Monday, June 28, 2021

Ed Ward 1948-2021

 

Greetings. Yes, it's been years. It's become apparent, though I am busier than ever as a professional writer these days, there is a need to revive this blog. It's a necessity to tackle subjects to which I may not be able in the outlets I have at hand, or to post material that has to be excised from my pieces. Today, I post the eulogy I delivered at the memorial service for one of the pioneers of rock journalism, Ed Ward, found dead of unknown causes this past May 3rd. The service was held this past Saturday, June 26th, at Sam's Town Point, a funky dive on the edge of town that reminds many of the much-missed "old Austin."  I was joined on the dais by Wild Seeds leader and Texas Monthly staff writer Mike Hall. He regaled us with personal tales of the impact Ed had on the local music scenes, most specifically the criticism Ed had for one Wild Seeds track in particular. Mike then performed an acoustic rendition of the song in question. I went long, covering as much of Ed's life and career as possible, then performed "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory" for him, as I have at many a memorial service the last few years. I did incorporate or rewrite portions of the Ed obituary I wrote for The Austin Chronicle, which you can read by clicking this blue shit right here. Meanwhile, here's what I read Saturday to the gathered. I began by displaying the ancient iron-on t-shirt transfer displayed in Jim Ellinger's pic above, part of a "Dump Ward" campaign you will read about below.

I never heard about this until I started reading the obituaries. I didn’t live in Austin then. But my understanding is that these started appearing around town one month after he began working for the American-Statesman. I got confirmation yesterday Doug Sahm was responsible. Seems Ed gave him a bad review.


One month. That’s impressive. Truth of the matter is, Austin’s music community was not used to a music critic who actually critiqued. Ed Ward was not going to be your cheerleader, just telling you how great it was you got a new album out. If you couldn’t deliver the goods, or he felt you couldn’t, he was gonna tell you. He was the nicest, most encouraging of friends. But when he wore his critic hat? You were gonna get criticized. Fairly, and honestly. But you would get criticized.


Ed went to college with Ray Benson from Asleep At The Wheel. He could have warned you!


For that matter, Doug could have warned you. He knew already. Ed reviewed the Sir Douglas Quintet’s comeback album, Mendocino, in the May 17, 1969 edition of Rolling Stone, a little less than a year before he became its record reviews editor. He wrote of the title track’s lyrics, printed on the back cover: “Please don’t look at them. They’re not very good.”  Then he added, “But if you hear the song twice, you’ll be humming it and it’ll make you feel good.” In the next paragraph, he noted, “That’s the thing about this album. Despite its many faults, it makes you listen to it. It’s poorly recorded, sloppily produced (dig the fade on ‘If You Really Want Me To I’ll Go’), and could hardly be called innovative, but it’s the kind of album you keep coming back to. It has something very few albums I’ve heard recently have got - atmosphere.” *pause* So, is it a good record or bad, Ed? He apparently elevated the backhanded compliment into high art. Perhaps this was why, when Jaan Wenner sent his new record reviews editor to interview Doug several months later, Sir Douglas got Ed so stoned that the interview was useless. I suspect this was actually Doug’s revenge on Ed for that review, not the “Dump Ward” stickers. 


Ed was simply gonna tell it like it was, whether you were his friend or not. His opinion of the first Stooges album was, “Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish. I kind of like it.” As I said - master of the backhanded compliment. Later in the ‘70s, long after he’d quit the record review editor’s desk and went on to Creem, he still contributed record reviews to Rolling Stone. He wrote of Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus that it was “sadly undistinguished at best and embarrassing at worst.” He felt that Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity was “loaded with dead spots.” 


But when he loved something, he’d write beautifully, eloquently. Among the chapters he penned for The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll was a gem about what Ed dubbed “Italo-American Rock” - basically, the East Coast Italian version of doo wop, evolving into the late Sixties and the Young Rascals. Having grown up in Eastchester, NY, Ed knew a thing or two about the area and the era. He got downright autobiographical in the course of that essay. Dig what he wrote of Dion and the Belmonts: “Dion DiMucci was a fine tenor, and the support from Angelo D’Aleo, Freddie Milano, and Carlo Mastrangelo couldn’t have been finer. The group had a real flair for arrangements - what attracted me to them instantly was their first biggie, 1958’s ‘I Wonder Why,’ with the voices chiming in one at a time. I almost ruined my vocal cords trying to sing all three parts at once, and trying to imitate Dion’s teenage nasality (but not his New York accent). With ‘A Teenager In Love’ in 1959 and ‘Where or When’ in 1960, the group just got better, and I think every kid in my school idolized Dion and the Belmonts when the group was hot. It was around this time that I did a little singing with some of the kids at school. I was the only one who knew Carlo’s bass part from ‘I Wonder Why,’ so when we sang that, it was the only time I said ‘wop’ in front of that many Italians without having to run like hell afterward.”


Okay, maybe he couldn’t help but deliver zingers, even when he adored something. 


