This will be my last post before I migrate the website to a new host ...a cheaper, US-based web host. Partly for cost, partly for consolidation and convenience reasons. Though I love the way it looks, I can't justify the expense at the moment.
SO MUCH has happened since my last post talking about an album "idea," well friends, that idea has borne fruit and taken over all of my mental, emotional and physical capacity. Well, not all of it, I still manage to find time to stand around and watch bugs crawl on the ground or a squirrel run along the top of the fence.
Panama Sound was more than a whim, it's something that has been percolating in my brain for a while now, a sound studio, recording studio, music studio. My very own music studio. I haven't had my first client yet, but I'm acting as if I had. I'm giddy. Perhaps naive, perhaps even foolish to think that I–with no formal music training (or very little) and no audio engineering training could possibly run a music studio. The sheer audacity.
Wanna know what I'm listening to as I write this? Polish jazz from the '70s. That's right, Polish jazz. "Kujaviak Goes Funky."
17,073 views Oct 24, 2018 Provided to YouTube by WM Poland/WMI Kujaviak Goes Funky · Zbigniew Namysłowski · Zbigniew Namysłowski Quintet Kujaviak Goes Funky ℗ 1975 The Copyright in this sound recording is owned by Polskie Nagrania, A Warner Music Group Company. Drums: Czeslaw Bartkowski Bass: Paweł Jarzębski Saxophone: Tomasz Szukalski Electric Piano: Wojciech Karolak Alto Saxophone: Zbigniew Namysłowski Composer: Zbigniew Namyslowski
What in the actual fuck?
It's 3am, don't worry about it. I want to take a hot coffee shower and rub biscuits all over myself, the kind that come vacuum-sealed in a can that explodes like a demented jester on a spring when it hits the dirty lino floor, maybe some honey too. Not the good honey in the jar from England, give me that fucking squeeze bottle. Jesus. Time for another smoke.
ANYWAY.
Where was I? If Warner can sign these guys, and don't get me wrong, they're–something. The money just isn't there anymore man. It's just not. Hasn't been for a long, long time. Probably three decades. Yeah, maybe I'm a fool. Maybe I'm fooling myself. I don't know. An old song-writer's lyrics are bouncing around in my brain "Do it for the love." Yeah, thanks. I know and you know too, that's a dirge. A sad song.
Fuck it, you know? Another songer-writer's lyrics are bouncing in my head too "Kick out the jams motherfuckers!" Do you know who that was? What proto-punk band coined that? It was MC5, the Motor City Five in nineteen-sixty-fucking-eight. They were playing the precursor to punk rock while people were still dancing around naked with flowers in their hair. Yeah, a little different, a little reality check.
I chuckle thinking about a hippie who stayed at the show too long and finds himself searching for a dropped joint in the midst of a mosh pit.
By the way, the MC5 helped get John Sinclair (the founder of the White Panther Party) out of prison, with the help of none-other than John Lennon. Yup. He sang "Free John Sinclair," and they released Sinclair soon afterwards. He spent a total of two years (he was sentenced to ten) in the joint.
My high school buddy's dad, Country Joe MacDonald was there in 1968 at the Chicago DNC with John Sinclair. So there are some direct lines and indirect lines to the significance of this story for me.
Anyhow, by the time Sinclair was out of prison, the world was already a different place. His revolutionary entourage had busied themselves getting jobs, girlfriends, going back to school, having kids, you know, and they all just kinda pussed out on the whole thing. By 1975 Sinclair said he'd given up on revolution and gone back to his first loves, poetry and jazz.
He died in Amsterdam not too long ago.
I have a lot of feelings about that. On the one hand, I feel like though we collectively needed him, we collectively turned our backs on him. On the other hand, a quiet, private life is it's own very special reward. Who knows how the world would be different.
Well, I think this was the most unboring data-migration story you will ever read. See you all on the flipside.
Logan
PS: If you want to see what I've been up to for the past six months or so visit my ode-to-captialism because I have to pay the rent, or at least make a concerted effort to do so: