Chitlins

T-Shirt Tales
The Saturday Night That Should'nt
Saturday Night That Wasn't
Fish Tales
Cock-A-Snook: Saddam Hussien Proclaims Iraq a Christian State
Ship Of Fools
Monday Night Music
Uh oh! English Rock Band In Chicago!
Gigs Gone Awry
Parties
Puerto Rico
Good King Wenceslas - bunny wearing, slave driving, wenching tyrant
New Orleans and Baton Rouge
Swinging Musicians of Lancaster Town and the Midwest US Promotor
Another Saturday. Another Sunday (or Mardi Gras) in the Windy City
Last Weekend
Krispy Kreme. A Story of Love, Music, Chicago and Donuts!
Street Blues in Chicago;
The Cotton Club
Viva Las Vegas
Another Saturday
The 35 Pound Monkey
Blues For No One There
Cruisin’ in The USA
Dancing Iguanas
California Scheming
Cruisin’ in The USA
Would You Like Ice With That?
Flights of Fancy

Chitlins

I've had slippery gizzards before - trekking out to Windber, PA to buy a custom Chevy 20 van for the band. Close to the historic town of Johnstown's inclined plane railway that was built after the dam burst of 1889. That event killed over 1200 folks. The inclined railroad saved about 500 more souls when the dams burst again in 1936.

Well, the haunted Windber Hotel boasted one of the few piss bars still in existence in the continental USA - the patrons face a tiled bar and stand above a trough running down the length of where streams of wee used to gutter past your feet. Yes, spit and sawdust behind, widdle in front. Slouch sharp now.

A bearded fellow with a Pittsburg Stealers baseball cap on, challenged me to a pickled turkey gizzard eating duel. Alas, poor soul, was unaware of the English predilection for roll mops herrings, pickled eggs, cockles, whelks - and, afterall, I was feeling pretty homesick at the time (I was also feeling much Kentucky B. too),

Turkey gizzards and other gastronomic oddities aside, it pains me to say chitlins are the foulest smelling most disgusting, stomach turning, olfactory offensive saddest part of the abomination of slavery and Jim Crow that could come to a culture evolving in isolation and on a diet of necessity. That anyone could conceivably consider biting down on this stuff without a nose peg, belly full of disinfectant, activated charcoal, and iron filings is beyond my humble comprehension.

It beggars belief. I thought I was oh so cool to be invited into the heart of southside Chicago culture, if not as an equal, at least as an enthusiastic oddity. A white man from across the pond, someone no one could be angry at (though we did supply, ancestorily speaking, most of the wankers who went on to to create the slave industry of the Plantations). But I baulked at the chitlins. As I approached the table I thought someone had died. Pray, the smell comes from a misapplied past on rodent under the bar's floorboards, but not that mound of innocent noodle like excresences.

Nope. It was them. They smelled worse than they should even considering their lowly role of dewatering bovine manure before it is cast forth upon the land.

My love affair with the black south side Chicago culture took a momentary pause as I, nonetheless, bit into a modest fork full of cow colon. Within seconds the bite and the plate it had come into town on, had discreetly been garbaged and a large Cosmo was downed in immediate relief.

The taste was one thousand times worse than the smell.

Well, so much for that piece of social commentary from Chicago. I was going to go on about how bloody cold it is here - car exhaust sticks to the street like candy floss and smoke and steam from building vents across the city is gray paint frozen against a bloody sky. In fact, there is sheet ice on the inside of our front door and windows, and even with the front room heaters on you can see your breath in the bedroom. At least my closet is the perfect temperature to keep a case of Goose Island Imperial IPA at the perfect temperature and you don't really need to change clothes much because you go to bed with the ones you have on.

Anyway, that said, I would rather drink a mug of bad American beer with ice sliding down the outside of the glass in this -20C weather than warm my belly with chitlins. I guess some things you do have to be born into.

T-Shirt Tales

Finally got most of my clothes out of storage (a flurry, a freeze and a gloveless walk to work were all the incentives needed). As the thought of enduring yet another Midwest winter led to seasonal thoughts of packing it in and returning to England, I started separating out my warm clothes from the purely advertisal. A t-shirt purge in mind.

Top of the pile was a cotton tent built to house an all American large arse. It's the Wilton Ave. block party where I learned I couldn't learn basketball, but later played across the street in the grounds of the old people's home only to lose a shoe to a triumphant old lady who headed inside with it neither shoe nor lady to be see again.

Next in the pile was a black fragment from the Crystal Corner Bar in Madison, Wisconsin - signs of jolly punters entering the club on the front and the same lot lurching, lunging, binned, and purgatively exiting on the back. That was a gig with the great blues musician Lefty Dizz, who, after the owner handed us all t-shirts, did a shot of Wild Turkey with the band only to bring it right back up. The first sign of his esophageal cancer the complications of which were to kill him 8 months later. A heroic blues musician who had an infinity of riff based crunchers, who always encouraged new players, and who still performed even while undergoing chemo.

