Gentle On My Mind

The picture was taken in 1966 when I was 12. I was asked to visit a nearby school and play for an English class. It wasn't my first gig but it was the beginning of neighborhood fame. That is an album cover. The title is the humorous response to, "Whatever happened to that kid?"

The guitar is a Stella 12 string. It was a big beastie but I was a determined kid. A few months later, my sister friend and I would pass the audition to play for the Cerebral Palsy Telethon at a local TV station. Being kids, they put us on in the middle of the night. Ralph Embrey, a famous Nashville impressario was hosting. The next morning at ten, I would be roused from where I was sleeping on the floor to come see Ralph who told me someone had called and would donate $5 if I would sing "Gentle On My Mind" on camera. Having no fear then, I did just that. Ralph then looked at me and said, "Your Dad called that in" then asked "I know Glen and he can't remember all the words to that song. How do you do it?" I told him, "My Dad asks for it a lot."

Dad didn't want me in the music business. He said it was a rough game and I had too many brains for it. We were asked that morning to come to Muscle Shoals but my parents declined and for the better or worse, it would presage things to come. I would play it one last time on TV three years ago on a morning show when the host who remembered me playing it for his father on TV years earlier in the 80s asked for it. I told him I didn't think I could remember the words, but he insisted and I did. Dad got up early that morning to watch it proud as he could be.

A year later as Dad lay dieing, I sat in the next room and sang this song for him. We can't know why we remember all the words until we need them. Then life is clearer and all the moments that didn't make sense do. Art isn't about fame. It is about service, reflecting emotions so it will make sense.

I did see Glen in an airport many many years later and was on the flight with him. I didn't introduce myself because I have a rule about not being rude to famous people, but I think I would have liked to tell him the story. Dad would have liked that too.

Haunting Faces

Some faces haunt me and not in a bad way, they become hazy images at the periphery of consciousness that never quite go away.

Kate Bush - Anyone who knows me knows I'm a Bushaholic. I believe she is the finest female rock musician - no contest. Yes there are plenty of more famous, bluesier females but Kate captured the heart of what it is to be rock: she goes her own way and never repeats herself. Kate is the Queen.


Dame Wendy Hiller - the essence of the smart self contained actress who had a way of reaching around to find the heart of the part. She was not a classic beauty; she was a quiet determined intelligence who was beautiful and above the fray of an industry that consumes women like chocolate.


Cecile Chaminade - the most famous woman composer of an age and possibly one of the greated composers of that age, she wrote salon music, songs, orchestral works, opera and more. They buried her before she died because she refused to modernize and she was a woman. She blazed the trail for all the women composers after her and her reward was to die alone in a small apartment with an amputated foot and a broken heart never having met the man who was her equal.


There are beauties that we should not let go of or forget even if fashion and other's needs say we should. We empty our hearts onto our lives only to find our hearts are the only springs that fill them. The price is we must stay where we stand while our lives flow away into ever deepening fog, but if we do not remember beauty, it will be as if we never lived at all.

Music Tribe Alert!

Music Tribe:

I’ve completed the scene in Facebook/Vivaty integrating the videos, music other materials:

1. Smooth. Easy Drag Drop and Go.

2. Integration: fast dialog building for pulling in YouTube, Facebook, and externally hosted audio

3. Time to setup: about eight hours total. It sets up in minutes, then you customize and I have lot of media assets to put in there. For those of us who have to spread work across pages, this is the BEST way to integrate them as services.

4. Results: Excellent.

Bands on Facebook who don’t build one of these for their act and business quick need cranial exams. This is the way to get it done in social network markets.

As the stagecraft objects improve, this will also be how albums are made, released and navigated. In fact, these become the albums++.

Big juju, musicTribe. Bery big.

Media convergence at long last!!!

Epiphany - The Video

Here's a new video suitable for the season. Short, meditative, peaceful good for early risers who want a moment before they drive.

