!! (from: http://www.loudersound.com)
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Then along came that instigator, that inserter of doubt, that offender, Mick Wall:
The “Historical Record” – Bah, humbug!
On page 188 of the hardback edition of his otherwise fantastic book Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe, Wall includes the below quote from Sabbath bassist extraordinaire Geezer Butler:
…’We got to Denver,’ Geezer recalled, ‘it was the night before we were playing the McNichols Arena, which is an 18,000-seater which had been sold out for weeks. And Bill decided that’s when he was gonna leave. He just got in his bus and he was gone. And I was so used to Bill saying things that he didn’t mean, I thought oh, he’ll be back tomorrow, and he wasn’t.’
Wall then appends the following:
Forced to cancel the show, the promoter threatened to sue them for $100,000. When it became clear that Bill really wasn’t coming back, though, the promotor took pity and the next four shows were all rescheduled for later in the year.
Reading the above in mid-2016, I was quite obviously outraged. How could the miscarriage of justice carried out against me (and all my Utah comrades, of course) be so carelessly cast aside with solely a vague reference to “the next four shows” being rescheduled? Did we, the suffering (black) masses who had gathered in our masses for naught at that oil-soaked desert track on 22 August 1980, not deserve at least to be listed, specified, named? And what was this “rescheduling” of which Wall spoke? Bah!
Confronted with Wall’s two-paragraph sham of a treatment of my history, I knew instantly what had to be done. I would write my own book (or article or blog post or email to my sisters) setting things straight. The episode would not be so casually swept under the rug. I immediately just under two years later set out to gather the raw, concrete facts in preparation for the truth-telling. Unscrupulous historiologist wankers be damned!
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…And that’s where the tangible universe with all its law-abiding beauty and moral clarity came crashing down around me, catapulting me into a tilted neocubist world of multiple perspectives and nuanced conceptions, with reassuring truth traded in for emasculating perception. I was cast from self-evident Heaven and Hell opened its misgiving arms wide to receive me.
Results:
— BÖC as heroes: Via the absolutely amazing (and endlessly fun) website, http://www.hotrails.co.uk, I was able to confirm that the 22 August 1980 Bonneville Raceway show was a scheduled “Black and Blue” tour stop at which Sabbath was a no-show. We were the second cancelled Sabbath appearance after Bill Ward bailed on the tour, with the 21 August McNichols Arena gig in Denver having been the first. However, two accounts on the website – plus others I fearfully google-reaped elsewhere — indicated that BÖC had actually cut their Raceway set short due to strong winds blowing desert sands into the band’s faces, threatening to topple equipment, and carrying upon us a dark, lightening-packed storm that made the outdoor site too dangerous to continue. As I researched, long-dormant fragmentary brain ripples asserted themselves, callously forcing me to accept the falsehood of my prior “extended set” Blue Öyster fawning. I still know with all my heart that Eric Bloom stated early on from the stage BÖC’s intent to make up for Black Sabbath’s absence by doing a double set. Nonetheless, unrealized intent is likely insufficient testimony for heroism.
— Bill Ward as villain: This much is true: I was robbed of my chance to see Black Sabbath on 22 August 1980 because Bill Ward abandoned the concert tour two days before. In his book, however, Wall paints a picture of a sad Bill, missing and feeling disloyal to his touring buddy Ozzy, isolated from his bandmates, distressed by the death of his mother earlier in the year, and so deep in the abyss of hard-drugs addiction as to bring into question his ability to make considered choices. The timing of Bill Ward’s departure affected me negatively, but it also gave Bill needed space that he eventually leveraged to get better, and it brought drummer Vinnie Appice into Dio’s orbit, an event which led to oodles of musical goodness over the subsequent decades that have directly and dazzlingly stoked my buzz.
— Missing my one chance to experience Ronnie James live: Mick Wall’s insouciantly executed memory murder was accurate. Sabbath’s cancelled show was, in fact, rescheduled and occurred at Salt Lake City’s Salt Palace just over two months later on 3 November 1980. I have no recollection of that show. I do not know why I would not have gone. That I can recall, nothing major happened in that time frame that would have precluded my attendance. Absent further context and/or uncovering of mitigating facts, I am forced to admit that I appear to have had another chance to see Dio fronting Sabbath, but I did not take advantage of it. My wounds may be self-inflicted; my victimhood nothing more than a false memory carved to protect myself from blame.
