A Woman On The Radio Talks About A Revolution

Two albums that came out in 1991 from British bands were outliers in what I liked that year. This was a year when popular rock music was in transition from hair bands to grunge. Grunge bands though being played in medium rotation on college radio was bubbling under the surface of the American rock scene but would not break through until later in the year. Hair bands were still touring, popular on commercial radio and MTV and releasing new albums but their influence and dominance was about to come to an abrupt end.

In between the the two camps of rock music being hair bands and what would come to be grunge there was room for these hybrid bands such as EMF and Jesus Jones that made their way onto MTV, commercial radio and into my own then eighteen-year old music rotation at home and in my car in the spring and early summer of 1991.

At the outset of 1991 the hair bands were in firm control of rock music but by the late summer momentum was turning towards the new sound of grunge bands and by fall it was down to a full out battle between the old and new sounds.

The rock music landscape in what would be a pivotal year for the genre was in a tug of war between the hair bands and the upstart bands that would become the faces of grunge. Skid Row released their sophomore album, Slave To The Grind, in June which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 indicating that there was still plenty of enthusiasm for their music. Metallica's "black album" came out in August and it also reached number one on the Billboard 200 that year too. I was never a Metallica fan so I never even noticed it. Instead it would be another album by another band that came out that same month that caught my attention.

The Revolution In Rock Music Was On

Pearl Jam released their landmark album Ten in August and had their first commercial hit with the song Alive. One month later Nirvana released Smells Like Teen Spirit and the monumental album Nevermind in September. Rock audiences began to snap up these two albums and explore them deeper and everyone was being bombarded by Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV.  The world of rock was changing.

But the hair bands were not to go so quietly as Gun N' Roses would see the peak of their success and excess by releasing two albums in September, Use Your Illusion I & II. 1991 was the year they released grossly epic music videos that were more like self indulgent short films. November Rain was ridiculous in every way. They were a band drunk on themselves but audiences still bought up both albums but I had no interest in them whatsoever. Use Your Illusion II would reach number one on the charts and Use Your Illusion I would see number two. Despite their success Gun N' Roses was on the way down from here after their masturbatory albums of excess left them blind to what they should have seen from the corners of their eyes.

September was also the month that Alice In Chains' 1990 album Facelift went gold. If you had to pinpoint when the rock music landscape changed from glam and leather to flannel among teenagers it would be either August or September of 1991. The success of Gun N' Roses' two albums might have been the apex of the glam and leather fever but their excess was what helped to break it thankfully.

Bands such as Bon Jovi that had ruled the charts in the 1980s  couldn't transition to the new sound of the 1990s. By 1991 it had been three years since their last album and even though I had loved them and went to see them in concert on their New Jersey tour in 1989 their sound was so out of touch to what I craved that I never listened to them again. Other bands like Motley Crue put out a greatest hits album and Poison released a concert album in the fall but both bands couldn't sound more stale by 1991.

The future of rock's new sound continued to evolve as Soundgarden's album Badmotorfinger came out in October.

I might have been mesmerized by Nevermind and Ten but I did take notice when U2's Achtung Baby came out in November that year. Established bands like R.E.M. which had a number one album with Out Of Time in 1991 and U2 would adapt their sound and be able to remain popular in the alternative 90s.

Meanwhile, EMF and Jesus Jones managed to find success in the middle of the two rock camps with a sound influenced by the beats of dance music. The rock guitar was still there but less so than their American counterparts. These were two bands listened to for a good time and to dance along with, not bang your head but yet it was still rock.

In the U.S. in 1991 there was not much current British rock on American radio other than the Cure who had had phenomenal success with Disintegration in 1989 so there was a void of British rock bands at the time. The success of EMF and Jesus Jones in 1991 might have helped pave the way for Oasis (Definitely Maybe) and Blur (Parklife) to be successful stateside in 1994.

These were not great albums from beginning to end but they did have catchy songs that were able to find a place with American audiences and my ears. EMF had their number one hit with Unbelievable and Jesus Jones' album Doubt would have two top five hits in the United States with Right Here, Right Now and Real, Real, Real.

Screen cap from EMF's Unbelievable music video.

EMF's Unbelievable from Schubert Dip was the more dance oriented of the hit songs of these two bands. It had a raucous beat, a prominent base line in the mix, samples and keyboards pushing an uptempo song. The song is relentless in its tempo but it does have some hard breaks and even a guitar solo in it. The music video was like watching a rave with the band members dancing on stage, the swirling lights and the crowd dancing to the song. This song was a complete left turn from anything else on commercial rock radio at the time. The song was one big good time.

Unfortunately the rest of Schubert Dip was a let down. Only the song Lies was of half-interest to me. So EMF caught lightning in a bottle with Unbelievable and they had no staying power in the American rock scene. The album released in May 1991 would reach number twelve on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart and they would never achieve that success again.

Jesus Jones' album Doubt also recorded in 1990 like Schubert Dip and released in 1991. It would climb to number twenty-seven on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart but it would produce more than one hit song. Of the two albums Doubt was the better one as it featured more skillful songwriting and had a more cohesive sound. Of the two bands Jesus Jones would have seemed to be a more sustainable band but like EMF they never managed to have prolonged success in the United States. The window that had quickly opened for them while rock was transitioning in 1991 would just as quickly close as grunge took over.

Right Here, Right Now was a song that was perfectly timed at the beginning of the new decade. It captured the sentiment of the time that was about hope and a sense of change that was flowering in the air. After the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the failures of communism at the end of the 1980s hope for a brighter future was evident. The song opens with the line, "A woman on the radio talks about a revolution, when it's already passed her by." That line is quite funny because it speaks to differences of how some (the media, the older generation, the powers that be) are finally catching on after the revolution has already happened and the new generation is taking control. Rock music was ready to take that cue too and it would happen in 1991.

