There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in recent years about the demise of bipartisanship in Congress.
They say that neither Democrats or Republicans are willing to cross the aisle and work with members of the other party.
But to paraphrase Mark Twain, it appears that reports of the death of bipartisanship are greatly exaggerated.
Earlier this month, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced House Resolution 1100, which would have directed the House Committee on Ethics to disclose publicly all investigative materials concerning alleged sexual harassment, unwelcome sexual advances, or sexual assaults by members of Congress.
Rep. Nancy Mace
When the roll was called on Mace’s proposal, 182 Democrats joined with 175 Republicans to vote it down – proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that bipartisanship is alive and kicking in the House of Representatives.
It did my heart good to see the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats and Republicans joining hands to make sure that the Ethics Committee’s reports concerning sexual misconduct by House members were kept hidden from the prying eyes of the American public.
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The ranking Republican and Democratic members of that committee issued a joint statement explaining their opposition to the Mace resolution.
“Victims may be retraumatized by public disclosures of interim work product, excerpts of interview transcripts, and certain exhibits,” the two Ethics Committee leaders said.“And witnesses, who often only speak to the Committee confidentially or on condition of future anonymity, could fear retaliation if their cooperation is made public.”
Given that the Mace proposal clearly states that documents relating to sexual misconduct should be released only after all personally identifiable information relating to victims and witnesses was redacted, that objection doesn’t seem to hold water.
But let’s not nitpick here.Instead, let’s celebrate that a Democrat and Republican are making a bogus argument together.That’s what I call bipartisanship!
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Click here to listen to “Let’s Work Together,” which was released on Canned Heat’s Future Blues album in August 1970 – just a month before the death of the group’s frontman, Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson.(Like his contemporaries Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, Wilson was 27 when he died.)
Click here to buy “Let’s Work Together” from Amazon.
2 or 3 lines is, among other things, a sort of autobiography.
I doubt that I’ll ever write a real autobiography. Most of 2 or 3 lines is not autobiographical, and the autobiographical parts are interspersed with a lot of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam. But if my children and grandchildren want to know more about me after I’ve gone on ahead, 2 or 3 lines will likely be the best place for them to look.
Today’s wholly autobiographical 2 or 3 lines is about the vacations my family took before I left for college. It will be a very short post.
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I spent the first 18 years of my life in Joplin, Missouri. I can count the family vacations we took during those years on one hand. (I’m not counting as vacations all the times we drove two hours south to visit my great-grandparents and my numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, area.)
When I was very young – still in diapers, I think – my parents and maternal grandparents drove from Joplin to Los Angeles and took me along for the ride. (They must have been out of their minds.)
The Royal Gorge Bridge
I was far too young then to have any memories of this trip. All I remember my parents saying about the trip is that they drove across the Royal Gorge Bridge, which crosses the Grand Canyon of the Arkansas River in central Colorado.
The Royal Gorge Bridge from the canyon floor
That bridge is 955 feet high, which is about the same height as a 65-story building. It was the highest bridge in the world from the time it was built in 1929 until 2001. (Since 2001, 19 higher bridges have been built – 17 of them in China.)
When I was 11 or 12, we drove to Dallas to spend a couple of days with friends of my parents who had moved there from Joplin. The highlight of the trip was going to the Six Flags over Texas theme park, which had opened only a couple of years earlier.
Six Flags over Texas postcard
Today there are similar parks in every major metropolitan area. But when Six Flags over Texas was built, it was a huge deal – the only theme park in the country that was better was Disneyland.
A year or two later, we went to Springfield, Missouri – an hour east of Joplin – and spent a couple of nights in a typical sixties motel.
It might have been the Rail Haven motel:
Rail Haven Motel
Or it might have been the Lamplighter:
Lamplighter Motor Hotel
Whichever it was, I went swimming in the motel pool, and ate fried shrimp and French fries in a nearby coffee shop. But the highlight of the trip for me was watching an episode from the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which wasn’t being aired on the NBC affiliate in Joplin.
Joplin had two TV stations at the time. One was a CBS affiliate – CBS was the dominant network then. The other station cherry-picked programs from both NBC and ABC. That year, it was airing an old-school Western, Wagon Train (which had been picked up by ABC after NBC dropped it), instead of Man from U.N.C.L.E., which I just knew was the coolest TV show in history even though I had never seen it.
We also went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a brief motel-with-a-swimming-pool vacation. I’m not sure when that trip was, but I’m guessing it was a couple of years after the Springfield extravaganza.
