You Kind of Have Heard This One Before

Album: Kevn Kinney, Down Outlaw, 1994

Best Track: "Shindig With the Lord"

Lasting Memory: I taped this album from the radio during the spring or summer of 1994. The rock radio station for the conjoined towns of Christiansburg and Blacksburg, Va., dedicated every Sunday night to playing complete new releases. I can't recall the station's name, call letters or frequency signature, but I do remember that I loved that station because it was truly open-format.

Unlike the current slew of "We Play Anything" radio stations that recreate yesteryears' Top 10 Billboard charts, that one station I can't now name really would play any song from any artist. It's playlist ranged from orchestral folkies such as Joan Baez to death metal auteur such as Sepultura.

When the station was sold by its private owners to a nationwide radio operations firm, it changed formats dramatically, to mostly '70s soft rock. One of the final songs that station ever aired under its old open format was Bob Dylan's "Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts."

I'm mentioning this because I want to make the point that if, as I wrote in my preceding post that it is a theory that every rock band since 1964 has wanted to be The Kinks, it has been a truism -- an undoubted or self-evident truth; one too obvious for mention (H/T: Webster's) -- of music criticism since 1962 that every folk singer has wanted to be Bob Dylan. I could argue that, as with most truism, the Dylan-wannabe shorthand critique is arguable in most cases.

For Kevn Kinney, it is true.

And to Kinney's credit, he does a fair job of channelling Dylan's early 1960s sound, worldview and lyrics. Especially on Down Outlaw's title, and opening, track, Kinney does a whole lot more than betray his principal influence, but he sounds pretty good doing it. If you like that sort of thing.

As on much of what Dylan has recorded over the years, Kinney's voice can be taste that's hard to acquire. Also like Dylan's songs, however, the general sound of the instrumentals and the lyrical content make putting up with Kinney's raw, unsweet vocals worth the effort. Give "Shindig With the Lord" a listen and dare to come back to tell me that the song isn't downright enjoyable.

Range, either in theme or style, isn't Kinney's strong suit, as Down Outlaw's third standout track, "Midwestern Blues," clearly demonstrates.

Fortunately, a lot of times, a listener just wants an album that sets and perpetuates a sound, mood and/or ambiance. Down Outlaw is one of those types of albums for anyone who's looking for a soundtrack to kind of morosely reminiscing on a drizzly day after they've received some bad news that doesn't actually affect him or her in any direct way.

Which makes Down Outlaw a perfect album for me to have listened to several times over the past two days, since I learned on Tuesday that my high school religion teacher, football coach and school's athletic director John O'Hara had passed away after a decade-long struggle with cancer. Coach O was a good guy. I never kept up with him, never even went back to my old school for any sporting events after I graduated. Still, I'll miss that guy.

Up Next: Kiss, Lick It Up, 1983 (from the nearly sublime to the ridiculously awful)

Album: The Kinks, Live at Kelvin Hall, 1983 (Spanish cassette reissue of the 1967 album)

Best Track: "Sunny Afternoon"

Lasting Memory: The first time I saw The Smithereens play live, way back in 1986 or 1987, they closed their second encore with a cover of The Kinks' "Milk Cow Blues (Batman)." That is the final track on the brief concert album Live at Kelvin Hall.

This indicated nothing more than that The Smithereens had excellent taste in semiobscure covers.But it probably planted the subliminal seed that evolved into my pet theory that all good-to-great rock bands really want to be The Kinks.

I can't prove the theory, but I can list you any number of bands that owe some or all of their approach to music to the influence of brothers Ray and Dave Davies and the other Kinksters. Early Van Halen was pretty much a Kinks cover band judging by the sound of things, if not all the content of VH's discography.

A writer for The Onion A.V. Club further noted that "Madness, of course, was just one of the many exciting new groups of the late '70s and early '80s that had strong roots in The Kinks' music. The Jam was The Kinks' clearest heir, and the young band honored its ancestor with a tightly wound version of 'David Watts,' Ray's class-conscious stomper from 1967; meanwhile, everyone from The Fall and Mission Of Burma to The Pretenders ... was also covering The Kinks in the studio and onstage." The writer failed to mention that even Def Leppard -- freakin' Def Leppard -- recorded a Kinks song, sticking a much-lamer-than-the-original version of "Waterloo Sunset" on their official greatest hits collection.