This song is a celebration and makes a wise observation of that change in the world with lines such as, "I saw the decade end, when it seemed the world could change at the blink of an eye and if anything, then there's your sign of the times." I felt that way, I felt that the world was changing and mostly for the better. The Cold War was over and it no longer captured our imaginations in a slurry of fear. Anything was possible and many of us in the United States were getting ready to put our faith into a candidate from Hope, Arkansas in October 1991 named Bill Clinton.

Screen cap from the video for Right Here, Right Now.

Right Here, Right Now touched on the mood of so many of us that year that it hit number one of the modern rock chart and number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The music video for the song was just made for the MTV generation as it employs clips of actual news events projected onto a wall while the lead singer sits on a sofa watching the world change. MTV played that video so often you could not avoid seeing it several times a day that spring and summer.

EMF and Jesus Jones would never achieve the level of success as they did in 1991 but they did leave us with a few hits that are still worthy of listening to today.

The brief success and my liking of these two bands prove that I and other teenagers were ready for something other than glam and leather rock. Little did I know that while I was enjoying EMF and Jesus Jones, a band I had never heard of called Nirvana was in the studio that spring recording Nevermind. As much as I loved rock music I never could get into Skid Row or Metallica and I was tired of Bon Jovi, Poison and Motley Crue. Lord knows my friends were pushing Skid Row on me since 1989 but I never liked them. Thankfully bands such Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains were there to take the reigns of rock if only for a brief few years. It was an exciting time in rock music and one I wish we could experience at least one more time in my life.

Uncivil Kids

Kids directed by Larry Clark.

Last week I was in the mood for a 90's film so I chose Kids. This is a movie I have seen perhaps four times but not since the 1990s so it was almost like watching a new film. I had forgotten some of the details over the last twenty-odd years.

The first time I saw Kids was when it was released in theatres in July 1995 and I was twenty-two years old. I watched it at the Tara Cinema at the corner of Cheshire Bridge Road and Lavista. This movie was so controversial at the time and still is even today that the Tara was the only theatre in all of metro Atlanta brave enough to screen it. This was common in most cities around the country that if you were lucky enough and your city was big enough then could find only one theatre in your city willing to show this film. The subsequent times that I saw the movie was by renting it on VHS at the long forgotten video rental place in Little Five Points that was named very simply, The Movie Store.

One Strange Family

A

fter reading The Executioner's Song about the execution of Gary Gilmore I learned that his younger brother Mikal had published a book in 1994, Shot In The Heart, that was about the history of the Gilmore family. What a sordid history it was.

I give Mikal plenty of credit for his willingness to lay bare the history of his family for the world to read and judge. It is a history that involved plenty of crime including murder, incest, drug and alcohol abuse and most any terrible thing you could imagine.

The author, Mikal, was the youngest of the four brothers born to his family. He was a stranger in own family it seemed having not been a part of the early years of the family that saw them living as vagabonds moving all over the American west. His childhood began once the family had settled in the outlying neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon. Growing up he still was isolated from his siblings by his father who often took him for months at time to Seattle while on extended business. He readily admits that he did not know his own family very well and that writing this book was a way to learn about his own family.

The book goes deep into the family history from the beginning to when his parents met, through their deaths up until when the book was published in the early 1990s. By the early 1990s, both of his parents were dead and so were two of his brothers including Gary Gilmore.

My motivations for reading the book were to learn more about Gary and see what might have not been written about in The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer. Through the stories that Mikal relates about his family and Gary you come away getting a fuller picture of who Gary Gilmore was but perhaps not a better idea as to what was wrong with him and why he became a murderer. The reason he became a murderer will never be answered of course. His childhood was littered with abuse and abandonment but that doesn't make a person a criminal. Perhaps it contributed? Yes.

It was surprising to learn that Gary Gilmore had a living son. In The Executioner's Song the story is told that Gilmore had a child that did not live but the real story is that his child was born and it was a boy. He fathered the boy in Portland. The child was the result of Gary Gilmore's rape of a fourteen year old girl in 1958. Gilmore was arrested and indicted for the crime but through pressure the girl dropped the charges and had the baby and Gary was never told. He got away with the rape and somewhere out there today his son is alive.

Gary also robbed a grocery story at gunpoint wearing a stocking over his face in the 1950s as a teenager near the family home on Woodstock Boulevard (page 167). His brother writes that he netted $18,000 from the store's vault. He was never arrested for the crime and was never even a suspect. Now for some reason I have a hard time believing this story. I really do not think that a grocery store in 1956 when the crime allegedly occurred would have $18,000 in cash inside the store's vault. The average yearly income for a family was only $4,783 (Source PDF: U.S. Census) in 1956 so why would a grocery store have $18,000 cash on hand inside the store? Mikal also writes that the money, remember $18,000 now, "held him over for a while." A while??? If Gary Gilmore got away with $18,000 in cash in 1956 then he could have been set for years and years living like a king and just how would he have hidden a crime like that? Either the $18,000 is a misprint or this story holds no water.

The book also relates stories of Gary and his friends hanging out in gay bars in Portland in the 1950s (page 166). According to a man using only the name "John" that was interviewed for the book he knew Gary intimately. John says that Gary was seen to be kissing men and allowing himself to be fondled. The tale continues that Gary would turn tricks including giving oral sex to John and his friends in exchange for a place to party and hide stolen goods. It would not surprise me that Gary was sexually confused given his time in an all-boys reformatory school and his sexual experiences then, also the story I mentioned from The Executioner's Song of Gary admitting his sexual attraction to a young thirteen year old boy when he was in his 20s and his sexual encounters with an underage teenage girl during his last release from prison when he was living in Utah. I definitely think that Gary was sexually attracted to young girls and boys given what he admitted to and what has been written about him.

Then on page 302 is the curious story of a young man named Barry Black. Barry was a fellow inmate that was rumored to be Gary's prison boyfriend. Mikal even writes, "Gary in one form or another loved Barry Black." Gary even had plans to break Barry Black out of a prison hospital and escape.

