A Free Man

It was a Harry Potter filled weekend in A Free Man’s household this weekend. I finished the book in an orgy of laziness on Saturday - don’t worry, no spoiler from me. Although, Dr. O’C’s Mom spoiled it for both of us by passing along some gossip she’d heard about the ending, and people wonder why your loved ones’ mothers are hard to deal with. In addition to finishing the book, on Sunday we went to see the new Harry Potter film. It was good, what you expect from a Harry Potter movie. But what I found amazing was the number of advertisements before the movie. There were no less than 20 standard 30 second TV commercials before the previews, advertising in themselves, even started. We don’t get to the movies often, so I think that this seeping in of TV commercials before the films is stands in starker contrast than if we went every week. I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but I imagine very similar. When we were leaving in 2004, there would be a couple of commercials prior to the films, so I suspect that number has risen since then. What annoys me is that I’ve paid £7 to go and see the film and then I have to be subjected to 20 minutes of ads before another 10 minutes of ads before the film? Harry Potter is OK because product placement can’t be slipped into the film, but in a lot of cases you are then subjected to another 2 hours of advertising in the form of product placement.

Advertising is nothing new, but it’s become ubiquitous in the past couple of decades and its crept beyond the places we expect it - TV, radio, newspapers. I wonder how long the average person goes without seeing an advert. As I type this virtually any website (this one included) that I go for sourcing or information is festooned with ads. When I venture outside, I will see advertising on peoples’ clothes, cars, buses, trains, sides of buildings, and so on. When I go shopping anything that I purchase and place in a bag is like a little kick back to the shop in which I’ve just spent money. If I buy a coffee, I advertise with their takeaway cup. Can anyone in the States name a sports arena not named for some company or another? These things are often a blight, while in Crete this spring we were driving along the north coast, enjoying the rugged hills rounded a curve and were confronted with a bright red Vodafone billboard that was the size of an office building. Nice.

And one could continue. What’s troubling is that advertising is perhaps the only media (and I use the term loosely) in which deception or even outright lying is inherent. This is particularly insidious in advertising to children and there is less and less government control of advertisers. The ultimate goal is to sell the product, and any means necessary is OK. I don’t remember the last item I purchased solely because of an advertisement, but I am brand loyal. I buy Apple computers, Levi’s jeans, Sainsbury’s groceries and I could go on but I am, in effect, advertising. My point is, where does this brand loyalty come from? In some cases, maybe the brand I use is superior, but in other cases (groceries, coffee) it is not. So, despite thinking myself an intelligent discerning consumer, I am susceptible to some sort of advertising.

A few years ago a novel called “Jennifer Government” by Max Barry came out - yes I realize this is an advertisement. It’s a novel of a dystopian future, “1984″ or “Brave New World”, in which giant conglomerates run the world. People are named based on the company for which they work - Julia Nike-McDonalds, for example. The police and the NRA are publicly-traded security firms; and the U.S. government only investigates crimes it can bill for. Hmm - privatization of public services, private security contractors running war zones and parents, God knows why, are already naming their children for corporate brands. Maybe we should auction off the naming rights for Baby D, or shall we just wait until they go to work?

Image credits:

Harry Potter Bus

Jennifer Government

Popularity: 14% [?]

“And if the world does turn, and if London burns
I’ll be standing on the beach with my guitar
I want to be in a band, when I get to heaven
Anyone can play guitar…”
-Radiohead

At some point in my childhood it was decided that I should take piano lessons. I don’t know by whom, but I have memories of afternoons spent in the company of dowdy older ladies banging away gracelessly at scales and “Fur Elise” and “Frere Jacques” in their potpourri scented living rooms. I remember subjecting my family to clumsy renditions of Christmas carols in the holiday season. I remember painfully long recitals in church fellowship halls. Basically I remember really disliking piano lessons. I also remember arguments with my Mom and her telling me - “If you quit now you’ll regret it for the rest of your life”.

You reach a point in your life where there’s no longer shame in admitting that your parents are (VERY occasionally) right. Since my aborted piano lessons, music has begun to mean more and more to me. It may be safe to say that I am obsessive about music. I think about points in my life relative to music I was listening to then. When I hear a favorite album it opens the floodgates of memories. I like to have a soundtrack to my life. The advent of iTunes has been wonderful - I list, I rank, I obsess. There’s nothing like seeing a favorite band live or tearing the shrinkwrap off of a new album and anticipating that first listen.

However, I’ve always felt a little bit like a musical parasite. Consuming but never producing (although I guess the music industry relies on folks like me). And there has been many a time that I yearned to go back into those floral living rooms and bang away at “Greensleeves”. About a year ago, I made the decision that it was time to learn how to play music and if one wants to play rock music or derivations of rock music, one must learn the guitar. So for Christmas of 2006, the long suffering Dr. O’C purchased for me a lovely Yamaha acoustic guitar.

