A pragmatic world.

Recently I've been trying to figure out why the world is so f-ed up all the time, when it's obvious what the problems are. Seriously.

I was watching an episode of Charlie Rose recently and they had a discussion on Latin America. The interesting part for me was at the very end of the show when all four panelists talked about the failure of the Drug War.

Charlie Rose

These were not pinko commies talking, they weren't pot heads either. All four men were members of the Council on Foreign Relations. If you don't know who the Council on Foreign Relations are you should probably look them up. Council on Foreign Relations

These guys basically replaced the Trilateral Commission as the world body that tells everyone what to do. Middle of the road players including both Clintons, both Bushes and the current president.

The bottom line is the powers that be are now admitting that the Drug war is a failure. So we should really knock it off. But we're still debating it.

Time to just admit the truth and move on I say. But there are still a lot of folks that get something out of Mexico as a failed state, Afghanistan as a failed state and Latinos, African Americans and other minorities being locked up.

Time for the rest of us to step up and stop the nonsense I say. Time to get pragmatic!

I'm gonna miss Ken Griffey.

When Ken Griffey, Jr. retired earlier this week I realized I was officially old.

I remember a night in 1988 when we took my niece up to Everett, WA to see the then Everett Giants play the Bellingham Mariners featuring an 18 year old phenom by the name of Ken Griffey, Jr. From that point on I referred to my niece as a Griffey baby.

She turned 24 earlier this year and works as manager of a sports club. So, yeah. I'm old.

It's hard to explain what Griffey, Jr. meant to Seattle sports back in the late 80's. The Mariners aren't exactly the best team in baseball these days, but back in then they were one of the worst teams in professional sports.

The Mariners were a replacement team given to the city in 1977 after a successful law suit against Major League Baseball for allowing Milwaukee to steal our original team the Pilots after one season in 1970. That law suit was to be the only big win for the team until Griffey, Jr. came on the scene.

From 1977 to 1991 the Mariners never breached the .500 mark for an entire season.

Add to the fact that the team was dreadful was the stadium where they played. TheKingdome was a large concrete cylinder with all the charm of a roadside culvert with seats.

One of the worst night of my life was a Mariners-Yankees game in the mid-80's. Myself, my brother-in-law and mutual friend went to bat night with five kids in tow.

Back then they used to give the kids real bats and sometime during a late rally the kids discovered that if all 30,000 of them pounded the floor with their bats at the same time the Kingdome would echo so hard that the entire building shook from the noise.

The Mariners came back from a 6-1 deficit that night and won the game on a Tom Paciorek three run homer in the ninth. That blast set off the kids in bat pounding frenzy that caused most of the adults in attendance to work for an entire week.

I later told someone that what we went through that night was akin to jumping into a trash dumpster and having a crowd of people whack it on the side with large logs.

And that was a good night at the Kingdome.

But when Griffey came to the team everything changed. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed as sports fan.

It took two years before the team had it's first winning season. Several more before the city built a new stadium. But almost immediately things got noticeably better for the Seattle baseball club.

Griffey was one of those rare athletes that matched the hype of his arrival. He was that good.

And when his Dad came to the Mariners in 1990 marking the first time a father and son had played on a major league team the city fell in love.

When the team started winning shortly after, the romance was in full bloom,

If you are a true baseball fan and you never got to see Griffey play in his prime you missed something special. Because you really had to see him in person to realize just how good he was.

Whether it the time during his sophomore season when he ignored the cut off man to throw out a runner trying to score from second on a deep single or when he tomahawked a ball several feet out of the strike zone for a home run that kept his record setting home run streak alive in 1993, Griffey was incredible in person.

That doesn't mean there weren't controversies. But they were so minor and so "Griffey" that they seem quaint in this day and age.

One of those controversies was his refusal to sign autographs for adults.

This was during the sports memorabilia hey day. It's hard to believe now but there was a time in the late 80's and early 90's when people were investing in baseball card sets like Glenn Beck invests in gold now.

Griffey got upset when he found out that many of the autographs he was giving out were for memorabilia sellers rather than real fans. That was when he went to his only kids policies.

