I keep forgetting to mention this: two weeks from tonight, Friday November 10th, I’ll be on a radio show on the local community radio station, KKFI, 90.1 on the dial. It’s a two-hour show devoted to the music of Howard Iceberg, whom I have worked with in one capacity or another for almost 20 years. It will air from 9 to 11 pm, alternating recorded material with live performances by three sets of players. I will play drums or percussion, whatever is quiet enough, with all three groups.

Besides Howard, it will be Gary Paredes (of Mike Ireland and Holler, and the Rockhills) and Doug Osburn (of the Rockhills). Gary and Doug have also been in Howard’s live act for several years, and Gary goes back at least as far with Howard as I do.

Chad Rex (of the Victorstands, among others) and Brendan Moreland (Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys) will also play a set of three songs. The final live set will group Mike Ireland with Howard and me.

There will also be a film crew there. Hopefully you won’t hear them. Anyway, it should be a fun night, and if you’re not familiar with Howard and his music, this might be a good chance to check him out.

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Nothing eats up as much time as a project that you thought was more or less finished.

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I just mention this because the image has stuck with me for the last month since it happened: we were playing a slow song, the floor was full of couples—the technical term for this kind of song is a “buckle polisher.” Everyone was snuggling, kissing, whispering in the other’s ear as they danced. I noticed a young woman, swaying with her arms wrapped over her man’s shoulders. Talking on her cell phone. Reach out and touch someone, indeed.

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It’s always nice, when you’re struggling to write about something, to find someone who has already said it better. Thank you, Robyn Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times Online.

“E Pluribus Unum be damned. Here's America's new motto: If we can't pronounce your name, we don't care what happens to you.”

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Last night, for the fourth year in a row, our band played at the American Royal Barbecue Contest. It is claimed that this is the largest barbecue contest in the world—if there’s a bigger one, I don’t want to see it (here is a PDF of the booth layout for the annual contest; each of those little green rectangles is a tent. I swear about one in four has a live band).

Playing—or for that matter, attending—this event is an exercise in sensory overload. There are live bands literally every couple hundred feet, and most of the tents or booths without a band have a DJ or at least a sound system blasting some kind of music. I realized how loud it was, before we were even set up, when I saw a helicopter flying a few hundred feet overhead and I couldn’t hear it. The sound was a continuous bass-heavy roar, like the sound of massive surf combined with a freight train bearing down on you. When we would finish a song, the last chord would die down a little bit—and then be swallowed up in the omnipresent black wall of sound.

Blues music inevitably seems to dominate at this event. It seemed like I knew somebody in every band, and it’s nice to get to hear other players. Since most musicians work 9 to 1 on the weekends, you don’t often get to check out your peers, and there are a lot of good players around here. That said, I am not a big blues fan, especially the stock, straight-ahead shuffles most bands in KC seem to play. As I walked along the “street”and one band faded into another, it sounded like they were all playing the same song.

Of course sound is only part of the equation. There’s the smell, the sweet smoky barbecue aroma of pork and beef and chicken and sausage and sauce and every kind of wood burning. An awful lot of guys seem to smoke cigars at this event, and why not? You barely notice them. There is other food—the team whose party we play for every year makes a jambalaya which has won national awards several times, and it is a thing of wonder. I actually took a picture last year. There’s baked beans and bread and coleslaw, and who knows what else. But those smells are lost in the overwhelming barbecue smoke. We marinate in this smoke for the nine hours we are there to set up and play, and the first year when I got home, I had to leave my clothes at the far end of the house so we could sleep (and Elise kept threatening to take a bite of my arm because I smelled like a big platter of meat).

Then there are the sights. According to the KC Star online, over 100,000 visitors were expected Friday, and I believe it. Naturally that doesn’t include the thousands of people participating in and supporting the event, including contestants, arena staff, entertainment, and so on. Yeah, there are an awful lot of overweight guys who look like they just jumped off a Harley, with shaved heads, ZZ Top beards and black t-shirts, but there is a lot of everything to see.

