The Message Column

Neil Young

Politics and Love

July 19, 2015
Champlain Valley Exposition
Essex, Vermont

In full view of Mt Mansfield at sunset with thunderstorms off in the distance, way off in the sky far behind the stage throughout the whole show . . . the band rocked.

Neil Young gives an awesome show! Neil can get preachy, but we expect it. He's so good at what he does noone seems to fret about his going on about Monsanto: the truth?

Mr. Young can get away with being political at a rock concert.

I heard at least one person pause with great respect and say 'good' after hearing how, at the show, Mr. Young gave the Governor of Vermont a check for $100,000.00 to be used for the purposes of litigation. Monsanto and Starbucks are suing the State of Vermont!

Neil says, "the people want to hear about love." Don't tell them, he tells us, about the problems of mega-corporations and about the Citizen's United decision which he says has destroyed politics. "The people want to hear about love."

Neil Young has sung about love for 40 years, among other topics. And also he sang some of those same songs later in the show, after the one that seemed to deride the idea of love songs. But he wasn't saying don't sing the love song. Because he sang them later in the show. And then . . . oh my gawd, it was amazing what happened next. It was like watching something that was CG. Four guitarists rocking the house down. Amazing. It was like they were performing an incantation of Rock-n-Roll love. The song was 'Down by the River'. Well, yes, that is about love. But love gone wrong. Neil and his band were absolutely amazing. I must say that was the most intense rock-n-roll jam that I have ever seen. It went on for about 45 minutes through three or four songs.

Meanwhile a giant thundercloud had burst over the mountains and flooded down torrents of rain which resulted in flash flooding in Barre, which is a short 30 or so miles from where we were. I know Vermont like the back of my hand, having been from there at times (it's a complicated love affair). And so those torrents of rain could have just as likely have happened in Essex where the show was. It was a fortunate thing for us at the show that the rain didn't become a delluge where we were. It's common in the Champlain Valley, to have summer delluges, sudden down pours, during the late day or early evening. You can see them across the sky from 50 to 100 miles away looming above some other part of the world.

From the venue at the Champlain Valley Exposition center there is a full view of Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain, and a very special place for me. It's a place of Spirit and a wonderful afternoon car ride adventure if you ever get to go there. Ya, Stow side is nice. But the hidden gem of it all (from my perspective) is the side that we can see from the fair grounds where Neil was playing. If you get the chance some day maybe you can scope it out for yourself. Look for Underhill State Park and try The Sunset Ridge Trail.

When Neil and his band were playing the jams, it was like a mosh pit for guitar players. They were all doing what could be considered their own lead. But the four different leads were all playing the same song, in the same key, maybe different parts, all at once, all knowing what the other might do, a range of possibilities, and playing off of each other. It was amazing. And also very atheletic. They were trashing around on and digging on each other, I am sure (though I was rather far back). The sound amazed everyone. It had such a high bass component in the grand stands that soime people had to move.

Champlain Valley Exposition was almost exactly as I remember. My uncle Donald (Donato) used to sell sausages at a window there and we would see him every year and he was always so awesome. He's been gone for a while. I thought about him. The window where he used to be is still the same. It's the same trees, the same walkway. All the same. Except the fair wasn't going on. And Neil Young was there, and playing.

Well, Neil, I'm glad you finally made it to Vermont. We all took you for granted because we just knew that it was better for you to not have constant adulation from us. But I learned from you about poetry by listening to your album On the Beach with the arm up on the LP record player so it would play repeatedly. My copy had a cut so you didn't get your full deal from it. Some say it was your best album ever. My view? The best I ever heard from you was just the other night. And Neil, you are only getting better!

And your band is awesome too. And we all thought it was the dad and not the son when Mr. Nelson came out. Wow.

Politics is tough at a fair. It's not a service, it's a performance of hard rock with edgey lyrics.

When the message is that people should be free, and that we ought to be able to know what our food is, that . . . that we have a right to know, for example, if there are things in the food to which we might have allergies, that is a message that we can handle? Can't we? Should we not know when products have had such a short existence as foodstuff that eating them is akin to being part of a medical experiment. And their long-term effects can not have possibly been thoroughly studied, and if they were it may have involved egregious animal cruelty, raise critters just to use them to test the product. When the product isn't safe, those creatures suffer. And so, thank you food sellers, some jurisdictions want labeling. How can that then be prohibited through litigation? The feelings of many is that the labels need to be there telling us what the food contains. If that is what the message is then it's good to hear it.

Politics? Free Speech? It's a rock show! Tell us what you think. If you seem to be carrying on then people just don't pay attention. We are there to hear the band and commune with each other. No one is wanting to buzz kill anyone by getting into heated political confrontations.