He would sign all day long for children when they flocked to him, but adults were ignored or waved off. Some people were bugged by that but most of us understood his reasoning.

The team won games and division championships with Griffey in 1995 and 1997, but they were never get able over the hump and win the World Series.

In 1998, the team traded star pitcher Randy Johnson in order to avoid losing him in free agency. The team went 76-85 that year and 79-83 the next despite monster numbers from Griffey, Jr.

That's probably why when he asked to be traded to his hometown after the 1999 season the fans of Seattle accepted it and wished him well. He always did his best for the city of Seattle and the city wanted to return the favor.

They welcomed him back with open arms last year despite diminished skills. He played decently in 2009 but this year he hasn't been able to capture the old magic.

I don't think anyone was surprised that Griffey retired in the middle of the season considering his play this year. He's been less than a shadow of his former self, he has been quite frankly terrible.

It's always hard to see your heroes when they come back down to earth. I remember seeing Nolan Ryan in his last game. It was supposed to be second to last outing but two batters into the game there a loud pop that resounding throughout the stadium.

He faced two more batters after that and walked them both. I don't think came within a foot of the plate on eight straight pitches.

The old cowboy tipped his hat to the crowd as he left. It was then that I realized that Nolan was a very bald, middle aged man with a broken gate.

I also knew he would never pitch again and it made me sad.

That's how I felt when I heard Griffey, Jr. was retiring this last week. He was a class act in era when we seem to have fewer and fewer of them.

By the way, your debate coach is in a little trouble...

That was my Mom said in a phone conversation back in the 80's. To say she was understating his predicament would be to say BP was underestimating the anger of Americans after the gulf oil spill.

My old debate coach was indeed in trouble. Having been removed from his teaching job after one of my classmates returned from California and accused him of sexual impropriety, he turned to being the coke don of Seattle. After that an ugly divorce, a child custody battle and then an armed man attacking on his wife resulting in the death of their young son ended up with my old debate maestro ending up in jail on drug and murder charges.

It's a very convoluted story to tell so I'm just going to leave the link to the story here and let all of you read what happened.

http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1986/8601250648.asp

As I told my Mom at the time, that's more than a little trouble. That's whole sheetpile of trouble.

Recently I started talked on Facebook with one of my old debate buddies from back in the day. (Another Facebook miracle as my new/old friend Laura Nooney replied the other day.) it brought back some of the old memories.

Our debate team was the stuff of sitcoms, actually. We were from a white trash town up north but we consistently ranked at the top of the state rankings.

Most of the other top teams were from the upper middle class suburbs of Seattle (Newport, Woodway and Sammamish High Schools) or the top private schools in the area (Gonzaga, Bellermine, Holy Names) and the sight of a bunch of rugrats from Lynnwood winning trophies and winning championships really frosted their hides. It was real life Good Will Hunting scenario and we rubbed their noses in it every chance we got. We were incredibly obnoxious, cheated whenever we could get away with it, and we were lead by a coach who looked and acted like he was the spawn of Satan.

Seriously, dude looked like Satan. Goatee and all.

Then the came the 80's. John Hughes was the rage in films and cocaine was the rage in the clubs of Seattle. That's when everything fell apart for our coach. As you can see from the above article.

Lynnwood's a lot different now. Our hometown got paved over to install hotels, shopping malls and fast food restaurants. Our high school became a haven for the children of Southeast Asian refugees. (At one point in the mid-90's half of the Cambodian presidential cabinet residing in Lynnwood, WA.)

But at one time, a bunch of hick kids dominated the awards stands at debate tournaments all over the state of Washington. And it was good.

Pictured above. Our beloved old Lynnwood High School as me and my friends knew it and the brand new 100 million dollar Lynnwood HS that opened just last year. Almost makes me want to go back to High School.

Why Progressives always lose.

One of my biggest faults is my continued belief in progressive politics. Since the player on my team always seem well read and educated, I consistently underestimate their ability to be manipulated into believing that a conservative is a progressive.

Many of my friends are currently angry with our president and for what? Barack Obama hasn't disappointed me because I actually listened to what he said in the 2008 campaign . It's the people who didn't listen to what he said that are disappointed.