What did I forget? Alcohol. Beer and barbecue go together like—well, beer and barbecue. Rivers of beer, cartloads of ice. Sure there are wine drinkers and plenty of people surreptitiously sneaking a snort of something stronger, but malt makes the meat go down. Surprisingly, people seem to be very well behaved. I have only seen a few fights at any of these events, and if you had 100,000 people in bars you would expect a lot more. Police keep a fairly low profile.

We played for a hundred-some people in a tent, blasting out blues-oriented classic rock. I played hard, just trying to hear myself above the din. The crowd ate hard, drank hard, danced hard, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Big fireworks show at 10, then by 11:30 the bands stopped playing and everyone started tearing down equipment. People got on the shuttle buses back wherever they parked, and the party settled into what seemed like would be its all-night rhythm, barbecue teams tending their fires overnight in preparation for the judging on Saturday. Music still blasted from hundreds of small sound systems, but the cacophony was a fraction of what it had been.

It’s an exhausting gig. Nine hours of sensory overload and physically hard playing catch up with you. It’s sheer over-the-top madness, and I look forward to it every year.

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A few random links…. I’ve been very busy, and they just pile up.

Star Trek Cribs - The Director’s Cut. Hilarious. Apparently G4TV is running a whole series of these spots, but this one is the funniest.

We’ve all heard the media go ga-ga over Clinton’s anger at Chris Wallace in the interview last week, but nobody seems to have spent any time researching whether there was any truth to Clinton’s claim that the Bush administration did nothing against the terrorists before 9/11. Nobody, that is, except Keith Olbermann. Video and transcript are here. The video is probably close to 15 minutes long, but it is a pretty devastating and detailed rebuttal to the claims of Bush, Rice, and Cheney.

Juan Cole, one of the most informed Americans I know of on the subject of the Middle East, draws a parallel between the witch hunts of the 17th century and the war on terror. Why? Cole’s piece is based on the account of the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. His book Murder in Samarkand explains that it’s all about American military access to oil sources. While terrorists are dangerous, they don’t threaten our way of life (except in our dismantling our democracy as a response) (I’m struggling not to make this into another long post). But lack of access to oil? That truly does threaten us, and the Bushies are intent on implementing a “lily pad” doctrine of small bases throughout central Asia to make sure we keep getting it. The so-called War on Terror is just a pretext:

The Bush administration needs the Terror/ al-Qaeda bogeyman to justify the military occupation of strategic countries that have or are near to major oil and gas reserves. It needs al-Qaeda to justify the lily pad bases in Kyrgyzstan etc.

But the problem is that we now know that serious al-Qaeda is probably only a few hundred men now, and at most a few thousand. Look at who exactly did the London subway bombing. A few guys in a gym in Leeds. That magnitude of threat just would not keep a "War on Terror" in business. The embassy bombings, the Cole, and September 11 itself were done by tiny poorly funded cells that functioned as terror boutiques to accomplish a specific spectacular operation. They don't prove a worldwide, large organization. They prove tiny effective cells. Most of what the Pentagon does and can do is irrelevant to that kind of threat. You'd be better off with some good FBI agents.

So how do you prove to yourself and others a big terror threat that requires a National Security State and turn toward a praetorian society? You torture people into alleging it.

I’ve long felt that we would be much better off with the British model of anti-terrorism: that it’s a police matter, that you’ll get much better results from FBI and police units doing investigative work—without shredding the Constitution—than by sending armies all over the world and keeping liquids off of planes. The lily pad theory? It implies an administration that is hypocritical, slimy, sleazy, positively Cheney-esque—but at least it makes sense. It implies that somebody somewhere is thinking, however deviously. I was beginning to think there was no other explanation for this administration but stupefying incompetence.

Finally, on a totally different note (and it’s about time), I just found out a former long-time booking agent in the Kansas City/Midwest area is now working as an abstract artist. And he’s good. You can check out his stuff here.

Back to lurking again….

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