The Louisiane restaurant
The one thing I remember about that trip is dressing up and going to a swanky restaurant called the Louisiane, which was known for seafood. I’m guessing I had a bacon-wrapped filet mignon, or perhaps just a hamburger steak, but all I know for sure about my meal is that I ordered a glass of tomato juice. (Entrees were served with your choice of several appetizers, and the only one that appealed to me was the tomato juice.)
Shortly after I graduated from high school, we drove to St. Louis to see a baseball game. We were planning to ride the tram to the top of the three-year-old Gateway Arch the next day, but my parents nixed that idea after hearing that one of the trams (there are two – one in each leg of the Arch) had malfunctioned.
Busch Stadium and the Gateway Arch (circa 1970)
After a few minutes of poking around on Google earlier today, I learned that one of the Gateway Arch trams had gone haywire late on July 8, 1970, trapping four people inside for about 45 minutes.
I remember people talking about the FUBAR tram at the game we saw. But the July 8 contest was a day game, so we couldn’t have heard about the tram problem at the park on that day. We must have gone to the July 9 game – a 6-0 loss to the Pirates. By that time, the tram incident would have been common knowledge.
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Why didn’t we take more family vacations? It wouldn’t have been that difficult for us to drive to Colorado or Arizona to visit a national park or two. Or go to the Gulf of Mexico and spend a few days at a beach. Or rent a cabin on one of the many manmade lakes in the Ozarks and do a little fishing.
It didn’t seem odd to me back then that we didn’t take more family trips. (Maybe my friends took such vacations, but I don’t really remember them doing so.) I was accustomed to my parents being very frugal. We rarely ate at restaurants and didn’t go to the movies more than once or twice a year, so I certainly wouldn’t have expected us to visit national parks or go to the beach.
I didn’t feel at all deprived growing up. We had plenty to eat, and decent cars, and an OK TV set and console stereo.
But my parents watched every penny. They had grown up in the Depression, and both of them had lived through hard times – especially my father, who was nine years old when his father died in 1934, leaving my grandmother to take of seven children. (The unemployment rate in 1934 was an astronomical 21.7%.) I’m guessing they viewed summer vacations as a luxury.
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My kids would have found my childhood summers insufferably boring. I spent most of my time reading books from the public library and playing along with the contestants on TV game shows like Jeopardy.
I didn’t spend all of my time indoors – I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood, or organize a backyard baseball game with the kids who lived nearby. And once or week or so, I would accompany my mother to the country club where she worked as the club’s bookkeeper/office manager for a group golf lesson and a swim in the club pool.
I picked up a little spending money mowing lawns and caddying at the country club, but there wasn’t much to spend it on: model car and airplane kits, baseball cards and comic books, an occasional hot fudge sundae at the nearby Dairy Queen.
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“Going Up the Country” made it all the way to #11 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in early 1969, which made it Canned Heat’s most successful single. It was prominently featured in the Woodstock film.
Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson – who had perhaps the oddest singing voice of any sixties artist – modeled the song on “Bull Doze Blues,” which was recorded in 1928 by the obscure Texas blues musician, Henry Thomas.
Here’s “Bull Doze Blues”:
That recording features Thomas playing the quills, a type of pan flute.
On “Going Up the Country,” studio musician and “Wrecking Crew” member Jim Horn replicated Thomas’s quills playing on the flute. (Horn also played on Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations.”)
Those lyrics from Canned Heat's "On the Road Again" pretty much sum up the life of a solitary man on a solitary bike ride, who then writes about that solitary bike ride on his solitary blog.
(If that doesn't make any sense to you, click here to read the previous 2 or 3 lines. Then it will make at least a teensy-weensy bit of sense to you. Which is better than making no sense at all . . . right?)
I bet "fairo" is a word you haven't seen before. Am I right? Or am I right?
Legendary Delta blues singer Tommy Johnson
"Fairo" (which is sometimes spelled "faro") is a word that appears in a number of old blues songs -- including Delta blues legend Tommy Johnson's "Cool Drink of Water Blues," which he recorded in 1928. (By the way, Canned Heat took its name from Johnson's "Canned Heat Blues.")
According to the 1982 tome, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in Folk Blues, which was written by musicologist David Evans, "fairo" means "sweetheart."
The etymology of the word is uncertain. Evans speculates that it might be derived from "fair," or from the Scottish word fere (which means "mate" or "consort"), or from "farrow," which is a term for a young pig -- "as in the expression 'pigmeat' for a young woman."