Mainstream Media: who do they serve anyway? (from: http://www.dio.net)
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My anecdote doesn’t look as nice on the mantle as it used to. I’d try discounting my April 2018 findings as obvious examples of “fake news,” but I am afraid the gleam on my story is permanently smudged. I am victimized once again, this time by a conspiracy of truth.
Well, maybe truth can just bite me (and maybe I’ll still refuse to weep over Bill Ward’s absence at The End.)
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#6: Paul Displays His Instrument (1977):
I like to think I am comfortable in my own sexuality and generally relaxed with regard to the proclivities of others. I suffer from no need to sew on and display any particular identifying patch and would describe myself, at this stage, as profoundly bored with the entire idea of even caring which way others’ winds blow. And yet, I find myself unable to give this soft-lit masterpiece the wall space it deserves. As much as I hate to admit it, Mr. Stanley is simply too pretty here. He intimidates me. I find him disquieting, a threat to the calmness of my seas. As such, he is left to stare out at me from his cluttered corner, those searing eyes a constant reminder of my weakness. He knows that he deserves better.
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#5: U.S. Tour (1976):
I wonder how visitors view this one. Is it a demonstration of patriotism or an indicator of disrespect for national symbols and narrative? Is it rebellious rock and roll or kitschy bubblegum? What it certainly is not is evocative of the music that induced my younger self to march proudly in the KISS Army; the cartoonish buffoons here were certainly not my ranking Gods of Thunder. Is pursed-lip Paul meant to be stern or stoic? Is Peter forlorn or just a lost kitty? Gene’s expression seems less demonic than responsive to whatever Ace is doing with the butt end of that flagpole behind him. And speaking of Ace, what the hell is he so happy about? Does he already foresee just how much better his solo album will be than those of two-thirds of his band-mates? I have no answers, and yet the poster remains up, albeit skeptically.
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#4: Destroyer! (1976):
Nothing cartoonish about this winner! Our heroes have achieved transcendence. They are beyond the need for rational footing or, as so epically revealed by Ace, any kind of physio-mechanical logic in their corporeal magnificence. It is not they who lay waste; it is rather they who reign glorious above the existing wastelands. They come to carry us with them, to lead us over the, err… jagged coal-brick peaks to the plains of sweet pain beyond. (They know we want it: Yes we do, yes we do!) We comply with their command to kneel, clutching our breasts and offering up our virgin souls to be robbed at their whim.
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#3: The Alive II Stage (1977):
Behold the true spectacle of KISS in their greatest glory. It doesn’t matter what came later; not tanks, 3-D glasses, nor fire-ladder extensions floating Paul over rapt audiences. This was the stage on which we dreamed of seeing KISS live. What could be better than dual stairways to Peter and bat-wing Gene shadowed by his similarly-feathered Rod of Asclepius, unless it were the sparking gold-plated, sorta-sickly house-cat pair backgrounding for feathered-hair Ace and his sunburst Gibson as he did battle with soft-lit Paul and his all-over man’s mane for stage-left platform time. This is what I expect my ascension to heaven to look like should the net of my works rate; it is too magnificent for simple grace.
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#2: Love Gun (1977):
Where Destroyer emphasized the lean, Love Gun accentuates the rippling bulk. Soaring buoyancy is set aside in favor of rock-hard permanence. Our stainless steel idols no longer simply reign from above, they now rule supreme right here in our midst. We do not pretend to lustful fantasies of cavorting on the steps with our leaders’ painted sirens; our unworthy minds reject such nonsense outright. We question not the division between what is given unto us, and what is forever beyond our station. We see our Lords and we rejoice in their gifts. (If only maybe they’d thought twice before gifting us “And Then She Kissed Me” and “Hooligan.”)
