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XXI Annual Bob Dylan Imitators Contest

The spoils of victory.

I happened to stumble upon a website for place in Buffalo called Nietzsche's one fine day while fulfilling the tasks and duties of my high-stress-level executive-type position, and I was delighted to find that Nietzsche's hosts an annual event called the Bob Dylan Imitators Contest. Well, that sounded like just the thing to get involved with, and having never heard of the place, I went down the hall to consult with Linda, the sole Buffalo native at work. Linda's description, plus the fact that hanging out in a bar all night on Thursday would require that I take Friday off convinced me. Hey honey, we're going to Buffalo!

The 27th finally rolled around and into the car we went and lit out for Buffalo. Now we usually go up there with a carload of dogs to see Dr. Stanz at Animal Eye Care, so it was nice just the two of us for a change.

We got to Nietzsche's about 6:30, found a parking spot and after camoflaging the guitars, harmonicas, audio and video equipment with a blanket, we stepped out onto Allen St. to do a little exploring. As I leaned into the freezing rain that blasted us I cursed myself for ignoring Nancy's advice to "Bring a coat, you idiot. You'll freeze". We ducked into a little bookstore/antique place after a block or so of exploring became too cold to continue, and after looking around half-heartedly, decided to just go to the place where the contest was and hang out, get something to eat, have a beer and wait for the sign up to begin. So into Nietzsche's we went.

Talking with some of the judges.

Well, it was lucky for us we went in when we did, for news of the Dylan Contest had swelled the ranks of patrons to exactly five, including me, Nancy, and the bartender. Hmmm... nobody in the place. Well, we were a bit early I guess, so we sat down to have a beer and regroup. "A pale ale and Bass" I replied to the barmaids query. The pale ale tap blew foam and sputtered off after a quarter of a glass. No pale ale. Oh, and no Bass either. And changing the keg was out of the question because Bass "Has a weird triangle hole and it's hard to change". Okay, fine. Ultra and Blue Moon it is.

We had a few pulls out of the bottle and took a look around. Turns out that the sign-up time for the contest was at 8:oo, not 7:oo as I had been told when I called Nietzsche's earlier in the week to verify the starting time. That's cool, it's all good when you don't have to work Friday.

We started up a conversation with the bartender and a kid sitting at the bar, and we were struck by what we always think when we visit Buffalo, folks there are very friendly and real.

Mike Meldrum- He runs the contest and was

Ani DiFrancos mentor. Nice guy.

Pretty soon in came a couple, and the fella was carrying a guitar. They turned out to be Ralph and Cindy, two of the nicest people we met that night. Ralph is another member of a group I know quite a few of; college professors who can sing and play the heck out of the guitar. He did a real nice Don't Think Twice which I have on video, and I'll add some stills of him to this post when I figure out how to grab them.

Nancy and I got a bunch of new cameras and camcorders and this was the first try out for some of the stuff, plus I was trying to record audio as well on a Zoom H4, which my brother-in-law Dave did a nice job of manning.

I disremember this lady's name. I do remember

that she did a nice Masters of War.

Next thing you know, people were showing up and the contest got rolling and the fun began. Lots of good tunes and everybody was having fun singing, playing and listening. When it was all said and done, I had a great time, met some good people,got to play some tunes I haven't done in years, was lucky to be judged "Best in Show", won a lot of good prizes and got to drive home in one last snowstorm.

JFK Anniversary

A bit late with posting as usual.

While reading a few articles on the JFK assasination anniversary, I thought about the fact that we Hunts have a rather fascinating connection to the whole business, the Lawsons.

To this day, I have only the vaguest notion of the relationship between the Lawsons and the Hammonds, (Mother, would you please post a comment and fill me in on the exact story?)

About all I can recall of the few visits I made to that little house in Portland was that there was a gooseberry bush in the back yard, and I vaguely remember seeing a letter signed by President Nixon(?) on top of the piano concerning someone named Winston. Winston's name came up in conversation occasionally, and I do recall hearing that he was a government guy and had been in Dallas that day.

