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Banging the drum for Mitch Mitchell |
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Friday, 14 November 2008 |
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Teens today seem much less verbally combative than when I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s. They don't protest anything the way my friends and I did. I suppose that is progress and a good thing, but the older I get, the more nostalgic I am about the partisan debates my friends and I had about sports in the New York area back in the day. We constantly argued, often quite loudly, about who was the best centerfielder in town, Willie (Mays), Mickey (Mantle) or the Duke (Snider). I was a Dodger fan and, of course, I dug my heels in for Snider. I knew that Mays and Mantle were a little better, but defending Snider's skills -- "But didn't you see him climb the wall at Ebbetts Field to make that catch?" -- was helpful in honing what modest debating skills I brought to college and later life. Mitchell more than held his own against the likes of my favorite, Ginger
Baker (Cream, Blind Faith), Keith Moon (The Who) and Phil Collins
(Genesis).
Mitch Mitchell died yesterday of apparently natural causes. Mitchell, the last surviving member of the three-member Jimi Hendrix Experience (Hendrix and bassist Noel Redding were the others), was playing in a Hendrix tribute band at the time of his death. He was always in the mix during our college debates about best rock drummers, and he more than held his own against the likes of my favorite, Ginger Baker (Cream, Blind Faith), Keith Moon (The Who) and Phil Collins (Genesis). These were all very physical drummers.
Some instruments reflect their player's personalities but I think the drums might actually have a mood altering effect because of their physical nature. One of my high school friends, for example, had a vicious temper from 5th grade on; I once saw him chase a slightly faster friend around a baseball field and literally up the side of a batting cage. But he mellowed later in high school, and I think it was from all that banging after he took up the drums.
One of my enduring memories of the 1960s, of which there are many, was a Hendrix concert at the Wollman Skating Rink in New York's Central Park. I don't remember the song, but at one point, Hendrix dropped his guitar, set it on fire, and then smashed it about the stage. [Click here for a video of a similar night of Hendrix carnage and note Mitchell's furious but controlled drum playing in the background.] No matter the chaos before him, Mitchell seemed content typically to remain in the background, his theatrical contribution coming through his hands and sticks.
Maybe Jimi should have taken up the drums. He might have lived longer.
Mitch Mitchell was 61.
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Tuesday, 11 November 2008 |
Veterans Day has special meaning for this non-veteran. I get a little weepy listening on the radio and television to the many tributes to our troops serving overseas and the millions of veterans still alive who served our nation from World War II through to today. My late father, Ed Gavrich, was amongThe luckiest day of my life, December 1, 1969, sealed the unlucky fate of others my age.
Veterans Day reminds me as well of how luck can play such a big part in the arc of a person's life. You can say that your luckiest day was when you met your spouse, or when your kids were born, or when you made a fateful decision that turned your life for the better. But when something happens that makes all those other things possible, that is at a different level of good fortune.
The luckiest day of my life was December 1, 1969. I was 21 at the time, a junior in college. Those my age may remember it as the day of the Selective Service System's first lottery for the military draft. My son and his friends could not begin to imagine how nervous we all were on that day, even those of us who swore we would go to Canada before we would fight what we perceived as an unjust war.
One by one, Alexander Pirnie, a U.S. congressman from New York, pulled 366 blue plastic balls from a deep container. The first was Sept. 14, then April 24 (four days before my own birthday), then Dec. 30 and so on. The boys born on the dates on the first 10 blue balls were inducted within weeks. After a harrowing hour or so, my birthday of April 28 pulled number 262, and I uttered a silent thanks to my mother and father for their timing, and returned to the comfort of college life.
Veterans Day, like no other, reminds me that someone else went to Vietnam and I didn't, simply as a consequence of conception and birth dates.
But my wistfulness is blunted by another reminder this Veterans Day, that old men still lead us into war, as folksinger Phil Ochs wrote during the ‘60s, but it's always the young to die. Our leaders never seem to learn, no matter the lessons of history. When they do, that will be a change we can believe in.
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Saturday, 08 November 2008 |
Not just a few citizens voted for Barack Obama because of his eloquence, rather than in spite of it. Recall that John McCain and Sarah Palin tried to make some tenuous connection between lack of trustworthiness and Obama's way with words. That jive fell on deaf ears. We American voters understand that if eloquence counted for nothing, then Kennedy's "Ask not" If Obama's Presidency turns out the way we hope it does, "Yes we can" may someday attain its own stamp on history.
President-elect Obama is a great speech giver, but his extemporaneous speaking has been inconsistent. He is a thinker, and when asked a question, you can sense the wheel's spinning behind his eyes. But our demands for press interviews and debates compel candidates to be fast on their feet. Obama grew substantially from his too-cautious primary debates to his stage competitions with McCain. Better that he had the steely Hillary to train him for the lurching McCain than the other way around. Now, with the grueling race behind him, you can tell the President-elect is much more comfortable talking off the cuff.
That may be a two-edged sword, as he demonstrated yesterday at his first press conference since election. When asked if he had consulted any"We would have preferred a mutt like me," said the President-elect.
But as some words taketh away, others giveth, and the President-elect showed more of what we can expect in the way of stage-personality during his Presidency. When asked about the dog he had promised to get for his children in the White House, he explained that one daughter is allergic to dogs, which will cause them to look for a hypoallergenic breed. (Aside to the Obama family: Our family went through the same thing and settled on a Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier, the joy of our family for the last 6 years and a choice that was literally nothing to sneeze at.) Although the Obama family's preference was for a rescue dog from a shelter, those mixed breeds are unlikely to be hypoallergenic. "We would have preferred a mutt, like me," the first dad said.
After 16 years of the salaciousness of Bill Clinton and the daddy hang-ups of Dubya, how wonderful to have a President so comfortable in his own skin. And how ironic.
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Recovered memory: "My fellow prisoners..." |
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Tuesday, 04 November 2008 |
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Politicians say the darndest things. Most of their words are calculated, as in Obama saying of John McCain that "he isn't a maverick, he is Bush's sidekick." Or McCain saying of Obama that, "he is more liberal than a Senator who used to call himself a Socialist." (That would be Bernie Sanders of Vermont.) But it is in the moments, few though they may be, when the candidates forget themselves for a second and burble out a few words of what they are really thinking, that we learn more about them than anything they say at their rallies or in interviews. "Across this country, this is the agenda I have set
before my fellow prisoners," McCain told the crowd.
For me, Obama's moment was with Joe the Non-Plumber when the candidate, in explaining how he would treat Joe's phantom $250,000 business, indicated it is a good thing to "spread the wealth around." His words, in that one-on-one conversation, became the centerpiece of the McCain-Palin rationale for the last few weeks of the campaign, with the two hurling charges of "socialist" Obama's way. They didn't stick, largely because anyone to the left and right, respectively, of orthodox conservatives and liberals saw the comment for what it was -- one, perhaps clumsy, way of explaining how the progressive tax system works.
But there was no such "private" moment, with cameras rolling, when John McCain, addressing thousands of people at a Pennsylvania rally, referred to the American people as "My fellow prisoners" (instead of "citizens"), a slip that was revealing on many levels. The full quote: "Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners," he said. He followed immediately with a call for Obama to be "clear" and "candid" about his own positions.
It is inarguable that McCain lost it for a split second there. In the history of politics outside the walls of Alcatraz or Gitmo or such a place, has anyone ever addressed their supporters as fellow prisoners? Whether a sign of age, exhaustion (with nearly two months left in the campaign) or, God forbid, some delayed manifestation of post-traumatic stress syndrome, it was a scary moment that revealed everything any voter need know about McCain: He would not be ready on day one.
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