Then there was a musical shirt "Fish-a-wack O!" named after a song about a Massachusetts Indian Chief and a memento of a holiday romance with a school teacher from Great Barrington, there's a sweatshirt I printed with my band's name and November gig date I wore while running the 1998 Chicago Marathon, there's a black "Chicago Care's Charity" shirt from a charity gig we did in '96, a sweatshirt from a half marathon from '99 that half killed me (had a gig the night before), oh, and here's a beaut:

"Martin's World Engine - "It's A World Engine Thing - You wouldn't Understand It". Don Martin was a colourful old Chicago cat. Hadn't paid taxes since 1965, had a cousin who reared catfish and marijuana down in Louisiana at a place called "Space Park", and gave me a part-time job cleaning engine valves when I was penniless in '94. He raced speedboats too. Oh, and when he got paid in lobsters for fixing a trawler man's boat in Maine we had a great party of lobster, catfish, and southern greens at O'Donnell's Tavern.

Here's a black Pan Celtic shirt. Ahh, fond memories of the Yorkshire House celidahs. Jimmy McGuire rest in peace, you were the best MC. There's a "Blues Hounds" t-shirt - barely intact - and the first band I was in at Penn State (other than the "Bad Apples", but they were so dreadful they don't really count), there's one from the "Asylum" student union battle of the bands from Penn State '91 (that was "Little Evil and the Rhythm Saints"), there's a blue "Left Undone" shirt. Left Undone were a great funk band, sadly disbanded, that afforded me the opportunity to play major venues outside of Chicago culminating in the House of Blues in LA (my contribution to that gig was a kicked off shoe that landed somewhere in the sound booth but wasn't recovered until the next day leaving me hobbled for schmooze during the after party - some old lady may have taken it). There's an Aids Ride sweatshirt. The rural route we cycled through Wisconsin was stunning. 600 miles in all.

Last but not least, and the only one of the lot I ever paid for, a navy t-shirt for the Mike Watt Band's "Third Time to the Mast" tour of '98. One of the hottest shows I've ever seen. So good I had to buy something (they'd sold out of records while on the road).

Bugger, it may be summer soon enough, I'll give these folks one more season in the sun.

Oh, hey, afore I forget the Convulsions are gigging at the John O'Gaunt Wed. Dec. 17th and Boxing Day too. We'll be teaming up with the explosive Derek Jackson again at the Gregson on Sat. Jan. 10th. See you for a Yuletide tipple soon!

Cheers from Chicago, Ben

The Saturday Night That Shouldn't

Playing back the recording two days later the lead singer regretted not immediately destroying the CD while he had the chance (the guitarist heard it later that day and almost quit the band).

The show had started well enough that Saturday night - the lead singer, while jumping up on the Hammond organ, banged his head on one of the main speakers and blood flew everywhere from his leaping form. That outdid the Goth horror group of the night before who had drunk fake blood from a large chalice. Bollocks to that. Get real.

Then a guy jumped up screaming incomprehensibles into the microphone. The bleeding band had missed the opener and weren't sure if the interloper was part of the earlier act. They didn't wish to appear rude by kicking him off. However, on the play back it was all to clear of the errors of their ways. The fellow should have been dumpstered after five nanoseconds. Fortunately, the good folks in the Ghettobillies diplomatically forced this fool's exit with violence at his next attempt to grab the mic.

The harmonica playing wasn't too bad (thought the lead singer). Alas, the play back showed that most of the harmonicas used that night had decided to go flat in that unsubtle way that they sometimes do (metal fatigue of the reeds), and would only really have charmed rutting cats.

After bearing, with mounting illness, the contents of this evil recording the band leader was suddenly delighted to hear the one song that always was never "quite right" actually sounding quite good. No mistakes - the difficult switch from organ solo to the octaves in the first bridge section worked at last! The solos ripped! The recording ended unobligingly four notes away from the end. The CD, brimming with awfulness, had run out of room at the one decent song.

Ahh, if only the band, or rather the bassist, the lead singer, and two thirds of the Ghettobillies, had left it at that last song and GONE HOME. Don't battle the night anymore. Quit. Leave a bad night a bad night and just GO HOME.

But no, they all headed up to Lakeview Lounge, home of the fabulous Night Watch band mentioned warmly in these dispatches before, and a bar that stays open until 5am on a Saturday. The band warmly greeted the lead singer and his friends. A certain well-meaning friend asked the band if these musicians could do a turn on the stage behind the bar.

Alas they did, and as the American phrase goes, "Dude, they totally sucked ASS!"

A 15 minute instrumental funk jam known only to the guitarist who started it. The bassist playing a line from another song hoping it would fit (it didn't), the harmonicist finally realizing the degree to which his instruments were now out of tune playing very little of anything, and the drummer really too drunk to play at all and who ran out of the bar immediately after the Night Watch bassist, Raoul, had succeeded in getting the mess off the stage.

The bar owner berated the Night Watch band for their selection of guests. The band in turn berated the bar for telling them who they couldn't and who they could let on the stage. The bar owner then told them the stage was his stage, the band replied that it was their show. Ten minutes later and it was all screaming incomprehensibles. The band quit and were also fired.