I'll take all of that as strong support for my theory about bands wanting to be The Kinks. After all, as everyone knows imitation is the sincerest form of emulation.

To miss the meaning of the song's lyrics, but to end with a line I probably should have resisted typing, The Kinks may not be the fount of all that is still good and true about rock 'n' roll, but they can certainly hang their hat on being a "Well Respected Man" of rock.

Up Next: Kevn Kinney, Down Outlaw, 1994

Secrete Ballot

Bear with me as I post one more entry about politics. For what it'll be woth to you -- you make the call -- at least this post will have a pay off.

I won't even make you wait for it: I've decided to vote for Barack Obama on November 4.

Reaching this decision has not been easy. I have no great faith in Obama's ability to affect the positive changes he preaches. I'm on blog record as a critic of the very "change" agenda, and of Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Still and all (to use a regratably anachronistic phrase), I have come to accept the hard reality that I have to vote against my generally right-center mind-set because Obama has less of a history of acting against the best interests and the foundational freedoms of the Unied States of America.

Yes, John McCain as a naval officer proved himself to be a hero of the highest order. As a politician, however, McCain has been graft-prone and a champion of the single greatest restriction on political speach ever enacted in this country, the McCain-Feingold Act. It is because he has a public record that MccCain is disqualified from receiving my vote. Who knew that lack of experience was a qualification for the presidency? But there you are.

I can't say I'll be thrilled with casting my ballot for Obama-Biden. Obama's wrongheadedness about the use of the U.S. military to squelch worldwide terrorism, his vote for the FISA reauthorization, and his reneging on his promise to use only public financing for his campaign show him to be a dunderhead and a hypocrite of the order of any national elected official. Offsetting those negatives are the man himself and his willingness to admit that he is not perfect. Who else is the American dream more than Obama? And I grok the fact that he smoked some dope and ran some streets. 'Bout time we had a baller prez.

So who is getting vote, and why?

P.S. All politics is local. Hence, I'll be voting to keep Thelma Drake from returning to Washington.

On Hiatus

This may seem like a pointless post, since I've dropped down to two or three posts per week over the summer, but I'm checking in to let frequent readers know that I will resume more-frequent posting starting Monday.

Honest.

In the meantime, enjoy this tribute to a Nashville great.

And check out The Onion's R.I.P. post to an animation giant.

Both dudes will be missed.

Palin by Comparison

Forget about the experience question. Leave aside any concerns that the pick was a pander to far-right social conservatives and/or a cozen to women voters.

There are three things to know about Sarah Palin (the far right picture is her as Miss Congeniality Alska in 1984) that should instantly and automatically disqualify her from the vice presidency:

1. Palin didn't tell anyone she was pregnant with her latest child -- not even most of her family or staff or government colleagues -- until she was nearly to term.

2. Palin didn't tell her children that she had accepted the veep slot on the Republican ticket until mere hours before she took the podium in Dayton with John McCain last Friday morning.

3. Palin's latest child was born with serve disabilities related to Down syndrome, a condition that could not have been made better by Palin's obvious concerns with keeping her weight down during her preganacy or her insistence on delaying delivery for nearly a day after her water broke. She was back at work three days after the child was born, and now she is hitting the presidential campaign trail. (BTW: Mr. Palin, oil-field worker and commercial fisherman, is not a stay-at-home father.)

Children are often ignored -- or worse, exploited in the name of -- career and political advancement, but what Palin has been doing and continues to do constitutes negligence at best and abuse at worst. Who doesn't tell their children they're running for national office? What kind of mother who has the ability to do so doesn't take time off after giving birth to make sure her child is doing as well as possible?

This is not sexism. If Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine had been named the Democratic vice presidential candidate, I'd have the same concerns that he was looking after the best interest of his children. He appears to be doing so. And are the Obamas making sure their kids are doing okay? Aside from letting them stay up way too late each night last week and using them as props a couple times, I'd have to say they are.

For all of her pro-life bona fides, Palin's actions paint a picture of a person who is putting just about everything before her family, especially the welfare of her children. That makes her a hypocrite in extemis, and we already have enough of those in Washington.

Even if a voter could get past all the troubling antiparental behavior, he or she will then have to confront that fact that Palin has been active in Alska politics for the past 18 years and has never once called for the construction of a fence along the Canadian border. Palin is soft on Cannucks, which is something that simply cannot be allowed to go unpunished. How much longer must those 1,538 miles go unmilitarized before someone draws a line in snow?

