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Blow the rust outta yer pipes. Last week, Lee Aaron. This week, Thunder. Too bad the rest of the album wasn’t so dynamite.
Drummer Gary Harry James, or was it Harry Gary James, steals the show.
The “na na na’s” do it every time in a rock song.
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Blows the rust out of your pipes. Rawk.
You didn’t wanna be listening too much to the Hank oaf and the clogged ol’ man singing his wishes for a new Confederacy, anyway.
At the beginning of the week Hank Williams, Jr. promised a “new” tune as payback for the Fox & Friends imbroglio in which he compared the president to Hitler. Two times.
This precipitated the loss of his big money gig as theme song provider to ESPN’s Monday Night Football. (To see the look on the man’s agent as it happened: Priceless.)
The entertainment press jumped all over the press release announcing Hank’s new song and now you can hear it in the YouTube stream above.
‘Cept it’s not a new song.
Hank unfurled his mediocre country-ish hard rock tune, Keep the Change ‘– an obvious play on the Obama administration, in 2009.
And it’s been flogged on YouTube ever since.
Rewritten only slightly to mention Fox & Friends — it was all about hating on the President (lyric: “we know who to blame”) and how we’re in the United Socialist States of America.
“I’ll keep my Christian name,” Hank sang in 2009. And that’s carried over.
Yep, we’ve all been in danger of losing our Christian names since the Muslim took over in the White House. Any day now I expect to get a card in the mail saying my new designation is Dick Muammar Destiny al Pasadena.
Here’s Hank, from 2009, singing the same song for the drumming up of love from the Tea Party:
The Tea Party generated (and generates) a lot of music.
The stuff for Ron Paul protesting fiat money and the Fed is enough to make you run screaming from the room.
And YouTube arrays much of the most popular material in the genre down the right side of the page for Hank Jr’s live performance of Keep the Change.
Many of these tunes were discussed last year here.
So it’s not really a coincidence (occasionally the computer algorithms are spot on) that the next video flashing up right next to Hank Jr’s is this:
As painfully stupid and bigoted as it is, Tea Party music is very successful. It is passed around, linked to, played repeatedly and serves as rallying cry/expression of defiance/social glue for its audience. It is brimming with conviction.
There’s no corollary on the other side of the line.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would have perished due to neglect if they’d found themselves catapulted into 2009 and forced to compete for matching Democratic or progressive attention.
Hank Jr’s Keep the Change is not the only Tea Party tune with the same title and subject.
Country artist Darryl Worley tried for publicity using the same method last year.
It won’t come as a shock to anyone that lots of country music artists and their fans don’t like the president …
However, the country charts have largely shied away from this type of inflammation if we don’t include the short period after 9/11 when it granted a dispensation for those who liked the idea of getting our war on. (Chuck, you can correct me if I’m way off.)
These days there’s no political challenge in Country Music TV’s Top Twenty. And while any analysis of the country audience would come away with the idea that a profoundly anti-Obama song might move significant units, no one with a big reputation has tried to test it.
Until now.
Darryl Worley’s “Keep the Change??? is just such a song, one the singer obviously hopes will set his career on fire. For those unfamiliar with him, Worley’s highest-charting number, the jingo and manipulative “Have You Forgotten,??? benefited from the brief country music get-out-of-jail-free card given out after 9/11 to all redneck boors with hearts of gold …
[Worley] rather calculatingly seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that if “Keep the Change??? … sells enough to white and worked up rural people who buy it because it massages their fear and loathing, country music [would] eventually be forced to play it …
For a Kalamazoo newspaper, Worley — it is told — “[is] concerned about the state of the nation and the overall emotional well-being of its people.??? And that the song “transcends political ties??? — which must surely be one of the biggest crocks you’ll read today.
“We (co-writers Jim ‘Moose’ Brown and Phil O’Donnell) pick song titles because we know they’ll stir up a stink,??? Worley told the newspaper.
It was a strategy that did not work.
Hank Jr’s repackaging of his Keep the Change is obviously a transparent attempt to monetize an epic career embarrassment on Fox.
But even Hank can’t be so stupid that he would think it could make even a few thin dimes against the pile the Monday Night Football song raked in.
Putting Ted Nugent to good use.