Although I have nothing personally to do with any of this, and I'm merely relating events, I have yet to set foot in the Lakeview Lounge since that fateful night. Recent rumor has it that Night Watch are still playing there every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as they had for the past 11 years before the clowns came in. I do hope so. Because, as Bette Midler used to sing, "one monkey don't stop no show."
©Benjamin Ruth, 2003

Saturday Night That Wasn't

NOTE: Hey folks! This was the article that was planned to run in March but got lost in cyberspace. Seeing as it's only 5C here at the moment there is a certain relevance printing it now. Also, the next month's article leads on naturally from this (that is to say other than slurping a large amount of Chicago Beer in good company at the Burnley Blues Festival last month, I really don't have anything else to report!)

Most Chicagoans will confirm that living in Chicago is like loving a person with bipolar mental disorders: As long as the love light shines brightly in your direction you can't conceive of a colder season. Then as the fulmination of the incomprehensible tumult of which you suspected nothing enwraps you in the maelstrom, you vow to leave as soon as the storm breaks. Well, maybe not that bad - the cold winters are one thing though, but the bloody springs!

Of all the "dark times" in Chicago, the month of February starts the seasonal nadir. Even in the first days of March the high temperature during the night may be only -15C. The hardier frontier folks go about outdoor winter exertions in this "spring" with no thought to cheek cracking, snot freezing cold. Not me. Folks like myself eschew all chilblain bravery for a moribund winter life of sloth and semi-hibernation. The churning, clattering, spinning wheel of an exercising hedgehog in a friend's apartment were a derisory torment to my larger mammal malaise.

And it's Saturday! Oh the choices! A party at 5025 N. Clark for a young CNN producer's 26th birthday. A vivacious redhead and one of those dancing behind the bar at Lakeview Lounge in February (see these ramblings do have occasional coherence). An opportunity to harangue a bunch of American media gurus doing nothing obvious to question their country's impending hegemony in the Middle East was tempting but no match for the excitement of introducing seven overseas Sicilians to Lee's Unleaded Blues on their last night in town.

A twenty mile drive down south and, bollocks! For the first time in seven years, Lee's asked for proof of age. One of the Italians (the cutest) had no passport on them. No entry. What an inspiring last night for them! You can guess what they thought of their sodding last night in the land of the free! Bollocks, here we go - this is why this is not a very musical article. Not through want of bloody trying that's for sure! Bloody stupid drinking age!

Yes, here we go! I mean, here you have ONE state (New Jersey) deciding to blackmail all the others in the 1980's. NJ jacks their drinking age up to 21. The number of teenagers killed in driving accidents across NJ state's lines to get booze now quadruples. NJ hypocritically points to these accidents and hollers the cry of abstinence, temperance, and accuses their neighbouring states as being responsible. The Reagan federal government then gets involved and refuses to hand out highway construction funds until ALL States increase their drinking age to 21. 1984 (Ha! - 1984 for Chrissake, think about that!) and every state in the union ends up with a drinking age of 21. Every last one of them! In the meantime these righteous twits have helped cause the deaths of 1000's of US teens.

These are the same asinine prats who, when building new housing estates, have enacted laws that make it illegal to place a bar within walking distance of a residential community. Oh, there's progressive thinking for you! Now the residents have to DRIVE to get a beer. The Door's 1971 "Roadhouse Blues" says it all. You drive to drink - if you have time and dosh for some tarts, "back of the roadhouse they have some bungalows", then bloody marvelous.

Sounds familiar? Welcome to the wisdom of US policy here and exported everywhere (don't even get me started on the American Dream - where anyone who owns land has to pay tax on their property. As high as $15,000 a year in some cases. And did you know this? State schools in the US are paid for by property taxes. That means poor folk's kids are in the poorest schools, while the kids in richer neighbourhoods get five times as much dosh per pupil per year. Did you know that in Chicago, over 90% of all children in the Chicago Public Schools are minorities?)

So much for music on a Saturday night. Got a puncture cycling home at 3am while the snow swirled, found the replacement inner tube was punctured and re-patched that (while the snow swirled), covered a good going out shirt with salt, snow and road grit, white tornados froze my fingers to the thick grease bike chain. Hmmm! All topped of with the exquisite joy of feeling the sub-arctic air whistling through your helmet cracks! Finally got the bike on the late night road amidst, by this time, twirling frozen ammonia flakes. Then slowed down, quickly and inexplicably, falling off in a conveniently placed puddle of brine at Western and Augusta.

Solution? Unwrap a 30 times wound sodden frozen bootlace from around the right pedal's swindle.

So Saturday was a wash. Fortunately, Brother Brother's 12 piece funk band have started playing every Sunday at the Lyons' Den. And they are bloody incredible! And they'll just get better each week. Chicago, you wench - one great band for free when its -16C outside and you think that will convince me to stay???? Bugger, bugger - wait 'til next year! One more year - that's all I swear!!!