Edmund Osborne Ward was born on Nov. 2, 1948, in Port Chester, N.Y., in Westchester County, and grew up in Irvington and Eastchester. He attended Antioch College in Ohio, and began writing about music in 1965, in the pages of Broadside, the mimeographed folk magazine. He told me when I interviewed him last that he was 16. At that moment, rock ‘n’ roll was treated with all the importance of the newsprint lining a birdcage. You could pick up 16 or Tiger Beat and get “fab pix and fax” of the Beatles or that dreamy Peter Noone. But that was it. When he left Broadside because co-founder Gordon Friesen fumed that “Dylan wasn’t writing about Vietnam,” he lit upon another mimeographed mag, Crawdaddy


Published by 18-year-old Paul Williams, Crawdaddy was likely the first periodical lending this pimply electric jive any gravitas. Crawdaddy treated its subject matter with previously unknown earnestness. No one took rock ‘n’ roll seriously. Now appeared writers applying critical theory to the genre the same way Pauline Kael applied scholarship to film. As such, musicians like John Lennon and Mick Jagger paid attention to what writers like Ed Ward wrote. Even industry pillars like Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler developed friendships with this new breed of writer, picking their brains about this culture. That platform still exists, thrives even, albeit less in print and more in bytes, but cultural shifters continue to bear weight.


Basically, Ed built the desk I and many of us gathered here still sit at to this day. Rock journalism simply did not exist until Ed and Paul Williams invented it. So, when over the years Rolling Stone/Creem/The Austin-American Statesman/The Austin Chronicle/NPR hired Ed Ward, they hired one of the true pioneers of our craft. One who would nurture some of the greatest pioneering talents of the form. He told me that when he assumed the record reviews editorship of Rolling Stone in 1970, he was warned by Jaan Wenner about this shoe salesman in El Cajon, California who would send up to 15 record reviews daily! This was Lester Bangs. 


Ed told me Wenner told him, “‘You can’t keep up with it. You can only accept what seems to be the best, and don’t encourage him.’ I did encourage him by accepting a few of his things. So I was inundated!

.

“When I was fired, one of the things I left behind was two or three reel-to-reel tapes of Lester interviewing Charles Mingus. I had no idea who Mingus was. I just thought, ‘Oh, this is more shit from Lester!’ So I just left it there. Now I’m curious what that interview was like.” *give flabbergasted look* He also gave Dave Marsh work at a time Creem was on hiatus as it redesigned. Wenner yelled at Ed for giving assignments to the editor of a competitor. It’s no wonder Ed didn’t last long at Rolling Stone. Nor that he moved on to Creem afterwards. 


Late in the ‘70s, Austin came calling. Joe Nick Patoski alerted Ed, still residing in San Francisco, of a job opening: The American-Statesman needed a music editor. Ed told me the night he arrived here, he saw The Skunks opening for The Police at the Armadillo. He was immediately tapping into our musical zeitgeist. He covered everything: As Fresh Air host Terry Gross noted, “blues, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, pop, folk, protest and psychedelic music, soul, funk, Tex-Mex, punk….” I’d add progressive country. That was, after all, the town’s musical currency at that point, despite the incursion of the local blues and punk scenes. Chet Flippo and Joe Nick aside, I can think of no one who wrote better about Waylon, Willie and the boys. Even if he made them mad once in a while.


Mostly, Ed seemed to make employers mad. He had a special talent for that. When a group of youngsters he’d met at Raul’s or Club Foot decided they wanted to start a Village Voice-style alternative paper for locals, Ed jumped aboard, pseudonymously. The Statesman wasn’t happy when they figured out who Petaluma Pete was. No matter - he’d gotten book deals to write a biography of rock’s first guitar hero, Mike Bloomfield; and to write all the Fifties stuff for a new Rolling Stone rock history, Rock Of Ages. He could drop pseudonyms with the Chronicle now, should he choose. 


“See, I thought my job was to be a critic, so I criticized — helpful, constructive criticism, I thought,” Ed wrote as he exited the Statesman in 1984. “I saw my function as being a pipeline to the national and international music business, giving insight to locals as I learned about goings-on and making sure the national and international folks knew that there was something going on here in Austin. Of course, there are people who are fanatics, whose relationship to criticism isn’t rational.”


Roughly at this time, he also got the NPR gig as Fresh Air’s resident rock historian. He held that gig for 30 years. His stories for the show were filled with wonderful warmth and affection for his subjects, and a real eye for detail, both humanizing and humorous. When he reported on Paramount Records for the show in 2015, he described Charlie Patton as "... a towering figure who was looked up to by most of the other Mississippi bluesmen ... Once his records began to sell, Patton would load up a car with his friends, his girlfriends, his ex-girlfriends and some whiskey and head to Grafton, Wis., to record. One of those friends was Son House." He never lost that knack. In the second volume of brilliant History Of Rock & Roll from 2019, he noted the Liverpool Echo embedded a local journalist in the Beatles camp as they came to conquer America in February 1964. His name: George Harrison. No, not the Beatles’ lead guitarist. 


The same year, Ed was involved in SXSW’s launch. He was a key staffer for many years, barrelling around the conference in a colonel’s uniform. That could be intimidating if you were a young punk rock critic from Alice, TX. attending SX for the first time, and only knew Ed via his writing! I showed up in the Austin Chronicle offices shortly after moving here a few months later, a bit full of myself after writing for various national and international publications for five years. He made certain to deflate my ego as often as possible, the upperclassman razzing the cocky incoming freshman. I knew I was alright with him six months later, when I told him at that year’s Chronicle Xmas party that I’d recently picked up a Ricky Nelson anthology from 1973 he’d annotated. “Oh, yeah! That series was the brainchild of so-and-so at United Artists. He was this notorious chicken hawk whose office overlooked the entrance of Hollywood High. He’d be scoping out all the 15-year-old boys from his desk when classes let out at 3:30.” Ed had every scandalous tale in the musical universe filed away in his brain.