Well, as it turns out, Winston G. Lawson was a vey important player in the Kennedy assasination. He was the "advance man" for that trip to Dallas, responsible for checking into all the details of Kennedy's trip, and for meeting with Dallas police and arranging security for the motorcade ( Dallas police chief Jesse Curry always insisted that Lawson was the person who made all the major decisions). Lawson drove the lead car in the motorcade, and after the assasination, helped to load Kennedy onto a strecher and pushed him into the emergency room.

Here is more on Lawson:

Winston Lawson was born in 1929. After studying history at the University of Buffalo he worked as a wholesale carpet salesman. In December 1951, he became a sales representative for Carnation, a company manufacturing milk products.
Lawson joined the US Army in 1953 and after basic training was sent to the CIC Counterintelligence School in Holabird, Maryland. Based at Lexington, during the Korean War he took part in the interviewing of prisoners.
In 1955 Lawson returned to the Carnation Milk Company and had various sales or public relations jobs with them in Poughkeepsie. He applied to enter the Secret Service in 1956 but was not accepted until October 1959. He did general investigative work in the Syracuse area, until being transferred to Washington in March, 1961. Soon afterwards he was given responsibility for organizing the security for trips being made by President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
On 4th November Lawson was asked to prepare for the presidential trip to Dallas, Texas. This involved discussions with Kenneth O'Donnell (special assistant to Kennedy), Roy Kellerman and Jesse Curry (chief of police in Dallas). However, Curry always insisted that Winston G. Lawson was the person who made all the major decisions. This included the order that the proposed side escorts for the motorcade were to be redeployed to the rear of the cars.

Lawson drove the presidential motorcade's lead car. In a statement he made later, Lawson commented: "As the lead car was passing under this bridge I heard the first loud, sharp report and in more rapid succession two more sounds like gunfire. I could see persons to the left of the motorcade vehicles running away. I noticed Agent Hickey standing up in the follow-up car with the automatic weapon and first thought he had fired at someone. Both the President's car and our lead car rapidly accelerated almost simultaneously."
Lawson remained a member of the Secret Service until he retired. He still works as a consultant on security issues. On the 40th anniversary of the assassination he gave an interview to Michael Granberry of the Dallas Morning News.: I must have thought a million times, what could I have done to prevent it?... From Love Field to Dealey Plaza, there were 20,000 windows. How could we possibly check them all?"
Granberry's article goes on to say: "When the president's day began at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, a persistent drizzle had forced the Secret Service to consider covering the motorcade's cars in Dallas with protective bubbletops. (Hours later, Dallas would end up sunny.) Though the bubbletops were not bulletproof, the metal and the contour of the covering, says Lawson, would have made it difficult for a bullet to do much damage, and might have kept a gunman from even firing in the first place. So he's asked himself a million times: Why couldn't it keep raining?"


From Winston Lawson's Warren Commission statement:

"At the corner of Houston and Elm Streets I verified with Chief Curry that we were about five minutes from the Trade Mart and gave this signal over my portable White House Communications radio. We were just approaching a railroad overpass and I checked to see if a police officer was in position there and that no one was directly over our path. I noticed a police officer but also noticed a few persons on the bridge and made motions to have these persons removed from over our path. As the lead car was passing under this bridge I heard the first loud, sharp report and in more rapid succession two more sounds like gunfire. I could see persons to the left of the motorcade vehicles running away. I noticed Agent Hickey standing up in the follow-up car with the automatic weapon and first thought he had fired at someone. Both the President's car and our lead car rapidly accelerated almost simultaneously. I heard a report over the two-way radio that we should proceed to the nearest hospital. I noticed Agent Hill hanging on to the rear of the President's vehicle. A motorcycle escort officer pulled alongside our lead car and said the President had been shot. Chief Curry gave a signal over his radio for police to converge on the area of the incident. I requested Chief Curry to have the hospital contacted that we were on the way. Our lead car assisted the motorcycles in escorting the President's vehicle to Parkland Hospital.