I cannot even begin to relate all of the crazy stories of this family. My own family is far, far from perfect and we've had our own scandals but they are garden variety compared to the Gilmore family. I have never known people that lived like this family did and I do not intend that in a snobbish manner. Some of the stories are appalling like Gary being abandoned at an orphanage by his father as a young child in Iowa because the father was arrested for writing bad checks. The father was also a career criminal that had numerous aliases, children with different women scattered around the country and falsely believed he was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini. The mother was not any better at being a parent because she had a child a with her stepson, tried to smother her youngest son with a pillow when he was an infant and she believed she was haunted by evil spirits. These people were just bizarre.

Even after reading more about the early years of Gary Gilmore I still do not understand him. He was a violent criminal from an early age, raised under terrible circumstances and yet he got away with more crimes than he was ever punished for in his life. I look at the timeline of events and think maybe if he had been locked up sooner and for longer for his crimes like the rape of a fourteen year old then maybe those two men in Utah would never have been murdered. It baffles me how he got away with how much he did get away with before being executed. 

Shot In The Heart is an entertaining book that is jaw dropping at times even if I am not sure all of the stories are accurately told but even if half are true then that is one scary family. If you have read The Executioner's Song then this book is a good companion to it.

The Executioner's Song

Within nine months time Gary Gilmore had been paroled from prison, murdered two men, committed various other crimes, fallen in love, shot four times in the heart and his cremated remains scattered from a plastic bread bag by a plane over Provo, Utah - such is the story of The Executioner's Song.

The book by Norman Mailer transcends the story of Gary Gilmore, who by all accounts did not lead the most interesting life. Gilmore was a lifelong criminal mostly of a petty crimes who spent the majority of his life in prison. Even when he murdered two men in Utah his life story or criminal history did not make for that much of an extraordinary story. The only reason the public paid any mind to the story of Gary Gilmore was because he would become the first man to be executed in the United States in ten years in 1977. He also advocated for his own death by firing squad, waiving his appeals to his sentence of death rather than spend the remainder of his life in prison. In some ways Gary Gilmore was a coward and an uninteresting one at that.

Yet from this rather ordinary person author Norman Mailer crafted an extraordinary book around his life story. The book which comes in over a thousand pages in length offers several indictments of society. The book exposes the flaws and failures in the American criminal justice system, the prison system, the entertainment industry, journalism, the Mormon religion, the political system, the mental health system and the human condition.

Going into this book I knew next to nothing about Gilmore. I had only seen the movie version of this book with the same name that was made for television in 1982. I had watched it a few times as a child back then and mostly all I remembered was the fine performance of actor Tommy Lee Jones in the role of Gary Gilmore.

The book goes much more into detail than the movie about Gilmore's life from childhood to his execution. Gilmore was born in Texas while his parents were traveling so he only lived there for six weeks. His parents eventually settled in Oregon where he would spend the majority of his youth and his formative years. In interviews that are published in the book Gilmore is reluctant to discuss his childhood in terms of his relationships with his parents. He more often than not relishes in the glories of his past crimes. Gary never seemed capable of feeling any genuine remorse for any of his crimes during his life. His main priority in life was self satisfaction and self preservation without any impulse control and that is a very bad combination of personality traits to have.

The excerpts from his letters that he wrote to his girlfriend were revealing to his completely bonkers way of thinking and lack of impulse control. He often talked of sex, his obsession with his girlfriend and how he did not want her sleeping with other men for the rest of her life even after he was dead and he regularly attempted to manipulate her into killing herself so that they could meet together in death on the other side. It is revealed in the book that on a tape Gary left his girlfriend to listen to after his execution that he wanted her to kill herself. Even in death Gary Gilmore was a selfish manipulator.

Gilmore did attempt suicide twice while awaiting his execution. He also convinced his teenage girlfriend Nicole to attempt it. They both survived the attempts; hers was nearly fatal but she was found in time by a neighbor and recovered in the intensive care unit in the hospital.

In addition to his murderous and manipulative ways Gilmore also had an attraction to teenage girls and boys that were well below the age of consent. Before committing the murders that he would ultimately be convicted of he and his girlfriend would often have sex with a teenage neighbor girl.

He did not appear to be a pedophile but instead his attraction to young adolescent boys and girls would classify him as suffering from hebephilia.

In one letter published in the book to his girlfriend he relates the story of when he was in Oregon State Hospital and how he was sexually attracted to a thirteen year old boy:

"this  13-year-old boy came in 'cause he couldn't get along at home. He was really pretty, like a girl, but I never gave him much thought until it became apparent that he really liked me. I was 23 then. I'd be sitting down and he would come up and sit beside me and put his around me. It was just natural to him, a show of friendship. One time he came up in the locker room and asked if he could read this Playboy I had. I said sure, for a kiss. Man he was dumbfounded! His eyes got big a silver dollars and his mouth dropped wide open. He said no and it was really pretty, and I fell in love on the spot. He thought it was over then and he decided he wanted to read that magazine pretty bad, 'cause he gave me, or rather let me take, a very tender little kiss on the lips. I used to watch him down at the swimming pool. He was one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen, and I don't think I've ever seen a prettier butt. Anyhow, I would kiss him now and then and we got to be pretty good friends. I was just struck by his youth, beauty and naivete."

Now as Gary told the story the boy pursued him and he admitted to being attracted to the boy and kissing him. It would not surprise me if this not entire story and that he had sex with the boy as he did admit to having sex with other men while in custody.

Gary Gilmore was also a racist. He claimed to have had ties to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist group. He regularly used racist language and claims to have nearly killed a black inmate over sexual advances on a fellow white inmate. In one of the interviews published in the book Gilmore's words to the NAACP, who were fighting to stop his execution, were vile calling them "Brillo Pad heads."