But even after he moved to Europe in the early ‘90s, he was still full of encouragement when I’d see him at SXSW thereafter. It wasn’t until I wrote his obituary for the Chronicle last month that I realized Ed very subtly mentored me all that time. He gently, quietly guided me. He’d pledged over the last two years to help me get a book deal for the Austin punk history I am still working on, and probably will be for awhile. He invited me into his home twice to interview him for the Chronicle when he was promoting the reissue of his Mike Bloomfield biography, and his History Of Rock & Roll. That was an amazing work - he didn’t write about individual artists. He wrote the events of every year in chronological order, going back to the birth of popular music. He hated what he called the “Great Man Theory” of rock history. He wanted to make it more democratic. This mindset, and the sheer scope of his coverage, was mind-blowing. He unfortunately did not finish that work. Two poor-selling volumes later, he lost his deal for that book. There would be no third volume, telling the tales of glam, punk, heavy metal, disco, and beyond.


It breaks my heart. Just as it breaks my heart to have to be talking about Ed in the past tense. He was important. He built the desk at which I sit, at which many of you gathered here today sit. And he essentially welcomed me to it. Quite literally, in one instance. I had been away from the game for many years, and from Austin almost as long. I was burned out, thinking I needed to reinvent myself. It wasn’t possible. I returned to Austin in 2012, and was asked back to the Chronicle two months later. I covered my first SXSW back on the beat a few months later. I rounded the corner at the Convention Center that first day, and saw a literal roundtable occupied with many of my elders: Jim Fourratt, Bill Bentley, Joe Nick...and Ed Ward. They all grinned at me, happily surprised at seeing me, curious about my return. I told them I was back in town, back at the Chronicle, a writer once again. Ed Ward pulled out the chair next to him, the biggest smile on his face. “Welcome back,” he said.


I finally got to sit at the big kids’ table. Ed Ward was the one who invited me. Thank you, Ed. I will always owe you.



-30-





 




Thursday, March 16, 2017

"Never Play Any Club That Does Not Stock Your Brand Of Booze!" 17 minutes on the phone with Tommy Stinson



Freddie Kruger came to SXSW, and was kind enough to pose for pics: Me and my twin from another mother Tommy Stinson, 3-15-17

Note: This was to have run in The Austin Chronicle online, an expansion of a brief piece whipped-up for SXSW coverage. Space and time limitations conspired to have it, instead, be posted here. The paper's loss, our gain, eh? *grins* To read my review of last night's Bash & Pop showcase, click all this gray shit.


Q-and-A: Tommy Stinson of Bash & Pop
By Tim Stegall

Click onto Wikipedia, it'll tell you “Thomas Eugene (Tommy) Stinson (born October 6, 1966) is an American rock musician.” Which doesn't even begin to capture how important this Minneapolis-bred singer/songwriter/bassist/sometimes guitarist is to modern rock & roll. How many of you can claim membership in both The Replacements, the kings of sloppy/literate/heart-on-sleeve punk 'n' roll, and Guns N' Roses? Between those two bands, he formed Bash & Pop, whose 1993 debut LP Friday Night Is Killing Me embodied all the lessons Stinson'd clearly learned at the elbow of Paul Westerberg, The Replacements' bruised romantic songwriting engine. Hence it's intriguing that after The Mats' two-year reanimation-cum-victory-lap, Stinson'd kickstart Bash & Pop again in a completely new lineup, issuing a rowdy-n-right new LP titled Anything Could Happen via garage blues indie Fat Possum. One viewing of new video “On The Rocks” (framed hilariously inside a cracked-screen Smartphone) proves none of Stinson's gifts are lost, including his wink-and-grin way through life. Hence, after informing us seconds into this call from his Philadelphia hotel room the fire trucks his neighbors reported in front of his Hudson, NY home were a false alarm (“Not a call you want first day of the tour....”), we had to ask if he was planning on breaking up Bash & Pop again after two years, reforming his post-B&P band Perfect, and then rejoining Guns N' Roses....

Tommy Stinson: [laughs] Oh, you're funny! No, it wasn't really that thought-out, to be honest with you. The only reason I called this Bash & Pop was because this new album was more of a band record. My last two solo records (Village Gorilla Head in 2004, 2011's One Man Mutiny), I just kinda piecemealed together. I played way too many instruments and wore way too many hats, and overthought quite a bit of it, honestly. I wanted to make more of a band record, the exact thing I was going for when The Replacements fell apart the first time. This record became more of a band record because I now have a band (Steve Selvidge, lead guitar; Justin Perkins, bass; Joe Sirois, drums) that can actually play, that can add something, that looks good enough, that sorta thing. It just made sense, and the people I played it for said it sounded like a Bash & Pop record. So, I just kinda went with it.

Tim: It is exactly what you have always done best: Straight-up rock & roll with highly literate, heartfelt songwriting, exactly as you have done since you were a teenage kid playing bass in The Replacements. It sits exactly at the crossroads between the Faces and Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers.