Fish Tales

So, Dutch boys used to use eel skin to tie their catapult rubber to the forked yew frame, Candirus. is an Amazon catfish small enough and suicidal enough to swim up the urethras of an immersed human peeing, folks living around Lake Malawi eat chironimid cakes, Nile perch in the same lake wipe out hundreds of cichlid species - those hundreds of colorful fishes evolved in 60 million years from an "Adam and Eve" couple that found their way into the new lake. Tuna muscle has such a density of mitochondria, and their counter-flow bloodstream is so remarkable in the fishy world that they maintain a body temperature greater than the surrounding seawater - they perhaps evolve towards warm-bloodedness. Dolphins race with them for sport. Eels have a sense of smell greater than sharks and second only to bloodhounds. Elasmobranches (sharks and rays) use urea as an osmoregulator instead of salt (hence the suggestion that you soak shark steaks in water before cooking them).

Eels. The American eel, Anguilla rostrata, was definitely the smarter of the two compared to the unfortunate European eel (Anguilla anguilla - the Europeans at least got to binomially name them first). As the Atlantic ocean opened up from the Sargasso Sea a huge few million years before the African rift opened up Lake Victoria (now Malawi), those European eels found they had to travel further and further to reach their freshwater (now European) growing grounds while the American eels had a relatively short jaunt. Three centimeters a year is not much. 65 million years later . . . . . . ~ 4000 km (3cm each way).

Samurai warriors were trained as teenagers to jump over maize seedlings. By August the maize plants were 6 feet high. Eels leave freshwater and swim over three thousand miles from Europe to spawn in the Sargasso - without eating during the entire trip.

30% of folks in the USA confuse thirst for hunger.

And now the over-fished Antarctic Chilean Sea bass has been found in the Artic circle - the furthest journey known to be taken by a single fish.

You could walk out into the sea with gill nets in Felixstowe in the 1930's and catch herring. Hundreds of them.

Talking of fishy tales - Americans LOVE clams. Brits do not, and yet our deep dark boggy salt marsh muds abound with them. As do our waters with eels. Japanese aqua-culturists have managed to breed eels in captivity by treating them with chicken sex hormones. Heck, even truffle farmers in France are getting closer to the cultivated truffle.

Our worldly demands are so disparate in fishy manners.

Carp are prized in England. They are shot with bow and arrow in the States when they spawn and tossed on the bank in disgust at their blameless invasion. In much the same way Zander are tossed on the bank in England, yet are prized game fish in the US (where they are misleadingly called walleye pike - they are not pike at all, but part of the perch super-family which includes sea bass and Nile perch).

Where you were in the past and how you behave in the future are very fishy things.

Humans are very fishy things, but at least we have strong mitochondrial laddend fishy leaders who all believe in one thing at least.

Alas, fishes can't drive SUVs or play the Skate Wing Hernia Blues. "Like a big blue catfish swimming in the deep blue sea". "Like a one-eyed cat (El Gato Puerto in Habana, Cuba) peeping in a seafood store, I can look at you - 'tell you don't love me no more." Them big fishes gone taken away all the fun for us small fry, whitebait, fried smelt, and chicken feed. My dear school of minnows, we seem to be swimming further and further to get to where we want to be. And when we get there it tastes like pee. And our individual effect on the world as its leaders go mad seems singularly as powerful as the effect of an eel larva on continental drift.

Saddam Hussein Proclaims Iraq a Christian State

In a move redolent of England's Henry VIII's Reformation when the good Platagenet king thumbed his syphilitic cock at the Pope Clement VII in 1534, SH, The Maniacal Overlord in Waiting, informed his country today that henceforth, Iraq was "born again". SH, The Global Terror Miester, had "seen the light and the light was JESUS!!"

According to Baathist sources who spoke to Western journalists under penalty of beheading (if they didn't), SH, The Great Holocaust Hastener was inspired by an article in the Sydney Gazetteer about an apparition of the Holy Mary appearing in a 15 year old fence post in Queensland. Reporting of similar apparitions in the US have not impressed the secular Iraqi regime, but once the respectable Aussies got on board, the Oily Magnificent is said to have been taken over by a spiritual epiphany.

Although the Great Despot maintains that the government will still be run as a secular entity and that other religious interests will be allowed to barely coexist in Iraq he is encouraging, by necessary force, the adoption of Christianity as the country's religion of choice. The Magestic Megalo maintained that, just like the US, there will be a complete separation of Church and State. Like the US for example the secular Government can invoke "God's decree", or "God's Right", or "God Told me to F**k You Over Because We Are God's People and you are Chicken Shit" whenever they see fit and without any prayer services or religious leaders' blessings.

In an interview with Nimbus Broadcasting Company's anchorwoman Elizabeth Poutface, the Axial Evil One denounced his country's little understood Arabic religious philosophies as alienating his people in a time of great crisis.

In a passionate outburst similar to a that of a "saved sinner" at a Tennessee Evangelical meeting, the Poison Gas Guru, described how, over a plate of burned falafel, a vision came to him of a quiet and dignified man in white cloth and sporting a halo who said unto him;

"Oh Evil Bastard Who Would Flay and Cannibalize The World's Children - hear the cry of your country's people! Hear your country's plight!! I am you Savior in your hour of great need!! LOOK! Look to the soil underneath your feet! Feel the coarse sand that robs your people's fields of their crops! But look, LOOK! and feel the juiciness of this wonderful land's blood as it squeezes between your tosies!!! Yes! The land wants to set your people free! Follow me, dedicate your life to me - and see how the Righteous Ones in the West have my blessing! They are the true, the blessed, the meek, and the humble that would inherit this YOUR land. But when they see that you have turned to me, their anger will be as mutterings at a 1-point stock slump on the Great DOW Jones.