The music was written for the University of Western Australia's virtual reality campus. Big thanks to Oz and Surak!!

Making Money on The Web

A discussion asks how in the era of the Web As Copy Machine From Hell can the artist use scarcity as a means to increase or preserve the value of art.

First, the medium of distribution has nothing to do with the value of the art as meaningful.

On the other hand, no product no market no sale no pay.

Copy protection simply won't work anymore. It’s of no value to fight the machine/human interface behaviors. It simply won’t work.

The Internet figures values in terms of URLs as coin of the realm. Wealth is created as a scalar applied to the functions such as edit, copy, delete, revise, publish, yadda.

All Internet business models must first describe the process or means for URL production. You don’t want to stop copies; you want to be sure that the right URLs are created during the copying. Essentially, that is what the web services for any business model eventually come down to.

A social network is a URL amplifier.

1. Release the video.
2. Post the video.
3. Watch the download stats for the URLs.
4. Rate, collect, respond to inquiry, invoice or acknowlege, in other words, sell or discuss.

This isn’t hard. Everything I need (now) to create and sell product is managed from a single desktop. While it is not true for any communications industry model, it is essentially true at all scales of application.

Don’t think in terms of scarcity of copy. It is scarcity of talent and ideas that drives the production of significant URLs.

It will always come back to quality, fidelity, novelty, the gig, and the deal.

If I may ramble a little more: the big picture sea change so trivial it’s barely noticed is that web 2.0 is evolving toward a mass notification system where the messages are controls, that is a a message and link to a page for the purpose of task-orienting.

It’s a cosmic merely to the RSS/Atom community of feedfans, but in terms of higher order social norm organization, it is significant in that at one scale it is organizing your acts, at another, it is reorganizing your DNA. Still another cosmic merely to the social theorists.

At the monetization level, it is the very key to the product evolution. There are any number of public services that can avail themselves of Facebook, Twitter, etc., and these are subscription services.

My Son's Time To Go - The Video

If we are to use human memory as our guide, we may only be fair witnesses, but we must reveal all that we see.

This is the video for My Son's Time To Go. I didn't set out to write an anti-war song. It's in the questions.

My Son's Time To Go

Early Morning Light

At every moment in every spot in the world, light is different. If one could see that in aggregate, one would possess the all-seeing eye. If one can feel that in aggregate, one possesses the all-compassionate heart. If one understands all that in aggregate, one has the all-knowing mind. Light is the expression of the universe over it's own preponderant darkness. Light is the soul of life given to the universe as love.

Wise and Clever

Watch the video below. In case like so many of us elders you think the kids aren't thinking hard about the future, some are wiser than we know.

I guess this means I can stop circulating the petition to skip over their generation and pass the power and the money straight to our grandkids.

Dial M for Mayhem

In the beginning was the blank space. The data barrier was void and lo, it was good. Then came the round bracket. It was found to nest and the days of the never-ending cooder were upon us. Then came the curly brackets and all could C the structs before them but verily the semi-colon and the comma could not be banished from the land. Then came the pointy bracket with its faithful companion, the quotation mark to sweep all that came before them away. The data landscape was fruitful and the trees multiplied without number.

There are rumblings in the land of the Elder Edda of the monster, M. With spare incantations and in secrecy, it seeks to resurrect the curly by whose topology it will sweep all the pointy brackets into the bit buckets of the cloud hereafter around and anon.

Lo, the days of darkness have returned.

This Land Is Our Land

Remember when songs meant something? Here is an interview with Pete Seeger, a man who saw the entire span of modern American folk music and who as much as anyone made sure they did.

Little organizations doing what is right right near where it needs doing is the message. We can't count on the government and we sure as hell can't trust the bankers. We spawned a generation of rich sociopaths who believe they can steal right in front of us and there is nothing we can do.

I dunno. I know what we learned from people like Pete: we have to tell the story and maybe we better write some new songs.