There you have it. I'll take all of that crap. [laughs]

It has to be asked: What happened? It seemed like The Replacements were going very well a few years ago. Is this something you can talk about?

Well, yeah – we were going well then. Then we got to a point where, “Well, that's not going very well anymore!” [laughs] So we put the kibosh on it. For the most part, I think we had a really good run. We probably played a little longer than we shoulda. But all things considered, it worked out fine. We had fun with it, then when it wasn't fun, we stopped. That's just how we do things.

I got to see the two ACL shows. You blew my mind, that first show! It was like seeing The Clash when I was 14! The second show was more like the gig I saw in your heyday, where you showed up completely tanked and played 162 covers you'd never played in your life...

[laughs] Exactly! More shenanigans were thrown in that time....

It would've been nice to have gotten a new Replacements record, other than the benefit record for Slim (Dunlap, fallen 2nd Replacements guitarist).

We set out to do a record when we did that reunion tour and stuff. We tried three times in three different studios, and none of the situations were right for it. We kinda gave up quick on it. To be honest with you, I don't think Paul was that jazzed on making a new record to begin with. I think he has a lot harder time than the rest of us competing with his past, his legacy. I think it stuck in his chassis, the longer he thought about it.

Do you think you guys will work together again in the future?

Yeah! We've always done shit together, even between Replacements stuff. We've played on each others' solo records and shit. We're just drawn to each other, for whatever reason. We'll see. We've gotta walk away from this mess we made. “Eh, let's do this gig and go home!” [laughs] “Later! Talk to ya down the road apiece....” That's about as much thought as it got.

Well, that was the spirit of the band, to begin with. I always said that The Replacements didn't give a shit better than anyone!

[laughs] Yeah, I'll definitely buy that....

We should talk more about Anything Could Happen. How long have you had these songs waiting to be recorded?

A good handful of them have been around awhile. The oldest song on the record is probably 25 years old. I've attempted it a couple of times. It just took forever to finally rear its head. Half of the record's been around awhile, the other half we wrote on the spot. Some of them got recorded when we recorded all The Replacements stuff when we were heading out on those tours, and they just didn't work out. So I took 'em back and recorded 'em in my house with my friends and called it Bash & Pop.

You're primarily known as a bass player, but you play guitar in Bash & Pop. Do you prefer one over the other?

No, not really. I have a short attention span for anything, so I switch around all the time, just for shits and giggles. I haven't played drums in a band in a buncha years. But I kinda get off on playing all that shit. This time around, I didn't want to wear a buncha different hats. I wanted a more spontaneous record, have more of a band vibe, rather than sit around and wear myself out noodling around on a guitar for fuckin' months on end. It was all done in my basement, all playing in the room. A couple of times, I couldn't conjure a bass player, so I played bass myself. But it was all done as live as possible, drums and all.

Do you think you'll continue as Bash & Pop?I think so. It's a more enjoyable way to make music. So as long as these guys want to continue to play, we'll keep it going. Everyone seems to understand each others' playing, so it works out pretty good.

Can you talk a bit about having been in Guns N' Roses? That must've been a hell of an experience.

It was a good gig. It served me well, until I couldn't play anymore. I had personal issues at home that prevented me from touring with them - a little kid and a soon-to-be-ex-wife and all that kinda nonsense. So, I had to walk away from that, but it was on good terms. And it was the right time. Now they're doing their reunion tour, havin' a ball doing it. So I served them well, as well.




Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Scotty Moore, 1931-2016: Last Stop On The Mystery Train



Look at this snapshot above. It's impossible to imagine what it must have been like to have been in this photograph: At the eye of a hurricane called "rock 'n' roll," called "Elvis Presley," whipping across the world, obliterating The Old Ways. And you're standing there, stoic, creating the idea of "rock 'n' roll guitar." as your boss is creating the idea of a "rock star." You're just hanging on for dear life, pulling notes out your ass, trying to be heard over thousands of screaming teenagers. 

I keep finding myself saying Scotty Moore invented my job. It's because, as a musician in The Hormones, I always see myself as a lead guitarist. I keep forgetting I write most of the songs, plus I sing lead and front the band - so, Scotty created half my job. His boss created the sexier half of my job. But as Keith Richards has pointed out, "That should have been a band. They should have been the Beatles." Well, no, Keith - someone had to create The Beatles jobs'. And yours' too, for that matter....

And Scotty Moore did. To have heard him tell it, he was winging it the whole time, grabbing bits from Chet Atkins, Les Paul, and various blues guys he never really named. But he's flying by the seat of his pants, pretty much inventing these solos on the spot. Scotty was inventing rock 'n' roll guitar. Yes, he had some help there: Chuck Berry, Cliff Gallup in Gene Vincent's Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins. But Scotty is rock 'n roll's first guitar hero, drawing the blueprint because he had none, most of the time unaware of what he laid down on tape and scrambling to remember on the road with Elvis, frequently having to come up with something new. Notoriously, he never could figure out what he'd done on "Too Much," and self-effacingly described this genius break as "primitive psychedelia":


Every approach we take to this day, Scotty was there first. Think of the classic, overdriven rock 'n' roll guitar tone, and listen to Scotty on all those Elvis records: He knew you had to take a Gibson guitar and a tube amp, and crank that amp all the way, until the tubes and speakers are screaming. Mind you, that was likely a result of trying to be heard above auditoriums rammed to the gills with shrieking teenage girls, but.... And just listen to "Hound Dog" - this track is the definite birth of the powerchord! It also sounds like the Ramones, 20 years early.