Yours is the True, the Real Land of Great Potholes, of Large Rocks in the Highway, of Arid Tracks of Red Desert Torture, of Impassable Mountain Trails where only the Massively Tanked and Wheeled can pass. Yes! IT is IRAQ that is the chosen country!!!

My Peoples in The Great Land of the Free and Incarcerated has conveyances, no matter how humble, that would serve me, their master the best!"

"Yes" - the apparition said to the Galactic Overlord in Waiting -

"Follow ME and SET YOUR PEOPLE FREE - FOR EVERY IRAQI A CHRISTIAN BLESSED BRAND NEW SPANKING . . . . .

S.U.V"

Ship of Fools

Ship of Fools / Pirate bar - well trained crew. They had the Venetian blinds down before 11:30pm. Bar's opacity well achieved. No light shall escape! Duct tape smothered the escapes of illicit yellow splashes into the suspicious Wiltshire countryside.

The band played until the band couldn't play anymore and the dancers couldn't dance anymore.

Oh! So naughty! Names and locations withheld to protect the criminal from the Dance Puritans.

James and I twisted to music we made up a capella on the bar stools

Alas the crumpet had left. Sensibly so I guess.

The lifelike motif of Jimi Hendrick's and his guitar on the wall behind the stage was moving too by 2am.

Later, another place - names and locations withheld to protect the naughty - we danced on the ledges behind the bay seats. It was half past one. The girls invited us back to their place and we danced (well James did, I talked a lot, Matt didn't talk at all, and Mike table dusted with his head. Side to side, sweep sweep bottle caps flopple on the floor).

Girls went to bed leaving us on the hard cold floorboard. Sensibly so I guess.

Then there was the table dancing, stool prancing, Cuban rum pouring, lass dancing on the table on your back.
Yes. Another bar, another place (name and location withheld to protect the naughty). Of course, that kind of going on would never happen in Lancaster. No. Not allowed you see - dancing police everywhere (ha ha ha - there's a jolly thought - dancing police!)

Later, another place - names and locations NOT withheld to protect the naughty. It's back in the USA and the Nightwatch Band playing Jimmy Reed's "You Got Me Up . . ." behind the Lakeview Lounge Bar at 3am in Uptown. Half the bar joining them on the cramped stage. The owner explaining as we left at 5am - "maybe I got a little drunk tonight, but I just wanted to see you all dancing!"

Lecherous git! I bet you did! There were half a dozen brazenly revealing sinuously moving voluptuous women up there loving life (and to a noticeable degree each other).

But the women left, sensibly I guess.

Oh, remember last issue's burblings? ("Flights Of Fancy"). Well the infamous Paul Foulsham was at this Lakeview Lounge too - he'd heard my band was playing at the Goose Island Brew Pub, and that the beer was free for friends of the band, and so he flew over on a tipsy whim. Ha ha! All time audience member award.

Right. I'm not a particularly political fellow - but the entire USA is being completely bloody hoodwinked by some seriously lunatic berserk bestial baboon breast beating dinosaurs of an age that should have withered with the onslaught of love and reason. We're in a world besieged by the impudent stupidity of the greedy tribalistic Megalomaniacs of the new Corporate disorder. F**k OIL. The reason of alternatives is forgotten and the rush to chaos has begun.

Sorry for the interlude - the Bush speech tonight kinda triggered a delayed response to my otherwise jolly writing.

That said, at least the bars here in the USA stay open late. And dancing doesn't require a license. Neither does a bar with a few folks playing acoustic guitar if there is no charge at the door. I don't usually get political, but I wish US folks here could hear a reasonable debate about the Middle East (ask Americans if they heard about the World Summit and you get a blank look, ask them about Iraq, Bush and Oil and you get understanding, but you won't hear oil discussed on the media ANYWHERE not even National Public Radio - those NPR programmers should hang their head in absolute shame, and quit in the name of human decency).

Anyway, for all of you reading this who don't know about the catastrophic anti- live music legislation planned for Britain, please take some time to sign the email petition. Its fantastic enough that our Enlightened Leader has deemed it a good idea to drag Britain into Americas' oil garnering mayhem for whatever scrotally grabbed reason (because a sane fellow would only kowtow to the USA on this one if he was having his nuts crushed) BUT to cut back on our musical expression at a time when we need it most thanks to his plonkerish foreign policy, we now face possible emasculation of live pub music and more throughout the land.

Yep! In order to dim our musical escapism from the mess Bush's Poodle is helping create for y'all, ALL live performances (solo and duo music, theatre, comedy, juggling, the works) will now require an entertainment license, levied by local authorities. Unless you agree it's finally time to usher on the death of live pub music throughout the land, I suggest you DON'T take some time to go online and sign this one! After all there ain't enough techno nightclubs in the country yet are there (they're exempt I believe).

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/2inabar/petition.html

Did I start this off entitled "Ship Of Fools"? I guess I did. Boy, do you remember getting shanghaied, I don't?