The book tries to elevate Gary Gilmore into more than just a simple criminal by mentioning that he was an avid reader and that many considered him well-read. In none of the conversations that are printed in the book does Gary seem to be more than a man with a high opinion of himself and his own thoughts. His intelligence came across to me a veneer that lacked any deep understanding of issues that would mark him as an intelligent man. Reading without discernment is simply a superficial exercise.

The one talent, aside from lying, that Gilmore may have had was his ability to sketch. The few examples, though none are in the book, of his work that I have seen do show that he was a capable sketch artist. The book mentions that in 1972 Gary had the opportunity to attend an art school in Eugene, Oregon. That opportunity may have been a chance for him to turn his life around and use that talent at drawing for good. He of course never used that opportunity and committed an armed robbery that sent him off to prison.

There is one quotable line that I found worth remembering. In a book that uses short sentences and has a matter of fact way of writing there are not many beautiful uses of the language. Mailer is not known for possessing a florid style of writing so this is to be expected. However, I did like this line about pain that never goes away,  "pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics."

Though a fascinating book and well-written this is a depressing story. It would be difficult to find any hope in it other than that Gilmore's girlfriend did not kill herself in the end. The writing of Gilmore's execution down to the smallest detail is difficult to read no matter how one feels about capital punishment. There are no heroes in this story and perhaps we might consider after reading it is that we all live in a moral gray area faced with daily challenges but thankfully most of us do not cross over the fragile line of horror to become murderers.

Paint Me The Places You've Seen

Photo by me, January 2019.

Early yesterday as the sun rose on a frosty winter morning I was on the road. I melted the thick ice off my car windows and began driving from my home in Atlanta to my brother's house in northeastern Alabama. I am writing a book and our monthly meetings are informal interviews in front a fireplace, with cups of coffee and college football going in the background. I need his memories and his confirmations of mine.

I have made this two hour drive so many times in the last fifteen years since he moved there that I could do it in my sleep. Bored by the drive, I sometimes switch the route just to break up the monotony of the landscapes. I go one way and I avoid where I grew up in Paulding County, Georgia by driving around it. Of my choices of roads this is the preferred way.

I dislike the first parts of the drive as it leaves the city through the northwest suburbs of Atlanta and up to Cartersville, Georgia. Interstate 75 is a swollen mess of lanes, always in a hurry to get nowhere drivers and ugly scenery through Cobb County. The only beauty is the crossing of the Chattahoochee River caught in a brief glimpse as a stranger caught from the corner of an eye in a crowd.

My route from home to my brother's area.

After Cobb, the landscape changes from buildings, billboards and sprawl by the time I reach Lake Allatoona and Red Top Mountain in Bartow County to something more pleasing. Allatoona is where I swam, played with my plastic boats and loved the 1970s as a small child.

In Cartersville I exit the interstate and head north on old U.S. Highway 41, the road immortalized in the song Ramblin' Man by the Allman Brothers. Highway 41 was the precursor to Interstate 75 and was decades ago the main north/south route for northerners from the Upper Midwest headed to the sunny beaches of Florida. In my mind there is no other road that I identify more with the old Georgia that I used to know. Today it is a mostly commercial highway through metro Atlanta filled with endless traffic lights, fast food restaurants and shopping centers that could be outside any city in the country. 41 is an ugly scar.

I  am on Highway 41 only a few miles before merging onto U.S. Highway 411 north of Cartersville. This is the road that will take me north and to the west close to where I am headed in Alabama. This road is a lonely road of woods on rolling hills, the cold flowing Etowah River and pastures. I hope it stays that way and never changes. Miles onward, it skirts the city of Rome, Georgia in Floyd County and breaks south and west through Cave Spring, Georgia and scurries away into Alabama. The stretch of two lane road from Rome to Cave Spring is the highlight of this drive and the prettiest.

Northwest Georgia is known for its low topped ridges and valleys that are the final tails of North America's oldest mountains, the Appalachians. These are not the big mountains of the chain like those found in north central and northeast Georgia, but are more like grooves in the geological record. Having grown up in Northwest Georgia in what was then a rural area I feel very much at home passing through.

Topographical map of Vans Valley.

Vans Valley along Highway 411 between the community of Six Mile and the town Cave Spring is the most scenic stretch of the drive. It is a wide valley with grazing and crop land on the floor enclosed by two of those low topped ridges.

I have also seen this particular area spelled as "Vann's Valley" which I believe to be the correct spelling. The name is said to come from David Vann who lived here. Vann was a sub-Chief of the Cherokee Nation and was treasurer between 1839 through 1851. Vann was killed by Union supporting Pin Indians during the American Civil War in 1863.

Highway 411 follows the same road through the valley as it did when the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their land during The Trail Of Tears.

Photo by me, January 2019.

The road along the floor of the valley hugs the southeastern side. The area reminds me of the area in Tennessee where my father's family lived and farmed in the mid 1800s up to now. A picturesque world of bottom land and hills that pop up out of everywhere and nowhere. 

Photo by me, January 2019.

The eastern side of the valley and the ridges that enclose it.

Photo by me, January 2019.

Photo by me, January 2019.

A large estate can be seen looking to the western side of the valley. There are many nice homes through here and into the town of Cave Spring.

Leaving Vans Valley I enter Cave Spring. It is a town known for a cave, spring water, the Georgia School For The Deaf, antique stores and it is a speed trap if there ever was one. The cops aggressively enforce the ridiculously low speed limits that stretch too far. A person could walk through Cave Spring faster than they could drive through it.

Cave Spring is the last town in Georgia on my drive. U.S. Highway 411 veers due west from here and in a few miles crosses the state of Alabama line in the direction of Centre.

Photo by me, January 2019.

An old barn sits in another valley in Alabama. The scenery on my brother's road is the same as Northwest Georgia a few miles away. The ridges and valleys do not recognize the state line that divides them. Humans can put labels and can draw boundaries but the land does not give a damn. 