Boogie stomp with lyrics derived from the casual cruelty and idiot beliefs characteristic of the GOP we-want-blood crowds at the debates.
Riffs inspired/based on “Leland, Mississippi” (from Johnny Winter’s debut LP) and “I Ain’t Superstitious.”
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Unintentional hilarity, from the wire:
Arnold Schwarzenegger is writing a memoir for release in October 2012, according to a statement from Simon & Schuster. Tentatively titled Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, the book will discuss the breakup of his marriage to Maria Shriver in addition to his youth in Austria and his work in bodybuilding, film, and politics. A source told PEOPLE that the book will “not be a tell-all.???
Of course, to really spice the promotion, a record company should immediately release the two Dick Destiny tunes devoted to Arnold’s hobby of bonking and pawing unfortunate women he’s not married to.
Quite unique, they’re the only rock songs, ever, documenting this celebrity sleaze sex action with various famous Arnold movie bon mots .
This is a good rock song and you know it.
“I vould like to vurk you out! Your ass feels to me very stout!??? — From “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich”
[The song] is taken from a description in the The Times of an alleged movie set incident in which Schwarzenegger and his stand-in trapped [a stand-in named Carla] next to a food service table. Schwarzenegger supposedly said: ‘I think we should make a Carla sandwich,’ and the men squeezed her between them. After they released [the woman] … Schwarzenegger stuck his tongue in her mouth.???
In the old days — like mebbe forty years ago — Chuck Eddy would write something amusing as a small bit for the next issue of Creem magazine.
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Back on Made-In-China Day at Guitar Center, DD’s colleague — a drummer who does not play guitar dropped an eye-popping 900 bucks for a Roland KC-550 keyboard amp and a Chinese-manufactured Classic Vibe Fender Telecaster.
He’d been sold on the guitar by a friend, and despite my advice, bought the Roland as an all-purpose amp. Not understanding guitars, the salesperson didn’t correct him, he bought an amp unsuitable for rock guitar.
However, the KC-550 is a powerful amp with absolutely no tonal opinion, much like having a small PA system run off a mixing desk.
So I told him I’d fix the mistake by bringing in some outboard gear I no longer use, namely an old Line6 PodXT, a digital guitar computer/simulator that mimics famous brand name analog amplifiers for studio work.
In a pinch, the desk model will work fine for live performance.
Plugged into one of the KC-550’s channels, one sets the POD exactly as you would for the studio.
I picked a couple of its amp sims, an old Marshall JTM-45 and a Hiwatt 100, for a test run.
Plugged in the Telecaster and did a quick 30 minute rehearsal of DD tunes with him at the drums.
The combination was loud, had good rock and roll dynamic explosion, and, courtesy of the Roland’s huge bass speaker, great low end.
I know loud.
My rig is the same as it was in 1985. A Hiwatt Custom 50 and some pedals on the front end for delay, chorus, rotary speaker effects and so on.
The Telecaster/Line6 POD XT/Roland KC-550 isn’t the same as my stuff into the old Hiwatt. But it would be close enough for quite a few people at small to medium gigs.
Limitations? Not a lot. The high end coming out of the Roland sounds good. But I could tell it would wear out the ears in a way the Hiwatt with its analog tube tone doesn’t.
And the Roland, which is simply amplifying the computer simulation of a Hiwatt or a Marshall from the Line6, isn’t as molten, as everywhere in the room, or as late-Seventies hammer down vintage hard rock.
These are relatively picky issues from my perspective, often not worth worrying about if what have in your hands translates to noise coming out the a big speaker in a way that makes the air move rock and rollingly.
In its favor, it’s a rig that theoretically will sound the same whenever you turn it on. That’s unlike my Hiwatt and things, which always requires a daily set-up, sometimes brief, sometimes maddeningly longer.
Then there’s the entire made-in-China thing. There I was, playing a Chinese made Fender, the kind they made in a huge factory that no longer exists here, when I was a kid.
I could get started. The USA-made Fender, four to five times the cost
of the “Classic Vibe” from China. The former instruments, of course, sold at prices the young adult employees peddling them cannot really afford on a weekly wage unless still living with mom and dad.
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Some on the right have tried to link the US government’s raids on Gibson Guitars to a sinister Democratic/Obama administration plan to destroy jobs.