Upon our arrival there at approximately 12:34 pm, I rushed into the emergency entrance, met persons coming with two stretchers and helped rush them outside. Governor Connally was being removed from the car when the stretchers arrived and he was placed on the first one. Mr. Powers, myself and one or two others placed President Kennedy on a stretcher and we ran pushing the stretcher into the emergency area which hospital personnel directed us to. I remained outside the door where the President was being treated and requested a nurse to find someone who would know hospital personnel who should be admitted to the President's room ..."



Lots more here:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKlawsonW.htm

Jeff's Benefit Bash

Hi Folks,
Not a whole lot of time to write tonight, but I did want to at least get these pictures up right away .

Nancy and I were happy that we could make it up to Ashville for the benefit today, and I do believe that Jeff looks pretty darn good considering the rough patch that he's been through.

Really got a kick out of seeing Sue and meeting her husband Jevin. Sorry about the embarrasing dance moves, though.

We need to do something about seeing each other a little more often, don't you all think?

More later, as I have more photos to go through and thoughts to collect.

Erie Spring Show Opening

Posing by "Stop the War"
Busy weekend !

Friday was the Folk Festival down in Cambridge Springs. Forsythe and Generic played back to back sets, so I got a bit of a work out in a very hot and sweaty setting. Fun time, but I about croaked by the end of it all.

Saturday night was the opening of the Spring Show, so we went on down to see what it was all about.

Coming up the steps to the museum, there were a lot of people sitting out on the steps in the cool of the evening, so I laughingly called out "Must be an awful show if you all are hanging around outside". No one reacted. Hmmmmm.

Once inside, it became rapidly apparent that it was hotter than Hades and jam packed full of art lovers, bohemian wannabes, extra credit seeking students of every stripe, free drink swillers and free snack gobblers.

We took a deep breath and pushed into the throng.

Now the Erie Art Museum is not a cavernous structure by any stretch, and art viewing sort of took second place to dodging bodies, drinks, hairdos and opinions. We went with the flow of the crowd and tried to see as best we could.

Five or so pictures into it, we knew that the crowd was moving too slowly for our liking, so we busted out and went looking for my painting. Various and sundry unfortunate visual experiences later, we found it hung into an inconspicuous corner where those wandering in search of the bathroom, smoking area, or unnoticable empty wine glass/snack plate disposal opportunity might accidentally stumble upon it.

Several people were gathered around, but this was because this lonely hallway offered the only seating in the place, and the remote location provided a respite from the pressing crush of art lovers and wine swillers.

I felt a little embarassed seeing the thing I had spent so much time working on hanging there all lonesome like. We looked for a bit, then I grabbed some passerby and asked her to take a couple photos for us (thanks lady, whoever you are), and then it was time to get on out of there.

Art shows are a funny business. On one hand I was tickled to have gotten in, and then once we looked around, I felt kind of goofy and sad about the whole thing and just wanted to leave ASAP.

Maybe I'm a dope and maybe my attempt to say something about this idiotic ,illegal and immoral mess we are in was lame, ( it's called "Stop the War) but it sure seems to me that if ever there was a time when artists should be using their medium to stand up for something, that time is now.

I was a bit stunned and disappointed that this show had very little (if anything at all) to say about a time when events of potentially disastrous proportions are erupting all around us.

Thank God for that BFA

Two weeks ago I decided, after one and a half minutes of profound contemplation, that it was about high time to dust off the pencil, dig out the sketch pad, and break out the ART.

This decision was the result of stumbling upon the Erie Art Museum web page instead of working one day , and seeing that the annual Spring Show was coming up. Since I had just gotten my taxes back, I was in possession of the required fee of $10 per entry, and I also determined that the sting of previous rejections had abated sufficiently in the 18 years since I last pissed away time, effort , creativity and $30 to allow another go at acceptance in the ART WORLD, or another dance with the miserable twin of acceptance, humiliating rejection.