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#1: The Epitome of All That Is Rock (1975):
Words cannot suffice. Here we have that which is felt, yet not touched. The ephemeral essence and spiritual truth of our divine hard rock is magically encapsulated in this impossible-and-yet-here-extant image. Paul asserts; Ace soars; Gene conjures; and Peter exalts. We hear the truth and it sets us free: God gave Rock and Roll to us, putting it in the soul of everyone. And whosoever would deny it, in fact denies only himself. Yep, this is the best poster.
I don’t do change well. I spend months, and sometimes years, pining for it and trying to passively will it into being, only to tense up and pretend that casting it from my thoughts can somehow hold it off when it presents itself. With less than two weeks remaining here in Egypt, I am irresolutely in denial. Pushing potato chips and diet sodas down my throat while focusing attention on to-do lists and personnel evaluations has proven only partially effective in keeping the fear-of-change demons at bay. Maybe little surprise then that I find myself temporarily retreating into the comforting warmth of guns and religion nostalgia and reassuring truths:
Growing up in Ogden, Utah, in the early 1970s there wasn’t much of a sense of connection to the broader country, let alone the rest of the globe. Television provided some window, as did my parents’ occasional liberal-minded commentary on events of the era, but truth be told, my adolescent friends and I would have been hard-pressed to identify any specific way in which the larger world touched us. We certainly knew how we touched the world however. For it was little Ogden that had gifted the celebrated Osmond Family in all its facets and wonders to our fellow planetary inhabitants.
This knowledge of my hometown’s contribution to humanity was especially meaningful to me personally as I had information of which many of my peers were ignorant; I knew the precise location of the house in which the Osmonds had grown up. Even more exciting, it was within biking distance of my own home and was on a road we routinely traveled on the way to grocery store, haircuts, and spaghetti restaurants. I understood the family had years before moved on to imagined mansions elsewhere in the state, but I still stared at that relatively small, two-story white house with awe every time we passed, fully expecting to catch a glimpse of something mysterious or extraordinary in or around it.
Young Jimmy
Neither pride in Ogden’s most famous exports nor reverence for their early dwelling translated into patience for their pabulum, of course. I was way too cool for that at the time. Sure, I stared agog at young Jimmy Osmond when our pre-teen paths crossed in a ski slope lift line, but that was just curiosity because he
Young VotF
was famous. Otherwise, my youthful partaking of the Osmond offerings was limited to the occasional late-70s viewings of the Donny and Marie variety TV show, especially after it moved to Sunday nights in its final season and became weekly post-pot roast family viewing at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. After all, Marie may have been a little bit country, but she was also a little bit hot, so no apologies.
Fast forward to the 2010s and I have developed a newfound appreciation for my illustrious hometown compatriots. With most – albeit not all – of that silly “cool” baggage long cast off, I can grant the Osmonds’ “Yo-Yo” and “One Bad Apple” their rightful place as terrific, painless pop songs; and, Marie’s countrified take on “Paper Roses” delivers pleasant-enough empty-calorie sweetness. Even so, I felt no need to add any Osmonds to my own music holdings until I discovered a few years back their 1973 concept album called The Plan, the existence of which I had been previously oblivious to.
Recorded at Los Angeles’ Kolob Studios – which could not be a more apropos branding, as can be confirmed by anyone willing to dive into a quick wiki hole — The Plan was the Osmond brothers’ attempt to narrate the Mormon cosmology via popular song. Taking its name from the Plan of Salvation, a key tenet of the Mormon faith, the album plays as a series of musical vignettes and extrapolations that, while recognizable by Mormon cognoscenti as emanating from doctrinal wellsprings, burden the non-member listener with little weight of the sacred. In fact, gleaning metaphysical meaning from the album is likely near impossible for anyone not steeped in Mormonism. But, for those with the contextual backing, The Plan can thrill like a birthday party scavenger hunt.
The Plan is no lost classic and only a false prophet could suggest it would broadly appeal to most who read this. That said, the album is no bubblegum throwaway either. For all the blandness of their goody two-shoes image, the Osmond brothers were versatile, talented musicians whose ambitions stretched way beyond their barbershop and teen idol beginnings. For me, the draw of this album is its unique insider connection to my peculiar clan, but I can also understand why it hit 58 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold in the UK in 1973. It was ambitious and heartfelt, and in some places even beautiful. And I would vociferously bear witness against anyone so sinful as to deny Merill Osmond’s divine way with a vocal.