 
"Down the way the road's divided
Paint me the places you have seen
Those who know what I don't know
Refer to the yellow, red, and green"
R.E.M. - Maps and Legends

Mud Creek Falls, Georgia

Out wandering around the far northeastern tip of Georgia in Rabun County I went to see a waterfall on a late summer day. There was no hiking through a forest or up a mountain, this was a waterfall for a lazy walk. Mud Creek Falls, sometimes referred to as Little Estatoah Falls, was the perfect waterfall for the moment.

X marks the spot.

The waterfall is located in what was Sky Valley Ski Resort, the only snow ski resort in the state. Fifteen years ago it became Sky Valley Resort dropping the snow skiing altogether, apparently a snow ski resort in Georgia was not profitable enough. It was a place I remember hearing about as a kid and seeing on the evening news when the local Atlanta television stations went looking for a "snow in Georgia" type story.

September 2018. Photo by me.

Out of the 57,513 square miles of land that Georgia has, Sky Valley is one of my favorite scenic places in the state.

On the far reaches of the resort on Tahoe Road and behind Spring Lake is where you will find the waterfall. It is open to the general public, there is no fee to visit and there is no entrance gate to hassle you.

After you park on the rather steep and narrow parking area there is Mud Creek. To your left is the 100 foot waterfall, which you will hear before you see it. If you are so inclined and not concerned with your safety, you can climb all over it. I do not recommend climbing on slippery large rocks with water pummeling you from above, but some people will do it anyway.

If you wish you may also hike to the falls. I would like to return and do that one day. There is a hiking trail that begins on Highway 246. It is roughly a two mile hike one-way that approaches the waterfall from the northwest and parallels Mud Creek. The trailhead is located on the right side of the road just beyond the Sky Valley overlook. There is a small pull off area for parking. The trail may at times have a closed gate, but you can disregard that and walk around it without worry.

September 2018. Photo by me.

The dull name, Mud Creek,  does not do it justice.

 

September 2018. Photo by me.

 

A closer look at the top of the waterfall. It has a nice misty spray for those hot days.

September 2018. Photo by me.

September 2018. Photo by me.

September 2018. Photo by me.

It is a green, cool and shady spot around the waterfall in the summertime. There are ferns growing among the rocks of the waterfall and the creek. This is what I believe to be an eastern hay-scented fern in the second photo above. I am not positive on the identification, but these are common ferns in this type of environment next to a Georgia mountain stream. The UGA Extension service is a wonderful resource for identifying plants and trees in Georgia has a list for identifying ferns here.

Wipers' Silver Sail

S

ince most current rock/pop sucks I am going back and listening to bands and artists that I did not know about back at the time or never got around to listening to until now. I would like to discover new music from the past to listen to that I can enjoy.

 

The state of current music is pitiful, especially what is deemed to be popular today. Last week I turned to the other person in the car as we listened to Power 96 and asked which computer was singing that song. He laughed.

 

This weekend I decided to take listen to Wipers, a band from Portland, Oregon. The band formed in 1977 and continued releasing new material until 1999. The only information I knew about them was that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was a fan of the band and had three of their albums on his top 50 favorite albums list. Since I'm a Nirvana fan, and if Cobain liked them, then maybe I would like them.

 

Everywhere I turned to learn about the band I saw them labeled as a punk rock band but after listening to their music I decided they sounded more post-punk than punk. The lead singer of the band Greg Sage said that he, "never liked being labeled anything."

Listening to their entire discography I hear influences from punk, but not enough of to call them a punk band on the order of Black Flag or anything similar. To my ears, they sound like an alternative/indie band. What's in a label anyway? What matters most is whether the music is good and strikes your fancy.

I am really taken with their 1993 album Silver Sail. It was a reunion album after the band broke up in 1989. The album sounds different from the albums in the 1980s and has the band moving forward and adopting a sound very much of the time. Some of the difference in sound might be attributable to a change of location since this album was recorded in Arizona and not the darkness of the Pacific Northwest. Not that this is a sunny happy experience with songs titled Prisoner, Never Win and Warning.  The sound is moody and bleak with plenty of fuzzy 90's guitar.

As much as I have enjoyed Silver Sail you cannot go wrong giving a listen to any of Wipers albums if you are looking for real music.

 

Magnapop

Magnapop's 1994 Hotboxing

I was writing something up about Los Angeles, VU meters, over modulation, potentiometers and how to operate certain aspects of a studio while I was listening to music on Youtube.

Then I remembered this mostly forgotten band from 1990s Atlanta called Magnapop. They were/are a good band and I remember hearing them get airplay back in the day on 99X when I was bopping up and down Ponce de Leon Avenue. A quick search revealed that they are apparently still performing. Hmmm.

The songs I liked from them were Slowly Slowly, Open The Door (my favorite), Merry and Piece Of Cake.

Magnapop rocked.

We had good alternative rock in the 1990s from all kinds of bands with male and female lead vocalists. I wonder when if ever alternative rock will ever make a return?

Damn I miss guitars in music.

For The Love Of The Turtleneck

Designer Halston. Photographer unknown. Probably 1970s.

So I have read, heard and seen turtlenecks are back. I greatly approve of the recycling of the turtleneck back into fashion. I love turtlenecks and have worn them off and on since the late 1980s.

For the last decade or so I haven not worn one because I didn't own any and they were impossible to find. Then much to my delight they came back into style. I will admit that turtlenecks have been much maligned and some people absolutely detest them. Some people identify them with the beatniks of the 1950s and poetry readings. Others associate them with boring English professors that are too concerned with books than fashion.