Whoever makes the best biopic of Pete Seeger can tell the story about what is best about this country: people who keep doing the right thing.

Change is necessary but it only works if we know what is right. Is that corny? I don't care. It's right.

In Times Like These

In times like these we wonder where old friends are, who friends are and who are just the liars that litter the alleyways of streets where we took a wrong turn and stayed on that path a little too long. Then one day we run out of shoe leather and gasoline, feel that engine winding too shrill and the slide on wet roads from tires without enough tread left to keep up going forward.

Then someone sends a good song from an old friend and I remember how many people are on that road with me. Thanks Joe Cookbook. I thank the big guy for friends.

The Long and Winding Road

The bad news is I start the treatments for leukemia (NHL) today. It's a schedule of two weeks of steroids followed by 18 weeks of chemo in three week cycles. Every third week, they hook me up for four hours while I sit in a chair. It may be time to find something I actually want to read or set up a laptop for midi composition.

The good news is I get out of yard work for most of the summer and I can rent out the top of my head for Google Ad Space. :-)

I'll be fine. Steroids are an emotional roller coaster though so if I write whinier than usual, well, it's coals to newcastle. I'll see if I can compose a blues mass for the church choir. Hey, emotions should not be wasted. Minds should.

And I still have fine music.

THe Watchmen

Don't bother. If you have young children, don't let them see this. In fact, thumbs down. It has it's own audience, no doubt.

Normally I don't diss a film like that, but these guys are running ads that don't tell you the degree to which this movie is soft-sci-fi porn with full frontal of men and women, and some explicit gettin' it on. People who took their kids were dumbfounded.

And the plot sucks. Good CGI.

The Star Trek preview looks excellent.

Amazing Grace

Arlo keeps on the path he has been on since he was thirteen years old, straight down the middle toward a home he can see or just because he likes the road. Wherever he performs, he brings a unique but familiar perspective some might say is old Hippie talk, but others of us know is the gospel truth. At the core of the Hippie thing was peace and love. It's hard to object. Then togetherness. That's tougher. It gets tight in small corners and we start pushing against each other for space and air to breathe. We can push so hard that even while we have reasons good enough to make Officer Obie stop and think twice, we aren't making more room. We're making each other hurt.

The Guthrie family purchased the old church building where much of Alice's Restaurant was filmed. It is called The Guthrie Center. If you order CDs from his label, www.risingsonrecords.com, they come in a US Postal Priority mailer, meaning someone carefully put them in there out of the box and hand-sealed it then dropped it off at the Post Office on the way to shop for groceries. Inside the box with the rightly priced CDs is a form to send a donation to the Guthrie Center. I may send the money but I think I'll keep the form.

Arlo stayed on his path and that path led him straight home, straight to the heart of love and peace and togetherness. In the video below, he describes the Guthrie Center as a "Bring your own God" church. Maybe it gets crowded in there, but maybe in that church there is room for all of the people who bring their God and because they do, no one's getting hurt.

So he could be right. Maybe we should stay in that log until we outnumber the dogs outside howling. Breeding's got to be better than marching.

The Perfect Folk Song

I know a lot of Dylan fans. I've never been one. It isn't that I don't admire his songs but Bobby always came across to me as a bit mean and so do most of his fans. It's the We Are Too Smart To Care What You Think Brigade and well, I guess I don't follow that trend in folk music.

Then there's Arlo. For my time, Arlo Guthrie was and is the perfect folk singer. He is incredibly gifted as a writer, a wry commentator on the times, a fantastic musician, but through it all, he is funny, he is generous, he is kind, and he sees through the bullshit. He is never mean. Of all my heros in a lifetime of making music, writing songs and listening, he is still the one guy I want to sit down and pick with for an evening somewhere away from the crowd. He simply impresses me as a man who would be a good friend and teacher.

Here is the perfect folk song seen through the eyes of the leader of the first family of American folk music: Arlo.

