Mr. and Mrs. Fehrenbach

Now it can be told. My daughter Michelle and Lance Corporal Eddie who you all last saw are married.  They were very sneaky about it.  We found out Thankgiving day but have kept it quiet because they wanted to surprise Eddie’s parents back in Oklahoma personally.  Well those Okies and Texans are just as ecstatic  about the news as we were and have welcomed my little girl with open arms .  Alot of you that visit here wished them well the last time I wrote about them. We are very happy and proud and now that the cat is fully out of the bag I feel like dancing.

Why???!!! Oh why did I ever invent that damned internet???!!!

Obama was wrong. This is the moment the rising of the seas will begin to slow and our planet will begin to heal.

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth  has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka  CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. 

My niece Megan lives to ride.  Here is how she and some of her friends spent Halloween afternoon yesterday.

My friend Lisa from Castaic sent me some photos of last night’s Zombie Happening  down there. Up here in Clovis we are still safe, the only zombies sighted were all staggering around the intersections and crosswalks promoting a Halloween Megastore over by the mall. I drove another block and spied a lone zombie limping across the intersection. This guy was older than the others and his clothes were clean and pressed. No blood or gore anywhere but I gave him extra bonus points for the withered arm.

Blue Öyster Cult for Baptists

Marty Stuart is a thoughtful, driven man. Make no mistake he has talent down to the bone, but he knows talent will only get you so far and Marty Stuart wants everything. He wants your soul baby.

Driven? Consider the year 1970 and an 11 year old Marty asking his mom to buy him a bright yellow shirt for the Choctaw Fair. Why you ask? Well it seems Connie Smith (29 years old and married at the time) is performing there and he wants to make sure she notices him. The young man is not only smitten, he has a plan. In the car on the way home from the Fair, he tells his mother “I’m going to marry Connie Smith one day.” It took him 27 years, but that’s exactly what he did. 

Being a thoughtful man, Mr. Stuart concedes that even Jesus needed helpers so he has assembled an elite band of Nashville heartbreakers and life takers to assist him in spreading the Hillbilly Hoodoo Gospel. Seperately they are; “Cousin Kenny” Vaughn on guitars, “Handsome Harry Stinson” on drums and “The apostle Paul” Martin on Fender Precision Bass. Together they are The Fabulous Superlatives.

Mr. Stuart takes into account the importance of iconography and ritual as a means of fascilitating worship and here he casts a broad net. The very first item placed on the stage is nothing less than Clarence White’s fabled Telecaster. Just standing there dead silent in the middle of the stage, it calls the faithfull in like a bell. Later, Mr. Stuart will also haul out Bill Monroe’s old Gibson Mandolin and flail away on it lake it was a $300 made-in-Korea replica. There is power in the old wood.

 Obviously well versed in the study of physics and human anatomy, he knows exactly the…tenderizing effect two Telecasters and three Twin Reverb amplifiers can impart on your heart and other internal organs. And last Saturday night up in Golden Gate park we got tenderized good.  Marty and his Fabulous Superlatives took the stage and straight away went into “Branded” followed immediately by a twangy instumental. Marty proweld the stage looking intenely into the eyes of the audience.  I could almost hear him thinking “are they ready yet?” Almost probably. The band mugged it up in the finest Southern Gospel tradition, but there was something else going on here, someting daker and heavier. Then it hit me, these guys dressed all in black are like Blue Öyster Cult for Baptists.

As “La Tingo Tango” reached it’s reverb drenched conclusion Marty stepped into the pulpit and good naturedly demanded “Everbody say Howdy!” We respond as one with our best Minnie Pearl how-deeeeeeeeeeeeee! Marty bows with a flourish, yeah we were ready.

On your feet or on your knees pilgrims!

“Got a sound in your head? Play it with heart, and it’ll come out of your hands. Hear it? Play it. The only thing stopping you is you.”

Howard Roberts

Tommy Tedesco and Hal Blaine

“I learned a long time ago, you can always tell a Texan – but not very much.”

Hal Blaine

Used to be celebreties died in groups of threes, or so was commonly held. A movie star dies, then another and people would get all concerned and start wondering “Who’s next?” “Oh I hope it’s not so-and-so” Or “It’ll probably be you-know-who, he’s got the cancer.” Sure enough within a week or so there went another.

It was all great fun. The magazines loved it and sometimes they even printed up special editions that my Mom would buy because they would be collectable one day “You just wait and see.”  She still has some of them and no doubt my sister will inherit them along with all those Jesus plates.

This year all of a sudden, It seems like the pace has accelerated and more disturbingly, it’s people that I have emotionally vested interests in that are passing on. Part of  it has to be my…advancing age, but I think it also has something to do with Andy Warhol’s vision of everybody’s fifteen minutes of fame. That train done came and now it’s starting to chug it’s way out of the station.  

I remember my dad and his morning paper. First place he’d go was the obituaries. ”Well I’ll be damned, Milton Weaver died.” My mom would come over and look at the paper and she’d notice that somebody like Marty Robbins had passed away and they’d talk about Marty and then they’d talk about Milton. This was back in the ’80s, I’m about that age now.

I was over at their place this past weekend. I grabbed the paper out in their driveway and took it inside for them. They get up alot later nowadays. I put the paper on their kitchen table and talked to my dad over Fox News while my mom made us some coffee.  She served coffee at the table and my dad snagged the paper and went straight for the sports pages. “Well I’ll be damned the Giants won.”

I was shocked. “Dad, what happened to the obituaries?”

“What?”

“I SAID WHAT ABOUT THE OBI-TU-ARIES? HOW COME YOU ARE NOT READING THEM?”

“OH…I don’t know. I think just about everybody has died.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I hate the French, or at least I like to think that I do. And Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin are a prototype of the type of celebrity I usually detest, but I can’t help myself, I’m fascinated.  

Poor old Serge was a wreck when he first met Jane Birkin on the set of the film Slogan. Recently dumped by Brigitte Bardot, he was as Waylon Jennings would say, lonesome ornery and mean and reportedly gave his young costar a pretty hard time. Drove her to tears even.  

Looking at pictures and video clips from that time it’s hard to believe Jane was a soon-to-be divorced mother.  No, I’d rather believe Jane was a wide eyed, beautiful British innocent who showed a bit of kindness to kinky old Serge, who then corrupted and exploited her.  I’d like to think that but I don’t. Whatever happened, the pair went on to scandalize Europe and kept censors on both sides of the channel hopping for the next ten years.  

Their legacy in music, film and pop culture is undeniable.  Not long after after Serge’s death in 1991, there was a brief eclectic Lounge/Ambient/Eelectronica movement that mined their music deeply. You can still hear Serge’s influence today in groups like Dengue Fever.  Watch Polanski’s Bitter Moon or Lost In Translation, they’re in there.

Madonna, Britney?  Please.  Serge and Jane were there and did that 40 years ago.