Scotty Moore created history.Everything we do now as rock 'n' roll guitar players, he was literally there first. He forgot more than most of us had to learn, and he never played anything short of what was perfect for the song. Now he's gone, reunited in the afterlife with his old boss, and Bill Black back on doghouse bass. Lucky afterlife. 

R.I.P., Scotty Moore.


See also Folk Music Fireball, my detailing of Elvis Presley's 1955-56 gigs in Austin for The Austin Chronicle.








Friday, September 11, 2015

REPOST: Something I rarely talk about....

Today's True Hero: Johnny Heff

TIM SEZ: Hi. I realize it's been ages since I've posted in this blog - something I intend to repair in the coming days. This repost is from my old MySpace blog from 2008. Ike fizzled before he got to Austin, obviously. In the time since I posted this, my friend's death score was settled, with Bin Laden's capture and execution. (And no, I don't buy any conspiracy theories on this subject. Nor do I buy conspiracy theories, period. Please save it all for your next Alex Jones fan club meeting, thank you.) Troops have been thinned in Iraq and Afghanistan, but.... And there's a chance we may find ourselves in another conflict soon. On a personal level, I reflect that this day began a ten year spiral of personal tragedy and self-destruction I've only come out of in the last few years - miracles do happen. Today, I also reflect that America became a mean-spirited, selfish nation in the wake of this day, and we have never recovered from it nor corrected it - it just gets worse. We never fucking learn....

I repost this every year, so we don't forget, so some semblance of truth remains out there...and for my late friend Johnny you will read about here. He is a real hero. I miss him every day.

Something I rarely talk about
Current mood:  contemplative
Category: Life
It looks pretty certain the day after my birthday, I'm riding out a hurricane. Odd, for the Austin area. Where I grew up, it was more common: I'd been through three by the time I was a teenager, the last one having been Allen back in 1980 (I think it was). Not a big deal, really. By the time Ike hits here, he's gonna be a lotta wind and rain, really.

But, come on, Ike: Could your timing be any worse?

It's kinda par for the course, right now. Something about this decade and my birthday has meant disaster for me. There was the girlfriend who decided to break up with me the week of my birthday, just because that would sting the most, I'm sure. Then, there was the birthday on which Johnny Cash had the misfortune of dying. That really sucked.

But I think the coldest was the group of middle eastern gentlemen who thought it would be really cool to fly a couple of airplanes into the World Trade Center the day before my birthday in 2001.

I slept through it. I was homeless at the time and staying with a friend on 7th and Ave. B, probably three or four miles from the Twin Towers. She was out of town, and I was house-sitting, soon to move in with my friend Sami Yaffa and his girl Karmen. I was working at the time as a professional dog walker, and I got up at 11 AM. It was supposed to be just another day: I was thinking about coffee, looking over the schedule, wondering who the first dog of the day would be, etc., etc. I turned on Howard Stern's show, as was my wont back then (until he said something completely insulting about John Lee Hooker on the day Hook died, and I swore I'd never listen to the tasteless bastard again). And judging by the hysteria I was hearing, it was the end of the world.

I called my boss to find out what was going on. That was when I found out the towers had been hit.

From there, people were calling in left and right, canceling walks; most of our customer base worked in the financial district, so they were now gonna be home. I was getting all kinds of bits and pieces from there: The doorman at the building on Irving Place where a few of my dogs lived reported looking up and seeing the first jet flying so close to the ground, he could see its' markings. My friend Mark who lived two blocks away called me up and told me he was on the phone, talking to his mother, looking out his panoramic view of the southern end of Manhattan...and saw that same jet fly right past his building, shaking him and the whole building. Mark got a front row seat at watching it crash straight into Tower Number One.

These calls were going on for three hours. I couldn't sit down to eat. Finally, about 2 PM, I was able to leave the apartment and walk down to Ave. A, in search of breakfast. Every joint in the neighborhood was crammed to the rafters, it seemed. There were hand-written signs in the windows, advising that the Red Cross needed blood, go to this hospital or that one, go to Bellvue, go someplace, we need blood. The air smelled awful, like burning tires or hair, but worse. It would be that way for months. And can you imagine what it does to a mind, knowing that what you're breathing might be friends of yours'?

I finally squeezed into Sidewalk Cafe, ran into friends I knew from the local rock circuit. The waitresses and bartenders looked like they were gonna have coronaries. My waitress confided in me that they were severely understaffed, especially with the crush they were experiencing, and people due to work that day who lived out in Brooklyn or wherever were calling in because the subways were now shut down and they couldn't make it in. She looked like she was about to cry. Seconds later, some jerk at the table next to me started cursing her out about how long it was taking for him to get his eggs. I slammed my fist on his table and shocked him: "DUDE, DO YOU GET IT? CAN YOU LOOK AROUND YOU? DO YOU SEE HOW OVERWORKED THESE PEOPLE ARE RIGHT NOW? CAN YOU TURN AROUND AND SEE THE COLUMN OF SMOKE WHERE THE WORLD TRADE CENTER USED TO BE? CAN YOU FOR ONCE IN YOUR GAWDFERSAKEN EXISTENCE STOP THINKING ABOUT YOURSELF AND TRY TO PUT YOURSELF IN THE SHOES OF THE PEOPLE WORKING HERE AND THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU?"