Now I just watched Move-On Dot Org raise tons of money for conservative candidates in Pennsylvania and Arkansas to oust two older conservative candidates. because they think the new candidates are somehow on the left.

I know the simpleton talking heads keep saying Sestak and Halter are on the left. But that's mostly because they are getting funds from groups like Move On.

Halter is hardly a liberal. He wouldn't have survived in a state like Arkansas if he was. And Joe Sestak is actually to the right of Arlen Specter. Plus, he's a jerk who mistreats his staff to boot. But Move On Dot Org didn't research Sestak and Halter because they were so busy hating on Specter and Blanche Lincoln.

That's pretty typical of Move On, a bunch of Silicon Valley activists types who learned how to raise money on the Internet before anyone else and who have never taken the time to learn anything about politics. Not only that but they're bullies and creeps to boot.

Unfortunately, they're early success has continued to make them a name to be reckoned with despite their lack of any real credentials in politics.

I don't know what will happen in the fall, but from the looks of it the Dems will once again shoot themselves in the foot. With a lot of help from progressive activists.

Thank God for Arizona!

I went to Arizona last week to find out what was really going on over there, instead of the nonsense I was getting from unreliable news sources like NPR and the New York Times. I especially wanted to find out the truth about what law enforcement thought of the new law that was enacted in regards to illegal immigrants that has everyone up in arms.

I ended up talking to an Officer Renfro of the Phoenix PD at a local Circle K and asked him about the law. Renfro said he loved the new law and said he had already used it to detain a couple of "bad guys" and get them out of the country.

He told me he was patrolling his usual beat in Phoenix last week when he came across a couple of young men that he quickly realized had no business in the state of Arizona. "I was thinking to myself, if only some of those liberal commentators were here so they could see what is really going on. The fact is, here were two men who I was sure did not belong in this country and if it wasn't for the new law I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it."

How did Renfro know these two were illegals?

"It was obvious. Liberals will say it's profiling but I prefer to call it good police work. I think I first noticed the pasty skin, but it was mullets that gave them away. As soon as I got a look at them I said, unless they are a couple of carpet munchers they're from Canada. And they most assuredly were not carpetmunchers."

So, what did Officer Renfro do then?

"In the old days I wouldn't have been able to do anything. But with this new law I just went over and started asking some questions. I asked if they were with the Coyotes, eh? You know, the local hockey team. They said they weren't. Then I asked for some ID."

Then what happened, I asked.

" Well, first they say some BS about leaving their wallets at home. How they thought you didn't have to carry ID according to the US Constitution. Yeah, that's right they tried that constitution crap on me. Like I don't know my rights as a police officer. Then the little one says to me, Is there a problem Officer?"

Renfro was starting to get angry all over again as he told the story.

"I says, There sure is, Gord. I don't think you two are Americans. I just called BS on those two cheeseheads. That's when they came clean and admitted they were down from Medicine Hat trying to stay warm for the winter. And I get that. I understand what they were doing. But it's not right for a couple of hosers like that to come down and illegally soak up American sunshine that should be going to actual legal snowbirds from right here in the good ol' US of A.It's just plain wrong. And it's something that we as a nation should abide by. Not is we're going to continue to be a strong country."

I nodded as Renfro explained the situation.

"That's why I am so glad to be here in Arizona where the politicians gave us some tools to take care of the situation. Let's face it, if we wait for that crowd in DC to do something we'll all be saying things like oot and aboot and eh after every word. Heck, we might even end up speaking that gutter French they speak up in Quebec. If that happens even the Frogs will be making fun of us. And I'm not gonna let that happen on my watch."

I told Renfro I was proud of him. Proud of the people of Arizona, too. You see, I, for one, do not want to have to read cereal boxes in two languages any time soon. It's just plain un-American.

The Whitest Fest You Know

Went to Coachella this weekend and had a pretty good time. There was one thing though that bothered me a lot about the direction of the festival. For a "hip" festival it ain't very hip, and it's not open to any really adventurous acts.