(I don't know about you, but I've never called a young woman "pigmeat." God knows I've had enough trouble over the years attracting young women without referring to them as "pigmeat.")
"On the Road Again" popped up on the Sirius XM radio of my Chevrolet Sonic rental car while I was on Cape Cod last month.
The Shining Sea Bikeway (Falmouth, MA)
It was the day after Memorial Day, and I was on the road again myself. I was heading to Falmouth to rent a bike and ride the ten-mile-long Shining Sea Bikeway, which runs from North Falmouth to Woods Hole -- which is the departure point for the Steamship Authority's Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket ferries:
Ferry leaving Woods Hole
The Shining Sea Bikeway has plenty of twists and turns to challenge even the most experienced cyclist:
You see some interesting sights along the trail, like this array of brightly-colored Adirondack chairs:
There were several Memorial Day tributes along the trail:
I saw this "War Dog Memorial" near the northern end of the bike trail:
The tribute to military dogs was only part of a much larger artistic display. Here are photos of a few details of that display, the purpose of which eluded me:
I'm hopeful that some train aficionado will leave a comment explaining the function of this artifact, which was left behind when the old railroad right-of-way was converted to a bike trail:
"On the Road Again" was released in 1968 on the Boogie With Canned Heat album. It went all the way to #16 on the Billboard "Hot 100."
I can't imagine a song like this one climbing that high on the charts today. It's a very odd song -- more performance art than blues record.
I love the late Alan Wilson's falsetto singing, but I'm sure it annoys the hell out of a lot of people.
Here's a video featuring Canned Heat lip-synching to an abbreviated version of "On the Road Again":
I was taught in school that the Japanese poems known as haiku were three lines long, and totalled 17 syllables. (The first line had five syllables, the second had seven, and the last line had five.)
The Japanese would not agree. Japanese haiku consist of 17 on -- but one on does not necessarily equate to one syllable. (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagasaki all contain four on, but have two, three, and four syllables, respectively.)
There are quite a few English-speaking poets who have written haiku. Haiku written in English do not always contain five-seven-five lines or a total of 17 syllables -- in fact, the length of most of the haiku that are currently being published in English is 10 to 14 syllables.
I was riding my bike at the Cape Cod National Seashore recently when this song came up on my sentient iPod. For some reason -- perhaps the combination of my location and activity put me in a Zen-like frame of mind -- it hit me that the three verses of this Canned Heat song were really three related haiku.
The first verse has 15 syllables (if you don't count the second line, which simply repeats the first line), the second one -- which is the one quoted above -- has 17, and the third one has 16.
The third verse may be the one that comes the closest to having the "feel" of a traditional haiku:
Trouble will not wreck my life
Someday you'll like
What I'm putting down
"Time Was" combines the Japanese poetic form of haiku with good ol' American 12-bar blues, which usually feature three-line verses (the first two lines are usually repeated). East may be east, and west may be west, but sometimes the twain do meet.
"Time Was" uses words in an extremely economical fashion -- excluding the repeated initial line in each verse, the song has 41 words and only 48 syllables.
Alan Wilson, Bob Hite
Canned Heat was formed by blues aficionados Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson (Wilson was extremely nearsighted) and Bob "The Bear" Hite (who was big and hirsute) in 1965. The group appeared at the two biggest outdoor music festivals of that era, the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock.
I bought several Canned Heat albums. I think one reason classic blues music appealed to me was that its structure was quite transparent and predictable -- it was easy to anticipate where a song was going, and the musical structurer was simple enough that I could re-create blues songs myself. The blues genre was also viewed as more serious and intellectually respectable than top-40 pop, Motown, psychedelic rock, and certain other styles of popular music.
I bought the Hallelujah album shortly after it was released in 1969. One of my favorite songs on it was "Sic 'Em Pigs," a very snarky anti-police diatribe. (I was very young back then, and my judgment left a lot to be desired.)
"Sic 'Em Pigs," which featured a lot of fake pig grunts, snorts, and squeals, ended with a pseudo-public service announcement that was spoken, not sung:
Are you looking for a way to serve God and country? Your chance has come. We are now recruiting trainees for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. If you are big, strong and stupid, we want you!
Alan Wilson died of a drug overdose (some believe he committed suicide) in 1970, when he was 27. Bob Hite was found dead in his van after having a heart attack in 1981. He was 38.
Here's "Time Was":
Here's a link to use to order the song from Amazon:
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