Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Lightning Rod has the blues tonight.
I don't know why I should have the blues.
My belly is full and I'm surrounded by love,
there's beer in the box and plenty of smokes.
But still I have the blues.

(now you can hear the upright bass and
some brushes on a snare and high hat)

That's the nature of the blues
you don't know where they came from
or when they'll leave you alone
It's just a good man feelin' bad
children far away from home

(here comes the guitar with wah-wah
makes it sound like a lonely gunslinger)

if you understand the blues, they lose
their power over life and libido
it's more than one-four-five
it's more than twelve bars
it's wondering why we're alive
we sing the blues to lick our scars.

(the backup singers with oohs and ahhs
drop in, the smoky tenor sax)

If we knew where the blues come from
it would be like knowing what god looks like
or where you go when you die
It's best the blues remain
a mystery of joy and pain.

I found this funny, true statmentd, but I found it funny. Cheer up LR

The blues should make you laugh

that's why the blues exist

laughter is what you do

when it hurts too much to cry

the blues exsits so that you have somthing to do in the cross-roads bar aside from drink.

if I was down at the crossroads
and the devil asked me to sell my soul
I'd say, "can you afford the price of a drink?
I would owe you till the day I died
before I would stiff you on it."

Lightning Rod wrote:if I was down at the crossroads
and the devil asked me to sell my soul
I'd say, "can you afford the price of a drink?
I would owe you till the day I died
before I would stiff you on it."

I don't get that one LR

I usually don't do this
I mean explain what I write

but in your case I'll make an exception

did you ever see the episode of the Simpsons

where Bart sells his soul?

He laughed when he sold it because he didn't believe in the concept

I'll sell my soul cheap for the same reason.

In fact I'll sell it over and over again if I can

as for the last two lines

that's an old con-man's joke

it basically means, "kiss your money goodbye."

I'm listening to a version of "Over the Rainbow" by Roland Dyens, the great French guitarist. It's a very poetic version-- just acoustic nylon-string guitar.

http://www.classical-composers.org/cgi- ... comp=dyens


AND


http://www.roland-dyens.com/


I myself play a very much lesser version ( of course) on my own classical guitar, a signed Hirade with Brazilian rosewood back and sides and a 40-year-old tawny cedar top I got in 1980. It's a treasure and sounds much better than I can make it sound with my own poor powers.

I bring this up because in 1983 I was living in some seaside apartments in Ventura, and saw my downstairs neighbor, Harold Wachsmann ( now long dead), a cheerful ex-Hollywood promotion man and photographer in the 40's, then about 82, pushing an even older man in a wheelchair. They were going out to take some sun by the pool and watch the young women in their bikinis.

Bikinis and martinis, those two old guys.

Then I realized who the guy in the wheelchair was from the conversations I'd had with my downstairs neighbor, at the picture gallery his study was: two or three hundred of Hollywood's biggest stars all on the wall in frames, and Wachsmann's arm around every pair of famous shoulders: his clients from the past.

And this was one of them: This was Hyman Arluck, the son of Jewish immigrants, like Wachsmann.

And after I talked to them briefly, I walked away humming "Over the Rainbow."

It took me about thirty years to learn that I had shaken hands with Harold Arlen (1905-1986) that afternoon, smiling from his wheelchair.

The blues make me feel like that. They make me feel I just lost something but found something else.

"Ain't it hard to stumble,
When you got no place to fall?"


"Am I blue? Am I blue?

Ain't these tears in these eyes tellin' you"?


Two verses as great as those the Melvilles, Hawthornes, Thoreaus, Poes, Whitmans and Dickinsons ever wrote, and I love those writers dearly.


And you among them, my friend. This poem above is very strong.


One of the greatest paintings ever made, a screen/scroll about twenty feet long, in gouache and ink and gold leaf, is a Japanese work from the seventeenth century which depicts over seven thousand figures in excruciating detail.

The work is anonymous. Like some of the great blues.




Zlatko

Z--
If I shook Harold Arlen's hand, I'd never wash it again.

doreen and I do a little medley from The Wizard of Oz

it includes Rainbow. I love the piece.

Judy Garland's classic childlike version is hard to beat

but I really love Eva Cassidy's version too.

My belly is full and I'm surrounded by love,
"I heard the voice of a pork chop say come unto me and rest"
Jim Jackson's "I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop" recorded in 1928 in Memphis. The refrain in this song is the line "I heard the voice of a porkchop say come unto me and rest." Substituting only "porkchop" for "Jesus," the tune borrows from the mid-nineteenth-century invitational hymn, "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,"
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... _100440129

If we knew where the blues come from
it would be like knowing what god looks like
or where you go when you die
It's best the blues remain
a mystery of joy and pain.

I think the blues comes from Africa like everything else human

Just some intellectual bullshit about music, but you know how clueless I am about it.
talking walking you sound just like the music
nice work.

Judy Garland in Hollywood.
Funny how things pop into your mind at the sound of a name. A photgraph of her sitting on the lawn at a Hollywood party for children. It is from Charlie Chaplin's autobiography. Oona, the children and Judy about 16.
Sometimes lives are stolen, sometimes they are sold. Mommie dearest.

Judy I hardly knew ya.

The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music

The man said it right.

thank you for kicking this one up again.

studio eight pips. blessed be their memories

My Pips

Postby Lightning Rod » Sat Nov 05, 2005 11:36 pm

I have always called them my Pips
a variation on Shintoism, I think.

It's not exactly ancestor worship
more an enforced reverence for the dead

Every time I have lost a friend, I imagine them
joining this ghostly chorus of background singers

They do the little patent leather dance steps and snap their fingers
and say 'yeah' and 'amen' and 'remember, you are living for us.'

Today I learned that another friend had gone to join my Pips.
I have too many Pips. They are starting to look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

hester prynne wrote:I have a hard time reading this thread, because although I don't know Doreen and Lrod's friend that passed away, I too had a dear friend pass away on the ... so I painfully relate. This thread has brought tears to my eyes a few times, which is good because i'm having a hard time crying, believing, accepting that she is gone.

It's damn tough......I didn't think she was going to leave.

This is a very beautiful thread, indeed.