I think that the turtleneck has gotten an unfair bad reputation and I find them chic and sophisticated. I associate them with the glamorous 1970s. Just look at the photo of Halston above, was he a beatnik or a nerd? He was anything but. Some people might dislike or be uncomfortable with how a turtleneck gathers closely around the neck. Some people say they feel choked by them, but I suspect they are wearing one that is too tight fitting. I like my turtlenecks to be just slightly loose. The fabric around the neck does not bother me because I so often wear scarfs in the fall, winter and into the cool spells of spring.

Some just are not going to like the look and feel of turtlenecks and that is understandable because they do take getting accustomed to if you have never worn one. I am not one to follow fashion trends all that closely, but I have been waiting a long time for turtlenecks to return to stores so that I could again get my hands on some.

So back last November I finally bought some turtlenecks and I have been happily wearing them when it has been cold enough. Hooray for the return of the turtleneck because I adore them.

Donna Summer's I Feel Love from that wonderful decade that was the 1970s.

Avant Parker

Acouple of years ago I found out about Australian performer Courtney Barnett. I fell in love with her song Avant Gardener. I thought the song was interesting and the lyrics were humorous. I also liked her voice and that was left handed like me. She was a breathe of fresh air in a musical landscape of auto tuned robots that can't play instruments.

Last year, she was in Atlanta for the Shaky Knees Festival and recorded a series of ten music videos for her latest album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, at an impromptu performance in Piedmont Park which was not associated with the festival. How cool is that? I wish I had known about it.

Out of the ten songs I liked Nameless, Faceless the most.

My Favorite Albums

These are my top ten favorite albums that I have fallen in love with and never tire of listening. They are listed in no particular order because I could not rate one better than the other.

First, a little about my background and how it relates to music. I was raised in a household that always had music playing on the stereo. In my house we listened to records or the radio more than we ever watched television. Music is important to me and much of my life is remembered in association to certain songs or albums.

My musical influences at home were rather varied. I heard lotss of Elvis and even though I was young when he died I remember my mother going through an extended period of grief by playing all of her Elvis albums for weeks afterwards. My mother was more into rock listening to Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart and anything with a guitar and a good beat that she could snap her fingers to and tap her foot. My father was more of a listener of smooth rock and soul groups like Earth Wind And Fire, Steely Dan, Kenny Rogers, Chicago, Christopher Cross, Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. My brother who is five years older than I am was into Def Leppard, Loverboy, Boston, Twisted Sister, Kiss and AC/DC.

As a kid in the 1970s and 1980s I never heard much country music other than Hank Williams Jr. or Alabama and I never found it interesting on my own despite living in a rural area in the American South. My family was not country music fans and I was into whatever was on MTV and the Atlanta radio stations of Z-93, Power 99 and 94Q. By the time I started to form my own musical tastes in the 1980s I was into WHAM! then George Michael, Culture Club, INXS, Bon Jovi, Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston.

The first record I ever bought was a 45 single of Bill Squire's The Stroke followed by Paul McCartney's Take It Away and Rod Stewart's Infatuation. As teenager I went to a random assortment of concerts from Duran Duran, Bon Jovi, Rod Stewart to Joe Cocker.

During the 1990s I was all about alternative rock and female singer/songwriters.

By 2000 I was heavily into triphop which morphed into a love for jazz.

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Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)

I had been a fan of Radiohead going back to the Pablo Honey album from 1993. By the time 2001 had come and Amnesiac was released the band and I had both changed and grown. Radiohead had morphed into an experimental rock band and gone was the straight ahead rock band they were when Creep brought them onto my radar all those years before. Radiohead changed their sound with Kid A which was recorded at the same time as Amnesiac but released first into this musical abstract painting of electronica and noise. The songwriting was still there and still meaningful, but the layers of production often obscured them. Amnesiac was the better of the two albums and is my favorite from the band. Like all great albums this one takes the listener on a journey. Amnesiac is like drifting down a river on a small raft into deeper and deeper water, hitting rapids, sometimes going under the cold water and then resurfacing soaking wet. Knives Out for all the violence in the lyrics is the most smooth and peaceful song to listen to on the album. Thom Yorke's phrasing strings the words together in his vocals into one long blur over a languid guitar that lulls you into false sense of safety. Pyramid Song, another favorite of mine on this album, is like floating through space as someone pecks away on a piano. Amnesiac is one helluva journey.

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Sarah Mclachlan - Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993)

I was at the house I grew up in the country sitting out on one of the outdoor decks soaking up the sunshine of summer 1994 at the age of twenty-one listening to the legendary Atlanta alternative radio station 99X. The late great DJ Sean Demery was on the air and he played the song Good Enough from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. It was one of those unforgettable moments. I had up until that point never heard of Sarah Mclachlan and I was so taken by the song. Quickly thereafter I went to the nearest Turtles Record Store and bought Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I loved that album from song one Possession to the bonus track piano version of Possession hidden at the end. The album features sharp songwriting, slick production and exudes an atmosphere of hidden doors in dark corners of the human mind. It can be melancholy at times, but the songs are grounded in raw emotional writing that keeps the album from sinking into a depressing miasma. Give one listen to the bonus track of the piano version of Possession and tell me this isn't great music.

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R.E.M. - Murmur (1983)

My first introduction to R.E.M. came in 1988 in high school with the release of their album Green. I bought Green on cassette at the recommendation of a friend and ever since 1988 R.E.M. has and forever will be my favorite band. Little did I know at the time that Green was their sixth studio album. I had plenty of music to go back and personally discover like hidden treasure now that I had been handed the map of R.E.M. Murmur released in 1983 on the I.R.S. Records label features a couple of the band's more well known songs - Talk About The Passion and Radio Free Europe. Yet, most of the songs on this album are not generally known to people other than R.E.M. fans and would not be considered hit songs. Murmur is a fun upbeat collection of songs that gallop along to the early sounds of the band that is often described as jangle pop. There are a couple of slower songs such as Laughing and the brilliant Perfect Circle (my favorite R.E.M. song). Being a band from Athens, Georgia they are in my mind the sound of the 1980s in rural Georgia largely disconnected from the world, covered in kudzu, falling down barns and junked out cars in the backyard surrounded by privet. That is the sound that early R.E.M. evokes for me because I grew up in that landscape and Murmur is the best example of that sound.  Some might think that country music best fits the rural countryside of the American South or maybe the blues, but not for me because when I look at the pine trees, the pastures and rotting farm houses I hear R.E.M. This album is an invitation to mischief that is out there lurking somewhere down the country road and I suggest you follow it.