As for the songs, there are some gems to be found here. “Traffic in My Mind” will surprise listeners who thought the Osmond’s “Crazy Horses” was a one-off excursion into hard rock. Starting off with a greasy lead guitar riff that carries through the whole song, “Traffic” exudes toughness, with the raunchy vocal and six-string bends riding over the top of a meaty bass and drum-driven rhythm, before ending in a swirl of light psychedelia. The carnivalesque “Movie Man” is another highlight with its weird synth and kazoo lines, made even better for me by its reference to a horrifying inducement to obedience impressed upon all Mormon youngsters in Sunday School.
I am fully comfortable making the claim that knee-slapping, harmonica, and mouth harp have never been combined with less of a southern backwoods hoedown feel than they are in “Mirror, Mirror.” And “Let Me In” and “Darlin’” are the kind of big love ballads that bring the girls to the Osmonds’ yard, with the former leveraging bombastic horns and the latter opting instead for overwrought strings.
Traffic in My Mind:
Movie Man:
Mirror, Mirror:
Other listeners may have a hard time sussing out my most beloved and dearly-held Mormonisms – specifically, the ideas of eternal family and progression – but that doesn’t mean there’s not some wisdom closer to the surface to be had on the album. For example, what say we end with the following lyrics from The Plan’s other hard rocker “The Last Days.”
Nations take up their battle stations
Patrons of zodiac revelations
Lustations breaking family relations
Litigation allowing shoot-up sensations
…
People living lives of confusion
Billions caught up in revolution
Cities lost in their own pollution
Question, what is the Constitution?
…
That’s what they said, someday it would be
Now just look around if that’s what we see
It’s gotta be the last days
As large swathes of our global population seem set on following populist trail guides along paths toward nationalist stupor, I find myself vacillating between fits of arrogant condescension, bouts of resigned despair, and sessions of gleeful mockery. None of it satisfies. In the end, I neither participate in nor hinder the gloomy march. That passivity breeds discomfort in my soul because I know that inaction enables. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
I ought to do something. We ought to do something. And the first thing is to go talk to people outside of our own bubbles who experience the world differently in order to seek some deeper understanding into what the hell is happening. But, this is not a political blog and I’m not sure I’m much of a political thinker. So my only action in these pages will be to reprint the below post from March 2013. I’ll leave it to any readers who might accidentally wander by to figure out why I thought of it now.
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Saying Goodbye to Comandante Chavez
While working in Caracas from 2006-2009, I would regularly tune in whenever Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would address the nation, which he did constantly and usually for hours on end. I seldom paid close attention for more than 30 minutes or so as the actual content of his comments often either bored me to death with minutia or simply pissed me off. But even after drifting into other activities, I would leave the television on and let the voice of President Chavez serve as my background music; and I do mean music. I loved his voice and grew to find his cadence and tone soothing. His voice relaxed me.
Antonio Gramsci
One Saturday in early June of 2007, I was semi-listening to Chavez address a huge crowd of followers that had been called into the streets in demonstration of support for something that I no longer recall. My half-hearted awareness became rapt attention when I realized he was extensively quoting Antonio Gramsci, the early 20th century Italian writer, philosopher, and Marxist thinker. Chavez spent a full 40 minutes explaining Gramsci’s theory of revolutionary change in great detail to his flag-waving devotees. I kept wondering who other than breathless undergraduates even read Gramsci anymore, let alone attempted to impart to tens of thousands of gyrating sycophants the particulars of Gramsci’s missives on the growth of popular power via the establishment of a working class cultural hegemony.
As Chavez went on and on, the mass of red-shirted supporters in front of him jumped from cheer to cheer, seemingly oblivious to the lesson in political development theory they were receiving. They waved banners with pictures of Chavez, Simon Bolivar, Salvador Allende, and others and held their breath for each time the Comandante referred to himself in the third person so they could burst into a mass orgasm of applause and roars. I was engrossed.