Cheers, Ben

 "Flights of Fancy"

"I'm sorry Sir, but you can't drink that here." The rather prim stewardess on the Air India flight pointed out to us as we slurped through our duty free. Fortunately, there was quite a bit of "turbulence"" on the flight - "whoops, there goes yet more duty free rum flying out of the bottle, quick John catch it with your glass, Yaron, you too, Matt, quickly, catch it!"

Needless to say, the rum was successfully and repeatedly captured in all four of our plastic cups. Alas, with no one to meet us at Heathrow (August Bank Holiday), and a ton of bloody musical paraphernalia to cart through the London Underground, the London Overland system, and a half mile trudge through the rain to my mate's flat in Wimbledon we wished we had stoppered the rum somewhere over the North Atlantic.

Air India - use them at your peril. And not because of the rum episode. An organisation that is run by the intimidation of its employees is never one likely to please the needs of the punters. They don't take credit cards to pay for flights, are usually greatly rude at some point during your trip, and are complete b**stards at head office. We found out, weeks after buying our tickets that our return flights would not be honoured because our connecting flight from Manchester to London had less than a two and a half-hour stopover (they were an hour and a half).They just decided to change their rules and go hang the customers. We had to change our flights with BA in order to get back to the US.

Delta has stopped giving free drinks on international flights, so hang them too.

Foreign Entertainer Work permits - by declaring ours we were (well my travelling companions were) nearly all sent back on the next flight simply because they had work permits. They were not for the entire time we were over here, and immigration at London told us the return flights to the US had to be within two days of the last date covered by the work permits. Eventually, Pete's honeymoon, and John's visit to his girlfriend seemed to sway them and they let us through with 10 minutes to catch our connection to Manchester. I looked at all the fine print regarding our work permits later and determined that there are no written restrictions whatsoever - especially for visa waiver countries like the US and the UK. London Immigration were merely being d**ks.

British Airways - more like "Baggage Away ways".

While we were having fun with the Immigration, BA had our baggage sent to another destination. It took nearly a week to get it forwarded. That sucked for the Pete Special Trio because all the CD inserts for the albums we were selling were in the lost luggage. Folks still bought the CD but we ended up having to post loads of inserts to them later. Oh and when we did get our luggage back it looked like it had been through a tumble drier with rocks. Anything breakable (including my samples of bubble wrapped bottles of Chicago Goose Island beer) was shattered. My Himalayan, Rockies, all terrain, intergalactic alien attack withstanding rucksack was destroyed (though BA did replace it with a cheaper smaller version).

BMI - I do like them. Last Christmas I was tying flies for my dad (avid fly fisherman) on the flight, when one of the stewardesses asked what I was doing.

"Oh, my friend working in First Class fly fishes, do you mind if I invite her over to chat with you?"

Five minutes later I'm deeply engrossed in conversation with a truly beautiful woman - about fly fishing for cut-throat trout in the Colorado Rockies. I tied her several different flies to try out there and was rewarded with a bottle of champagne. That's flying!

My friend Paul Foulsham in London (who is wont to occasionally fly to the US, or anywhere for that matter, on a binge inspired whim - God bless him) always asks to be seated next to an attractive woman. He claims that this indeed usually results in his being sat next to an attractive woman. There is a definite social co-evolution at work here now as, subsequent to the many binge inspired flights of Foulsham, many ladies have learnt to ask NOT to be seated next to a boozed up Aussie male who falls asleep on them and plops his right hand on their nearest mammary.

On a completely unrelated note, now that our Chicago drummer Matt and I managed to fly here without ANY event at all (BMI) it merely remains for me to list the UK dates for my band in the Lancaster vicinity for this year, and to wish you all a very happy and jolly New Year. See you at the John!!! CHEERS!!! Ben.

6/1/03 Mon. Fleetwood Bowling Club Fleetwood Bowling Club, Upper Lune St., Fleetwood 01253-873903
7/1/02 Tues. Otley Junction 44 Bondgate, Otley, W. YORKS, 01943-463233
8/1/02 Wed. Lancaster John O' Gaunt 53 Market Street, Lancaster
9/1/02 Thur. Lancaster Ring Of Bells 52 King St, Lancaster,

New Orleans and Baton Rouge (pts. 1 and 2)

There is no place I every wanted to visit, growing up in England as I did yearningly listening to blues records, more than New Orleans: a mystic place blending a turbulent, decadent history with black cat bones, mojo hands, and the birth of blues and jazz.

My dreams of living and playing in the crescent city became a little closer to reality when I was finally accepted at Penn State University, in early 1989, as a graduate student in biology. At Penn State, I found out that I was expected to spend all my time (summers too) working on my degree (a Ph.D. on the "Visible polymorphism of the outer egg mass jelly layers of the spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum"). I candidly told my academic advisor that if he could not pay me over the summer (my assistantship extended only over regular term-time), that I would be better off playing harmonica on a street corner in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This went down not at all well.

However, that is what I did that summer (and for one hour busking outside the Jazz Heritage Hall I made a whopping $3.50, while breaking two harmonicas).