In the first years of the Coachella Festival there was definitely an attempt to bring in acts from all of the music spectrum. Over the years DJ and Hip Hop acts like the Chemical Brothers and Black Star played the main stage while more exotic fair like Tricky and the Nortec Collective played in the tents around the grounds.

Now the only acts that one might consider soul or R & B are either British bands featuring mostly white performers or older acts that have long ago been given the "whitey" hipster stamp of approval. Acts like De La Soul and Jay-Z who might have been radical choices when they first came out are hardly adventurous choices in 2010.

Even the couple of older acts that peaked my interest, Sly Stone and Gil Scott-Heron have both long been the kind of artists that old hippies point to proudly in their record or CD collections. Proof that whitey white white folks have a little subversiveness in them. Let's face it. Sly Stone was a headliner at Woodstock and Gil Scott-Heron played on the original Saturday Night Live a generation ago.

Oh, sure their were some DJ's on the bill. But even the dance music was mostly played by white British folks and hippie types. There were no underground hip hop acts, no jazz and other than a couple of hipster Latino acts like Aterciopelados and Calle 13 very little Latin flavor. Considering SoCal is a mostly Latino enclave that was pretty much a big middle finger to the people that live in the area.

Coachella isn't about the people of Southern California. It isn't even about music at this point. It's about making a buck.

I've always said the album that kills a big act isn't the one that sells poorly. It's the album that sells a ton of records and CD's that really stinks. You know the album I'm talking about. That real stinker that you and all your friends purchased and now the Used Record Store won't even take it back. That's the one that kills a career. Not the well regarded follow up record that no one buys after being burned on the last record.

The same is true of big events. No one went to Sundance last year despite some of the best films the festival has shown in years. Why? Because of all the years of crappy films made by a small handful of filmmakers. The years of crappy mumblecore, big actor vanity projects and the political screeds masquerading as documentaries have made Sundance a pale shell of the festival that once defined independent film. Sundance lost the adventurousness that made it a top festival and now people are turning their back on it.

The same thing will happen to Coachella unless they go back to the things that made the festival great.

What happened to popular music in America?

Tonight I was watching a little American Idol to kill time. It was the elimination episode after the usual karaoke performances from the night before. This week the Idol contestants were butchering the catalogue of Lennon-McCartney. It's really hard to take Beatles songs and make them unlistenable, but the Idol crew did their best.

I think the most noticeable thing about most Idol contestants is their overwhelming love for maudlin crooning. For that reason they almost uniformly picked the later Beatles ballads penned by McCartney instead the great pop numbers McCartney and Lennon churned out as a writing duo in the mid-60's. This meant a long and winding parade of the sap that Sir Paul specialized in over the years.

I was pleasantly surprised when the long haired rocker kid did the classic Lennon solo number Jealous Man until I began to worry this might open the door for another contestant to choose a later McCartney number like Ebony and Ivory.

To make a long story short, I started getting bored watching the show tonight and I started You Tube spelunking to kill time. Going to my front page I saw that a whole lot of old Smith's videos had been queued up for me because I had watched Morrissey's Every Day Is Like Sunday the other day.

Wow, they were a great band. I mean, really f-ing great. I watched them play early small shows on German TV and later big shows in front of tens of thousands in Madrid. Johnny Marr playing that great guitar and Morrissey doing his odd sensual geek boy dance while singing the most disarming, funny and heartbreaking lyrics.

It was about the time I was watching the lads from Manchester playing There's a Light That Never Goes Out with the audience singing so loud to almost couldn't hear Morrissey singing that I looked up and saw the Ryan Seacrest intro-ing current pop star Rihanna, She was singing her newest single Rockstar 101.

Good lord, what dreck. She comes out in a what appeared to be somewhere between a bondage outfit and a wetsuit. Then she proceeded to sing about being a rock star with lame keyboard sounds playing behind her in the background. I'm not sure what you call the kind of music the band was playing but it most certainly didn't rock.

Near the end of the song someone brought her a guitar to put on and she played a couple of chords while striking her best "Rockstar" pose. I'm not sure who she was trying to imitate but the guys in Zeppelin don't have to worry about copyright infringement. The bottom line is Rihanna may be a step up from the Idol contestants but she doesn't have the kind of unbridled energy that a great performer should have.