Back in my college days when I was buying my own personal copies of Das Kapital and Mao’s Little Red Book and arriving early to hear visiting Sandinista ministers rail against imperialism, I had played at study of Gramsci. I learned enough to be impressed with my own efforts and even cited Gramsci in a paper I wrote which attempted to objectively and unemotionally describe the ideology of Peru’s Shining Path guerrillas separate from their bloodthirsty actions:
“Antonio Gramsci has also written about the need for a proletarian attitude. He stresses the importance of a revolutionary proletariat developing its own ‘superstructure’ prior to taking power. He argues that understanding of proletarian ideology does not appear from ‘haphazard and sporadic germination’ but through experience. Shining Path agrees with these arguments and sees the long period of democratic revolution as a time when the peasants and petty bourgeoisie will come to recognize Maoism as the ‘correct’ ideology.”
And now here was Chavez matter-of-factly offering up Gramsci’s complicated ideas to his generally lower economic strata and relatively less educated followers, literally Venezuela’s proletariat and peasant classes. Most remarkable was his seeming sincere belief that his masses deserved to be treated as being fully capable of comprehending the ideas he was illuminating.
Now that he’s gone, I’ll remember Hugo Chavez’s willingness to lie and cheat and divert blame to accomplish his goals. I’ll remember his anti-democratic actions and his systematic centralization of political power in his hands alone. I’ll remember his readiness to cynically manipulate people and information whenever it suited his political and ideological ends.
I’ll also remember him as a tireless advocate for the right of the poor, ignored, and uneducated to be heard and to exercise influence over those who govern them. Even more, I’ll remember his success in convincing those same marginalized folk to enthusiastically buy into his vision and to learn to act on it. As Venezuelans rightly begin to cast off the excesses and drastic inefficiencies of Chavismo in the course of these coming post-Chavez years, I hope they nonetheless retain the newly politicized underclass that Chavez engendered, an underclass capable of effectively asserting its weight and demanding the attention of political leaders.
I’m sorry to see you go this way, Comandante. You should have lost power through an eventual electoral defeat resulting from your own increasing missteps and political overreach, not due to this merciless disease. Your mistakes and conceit should have done you in, leaving you to bluster away into revolutionary oblivion while those who followed you in power selectively picked up and ran with your few, but substantial, achievements in political empowerment. Mostly, I’ll miss the calming effect of your voice in the background.
To a great extent, when it comes to my music listening habits, I am a product of the influence of various persons who leveraged my respect, love or admiration towards them to foist upon me their own likes and dislikes. Sometimes this was a purposeful effort to preach their truth and bring me to their light. Other times, the role of these influencers was passive; I shared some connection or looked up to them and therefore was drawn to their predilections. Going all the way back to childhood, there is also the pure nostalgia effect of relating good feelings or happy times to specific music. For example, Mom gave me hours spinning and memorizing Chuck Berry, while Dad gave me fishing for trout to the songs of Johnny Cash (as described here).
Sure, I like to think I also discovered a lot of the music I listen to on my own. But even then, my influencers certainly have played a large role in determining how I set my sails as I cast off on my journeys of exploration. I’ve written quite a bit on this site about individual bands and albums and the people who steered me toward them. The truth is, however, I haven’t even scratched the surface of what is my long-standing, and ongoing, followership.
In what is clearly a moment of delusion given my less-than-prolific posting schedule, I’ve resolved to start an occasional series specifically acknowledging the various Jim Joneses that have served me my musical kool-aid. I’ve also decided to honor my blogging-as-social-interaction fantasy by beginning with a look at a few of the most blatantly manipulative of all my influencers, my fellow bloggers. What follows are just a few examples of the many successful efforts by determined blog-evangelists to wrestle funds from my wallet. In each case below, I had been completely oblivious to the existence of the musical drug on offer before finding myself targeted, only to become hopelessly hooked afterward.