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Natalie Merchant - Tigerlily (1995)

I was a fan of the band 10,000 Maniacs and their jangly pop/folk infused music so when Natalie Merchant left the group and went solo I did not know what to expect. Then she released her first solo album and killed it from the first note of San Andreas Fault. It was as if she had all these great songs bottled up, stored away and ready to unleash onto the world. Natalie is a wonderful storyteller and the unique texture of her voice, that is full and strong has an uncommon beauty, is ideal for tugging at your heart. Tigerlily is an album that will make your soul richer for having listened to it. There is not a bad song on this album. The song Beloved Wife is one of the sweetest songs I have ever heard and Natalie's voice commands you to listen and then...then her voice breaks ever so slightly on the chorus and your heart tears into pieces. By the time the album closes with the song Seven Years it is the end of a journey, a cathartic exorcism of emotional demons. This album is one heavy listen. Tigerlily for me is the overwhelming smell of incense and the moments of sitting and staring out the wall of old factory windows from my loft overlooking the gray winter landscape of Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta because that was my life in 1995. This album is like time traveling for me, but even in 2019 as I write this I can listen to this album and find it still as good as it was then.

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Nick Drake - Bryter Layter (1971)

This first time I heard Bryter Layter I was so confused by it, thinking what in the hell have they done to Nick Drake. This initial impression was based on years of only listening to Drake's Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon albums and before I had read the various books about his short life. Once I knew more about Nick the person and what was going on at his record label when this album was recorded I came to better understand it. Bryter Layter was such a departure from his other albums that my impression of him came to change. It took repeated listens, but then I saw the magic in this album and it never left me, becoming my favorite album of his. This album to me is Nick Drake leaves university, goes to the big city (London), gains sophistication and finds himself a more polished musical identity. If you know the story of Nick Drake then you know what unfortunately happens next. Nick's voice is as smooth as some 70's crushed velvet, his guitar playing is bang on and tight as always and the session musicians perform the lush piano, horn and string arrangements beautifully. John Cale was hanging out in the studio with Nick for the recording of this album and he plays celeste, piano and organ on the song Northern Sky. Nick Drake's voice once it gets into your head will haunt you especially on the song One Of These Things First. Overall, his lyrics matured from his earlier album (Five Leaves Left) and what I think is his best song, At The Chime Of A City Clock, is found here on Bryter Layter.

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Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

There is no album that changed the music industry or influenced a generation in my lifetime more than Nevermind. This was a singular cultural earthquake that will forever define Generation X, my generation. Hair bands like Warrant, Poison, Motley Crue and their ilk were wiped off the face of the planet, MTV and the radio when Kurt Cobain screamed, "here we are now, entertain us." I remember the fall of 1991 when this album came out and seeing the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV every hour. Nirvana put me into a trance. There was Kurt in his brown and green striped shirt and those anarchy wearing cheerleaders and those kids slamming into each other and I was forever mesmerized at age eighteen. Nevermind was this fuzzy wall of sound that came to be known as grunge and suddenly I had a new band to obsess over. Come As You Are was then and is still my favorite song on the album. This is still true even though the guitar part is probably lifted from the Killing Joke's Eighties (seriously see how obvious it is) who probably lifted it from The Damned's Life Goes On (I mean is there any doubt). Lithium, Something In The Way and On A Plain are also favorites of mine from the album. Nirvana gave us this very special album and I wish there had been more after In Utero besides the Unplugged album and all the old material that has been released posthumously. That's the thing about Nevermind to me, I don't listen to it or love it for nostalgic reasons, but to listen to the best alternative rock album ever recorded that won't be eclipsed in my lifetime.

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Portishead - Roseland NYC Live (1998)

In July 1997 the trip hop band Portishead recorded this live album in the Roseland Ballroom in New York. Typically I am not a fan of live albums, but this one is the rare exception. In the late 1990s as alternative rock music lost its way I was introduced to trip hop by an industrial designer I was dating and he set me off on a path of musical discovery that would forever change me. I went deep down the rabbit hole of trip hop which would eventually lead me to electronica and onward to jazz. During my trip down the trip hop rabbit hole Portishead became my favorite band in the genre. Beth Gibbons on vocals and the rest of Portishead performing live with an orchestra backing them sets a mood, a vibe that is ecstasy for the ears. It is dark and dramatically lit with the lights dimmed, you have your feet up, smoke is wafting by and this chanteuse named Beth pleading with you as she grabs you by the collar. "Just listen," she says. Roads is my favorite song on the album and of all-time by the band. Just listen to the crowd's reaction when they realize the band is about to perform Roads and you'll get the idea. As Beth sings "storm in the morning light and I feel no more," you shake your head in acknowledgement that yes, I totally get that.

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Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain (2000)

Felt Mountain is a trip to the fun house at the carnival or maybe being locked inside an insane asylum. Goldfrapp have never been a band that takes themselves too seriously and they have taken more strange musical turns than any band I can think of in my memory. The whistling to open the album on Lovely Head tells you to understand that this is no ordinary album. This album is cohesive in its strangeness, its "otherness" from beginning to end; listening to it, it never fails to capture your attention. At times it borders on being avant-garde with the heavily filtered vocals of Alison Goldfrapp on Deer Stop. She has an ethereal voice singing a lullaby in Oompa Radar to only be overtaken by the carnival tubas while your mind is turned wrong side up in a house of mirrors. Horse Tears, my favorite song on Felt Mountain, has the lyrics, "night has fallen mute and cold, my horse is crying," and I chuckle at it every time. Listening to it I feel like I am sitting in front of a fireplace on an icy night in a big old empty country house. Felt Mountain is music for those with an adventurous mind and I dare you to take it.