"What are you getting mad at me for?" he whined. "It's not my fault they don't have enough people working. I'm hungry." I just stared at him.

I decided to wander a bit after eating and having coffee. People were then walking up from around the disaster site, walking because the subways were shut down, and no cabs can be found. They were covered in soot, looking like some ancient Jack Kirby panel out of a '60s Marvel comic. I ran into Jesse Malin, on his way to buy a protein bar and a newspaper. We started talking about The Strokes' debut album, which had just been released a few days before. (Or maybe that was only in the UK? Well, copies were obviously getting around on import.) And I remember at the time thinking, "Why are we talking about The Strokes in the middle of this?!"

My cellphone rang. It was my mother. She'd been trying to reach me for hours. The satellite dishes for the cellphone companies were based at the Twin Towers. Finally, a provisional satellite path was opened, and she could know I was alive. The family were scared shitless: They had no idea of the geography of Manhattan, and for all they knew, I could be dead.

I went back to the apartment and finally turned on the news. For hours, my eyes were raped with endless repeats of the footage of those planes crashing into those towers. It was relentless. I finally had to turn it off and order pay-per-view porn. After all, what's amoral here: Being bombarded with footage of the WTC being penetrated hard and fast by terrorist-commandeered planes? Or being bombarded with footage of Jenna Jameson getting penetrated hard and fast from various angles?

The days and weeks after were like nothing I'd ever experienced. I remember having to wear a filter mask as I did the dogwalks for a long time, and suffering massive headaches from the air quality. For awhile, you would be forced to present ID at two different checkpoints to MPs if you lived in the East Village, just to get to and from your apartment. Armed personnel carriers would be going up and down Houston St. The middle eastern guys who ran the deli downstairs looked at me with pleading, fearful eyes that told me they were already getting harassed for the color of their skins and their accents. Probably by the same louts I heard that Friday up and down Avenue B, drunkenly chanting, "U! S! A! U! S! A!" I feared those clowns more than I did potential terrorists.

I can remember my mother and I talking, and she kept telling me, "We all understand. We all are with you. We're all going through this together." And I had to tell her that no, there was no way she could understand unless she was here. She got to watch this from the safety of her living room. This wasn't TV for me or anyone else in NYC. This was our lives. And it wasn't fun, and I hoped that she (and everyone else who didn't live here) never had to find out what I was going through.

The worst was finding out how one of my dearest friends was affected by this: Johnny Heffernan was one of my local brothers in rock. His band The Bullys was one of Napalm Stars' brother bands. Johnny was frequently there when I needed him, whether I needed to borrow an amp, or whether I was having to fend off an obnoxious and violent stage invader. I considered him one of my best friends. He was to have left on my birthday to go on tour with The Toilet Boys, doing their lighting.

Johnny was also a NYC fire fighter.

He was not supposed to be on duty on Sept. 11, 2001. It was supposed to be his day off. He was working instead, trying to get in overtime before he left on the road, to support his wife and young stepdaughter. His company was among the first to respond when Tower Number One was hit. From what I remember, most (if not all) of his company was buried when the tower collapsed. Johnny's bandmates, family, friends, we all held hope that he was still alive. They pulled Johnny's crushed body out one month later.

We all know who killed my friend, as well as the many others who died that day. America invaded Afghanistan shortly after, gunning for Osama Bin Laden. Over time, our leaders began telling us Iraq had some connection with the WTC attacks, that they had weapons of mass destruction, that Saddaam Hussein had something to do with this. This, of course, turned out not to be the case. We are still at war in Iraq. Osama Bin Laden, the man who commanded the men who killed my friend and all those others, remains free.

Happy birthday.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

A Thanksgiving Rumination

Well, for one thing, I'm grateful this jackass is no longer President!
Posted on Facebook an hour agoOff to have Thanksgiving dinner at Threadgill's, because my family no longer celebrates Thanksgiving and I got invited to no orphan's Thanksgiving dinners. Do not think I'm complaining, though - I'm not. I am grateful I now have the means to be able to do this. This was not the case when I returned to Austin, my tail between my legs, two years back. And certainly hasn't been the case for most of my life. This is among the many things I am thankful for today. Be good to each other out there. I post this with love and gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving.

Posted on Facebook almost 11 minutes laterWell, I wasn't looking for sympathy. I really was grateful to be able to get a Threadgill's turkey dinner for myself. But my editor saw the post, clearly, and texted me an invite to an orphan's Thanksgiving tonight. So I let my bus drive past. Now I'm eating leftover pizza and waiting to be picked up for tonight's dinner. Interesting, how things work out! Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!

It's true - that was no sympathy grab. I am grateful and humbled for having a life now completely different from what I've known for years. It's the main reason you don't see me blogging like I once did. I'm too busy.

I'm not a religious man. I'm not even spiritual. I no longer have much of a family since my mother died, aside from an uncle or two and a pair of cousins. The origins of this holiday are pretty despicable: "Gee, thanks, people who were here first and are darker-skinned than we are, for saving our butts upon our illegally immigrating here. Let's enjoy some grub, then we'll start working on taking you for all you're worth and then driving you to extinction." But I like the idea of a day to reflect and and be thankful for your blessings. It's a good exercise, a humbling one.