I would love to tell you that it all came back to me, my musical training. I would love to tell you that shortly after I finish this writing I will go and write my ninth original song and with that but the cap on my demo. I would love to tell you that we have a gig booked in Birmingham next Saturday. I would love to tell you that. What I can tell you is that I spend two hours every Thursday evening with five other men, with jobs and families and one slightly post-teen emo girl (who I imagine finds us all old and loathsome). We are patiently mentored by an excitable and very talented Polish guitarist in a school computer classroom strumming and plucking clumsily along. And I can tell you that I practice when I have an hour or so during the week and that in just like a lot of things I’m getting better slowly. I gracelessly play scales and “Frere Jacques” and “Greensleeves”. But I also can play a decent rendition of Johnny Cash’s “I Hung My Head” and “Hurt” and Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and on a really good day, a passable version of Steve Earle’s “Galway Girl”.

My mom was right, but you have to really want it, and I didn’t . You have to look at practice as a treat not a chore. At 11, there were just way too many more enjoyable things to do. At 35, when there’s time in a busy day to practice, I love it. Dr. O’C may not love it, nor our neighbors (I think the dog likes it - see photo above) but for me it’s a chance to relax and try to work out how to make the music I hear come out of that guitar. I have no aspirations of running away and joining a rock band or releasing a top 10 album. I think my goal is to be able to make music even just a little. And if I can play a lullaby to my baby or serenade Dr. O’C with a love song, that’s just a bonus.

And yes - Baby D will be taking music lessons….

Popularity: 9% [?]

That’s the way one of my favorite live albums starts, that deep baritone voice, with the soft Southern accent. This is followed by one of the most familiar guitar licks you’ll ever hear and…

“I hear the train a comin’
It’s rollin’ ’round the bend,
And I ain’t seen the sunshine,
Since, I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin’ on…”

The other day we were playing the baby Johnny Cash - the Sun Records version of “I Walk the Line”, in his/her continuing pre-natal musical education, and he or she went crazy, started kicking like Michael Flatley. We’ve interpreted this response as the baby enjoying the music, we’re glass half full kind of people. Now I found this kind of odd, I mean what’s in Johnny Cash for an unborn baby, where are the bits for him/her to relate to? Sometimes I think about things too much, but it got my memory working.

Some of the first music I remember hearing when I was a kid was Johnny Cash. When we first moved to Florida, my dad had a big green Mercury Marquis with an 8-track casette player and was a big fan of Cash’s “Folsom/San Quentin” live album. I can remember driving in that car with the windows down (no A/C) in the Florida summer just melting into the vinyl seats, with my Dad singing the chorus:

“When I was just a baby, my mama told me, ‘Son,
Always be a good boy; don’t ever play with guns.’
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
When I hear that whistle blowin’ I hang my head and cry… ”

That’s the only verse he ever sung. I’m convinced to this day that my Dad knows only one verse to about a hundred songs.

Johnny Cash was the original rebel. He played country and gospel when Sun wanted rock n’ roll. He did live albums in prison when his record company thought that was career suicide. He made mistakes but he got his life and career together when he needed to. There’s something pure and simple about Cash’s music. There’s no bluster and attitude. He was never a great guitarist, but the sound that comes through on his early recordings is something that had never been heard before. Listen to those Sun recordings when it’s a three piece and the music drives forward, it’s like a steam train chugging ahead, not necessarily beautiful, but damn compelling.

Cash fell out of favor with the public in the 80’s. So much so that he played a concert at the Community College gym in our small north Florida town. My Dad and I went to see it. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of the concert, but I do remember getting ill midway through and having to leave early. Wasn’t the last time I would get sick at a concert, but the only time that it wasn’t self induced.

Cash’s resurgence came in collaboration with the producer Rick Rubin, known mostly for producing rap albums. When “American” came out in 1994, I was living in Seattle and trying to live a lifestyle with little room in it for anything from my past. But I couldn’t deny the power of this record, just Cash and his guitar. His voice sounded different, weaker but in a way richer. And songs like the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” brought a ton of emotion that I could have done without in a kind of fragile emotional state.

Cash and Rubin released four of these records and one posthumously. I think the best is “American IV: The Man Comes Around”. I saw the video for “Hurt” before hearing the album and was awestruck. It’s an amazing testament to Cash and the footage of him, in very advanced age recovering from his own illness and the death of his wife is shocking. The album itself is amazing and unlike the other American series, the Cash originals on this album are the best tracks. Particularly the title track and “Give My Love to Rose”. The latter was originally recorded in 1959, but it’s the version on this album, when Cash sings:

“I found him by the railroad track this morning
I could see that he was nearly dead
I knelt down beside him and I listened
Just to hear the words the dying fellow said…”

You can tell you’re listening to a man that has a grip on his own mortality.

So, pardon, the riff. This was meant to be about why our baby might like Johnny Cash. And I don’t know, but I have a couple of ideas. Maybe it’s because you can’t not like Johnny Cash. I know people who hate country music, but still own a Cash album or two. He’s like Elvis or the Beatles, essential to modern music as we know it. And the honesty and simplicity of his music is impossible to dislike.

Or maybe its for the reason that I liked it when I was a kid. Maybe Baby D likes Johnny Cash because her Dad does. I like that answer, but then, I am a half glass full kind of guy.

Popularity: 16% [?]