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Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (2008)

If ever there was album that makes the perfect soundtrack for one of my other favorite hobbies, hiking in nature, it would have to be Fleet Floxes self-titled debut full album in 2008. Robert Pecknold's voice is like a tall old evergreen tree standing on the side of a mountain and at the same time a cold spring fed stream cascading over boulders. Put that voice on an album full of dense and beautifully constructed lyrics and backed by sublime harmonies and you have Fleet Foxes. The acoustic guitars at the beginning of Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (my favorite song on the album) sound just as I imagine the sunlight shining through the branches of a tree high above in the forest canopy would sound like. Meadowlarks with its slow strumming makes me want to go sit by a stream, close my eyes and drift away into the atmosphere. White Winter Hymnal will always reminded me of hiking down the Dockery Lake Trail in the North Georgia Mountains in the late summer heat on the way to camp. This song has a bouncy beat that is ideal to keep humping it down the trail for miles even though you are already beat. This album has its dreamy moments, tender moments and a strong sense for longing for place to call home whether in a physical space or in the heart of someone else. Fleet Foxes came at a time when listeners were in desperate need of authentic singers and musicians. The band found an overwhelming audience, but unfortunately what should have been a clarion call to the music industry to find genuine artists that weren't auto tuned robots wasn't heeded. Popular music instead would headlong into hell.

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Mono - Formica Blues (1997)

Mono is another trip hop band, but they did not have the career longevity as Portishead or Massive Attack, as a matter of fact they only released one album called Formica Blues. They did manage to have one hit song off of their album called Life In Mono that was featured in the film Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke. The band consisted of vocalist Siobhan de Mare and keyboardist Martin Virgo. Despite their one hit song most people are not going to be familiar with Mono and their album Formica Blues is rather obscure. While unknown to most, this album resides deep in my heart like a long ago lover that you cannot forget and you can still smell their scent. I listen to Formica Blues late at night with the headphones on and often with my eyes closed. This is not music for the daylight as sunshine renders it impotent. I compare this album to walking through an underground labyrinth with water dripping from the ceiling and lights glimmering in this distance. This could be music for a slow burning spy film during the Cold War. The album borrows from jazz influences and people such as Burt Bacharach and Phil Spector. My favorite song on the album is The Outsider. It has fat beats and a hypnotic rhythm with seductive vocals panning from left to right and back again. The songs The Blind Man and Penguin Freud are in the same vein as this too. Penguin Freud with the lyric, "beautifully stupid," is a close runner up to my favorite song on the album. Hello Cleveland is like a smooth drink after the longest of days.

2019 Arrived

Spring Street in Midtown Atlanta, December 31, 2018.

 

H

appy new year I suppose.

 

It is raining outside this morning and that has been the case for almost a solid month now. We completed one of the rainiest Decembers that I can remember with 12.02 inches of rain and for the year it was 67.22 inches. That yearly total was 14.25 inches above normal. It rained and rained through fall and into early winter after a dry summer.

On a drive over to my brother's house in northeastern Alabama on Sunday I noticed that all of the rivers and streams I crossed were close to flooding the landscape.

It has been mild since Christmas day and I am ready for the cold to return after this mild to warm spell. I bought a new black wool coat for the winter in early December and I have only had a few occasions to wear it so far.

Another new glass tower in Midtown pushes the old to the curb.

Yesterday walking around Midtown I saw teenagers sitting on a bench eating ice cream cones while wearing short sleeve tee-shirts. That's not normal, even for Atlanta, on New Year's Eve. 

Since I was last here I have read six books:
Lost In Hollywood: The Fast Times and Short Life Of River Phoenix by John Glatt
Eruption: The Untold Story Of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson
The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About The Murder Of Matthew Shepard by Stephen Jimenez
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
Being There by Jerzy Konsinski
The Devotion Of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

I enjoyed Skin Lane the most out of those books followed by The Devotion of Suspect X. Despite Being There is one of my favorite films I was not so impressed by the book on which it was based. It was one of those rare cases where the film was better than the source material. I felt the same way about the film of The Shining which was better than the original book.

 

The last few months I have been exploring more punk and post-punk music. Somehow, I'm not sure really, I discovered this band called Pink Turns Blue. They are a band from Berlin that began in the mid 1980s and are still performing today. They would be considered a "post-punk" band and some categorize them as a "dark wave" band. I think of their sound as post-punk and I have been enjoying immensely their 1987 album If Two Worlds Kiss.

Pink Turns Blue - When It Rains

I got a pair of Dr. Martens  boots last month, so I'm totally hardcore punk now, just kidding. I do like the boots though and have always wanted a pair and they are to my surprise so comfortable. It is a bit of a style departure for me to wear combat boots, but I find the punk aesthetic so appealing. I have not gone as far as to get a black leather jacket yet or to shave my head into a mohawk, but the leather jacket could be a possibility.

By the way there is no similarity between punks and skinheads so please don't confuse the two. The politics of those two groups were polar opposites despite some being confused about the two groups. Skinheads, real skinheads, would just as soon as exterminate my kind as look at me.

The photography book Skins And Punks Lost Archives 1978-1985 by Gain Watson is an excellent visual resource about the differences between skinheads and punks.  

Image source: Wikipedia

In the 1980s and the 1990s there was a gay subculture of skinheads in the United States and Europe. It was a movement that was about appropriating the look of the skinhead with the shaved heads and combat boots. It was about adopting the look without the politics. I remember seeing gay men wearing the skinhead look back then and I thought it was rather hot on certain men.

I will not be shaving my head, I like my hair too much for that.