The fact that she is considered a star right now says a lot about the current pop landscape.

It's not that there isn't great music out there. There is.

And a lot of it is coming from the US. It's just not being promoted on TV right now in this country.

Over in Europe there are still a lot of great music shows and they broadcast live from all the big festivals. When I meet young people from Holland, France, Spain and Britain. In Europe American bands like MGMT, TV On The Radio, the Black Keys and Deerhunter play in front of large crowds in the thousands at the big festivals.

Festivals here in the US like Coachella, Bonneroo and Austin City Limits also draw large crowds. But nothing like the festivals in Europe. And these bands are almost never on TV with the rare exception of an occasional one off on Letterman or Leno.

Americans are force fed the likes of this Idol cast and Disney's latest cupie doll pop tarts like Miley Cyrus or Demi Lovato while our best bands are playing overseas.

It's sad state of affairs if you ask me.

Animal Boner isn't dead: A short history of punk rock.

The other night I was hanging out with some old friends who I've known for a good number of years. We were commiserating after hearing that a friend of ours had OD'd and died up in San Francisco. I'd like to say that's unusual, but for this group of friends it just isn't so. We've had a number of friends die that way over the years.

But that's not what this blog is about. It's about the last days of punk rock.

There was only three true punk rock scenes in the history of music. The first one in New York with bands like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Television.

The second and probably most famous scene out of the UK with the Sex Pistols. the Clash, the Buzzcocks, the Damned and so many others names both famous and infamous.

Finally, there was Los Angeles and Southern California. This was the Screamers, the Weirdos, X, the Germs and the like. This was the last original punk rock scene.

There are people who will debate this basic truth. But they would be wrong.

These are the people who want to include places like Washington, DC and Boston in the mix. But those scenes happened later and were much more influenced by the Hardcore Scene. That was a scene came out the last throws of LA's punk rock scene and included bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Husker Du and the Meat Puppets.

And yeah, I know the good folks at Sundance tried to pawn off that awful, revisionist piece of crap American Hardcore as a legitimate documentary of a scene. But then the film festival geeks tend to get everything wrong.

So, my friends and I were discussing the death of this friend and it was mentioned along the way that he used to hang out with a bunch of other punk rock kids at the old Cathay de Grande in Hollywood.

The Cathay de Grande was one of second generation punk clubs in Hollywood and as such was what might affectionately known as a dump. According to one newspaper it was also known as "The most dangerous club in America."

According to Wikipedia this was "Due to problems with neighbors, violence caused in part by punk gangs such as the LADS gang, FFF, HRP and others, and legal problems related to business conflicts, the Cathay de Grande closed in 1985 With Violent Psychosis, The Mentors with El Duce and Circle Jerks performing the farewell show. Shortly before,Dobbs, the booker at the Cathay de Grande, started Raji's a block to the north on Hollywood Boulevard.

This was the club where punk went to die. where the last remnants of the original dream of freedom turned into a cesspool of drugs, violence and excess. It is also where the last punk rock kids got the last punk rock names.

See the original punk names out of New York were things like the Ramones, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. These names, while colorful, were almost stately compared to the next generation of names out of London like Johnny Rotten and Rat Scabies. Then came the LA names like my pals Smog Vomit and Dick Rude.

Then came the fans started giving themselves punk rock names and everything got even nuttier, or better depending on how you want to look at it.

Suddenly there was a kid named Animal Boner. Who we ended up talking about because he was a friend of our friend who passed away. He was one of the kids at the Cathay de Grande when it was fucked up and violent right at the end.

Naturally we assumed Animal Boner went the way of all those other kids. No way he wasn't dead from a drug overdose after all these years.

"Let's face it," my pal Bob said, "chances are you're not gonna live a long life if you're drug dealing punk rock kid with a name like Animal Boner."

"Animal Boner isn't dead. " said Andre, another friend of ours, "He's a born again Christian in Seattle."

At that point we all laughed. Laughed hard. Piss your pants laughter.