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Letting loose phrases like “psychedelic-infused, guitar-driven” and “two solos multi-tracked so that they interweave and dance,” Vinyl Connection (VC) was clearly on the offensive when he aimed his review of the album White Numbers by the previously-unknown to-me band The Bevis Frond right between my eyes. His unabashed, premeditated attack on my proclivities was further evidenced by his “casual” mention in the review’s very last line of the fact that Bevis Frond leader and guitarist extraordinaire Nick Saloman had at one point auditioned “for Procol Harum.” VC knew damn well that my adoration of former Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower meant I would be defenseless against any volleyed connection no matter how tenuous. Sure enough, I bought White Numbers almost immediately and have since added two more Frond albums to my collection. Listening to the 42-minute “Homemade Traditional Electric Jam” as I type this, I cannot imagine how I ever survived without having Mr. Saloman’s smoothly jagged six-string vulnerability in my life. Well played, VC, well played.
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Where some would choose full frontal assault, 1537 instead opted for long-term siege interspersed with sporadic barrage in his ultimately successful effort to force me into expanding my musical map to include the troubled sub-Saharan nation of Mali. He started way back in May 2013 with what seemed initially to be just another in his steady stream of well-written, humor-filled reviews of his eclectic LP holdings. As he described the album Amam Iman by Malian band Tinariwen he knew what he was doing however, injecting lines about “sorrow, regret, anger and hope” delivered via “intertwining traditional instruments and guitars; lots of beautifully played guitars” that were crafted just so as to ensure their being forever carved into the tissues of my mind. I mean, just look at his skill with a semicolon, for God’s sake.
After allowing yours truly to stew in those juices for a while – Over three years! What magnificent patience! – 1537 let loose a fresh bombardment in September 2016 via a review of a separate Tinariwen EP, this time combining the prose artillery with a precision-guided video of a Tinariwen-soundtracked melancholy road trip through Joshua Tree National Park. I was obviously powerless to stand against the onslaught any longer and out came the checkbook. As Aman Iman plays now and I marvel at the unique guitar, drum, and vocal stylings of bandleader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and his Touareg collective, I can only joyfully embrace my inner desert nomad and offer kudos to 1537 for his relentless mission focus.
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Heavy Metal Overload (HMO) proved himself a master of misdirection and the subliminal in his subtle, nuanced and impressively effective quest to get me to lay out for – and subsequently be entranced by – the album Kveldssanger by Norwegian black metallers Ulver. Knowing well my knee-jerk aversion to black metal’s guttural growls and/or puked vocals, HMO invested years into wearing me down by regularly featuring hell-spawned Scandinavian extremist Beelzebub-fronted bands in between ingratiatingly adorable internet-spanning commentary in defense of KISS’s atrocious Unmasked album. I couldn’t help but pine for each new post. So, when he finally launched his review of Ulver’s 1995 debut, Bergtatt, in May 2016, I was putty in his endearingly Satanic, Glaswegian hands.
Realizing I’d be wary of any direct hard-sell, HMO adroitly avoided any mention of Kveldssanger in the Bergtatt post itself. Instead, he carefully employed phrases such as “seductive, alluring, and magical” while emphasizing the debut album’s “dreamy acoustic guitars.” Embedding a song from Bergtatt without scary vocals was his masterstroke. Still cautious but also intrigued, I inquired via a comment into the representativeness of the soothing embedded song, at which point HMO deftly pulled the trigger via a seemingly cast-off aside about Ulver’s second album Kveldssanger in which “they went full-on folk” with “No gruff vocals at all!” Just as HMO had foreseen when crafting his diabolical plan, I was immediately onto the Spotify whereupon Kveldssanger’s spell was cast and my credit card number lept into the ether. Even now from the first gorgeously-plucked notes of album opener “Østenfor sol og vestenfor maane” I have to physically restrain myself from taking a hammer to the piggy bank.
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The above are only a tiny sliver of the vast mass of taste tampering effected upon me by multiple musical mentors, both physical and virtual, over the course of my susceptible life’s journey. I hope to add many more like stories via this occasional series in the future. You know me though, so don’t hold your breath. At minimum I’ll hopefully manage to post at least a few more before my homeland implodes. (Smile)