Gibson’s CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, has hitched his horse to the hare-brained conspiracy thinking for the sake of publicity.
They are among the most sought-after musical instruments in the world. Everyone from Chet Atkins to Les Paul to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin to Slash of Guns n’ Roses played them. A vintage 1959 Les Paul guitar can go for as much as $400,000. Almost every kid who has dreams of music stardom wants a Gibson guitars.
Gibson is also a company that is proud to put the “Made in the USA??? label on its instruments. While the company has lower-end lines that are made overseas, every guitar that bears the “Gibson??? label is made in the U.S. by American workers …
Outside observers see a more sinister possibility in all of this. Henry Juszkiewicz, Gibson’s CEO, is a Republican, who has contributed to Republican candidates (as well as some Democratic candidates). Other guitar companies, which have not been targeted, are led by Democrats. Is there a political motivation to all of this? Neither Mitchell, nor Juszkiewicz will offer an opinion, but consider what Juszkiewicz told Neil Cavuto on “Your World.”
“You know we’ve been pretty low key. We’re a guitar company. We’ve been manufacturing guitars. We’ve been involved in the environmental movement. We’ve been trying to do the right thing in terms of sourcing. We really don’t know why they are picking on us.???
The government is picking on Gibson because it appears to have been importing banned wood, something other guitar makers in the US refrained from. And that is explained here.
And Gibson, like many other musical instrument manufacturers, employs more people in China than it does domestically. It’s American-made business is for the wealthy as any day trip to a local Guitar Center will quickly demonstrate.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn gets it wrong again (“Gibson Guitar CEO joins jobs talk fray,??? Sept. 8). The investigation into Gibson Guitars illegally importing protected wood was started before November 2009.
The Lacey Act of 1900 was amended in May 2008 to add more protection to many commodities. The amendments were included in the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 passed by the House and Senate and vetoed by President Bush. A month later, Congress overrode the veto by a bipartisan vote of 317-109 in the House and 80-14 in the Senate.
The recent raid probably was to determine if Gibson had kept its word from the raids of November 2009 to stop using illegally harvested wood. This adds to a troubled past including IRS tax liens and charges of price fixing.
Everyone hopes that Gibson will survive this latest problem.
Laughably, Juszkiewicz has said the US government is engaged in “class warfare” in pursuing its investigation.
Please save my Gibson guitar from the tyrannical hands of the US guv’mint!
Passing article on the web on the best countries for vices.
Moldova is first in the world for power drinking, closely followed by old eastern Euro nations and other places formerly in the Soviet Union:
According to [a] WHO report, the country topping the list for annual alcohol consumption per person is Moldova. The average Moldavian consumes 18.22 liters of alcohol annually, almost three times more than the global average of 6.1 liters. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe and a major wine producer. Many of its people drink cheap homemade wine, vodka and other spirits.
The English and the Germans have some work to do if they wish to burnish their reps as paralytics drinkers. It may also help to have a smaller population so that any percentage of the folks that don’t get into the spirit of the thing don’t dilute the rankings.
And DD has a tune for this.
Walkin’ for Bumwine in Pasadena
Sadly, the US is no competition. I’d assume because there’s too much fundamentalist Christian religion embedded in half the country. Teetotal is the way to be when damning everyone else while you’re in service to Jesus and Mammon.
Now — gluttony — that’s where we’ve got it going. Second only to Mexico, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development:
The U.S. (68%) is ranked second behind Mexico (70%) in the proportion of adults who are overweight …
As for highest rate of fatness in the completely developed western world? We own that.
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Over the Labor Day weekend, Guitar Centers nationwide had a sale.
Naturally, DD went to the store in Pasadena.
What was being sold, tried out and handled — I was there on Saturday and Monday — were guitars, all made in China.
They were the only ones the customers, middle class youngsters, could afford.
The Second Great Depression Great Recession destroyed the buying power at the heart of the company’s customer base. The result has been a struggle to squeeze even lower prices from American-branded Chinese manufacturing.
On Saturday and Monday the store featured 99 dollar (99!) Epiphone SG Juniors, the lowest price possible Gibson-brand guitar made in China Indonesia. (Same difference. — ed)
I played one. It was solid, looked very nice, and it was so light it almost wasn’t there. Compared to my old ’79 made-in-Michigan Gibson SG, it seemed to weigh about as much as a paper plate holding a big cheeseburger. (I went back a week later. The tone knob was broken on it. The pseudo-slave labor instruments get played a lot by the daily store riffraff, but still …)
About five yards away was a $79 (!) Fender Squier (made in China) Stratocaster.