Go figure. Kids named Jason and Jimmy didn't make it out, but Animal Boner did. And so did some other friends who no one thought had a chance.

It's good to be alive.

FYI - I do know that's a picture of DC stalwarts Minor Threat playing at the Cathay de Grande. The mantle was passed from punk to hardcore at venues like this and Perkins Palace.

Six Degrees of Dr. Drew's Sober House

Recently my friends and I have developed a dirty little secret. We watch Dr. Drew's Sober House.

This is a very difficult for my friends and I because in many ways we find the whole concept of Sober House completely offensive. I mean, the idea of showing people on TV in the early days of recovery and making money from that is just plain wrong. In oh, so many ways.

Then there's the whole idea of Dr, Drew himself. He runs one of the better recovery hospitals in the country and he had a ton of respect. But now he seems like a media whore willing to degrade himself and others for a little fame and fortune.

Then there's the rest of the cast.

Let me start my letting you know I am friends with the main drug counselor, Bob Forrest. I've known him for years and I love the guy. I find it amazing that he walks through each episode and manages to always keep his dignity. But he manages to do it.

That's probably because he gets to come and go as he pleases.

He's not one of the poor saps staying at the Sober House. They're all messed up as the old man said in Night of the Living Dead. They're bat shit crazy. (Technically it should be bat guano crazy. Bats and seabirds have guano, mammals and regular birds have shit. )

Like Mike Starr. Mike's another guy I've known for years. A friend of mine used to go out with Mike's sister and he's from my hometown Seattle. I've seen Mike sober for little bits of time and I've seen the dude loaded to the gills. But he's a piece of work no matter what the condition.

The rest of the house is filled the detritus of pop culture. Former roundballer Dennis Rodman who gets farther out the older he gets. Actor Tom Sizemore who's been arrested countless times. Seth Binzer, the lead singer from Crazytown, the worst band ever to sell over a million records. And two porn actresses I'd never heard of before watching the show.

Finally, there's former Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss. I've never met Heidi but she her family used to spend their holidays with one of my exes family when she was growing up. I've heard a lot of stories.

Heidi and Tom were once involved with each other and the relationship ended so badly that Sizemore ended up in jail on domestic violence charges after Fleiss got a restraining order against him. So of course it makes sense to have them live in a house together as they are detoxing from alcohol and drugs.

I'm surprised they didn't try and get Bebe Netanyahu and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the show. Maybe they did and their asking price was too rich for the budget. Charlie Rose gets them so their fees can't be that high.

The oddest thing about the show is that the porn actresses seem like the sanest folks in the bunch. Which might be why one of them, Jennifer Ketcham AKA Penny Flame was just invited to speak at Harvard. As in Harvard University, the Washington University of the East.

That was after she appeared on Oprah and the View. She also writes a column for the crown jewel of progressive blogoshere, the Huffington Post. I'm not sure, but after the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts Jennifer might have a congressional run in her down the road. Taking your clothes off in public and starring on reality television might be the best way to move up in the political world these days.

In a weird way I should be rooting for the people on Sober House. These are my people. The drug addicts and the alcoholics. The people who are just trying to get their shit together.

I do root for them. I just don't think they should be on television. And I wish I didn't watch it every week. But I do.

And I don't feel that good about it.

I'm afraid of Little People.

That's right. I said it. I am afraid of Little People. Midgets and Dwarves.

I'm not proud of this fact. I just know that it's true.

For those of you who don't know the difference, Midgets are small people whose limbs are generally proportionate while Dwarves are small people who have shortened limbs but their hands, feet and heads are about the same as those of larger people.

Peter Dinklage and Verne Troyer are Dwarves, while Harry Earle, the lead actor in Freaks was a Midget. At least that's the way I understand it. I could be wrong.

It really doesn't matter. I am terrified of all Little People.

Now, I know what you're thinking. What's the big deal? Seriously, how often do you come across a Little Person anyway. Once every 5 years or so. Once in a blue moon.

Tell you what. It's a lot more often than that.