Give A Damm

They say the times of change are upon us like the Sixties but without the good music and the sex. That only leaves war, drugs and politics which means the worst of the Sixties are back. What to do?

In a 1993 concert just before performing “When A Soldier Makes It Home”, Arlo Guthrie observes that after all the movements of the 60s, he found there are only two kinds of people: those who give a damm and those who don’t and there were always both of those on both sides of an issue. What surprised him was how over the years he found he had more in common with those who do give a damm regardless of which side of the issue they were on.

As we continue on during the times of change and internationalization, maybe that is the best badge to wear.

The Great Gazoo

Someone sent me yet another reference to Facebook's weak defense of their policy that once on Facebook always on Facebook. I tell them to try get rid of their MySpace page and see how that works out.

Relational databases make it difficult to remove related entities once in the system and used by other entities. Given the numbers of friends one befriends, Facebook is possibly a tedious thing to administrate. That said, people seem shocked as they begin to finally realize the Web's existence has a dark side manifesting in everything from intellectual property to keeping one's DNA private. Databases leak and if one is using free services without reading the terms and conditions one is a fool. The world does not protect you. It will let you starve while it buys back a dime on a dollar of your retirement account from the men who stole your water.

If I am in a bad mood, I describe the web as a man-made viral pathogen rewriting our cultural DNA quickly, quietly and without our permission. No one knows how this will turn out for those who turn it on and can't turn off, but if you don't mind being the naked emperor, it should be ok at least until dildonics come with a URI and that is not far away.

In a good mood, I think of the web as the Great Gazoo combined with Fred's two feet. In the first case, a self-admitted "undependable, bit of a kook" alien can raise havoc if you call on him. In the second, a car made of stone, wood and animal skins can take you on a wild ride downhill. If you get in, you may not get out. How good are your own two feet?

Did anyone forsee all of this? Sure. We even warned you. First we were told it wasn't a problem, then it was society's fault, then that we were sick people for wanting to hide information from the commons.

What do I have to say now? "Take heed. Don't ask for more than you can handle You may get it." Toodaloo, Dum-dums!

The Mirror Ball Mosh or Buffy The Umpire Slayer

To assess digital art in these modern times, there are ten critical criticisms:

1. Popularity: How many sites link to it.

2. Citability: How many reviews link to it.

3. Authority: Of the links, how many links link to the sites that link to it.

4. Covetability: how many copies were stolen.

5. Enviability: how many competitors ripped it off and changed the names to claim originality.

6. Originality: huh? Who would link to something they don’t recognize? This one doesn’t matter but I toss it in here to satisfy the need for a ten item list.

7. Authenticity: how many animals were harmed making the thing.

8. Cultability: how many forums are dedicated to proving the artist is wrong about the interpretation of their work.

9. Derivability: how many forums dedicated to proving the artist is wrong are right.

10. Extensibility: how many new pieces of art are created to *honor* the resource at the bottom of all of those links.

The best way to assess art is to find the average size of the pile on top of it that keeps you from finding it times the number of those looking for something like it divided by the number of those who claim to have it for a price they will reveal to you if you give them your social security number.

Protest Songs and The Punctured Pretension

A friend of mine is letting his freak flag fly with political protest songs on mySpace. I sang on some of those including Sly Stone's "Stand" and "Vicious Love Affair". Ground Level Sound still covertly records when no one is looking. Well... no one is but... we have a good time together.

Everything I know about protest I learned from Doug Kenney, Henry Beard and Robert Hoffman although it was Christopher Guest who finally nailed it to the masthead.

That song is A Mighty Wind years ahead of the time but somehow these days, it's even more relevant. We should stop to deflate our shoes occasionally.

Schadenfreude is for Losers

What an incredibly beautiful day!

I am amazed how far some will run to hide a truth everyone knows. Life in a golden cage isn't life at all.