But Neil tells you this preachy crap (if you don't want to 'buy' into it, if you haven't discovered for yourself what foods you must avoid to stay healthy and who provides the various elements of that product to . . . let me just say it, though I am a little bit wary given the litigiousness of the vicious corpro-mobs . . . (some of the corpro mobs. Most corpro mobs are probably really nice people . . . one on one. a small joke) . . . bastardize the food and make it a long term health risk to continue eating that particular ingredient.

There not even saying what some of the most conspiracy minded might say , that it is . . .

I can't even say it because it's just repeating things that we will be sued if we say it here, even at my free site out in the wilds of the spinning Internet. I dare not name that particular ingredient that, I think, should be banned, like cyclimites were.

Thank You Neil for the awesome show. Even though some of your songs were preachy you rocked the night hard, and you enchanted your love prayers as a mosh hard-rock explosion of amazing guitar within the scheme of the music that you composed, and with the themes of the songs for which you penned the words . . . I can't explain it really.

Oh, and there was a fog machine with spot lights through it. It was like they were in a foggy place, the close spot lights shining open them from low, but on the stage with them. and hyper kinetic at the same time, really rocking their bodies with the music as they arpeggiated up and down the necks of their guitars, for real rock stars at a pinnacle moment of sound, song, message, audience, place, politics and love.

 Bop Bop and Woe.
 Santa Monica Says Hello.
 How many tracks
 of Bop Bop and Woe?

Bop Bop and woe
Bop Bop and woe
She's got tracks on her arms
just so's ya know.

Santa Monica
       sayyyysss
         Hello
         
California Flooding rain
rain and flood and peril
coming through on the 
      radio

Santa Monica
 in the rain
 
Bop Bop and woe
Bop Bop and woe
How many tracks
of Bop Bop and woe
Coming through
on the 
Radio.

Tourist Plate Graphics
Sitting on a stool
smooching a butt
playing flamingo guitar
for tips from tourists
who like to take something home
and posing for
tourist plate graphics
the tourists love them
they eat them up
they think that they are great
tourist plate graphics
Somewhere in tourist Spain
1956
Sitting on a stool
Smooching on a 
        cigarette
The miasma of the smoke 
drifting in the room
playing inspired bolleros
and making the tourists dance
tourist plate graphics
sitting on a stool

the above two songs are not exact transcriptions of the lyrics of my two new songs, Bop Bop and Woe and 1955 Tourist Plate Graphics Smooching a Butt Sitting on a Stool

If I stop being chicken I might actually post some of it here. It's a multi channel bop. I riff for about 60 or just a little more seconds and then record multiple tracks atop that until I might have 12 or 15 tracks. The song develops and then, at the end of it, I might be able to craft a longer song, or as many 'verses' as there are overlays. So a 12 track over lay might take 12 minutes of voice to record, quick as it could be.

But then, within the song, I might have a part where I want to make a particular chordal empahsis. I can set the record to start at the beginning of that and lay down a pletera of short few second tracks. At the mix down it can sound cool.

It's not a very traditional sound. At times it sounds a little bit . . . like some kind of athum from futball (soccor?sp). Othertimes it sounds really cool. So the mix down is the important part. So twelve mintues of recording might require some effort to craft a song out of it, cutting out the cruft and crafting ambient tracks utilizing chorus and echo effects. Using these effects it is easy to make tracks that will augment the original vocals. So one techinque, with which I have had success, is to make the back ground with a series of delays, and then mixed to gether, and then passed through a reverb. First I mix down all the tracks. Next I duplicate this at least twice. On the duplicates I put delays. On is usually tuned to the root of the key. it will be a C delay if the key were C. Next I do one for the 5 of the key. So in the key of C it would be a G. I have a chart of subtones that I used to determine these periods. Then, after all of that,I pass it through the reverb or chorus. Next I make multiple of that (the original voices will almost just be voices like you are at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia where you here everyone but can understand no one. I make multiple of this super reverb track. From that I do frequencing shifting to the various steps in the scale. Next I make custom mixes of that. From that I make a final 'ambient' mix by, perhaps, utilizing the envelope feature on a track (I have not done that with a vocal track yet, it is a little bit time consuming. ). Next I can output as many versions as there are tracks., mixing each on top.

I like my wav files to be normalized so that there isn't digital noise. That can really kill the effect.

There is all kinds of fun stuff to do with wave files. The important thing I need to do now is to select some tracks and perfect them for release. And as I have said previously, I'm a little bit chicken

hover above images for a modification effect.

Lake Champlain, Champlain Valley, Mallets Bay

Ah, Mallets Bay and the Laimoille River, Oh, how awesome Grand Isle and South Hero. What a wonderful and fun ferry ride from Grand Isle to Port Kent. It's a short passage, back and forth, and you can take it just for the fun of it without your vehichle. Yes, it is definitly a vacationers destination.