I've encountered Little People all over the world. I had one wait on me recently at my local Starbucks. I had one speak at an AA meeting I attended. (She had some great drunk stories by the way.) I've run into them in Europe and I even had one staying at my hotel when I was teaching in Iraq back in 2007. Those Little People are everywhere.

Probably the strangest encounter I've ever had with a Little Person was back in 1988 when I lived behind the church at Highland and Franklin in the heart of Hollywood.

The church itself is probably best known for the Giant Aids ribbon that has long decorated the front of the church. If you've ever been to Hollywood you've probably seen it as you drive up Highland Boulevard on your way to Mann's Chinese or the Walk of Fame. The AIDS Ribbon went up early in the crisis and it has never come down. They are deservedly proud of it.

Back in 1988, I used to live behind the church with my girlfriend Dawn. This was a couple of years before the ribbon went up and a couple of years before I got sober.

We lived in a triplex bungalow with a former South African model named Merle upstairs and young singer songwriter named Tori Amos next door. Yeah, that Tori Amos. She was a friend of Dawn's.

It was quite a group living there and if I could remember a little more of what happened I might be able to tell you some really great stories. But since I drank a lot back then and loved to mix my booze with coke and extasy I missed a lot of what went on. It was a good time as I remember it, though.

Anyway, Dawn got a job in New York that summer and had to move across the country. That left me to take care of myself with the help of Merle, who Dawn had instructed to make dinner for me because in Merle's words, "Dawn said you won't eat if I don't feed you." I thought that was a bit much, but since I quite enjoyed Merle's company I was more than happy to eat dinner with her each night.

You see Merle had lost her modeling career because at the age of 18 she popped out with the most amazing breasts this man had ever seen. It seems the clothes didn't hang right after she blossomed and she went from in demand runway star to just an incredibly beautiful young woman. She also had the most amazing accent and fine record collection.

When Dawn left for New York I got a job teaching reading development in Orange Country. That meant I had to get up early every morning and take the I-5 down to such exotic locations as Fountain Valley, Irvine and Tustin. Sometimes it would take me two or three hours just to get to the location where I was teaching and another two or three hours to get home. Those long drives and my continued drug use meant I wasn't getting a lot of sleep.

Which brings us to the Little People in question. Or should I say Little Person.

One morning when I started to leave for work, I stepped out onto my porch and almost tripped over... you got it, a Midget. At first I thought I'd finally gone around the bend and the Midget on my stoop was a figment of my imagination. But then the young man spoke to me.

"You seen any little people around here?" He said.

I glanced around furtively. Wondering if there was somehow a small Army of Midgets and Dwarves had surrounded my house during the night. But alas he was the only Little Person around.

At this point I seriously thought about turning around and going back in the house. Starting the day with a Midget on my porch didn't seem like a good omen to me. I mean, I'm really afraid of them. Lie some people are with snakes.

But I decided to face my fears.

"No, man." I responded. "I ain't seen no little people around. Should there be."

"There should be a bunch of them." Was the little guy's response. He explained that he was there for an audition for the film Dick Tracy. The church had rented out the gym to the producers and today they were casting Little People for roles in the movie.

I was starting to get a little queasy as he spoke. I'm sure part of it was the X that was still coursing through my body, or maybe the last line of coke I did in the bathroom as I was getting ready. Either way, I didn't really want to be attacked by a group of Little People actors looking for their next gig.

The Midget surmised that he might be a tad early for his audition and asked if I could let him inside the gymnasium. He would have let himself in, but he was too short to reach the door handle. I told him I didn't mind letting him but expressed my concern that he wouldn't be able to get out if he had the wrong day and the Dick Tracy folks didn't show up.

"I'll be fine," he said. "I'm sure I've got the right day. "

I let him in the gym and then drove down to the OC. I had a tough time teaching that day. I kept thinking about the Little Man back at the church. I really hoped the Dick Tracy people treated him well during his audition. More importantly I hoped they let him out of the gym.

I certainly didn't want a dead midget on my hands.

I got home about ten hours later and went straight into my house. I was afraid to go into the gym for fear of what kind of madness might be going on inside. Who knows what kind of things they had those Little People do during the auditions.