I look to my left, I see a pile of five guitars and a 50 watt Peavey amp, a fully-stocked wardrobe, and shelves overflowing with books and records. I see a box of shoes sent by a friend, waiting for the second shoe rack I ordered. Last year, I'd have seen one guitar a 15 watt amp, and maybe 1/4 of these items. Two years ago, shortly after I moved back to Austin, I'd have seen that one guitar and 1/4 of that 1/4 of that stuff.

Yeah, I have a lot to be grateful for, an abundance. And as stated above, even a year ago, I wouldn't have had the resources to buy that Threadgill's turkey dinner I nearly went to get.

I was lost for many years, after I walked away from Austin and from rock journalism. I drifted around, trying to find a different way to live, a different way to make a living, to support me and my music. I never found it.

I returned to Austin, because I had nowhere else to go. It was literally the final option. By accident, I fell back into life as I knew it in my 20s and 30s, back in the '90s. And that worked out. I needed a sponsor for "RADIO NAPALM," which ended up being Shannon Pollard and his fine Plowboy Records label, without me asking. And I needed my editor at The Austin Chronicle, Raoul Hernandez, to ask me back to my calling: Writing about music. And I needed Austin to bring me back and take care of me until these factors fell into place.

Two years later, I'm looking back and thinking I owe these people a lot. I am certainly not in the state I was in upon my return to this town I love. Yes, it was due to my own hard work and discipline and talent. But it was because all these people gave me the opportunity to do that.

I made some good friends along the way, and they helped keep me going until I could get to this point. The road to independence requires a lot of support, and I literally could not have done this on my own.

And now, I'm back to making music with a new version of The Hormones. Without the three guys manning the other stations in the band - Clint Shay, Kriss Ward, Pip Plyler, and those who were there along the way (Rob Laundy, Tom Trusnovic, Ryan Anderson, and Jason Crowe) - there would be no band. Nor would there be a Hormones without the wonderful booking skills of Julia Cohen.

Here I am: Able to write these words, and able to thank you all. I could not do anything without you. Thank you for giving me back my life. I owe you all. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

REPOST: Something I rarely talk about....

Today's True Hero: Johnny Heff



TIM SEZ: Repost from my old MySpace blog from 2008. Ike fizzled before he got to Austin, obviously. In the time since I posted this, my friend's death score was settled, with Bin Laden's capture and execution. (And no, I don't buy any conspiracy theories on this subject. Nor do I buy conspiracy theories, period. Please save it all for your next Alex Jones fan club meeting, thank you.) Troops have been thinned in Iraq and Afghanistan, but.... And there's a chance we may find ourselves in another conflict soon. On a personal level, I reflect that this day began a ten year spiral of personal tragedy and self-destruction I've only come out of in the last two years - miracles do happen. Today, I also reflect that America became a mean-spirited, selfish nation in the wake of this day, and we have never recovered from it nor corrected it - it just gets worse. We never fucking learn....




I repost this every year, so we don't forget, so some semblance of truth remains out there...and for my late friend Johnny you will read about here. He is a real hero. I miss him every day.


Something I rarely talk about
Current mood:  contemplative
Category: Life
It looks pretty certain the day after my birthday, I'm riding out a hurricane. Odd, for the Austin area. Where I grew up, it was more common: I'd been through three by the time I was a teenager, the last one having been Allen back in 1980 (I think it was). Not a big deal, really. By the time Ike hits here, he's gonna be a lotta wind and rain, really.

But, come on, Ike: Could your timing be any worse?

It's kinda par for the course, right now. Something about this decade and my birthday has meant disaster for me. There was the girlfriend who decided to break up with me the week of my birthday, just because that would sting the most, I'm sure. Then, there was the birthday on which Johnny Cash had the misfortune of dying. That really sucked.

But I think the coldest was the group of middle eastern gentlemen who thought it would be really cool to fly a couple of airplanes into the World Trade Center the day before my birthday in 2001.

I slept through it. I was homeless at the time and staying with a friend on 7th and Ave. B, probably three or four miles from the Twin Towers. She was out of town, and I was house-sitting, soon to move in with my friend Sami Yaffa and his girl Karmen. I was working at the time as a professional dog walker, and I got up at 11 AM. It was supposed to be just another day: I was thinking about coffee, looking over the schedule, wondering who the first dog of the day would be, etc., etc. I turned on Howard Stern's show, as was my wont back then (until he said something completely insulting about John Lee Hooker on the day Hook died, and I swore I'd never listen to the tasteless bastard again). And judging by the hysteria I was hearing, it was the end of the world.

I called my boss to find out what was going on. That was when I found out the towers had been hit.

From there, people were calling in left and right, canceling walks; most of our customer base worked in the financial district, so they were now gonna be home. I was getting all kinds of bits and pieces from there: The doorman at the building on Irving Place where a few of my dogs lived reported looking up and seeing the first jet flying so close to the ground, he could see its' markings. My friend Mark who lived two blocks away called me up and told me he was on the phone, talking to his mother, looking out his panoramic view of the southern end of Manhattan...and saw that same jet fly right past his building, shaking him and the whole building. Mark got a front row seat at watching it crash straight into Tower Number One.