Flashback:
Many years ago, fresh from college, young and idealistic, I entered the Spring Show for the first time. The first show I had ever had the nerve to enter.My theory was to enter paintings that opposed convention yet were still conventional in that they were paintings in frames. Or some shit like that. Come on, I was 22. Anyway, I actually had one piece that I framed with lasagna, macaroni, and whatever other decorative pasta I could find. I glued it all on and spray painted it gold.

Well, darned if I didn't not only get in the show, but I won one of the prizes. Hot damn, I thought as I pocketed my check and talked to all the Erie ART swells at the opening party, I'm on my way. Then soon after the Gulf War broke out, and I was invited to do a piece for a special "All About the War" show, and I was sure ART was my thing. There was no stopping me now.

Of course, every show I entered after that rejected my stuff. After the basement filled up with rejected crap, I just quit even picking the damn things up from wherever I sent them. Then I stopped entering all together. Bastards.


Flash forward:
All this rattled around in my brain as I worked on getting two pieces done in time to enter this year. The huge drawing callous on the middle finger of my right hand hand long ago faded , and my ART muscles hurt like hell after two days of cutting giant stencils with the scalpel that Mother stole for me about 25 years ago, but it felt good to do something ARTSY. It was even fun. I was very happy with the first piece, and okay with the second, and so off they went to be judged.

The moment of truth came on Saturday. I got the mail and there between the 0% APR credit card offers and the Penelec bill was the Erie Art Museum logo. I tore it open and had a look.


The Spring Show opens Saturday, April 22, from 7 to 9:30 p.m with a private preview and reception for the artists.

I'll be there.

Walk the Line

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

Johnny Cash- The Man in Black


That lyric, and indeed that entire song, which sums up a major part Johnny Cash's life and provides the supreme illumination into The Man in Black, is not even included in the film.

Imagine Loretta Lynn's story without Sissy Spacek singing Coal Miner's Daughter . That is what we have with Walk The Line .

Johnny Cash's story is one of redemption; a musician with one foot in country music and the other in the turbulent waters of the newly emerging rockabilly, a current that nearly swept him away with the power of it's seductive vices. But this formulaic film glosses over the lows that Cash hit, and in doing so saps the highs of any cinematic power. George Bailey has a grittier and more satisfying fall and rebirth in It's A Wonderful Life than Joaquin Phoenix is allowed to muster here, and what should have been a gold-record tribute to an American icon ends up as a hastily pressed B-side.

Cash found his salvation in the love of a woman who sprang from the family that literally invented country music and became that early form's biggest and most influencial stars. The Carter Family was the voice of rural America with their songs of love lost and found, mountain cabins, and very importantly, songs of religious faith. These were the songs Johnny Cash grew up listening to.These were the roots of June Carter Cash and their strength was vital to the real life story, but this film has no interest in these ties, other than a brief passage of Reese Witherspoon singing Wildwood Flower, which I'm sure few in the audience recognized anyway.


Much has been made of the musical performances of the actors, who did their own singing and held a few guitars, and to be fair, Phoenix does a reasonable job of approximating Cash and Witherspoon is actually quite good. Jackson is a nice number, for example. But all their hard work is wasted on dull script, barely fleshed out characters and unimaginative lackluster direction by James Mangold who proves that an MFA from Columbia does not a director make. Despite it's $28 million dollar production budget, I was glad I went to see this at the $1.00 theatre.

This is a movie about music, love, fame and the effects of all three on a troubled man who managed to rise, fall, overcome a host of demons and addictions and come out not only alive, but on top and with love and marriage intact.

Now that is a three-chord plot to be sure, but as Harlan Howard said, country music is three chords and the truth. Walk The Line gives us one G chord with a busted string and a wink.

That makes for a song that dissatifies