The depression in prices to match smashed and amputated incomes was eye-opening. Most used made in China guitars sold two years ago, now in pawn shops in Pasadena, actually cost more.
While business seemed to be fair — squeezing ever more out of the charge card and hoping things will turn better in a few months — the sale and the instrumentation were a good metaphor for the ruins of the US economy. The profit margins must now be terrible.
Gibson and Fender employ more people in China than they do in the US. And this surely seemed like a great idea during the last decade.
Now it looks like a growing pile of ashes. Unless, of course, you work in the Gibson and Fender custom shops making guitars for the wealthy end.
“The economy cannot possibly get out of its current doldrums without a strategy to revive the purchasing power of America’s vast middle class,” wrote former Labor Sec’y Robert Reich in the NY Times on Sunday.
The Reich column described what looked to me like an insoluble problem for the US. It de-industrialized and destroyed the idea that American workers deserve reasonable wages and that such things are good And it did it relentlessly over the course of decades.
Coming back from Guitar Center on the Saturday trip afforded an opportunity to chat even more about the vast amount of Chinese made merchandise.
My colleague, another musician, blurted out something I occasionally read and hear from those who run small businesses that have failed, or those who believe crap they’ve read from Tom Friedman, or those idiot libertarians stuffed full of Ayn Rand.
America, he said, should “only make the best things in the world!”
That was how we might fix things.
I immediately replied that this was Gibson and Fender’s philosophy — that they would only make premium goods for the wealthy. And that it had resulted in a relentless net loss of jobs, as it has throughout the economy with every other company that has practiced it.
I said that it was delusional to think a country of over 312 million people could get away with being the Swiss chocolatiers to the world.
For example, the Chinese multitudes do not have to make things better than everyone else. Far from it. They don’t need special education, or pricey degrees, or even know how to figure out enzyme kinetics or do linear algebra. They just do it cheaper because the rent’s so low.
And looking at the vast sea of US countrymen, it’s uncool, mean and exceedingly stupid to believe that they should only be allowed to succeed if they make “the very best things in the world.”
Americans used to make lots of things. And they weren’t always the best made. The Sherman tank, for example, was far from the best armored fighting vehicle in the world in WW II.
The Germans made the best armored fighting vehicles. That went well.
Making things is a living. It ought to be a good living for many and not tied to only those who can be artisans.
Coincidentally, last week news broke that the federal government had raided Gibson’s manufacturing facilities in Nashville and Memphis.
The company has been in trouble with the Feds since 2009 when it imported ebony from a corrupt regime in Madagascar.
National Public Radio explained it this way:
Andrea Johnson, director of forest programs for the Environmental Investigation Agency in Washington, says the Lacey Act requires end users of endangered wood to certify the legality of their supply chain all the way to the trees. EIA’s independent investigations have concluded that Gibson knowingly imported tainted wood.
“Gibson clearly understood the risks involved,” says Johnson. “Was on the ground in Madagascar getting a tour to understand whether they could possibly source [legally] from that country. And made a decision in the end that they were going to source despite knowing that there was a ban on exports of ebony and rosewood.”
Gibson uses ebony fingerboards on their premium Les Pauls, among other guitars.
Other guitar manufacturers stayed away from Madagascar.
One, the Martin Guitar Company of Nazareth, PA, in the Lehigh Valley, had its chairman put it this way:
“There was a coup … What we heard was the international community has come to the conclusion that the coup created an illegitimate government. That’s when we said, ‘Okay, we can not buy any more of this wood.'”
The company supports the ban on Malagasy ebony.
The most recent raid on Gibson concerned rosewood from India. And it now seems certain the US government will eventually file criminal charges against Gibson.
The raids had Gibson’s CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, in a fit. He said:
“We believe the arrogance of federal power is impacting me personally, our company personally and the employees here in Tennessee, and it’s just plain wrong.???
It was said Gibson was using social media to tap into “right wing anger with the federal government.”