These calls were going on for three hours. I couldn't sit down to eat. Finally, about 2 PM, I was able to leave the apartment and walk down to Ave. A, in search of breakfast. Every joint in the neighborhood was crammed to the rafters, it seemed. There were hand-written signs in the windows, advising that the Red Cross needed blood, go to this hospital or that one, go to Bellvue, go someplace, we need blood. The air smelled awful, like burning tires or hair, but worse. It would be that way for months. And can you imagine what it does to a mind, knowing that what you're breathing might be friends of yours'?

I finally squeezed into Sidewalk Cafe, ran into friends I knew from the local rock circuit. The waitresses and bartenders looked like they were gonna have coronaries. My waitress confided in me that they were severely understaffed, especially with the crush they were experiencing, and people due to work that day who lived out in Brooklyn or wherever were calling in because the subways were now shut down and they couldn't make it in. She looked like she was about to cry. Seconds later, some jerk at the table next to me started cursing her out about how long it was taking for him to get his eggs. I slammed my fist on his table and shocked him: "DUDE, DO YOU GET IT? CAN YOU LOOK AROUND YOU? DO YOU SEE HOW OVERWORKED THESE PEOPLE ARE RIGHT NOW? CAN YOU TURN AROUND AND SEE THE COLUMN OF SMOKE WHERE THE WORLD TRADE CENTER USED TO BE? CAN YOU FOR ONCE IN YOUR GAWDFERSAKEN EXISTENCE STOP THINKING ABOUT YOURSELF AND TRY TO PUT YOURSELF IN THE SHOES OF THE PEOPLE WORKING HERE AND THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU?"

"What are you getting mad at me for?" he whined. "It's not my fault they don't have enough people working. I'm hungry." I just stared at him.

I decided to wander a bit after eating and having coffee. People were then walking up from around the disaster site, walking because the subways were shut down, and no cabs can be found. They were covered in soot, looking like some ancient Jack Kirby panel out of a '60s Marvel comic. I ran into Jesse Malin, on his way to buy a protein bar and a newspaper. We started talking about The Strokes' debut album, which had just been released a few days before. (Or maybe that was only in the UK? Well, copies were obviously getting around on import.) And I remember at the time thinking, "Why are we talking about The Strokes in the middle of this?!"

My cellphone rang. It was my mother. She'd been trying to reach me for hours. The satellite dishes for the cellphone companies were based at the Twin Towers. Finally, a provisional satellite path was opened, and she could know I was alive. The family were scared shitless: They had no idea of the geography of Manhattan, and for all they knew, I could be dead.

I went back to the apartment and finally turned on the news. For hours, my eyes were raped with endless repeats of the footage of those planes crashing into those towers. It was relentless. I finally had to turn it off and order pay-per-view porn. After all, what's amoral here: Being bombarded with footage of the WTC being penetrated hard and fast by terrorist-commandeered planes? Or being bombarded with footage of Jenna Jameson getting penetrated hard and fast from various angles?

The days and weeks after were like nothing I'd ever experienced. I remember having to wear a filter mask as I did the dogwalks for a long time, and suffering massive headaches from the air quality. For awhile, you would be forced to present ID at two different checkpoints to MPs if you lived in the East Village, just to get to and from your apartment. Armed personnel carriers would be going up and down Houston St. The middle eastern guys who ran the deli downstairs looked at me with pleading, fearful eyes that told me they were already getting harassed for the color of their skins and their accents. Probably by the same louts I heard that Friday up and down Avenue B, drunkenly chanting, "U! S! A! U! S! A!" I feared those clowns more than I did potential terrorists.

I can remember my mother and I talking, and she kept telling me, "We all understand. We all are with you. We're all going through this together." And I had to tell her that no, there was no way she could understand unless she was here. She got to watch this from the safety of her living room. This wasn't TV for me or anyone else in NYC. This was our lives. And it wasn't fun, and I hoped that she (and everyone else who didn't live here) never had to find out what I was going through.

The worst was finding out how one of my dearest friends was affected by this: Johnny Heffernan was one of my local brothers in rock. His band The Bullys was one of Napalm Stars' brother bands. Johnny was frequently there when I needed him, whether I needed to borrow an amp, or whether I was having to fend off an obnoxious and violent stage invader. I considered him one of my best friends. He was to have left on my birthday to go on tour with The Toilet Boys, doing their lighting.

Johnny was also a NYC fire fighter.

He was not supposed to be on duty on Sept. 11, 2001. It was supposed to be his day off. He was working instead, trying to get in overtime before he left on the road, to support his wife and young stepdaughter. His company was among the first to respond when Tower Number One was hit. From what I remember, most (if not all) of his company was buried when the tower collapsed. Johnny's bandmates, family, friends, we all held hope that he was still alive. They pulled Johnny's crushed body out one month later.

We all know who killed my friend, as well as the many others who died that day. America invaded Afghanistan shortly after, gunning for Osama Bin Laden. Over time, our leaders began telling us Iraq had some connection with the WTC attacks, that they had weapons of mass destruction, that Saddaam Hussein had something to do with this. This, of course, turned out not to be the case. We are still at war in Iraq. Osama Bin Laden, the man who commanded the men who killed my friend and all those others, remains free.

Happy birthday.