I hope all you fellow musicians who, just like me, have wanted to go to New Orleans are not too upset with my impressions of that once great musical port city.

For starters, New Orleans smells. Not of dew dripping Spanish Moss, and moldering timber frames, not of okra and lotus blossoms, not even of the pungency of Creole cooking. No, it stinks of piss and spilled beer, of fast food regurgitations and bursting sewers. The beggars are blatantly hostile, angry and mean. The restaurants serve seafood deep fried and straight out of the freezers of chain supermarkets. The blues bands I saw, bar one, were awful, the jazz was largely lame. The streets were packed with rampaging youths arseholed on go-cups of shitty beer, vomiting and urinating in the streets.

Hooray for the French Quarter of New Orleans! Now the only place in the continental U.S. where it is still legal to carry a beer onto the streets all year round. "Open container laws" everywhere else in the States have destroyed the culture of this once great city. It was, and largely remains, an appalling parody of my greatest expectations. New Orleans is not what it used to be. Its blaggard charm is hard to find, its great music is hard to find, its marvelous cuisine is unbelievably hard to find ("Mother's" off St. Charles, a 24 hour rail-car po-boy sandwich emporium with it's dripping spit roasts is a wonderfully delicious exception - though you have to ask a cabbie to find it).

N'awlin's tourist industry is geared to college drunks and conference goers who think drinking Pat O'Brian's Hurrincanes (they're AWFUL by the way) out in the streets and to vomiting excess is cool.

Again, the music was let down after let down:

I saw Irma Thomas playing at an outdoor street fair with a band as far removed from her roots as the RnB of Anita Baker is from the Coasters. There she is whining on the microphone about tourists who are videotaping the show making it hard for her to make it in the music business. For Chrissakes, the band was as exciting as linoleum - you would have had to pay me to record it!

A fellow Englishman staying at the Youth Hostel was shot at in the French Quarter. That was it. I packed my rucksack and left the colossal roach ranch. I had stayed only three days in the city that had been a dream of musical adventure for over ten years. Now I was going to hitch-hike north up Highway 61, following the route the music had taken so many years before, and with maybe a new understanding of why.

First stop on the route was to be Baton Rouge. After the violent mendicacy of N'awlins gave me concern for my safety, I postponed the hitch-hike for this part of the trip and bussed the 77 miles north of New Orleans instead. On arrival, and without hesitation, I headed towards the location of Tabby Thomas' Famous Blues and Jazz Heritage Hall on North Avenue: a street decidedly architecturally down-beat. Derelict actually. A ghetto really. I mean worse than Barnsley on a rainy day.

Then I heard it! A faint sound of electric blues guitar drifting over the dusty pot-holed street. This was too good! The scene looked like a blues movie - if any decent ones truly existed. As I followed the sound into the setting sun and 90 degree heat the dereliction increased, surely this "world famous place" must be like a beacon amidst this squalor - I mean I could hear the guitar! Then, just as I was passing a particularly mean broken up old warehouse with bars on the windows, I saw my goal 500 yards away.

The building was magnificent. Neons arched over the gateway of a huge black door. I picked up my pace. I noticed that the guitar was sounding fainter as I hurried on. Nevertheless hurry on I did. My expectations this time apparently on the ball. I looked the building over several times, too numb really to believe what I'd found.

It was a Hip-hop Palace.

A huge place, almost as blasphemous as a gleaming white church in the grinding poverty of rural West Virginia. A costly piece of black exploitation dedicated to the music most popular then in the urban ghettos of America. It was no blues hall. I back tracked.

What a fool! I had imagined that it was Tabby Thomas himself who had been playing that guitar. As he warmed up in his "World Famous" club, early on that Wednesday evening he and I would meet across a vast cultural difference to be united in music, as has happened on so many occasions before. That night I would be hired in his band. The band would boogie swamp blues throughout the U.S and I would never again remember another life involving the egg mass jelly of salamanders.

Well bugger that, it was obvious that my directions were quite wrong. I was passing by the small rusted iron door of the decrepit warehouse, dusty, hot, disappointed, when I realized the guitar was coming from inside the warehouse. Sure enough, in chipping white paint above the door was the legend: "Tabby Thomas' Blues and Jazz Heritage Hall"! I walked inside. Before my eyes could adjust I could smell the stale beer, mingled with a gentle smell of sawdust and old, old, old hardwood. On a wood stool on a black painted wooden stage, sat Tabby Thomas, tugging gently fluid blues notes from a Fender Strat. (To be continued)

New Orleans and Baton Rouge (pt. II)

The guitarman on the stool, proprietor and owner of Tabby Thomas' Blues Heritage Hall declined my offer to play harmonica with him. He then proceeded to exhort at some length how you could only play blues if you'd been brought up a cotton picker, slaving long back bending hours in the hot Mississippi sun. Strolling over to the Juke Box he pointed to a signed photograph of Sonny Boy Williamson II (aka Rice Miller),.

"All these guys on these walls have played in this place."

It was an impressive statement. It was an impressive photo gallery. As the strains of Sonny Boy's "Help Me" percolated through the dust mottled air it occurred to me that it might be true. After all, it was also an impressive Juke Box, and I'm sure it got a lot of playing.