I never found out if the Little Man got the part, but I'm pretty sure he got out of the gym.

The Strange Case of Alex Chilton, REM and the Cramps.

Last week many of us mourned the loss of the late, great Alex Chilton.

For those of you who weren't listening to NPR or some other neo-hipster radio station last week, Alex Chilton was the one time lead singer of two seminal groups from the 60's and 70's. As a teenager he was the snarling lead singer of the pop group the Box Tops who scored several hits including the seminal tune The Letter. (My personal Box Tops fave was Neon Rainbow, but that song barely cracked the Top 40 and is seldom heard today.)

Later he formed the "legendary" band Big Star. And that's where things start to get a little wonky in term of his obituaries.

You see, Big Star never really made it when they were a band. Their records tanked when they first came out and for many years you couldn't even buy a Big Star record because they were out of print. About the only way you could hear Big Star through much of the 70's and 80's was by listening to bootleg tape that one of your friends had.

But much has been made about all the bands who have cited Big Star as a seminal influence. But one of the band that most often cited for being huge fans isn't one of them.

To explain, here is a quote from Chilton's Wikipedia entry. "The group's recordings met little commercial success but established Chilton's reputation as a rock singer and songwriter; later alternative music bands like R.E.M. would praise the group as a major influence."

That's right kiddies. According to Wikipedia REM was strongly influenced by one Alex Chilton. And they're not the only ones. Almost every obituary brought up REM as one of the bands most influenced by Big Star.

The music editor for Slate Magazine even went so far as to mention Michael Stipe by name.

Which I found extremely amusing for one reason. Years ago, I made a film called Athens, GA/Inside-Out that featured a lot of bands from Athens, GA including REM. And for an ever so brief moment in time I actually palled around with Mr. Stipe a little bit while the band was recording Life's Rich Pageant here in LA.

It was during that time that Chilton's record label at the time, Big Time Records (the home of one of my favorite Athens, GA bands Love Tractor) talked to me about doing a music video for Alex Chilton.

To make a long story short I mentioned this small tidbit to Michael one night thinking he might be interested that I might be doing a video with one of his heroes and was surprised at his less than interested response. I mean young Michael reacted to my big news the same way he did when Bill Berry and I talked football after a weekend of NFL games.

i.e. Dude wasn't interested in the least.

So being very needy back then, and a bit of a drunk to boot, I decided to press Stipe about his response. "I thought you might be interested." I said.

"Why would I be interested?" He responded innocently.

"I thought you were a big fan."

"Why do people think that? I can't stand Alex Chilton." He said.

You see, in reality only half of the band liked Big Star. Mike Mills and Peter Buck. The other two, not so much.

So, while there might be a some Big Star in the REM, Alex Chilton was hardly a major influence. There's a lot more Pylon, Patti Smith, the Velvets and Method Actors in there than Big Star. Oh, and from what everyone in Athens told me they played a lot of Monkees covers when they first started.

The fact is Chilton was a bigger influence on his friends the Cramps. He helped produce their classic Songs The Lord Taught Us.

He was most very proud of his involvement with that seminal band and remained friends with them over the years. He was also proud of his work with another well known psychobilly band the Gories. We know this because his wife mentioned that in a letter that was read at South By Southwest last week.

Her letter read: "The one thing he was absolutely proud of was producing the Cramps records. He would play them at home and and just talk and talk about the experience. He was also quite proud of the Detroit garage band the Gories – both his work with them and the band itself. He was very excited for them now that they are playing shows again."

Yet, almost none of the obituaries I read last week even mentioned the Cramps. Nor his long friendship and numerous collaborations with Jim Dickinson. Another great but little known Memphis music figure.

I don't want to call out the people who were sincerely writing Chilton's obit last week and I am certainly glad he got wide mentions throughout the US and the world. I just thought it might be time to correct the urban legend of Alex Chilton and push back on the tide of misinformation spewed by many in the music press.

And that's the real story!

For more on the real Alex Chilton. Here's a link to the full text of Laura Chilton's letter regarding the death of her beloved husband.

http://www.offbeat.com/2010/03/24/laura-chilton-on-alexs-passing/