Which is a fairly idiotic statement. Guitarists don’t have a lobby, let alone a right-wing Tea Party-like one ready to take the issue and run with it as another example of why we ought to hate that socialist from Kenya, Barack Obama.
Yeah, complain on Twitter the government is abusing your business after getting on the radar for importing banned precious wood from a Madagascar black market. Tweeting Twitterers to the rescue.
Keep in mind your host plays Gibson guitars.
Through the previous week a couple news stories tried to play up fear that the Feds might come for your old instruments if you didn’t have the paperwork in order, paperwork showing time of purchase prior to when things got sticky with bans on protected special woods.
DD wasn’t feeling the fear. And as far as I could tell, none were in GC on Saturday and Monday.
However, there is one small demographic that stands to lose money in the matter when and if the federal government occasionally seizes instruments with protected wood when they come through customs.
It’s those who trade in vintage instruments, selling very high priced pieces to the mega-rich around the globe.
From National Public Radio, one reads:
Nashville’s George Gruhn is one of the world’s top dealers of old guitars, banjos and other rare stringed instruments. “It’s a nightmare,” he says. “I can’t help it if they used Brazilian rosewood on almost every guitar made prior to 1970. I’m not contributing to cutting down Brazilian rosewood today.”
Gruhn acknowledges that the government has tried to create exemptions to cover vintage instruments. But he says they are rife with delays and to play it safe he’s nearly eliminated the 40% of his business that used to deal with overseas buyers.
Today’s example … men who hoard late-Fifties/early Sixties Gibson Les Paul Standard guitars painted in sunburst finishes.
An example of the ridiculous prices the instrument fetches is here at Gruhn Guitars, run by reseller/guitar collector/speculator, George Gruhn. If you read guitar magazines regularly you know Gruhn owns 98 or maybe even 110 percent of all the guitars worth having in the world. No one is allowed to say anything about the worth of electric guitars without first checking if it’s all right to do so with Gruhn …
In case you didn’t click through the link, the guitar on display at George Gruhn’s costs a good deal more than your house.
For you to accept the idea of used guitars which sell for a quarter-of-a-million dollars, you have to buy into all the conceits trotted out about them for the last thirty years. As conceits handed down for decades and pounded into the bedrock of electric guitar lore, they’ve created a warped reality.
In other words, “We said nonsense, but it was important nonsense.”
Now, if you’re a foreign buyer of a quarter million dollar Les Paul, you might be concerned if there was even a remote chance of it being seized by customs. Particularly since no insurer will cover the loss if the trafficking is a potential criminal matter.
Just off the cuff I’d imagine there’s little sympathy or much of a political lobby for the dealers in vintage guitars industry.
So they may be stuck by this attention to proscribed woods. But it’s no big loss to the middle class economy.
But it’s another example why the idea of rewarding only those businesses which can be the American chocolatiers to the world basically blows.
What will happen to Gibson? I don’t know. But I doubt it will put them out of business.
A criminal prosecution might cause the firm to purge some top management. Which probably wouldn’t hurt because it’s not that innovative or spectacularly run (traits it shares with the other American guitar manufacturers.)
Mine. Contraband? I doubt it.
870 views/listens as of this post. Which isn’t bad for relatively no publicity and the subject matter. So thanks if you gave it a listen!
One DD colleague commented that he didn’t attribute our economic and national fail to just one person.
Neither do I.
But so far I’ve found it impossible to fit everyone deserving mention into something between 2:30 and 3 minutes long. And make it catchy and amusing enough to get a laugh from those who still have a sense of humor.
And I get a kick out of “Lloyd Blankfein,” as a rock ‘n’ roll song with a lot less voltage, being better than Ted Nugent’s “I Still Believe.”
In Anaheim earlier this summer.
Glorified heavy metal bar band.
Ted’s big song on his faith in the USA, the title of his tour, and this is a
lyric sample: “I’m so [f——‘] alive; I’m so in love with this…
That’s it, along with “I believe in America”? It’s to laugh. He doesn’t even know he’s phoned it in.
“Sing that motherfucker!” Ted yells. The crowd doesn’t. Someone from the bar, in silhouette, hoists a drink to teetotal Ted. At least he still looks like he’s having a lot of fun. Mostly.
Next up — “Motor City Madhouse” — four and change decades old.
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