The phone behind the bar rang. Tabby Thomas reached over to answer it.

"Yes, Steve, I got you the drummer, yes the guy's fine, I've also got a t'wfic harmonica player just arrived in town from London. Yeah, the cats really good - like Harmonica Red."

Did he mean me? Surely not. Tabby Thomas hadn't even heard me play. Who was "Harmonica Red"?

"You'll like Steve, just come over from Spain. He's looking for Slim Harpo's grave to finish writing an article for "Living Blues" magazine. This new guy he's found though, needed a drummer. I told him you would like to play harmonica with him too. You can play, right?"

So there it was. A gig. Not just any gig, but a gig in a bona fide blues club in the deep, deep south, all lined up without an audition!

Imagine my surprise when Steve Coleridge turns out to be a bass playing tax evader from Sussex who moved to Spain to get away from the IRS, fell in with a gorgeous gypsy called Andrea (Andrea played a hollow body 1964 Gibson - I still have a tape somewhere of us both playing one of her songs) and then came to the States so they could be closer to the blues.

And what a gig! We played Slim Harpo. We played Jimmy Reed. Muddy Waters. Little Junior Parker and Bobby Blue Bland. We played some stuff I'd never heard before. But we played all blues and RnB (not one hip-hop song in the set). The band burned. After one and a half hours even I was thinking of a break. There was no break.

We played for four and a half hours straight until the lights came on.

Now it was pay time. When it was the turn of the "hot harmonica player from London", I received a whopping $7.50. Not much more than the $3.50 I'd made busking in New Orleans a few days before. Steve gave as much as he could to the musicians he'd discovered in Baton Rouge, many of whom had little means. What he gave me was what he gave himself.

I spent ten days in Baton Rouge, mostly at Steve and Andrea's place. We played every night. Either in the band I'd played in that first night, or Clarence Edward's group, or sometimes a zydeco band called "Short Fuse" fronted by Rudy Richard on accordian. One of Slim Harpo's lead guitarists, Rudy was a cheerful player who's only regret was that he'd received virtually no recognition as one of Slim Harppo's sidemen. On the few nights we didn't have a gig there was always an open blues jam somewhere in Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge (Exxon plant aside) was beautiful and lazy.

Most days I would get up around 11am, head down to the corner store, buy a 6 pack of Abita Amber Ale, half a pound of cheese, and a loaf of french bread, and head out to the Louisiana State University lake where I would catch 10, or more, channel catfish (on the cheese). We had catfish dinner every night. I found a great recipe on the back of a packet of cornmeal (marinate the catfish fillets in milk, vinegar, and baking soda, rub the fillets with mustard then coat with cornmeal mixed with chili powder and paprika. Pan fry until golden. Yummy!).

Baton Rouge was so lush, humid and fragrant. Here was the Spanish moss dripping from oak trees with branches that bowed down to the ground and then up again. Cyprus trees looming prehistorically out of the bayous, magic places charmed with lotus blossoms like perfect kisses. Okra flowers, vines, and fruits in abundance. And heat, heat, heat. The heat that drips you in the morning, burns you in the day and cloaks you at night. Heat and night noise! If you walked out to the woods at nihgt it was so loud it eclipsed the music coming from the club. Ululating amphibian, insect roar.

The Turning Point. This was a gig that Steve was very excited about. Used to be the place where Buddy Guy first made his mark as a Baton Rouge guitarist. We played their two nights with Clarence Edwards. The first night Mr. Edwards was Muddy Waters. I have never had such an eerie experience - suddenly feeling closer to Junior Wells and Little Walter as never before. We played on the red carpet of a bar no bigger than most folk's living room. The entire night I had goose bumps but there was no A/C. A Hells Angel couple in their 40's saw Steve and I hanging outside the club and pulled up on their Harley to inquire if there was a band playing. When they found out that it was a black neighbourhood they were somewhat hesitant. By the end of the night they were dancing with everyone else. The night finished with the four Neal brothers doing an a capella harmonica rendition of Jimmy Reed's "Honest I Do" (later that year Kenny Neal got signed with Alligator Records and released "Bayou Lightning" - in my mind a sadly, but typically, over produced soulless blues record that was thousands of miles from Baton Rough).

I've never come across a place that worshipped the blues quite as much as Baton Rouge. Jimmy Reed and Slim Harpo are revered in the music there every night. In ten days it won a place in my heart and a constant yearn to return. Bottom line, however, was that I was making very little money, spending more than I made, and I still had Memphis, St. Louis, and Kansas City to explore.

A year later, I did return though, and even toured with Steve's two bands for two weeks through Mississippi, Alabama, and even New Orleans (where I met Eric Burdon, a personal hero of mine, at The Maple Leaf club, but of course didn't realize until later). I never found out if Steve finally found Slim Harpo's grave. He went on to form a Record Label, produce several albums (e.g. Clarence Edward's, "Swamps The Word", and Short Fuses', "Sting It"), and play in virtually every blues club in the U.S.A before the Immigration Naturalization Service finally caught up with him, and tossed him out.

I would love to know where they both are.

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