I've written a few pieces about that part of the world. One of htem is a tribute to Michael Hastings which I call The Bardo of Macon Hasty. It's obviously not about Hastings at all because I never knew the man. I am sure that I did see him, for real, once, on the street in Burlington, Church Street. Maybe he was on his tour to do the thing at Borders Books thta used to be on that block. If you know Burlington then you probably know Church Street (if not you are living in a cave)

I wrote another piece about a guy whose staying at his house and motorcycle riding dude, a kind of anti-hero, shows up and takes over for a while. I wrote a piece called 'Deep Water' about a family who had a secret and if I tell you it I kind of ruin the story. I wrote a novel called . . . Not Out with Jack where there is a guy who has friends who have a summer home at the head of the South Hero where there is a breakwater that goes all the way to Burlington (breakwater?). It is a buetiful spot.

I was surprised while reading Wallace Stegner that he also lived in the Lamoille River Valley (which is part of the much larger Champlain Valley, which is a rift valley of grand proportions.

There used to be a haunted house on Clay Point Road. The story was of the St Michaels coed and a mysterious stranger . . . I'm making this up. But in any case there was a haunted house on Clay Point Road. At least it always seemed like it should be. It is still there, but I think that they gave it a good ghost chase. Ya, it is supersitious to believe in ghosts, and it's not a good idea to either. But as for that house . . . it really made you want to believe in ghosts because it was always so totally spooky. Someone bought it and cleared away all the brush and put windows back in it, to try and save it for habitation. It was an old, what I think was called garrison style because it was built like it could be used in a firefight, all brick, pre civil war I believe.

My friend who grew up in Michegan in the 1950's and 60's told me that when he was a young adult in college that the people he hung with knew of an old abandoned house way out somewhere where no one knew about it. They would go there and take LSD is the story my friend told me. Such places are unsafe, and one might end up falling through a floor.

Why do houses get abandoned? How long before they become run down and death traps for curious kids? Maybe that is why we get told that they are haunted. Or maybe they really are and the spirits speak to us and tell us a story. At least a whole lot of stories start pouring out of me when I recollect all of those old houses.

In Natick, along East Central Street, there used to be a house which was on a knoll. We never actually went in it, but we lingered by it a bunch of times. We imagined, with our second grade imaginations, that it was someone crazy back from the Civil War who never regained his sanity adn his life fell into ruin, and thus the house was a simbol of that. I remember my friend telling me he'd already gone in, and that I should too, but I told him no. I never went in, in my memory of it. Or if I did it was only once and it was a quick time in there.

When I was a kid my dad would stop at new construction and walk around and scope out the construction. He would let me run around in side the houses that were still in the first stages of being built, no sheet rock but all the walls in place, and the floors. You could be on the second floor and there would be no walls so you could see everything around you. It's not a good idea to let kids do this, is my guess. And a builder probably wouldn't appreciated it if someone did it now.

editing takes time.

🖐♥♥Love♥♥🖑
♥♥🖑Cops🖐♥♥


      🖐♥♥Jesus♥♥🖑
     🖐♥♥ is the♥♥🖑
🖐♥♥ life and the ♥♥🖑
♥♥🖑🖐Resurrection!♥♥🖑🖐

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     oh those
     
     
spin me a yarn neon
spin me a yarn neon

   write the letters all in different colors
   
 Done That!
 
 
 

 Bop Bop and Woe.
 Santa Monica Says Hello.
 How many tracks
 of Bop Bop and Woe?

 Hey boys? 
 Is this just noise?
 I know
 that you're annoyed.
 
 And they spin as well, spin me a yarn!
 
 

sitting on a stool
smooching a butt
playing flamingco guitar
at the tourists bar
posing for an artist
playing virtuouso guitar
tourist plate graphics
Spain, 1956
The tourist
like to bring something home
to remember the trip.
Smooching on a butt
sitting on a stool
posing for an artist
who's making ceremic plates
to sell to the tourists.

In Wicked Need of an Edit

🚛 🎓 🎔 🌀

Political and Media Inanity

Bill didn't like that I put his 'story' up. Bill: get overyourself. Stop being scared. Say what you mean. Why all of this bracketized cowardice?

And he's got all kinds of new music to share but he's too chicken to put it up. Grow a pair, bill. Let the public hear your music!

Truck-u-later

OK, enough of this.

July 22, 2015

We sure do need a billion dollar idea.

. . . well . . . 
     Truck-you-later!


Praise the Lord for his unfailing love!

  Praise
   the
   Lord
  for his
 unfailing
   love!

  Praise
   the
   Lord
  for his
 unfailing
   love!

  Praise
   the
   Lord
  for his
 unfailing
   love!

  Praise
   the
   Lord
  for his
 unfailing
   love!

  well, nothing more here today.