thanksgiving field note 1: republicans, four seasons and peter bradley adams
Greetings this morning from a well-to-do suburb just outside of New York city where we’re spending this Thanksgiving holiday with family. And my first as a vegetarian. Unlike our sad little California valley with fifteen percent unemployment and lots of vacant buildings , there’s no foreclosures here that I can see and no decline in the country club memberships.
It’s business as usual for the top two percent and aren’t we all fortunate that we have the Republicans looking out for them as they fight against letting the Bush tax cuts expire, while putting the middle-class in jeopardy and blocking extensions for unemployment benefits? Please don’t give us your tired, your poor, your hungry or your huddled masses because we have enough on our hands making sure we’re keeping our own tired, poor and hungry masses in their places and allowing our rich to get richer.
I’ve passed on an opportunity to see Bob Weir and Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead perform tonight at Madison Square Garden but in my place the wife and kids are going. In a different time I wouldn’t have missed it but although I’m sure they’ll sound great, Further is just another tribute band playing memories and I’m not in a nostalgic mood this moment.
That’ll probably change this afternoon as I take my eighty-nine year old mom to see the Sunday matinee of Jersey Boys down where the neon lights are bright. This musical is of course based on the Four Seasons, the biggest selling band in the land from sixty-two til sixty-four until the mop tops came across the Atlantic and changed everything.
Whenever I hear “Big Girls Don’t Cry” or “Sherry” I think of Vee-Jay Records….the label that could have been the biggest. Not only did they have the Four Seasons, but they also signed the Beatles for US distribution when EMI-owned Capitol Records decided that beyond England, nobody would care about the not-so-fab foursome. By sixty-four, both bands left the label and they were bankrupt two years later.
A quick change of subject.
At the airport we weren’t subjected to neither a scan nor a pat down. It wouldn’t matter if we were because frankly, I don’t give a damn how long the lines are or if someone sees me naked just as long as my plane makes it from here to there safely without being hijacked by a fundamentalist of any ilk. Sometimes we work ourselves up into such a frenzy over such little things.
On the flight from San Diego to NY, I listened to twenty-eight tracks from Peter Bradley Adams, founding member of the duo eastmountainsouth. Their only five year old self-titled release still ranks high in “alternative folk” sales at Amazon, and Peter’s band and solo work has shown up in film and tv shows. Although he’s been praised by quite a few publications for his brand of soft Americana, he doesn’t seem to be someone that the No Depression bunch has latched onto. I like him a lot and think you would to.