Talkin' About a Dope-olution

Album: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, 1988

Best Track: "Across the Lines"

Lasting Memory: I had a fast car, fast enough to go 110 mph before I slowed down out of terror and concern about getting pulled over. I had to sell that 1972 Pontiac LeMans to raise money for college tuition for the spring semester of 1993. It was a tough but necessary choice I made to give up something then to make sure I could have better things in the future.

Life is like that, and adults understand this. Adults don't always act in accordance with that knowledge, but that is a the subject for another day.

What I'm about to start riffing on is how adults all too often go out of their way to pretend that they don't know that current pleasures and luxuries can be done without if there is more to be gained by forgoing them.

And, yes, I'm talking about elective politics.

As I've been watching the Democratic National Convention, I've found myself shaking my head at hearing over and over again, "We can fix all your problems if you put all your trust and resources into government." I know I will hear the same thing next week from the Republicans during their convention, with the slight variation of "... and we won't tax you to pay for any of it."

I ask you: Who I should I hold in more contempt, the politicians who can bring themselves to speak the lie or the delegate on the floor who force themselves to believe the lie? Like the ne'er-do-well vehicle owner and the delusional baby's mama of "Fast Car," both are are to blame for the mess in which they find themselves.

At least "Fast Car" ends with a glimmer of hope when the woman tells the guy to take his car and "keep on driving." The Democratic National Convention is sounding notes of hope, as well. The reasons those notes are sounding discordant to me, though, is that the hope being expressed is desperate.

We should all vote for "change" because no one is better off now than he or she was four ago. The podium speakers and the delegates are "Talkin' About a Revolution" without seeming to recognize that revolutions demand enormous and usually irredeemable costs. They fail to acknowledge that change can be for the worse as easily as it can be for the better. They can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that 99 percent of people succeed or fail despite of what elected officials and bureaucrats do. They assume that literary everything is awful and that only having Democrats in charge can make the sun shine again, put food on people's plates, get rid of dogs' fleas.

Again, the Republicans will be hammering home the same messages next week, asking voters "Baby Can I Hold You"? and trying to make those same voters feel ashamed if they decline the offer.

I'm not naive or a Bush apologist or someone prone to saying what G.K. Chesterton considered to be the greatest abdication of patriotism and rationality, "My country, right or wrong." But I do know that not everything in the United States is shot to hell. I know that I AM better off than I was four years ago because I took chances to change my job and my living situation that paid off. I know that if I had failed, I wouldn't have blamed the government.

I know that the Patriot Act needs to be abolished, and I know that narcotics need to be legalized. I know that the Democrats can't keep people who take bad loans under false pretenses from losing their houses. I know that the Republicans can't rid the streets of crime, even if they do succeed in throwing more than a few women in jail for crimes they confess to "For My Lover."

I know that politicians are lying because their lips are moving. I don't know "Why." I just know that neither Obama nor McCain will be do much to change any of it. I just hope that whoever wins November's election doesn't make things worse.

Up Next: The Kinks, Live at Kelvin Hall, 1983 (Spanish cassette reissue of the 1967 album)

A Mainstream Contrarian Thought

Barack Obama finally picked his vice presidential running mate. Joe Biden shores up Obama's foreign policy bona fides and also gives the Obama coterie a sorely needed old-time Washington hand and insider.

Missed by most, but not all, reporters and commentaters over the long weeks of guessing about who would be Obama's veep is that what Biden brings to the 2008 democratic ticket is exactly what Dick Cheney brought to the 2000 Republican ticket.

The similarities between Biden and Cheney are much more than superficial. They both come from small-delegation states that no one ever thinks much about. They both have very definite views on what the world order should be. They are both significantly older and more influential among decision makers than their presidents. They both have odd, even off-putting, smiles.

I'm willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt on not being pure evil like Cheney is, but that's only because Biden is a Catholic. As a coreligionist, I can't admit that any Catholic has ever done anything wrong ever. That's one of the oaths the Vatican makes us all swear in Latin.

Still, for all you future Obama voters -- a group that may include me when push comes to shoving that key card into the voting machine on November 4 -- know that a vote for Obama as president is very likely to be a vote for Biden as vizier.

Start doing your homework now. (Yes, I read the link. Mostly just to spite anyone who would bring that up. I refused to actually learn anything useful. So there.)