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Sky Saxon RIP
by Jim Washburn 2009-06-26
If there’s ever a day you don’t want to die on, publicity-wise, it would be the day Michael Jackson dies. That kind of sucks up all the ink in the room, and if there’s a drop left, it goes to Farrah Fawcett.
So pity poor Sky Saxon, who left this life on June 25th much the way that he had lived it, forgotten. There was a brief period in the ’60s when he was spoken of as a West Coast Mick Jagger, a sexy, provocative frontman who drove girls crazy when his band, the Seeds, played the Hollywood Bowl.
They had a couple of local hits in 1966, the petulant, whiny “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine” and “Mr. Farmer,” and a national one with the garage/proto-punk classic “Pushin’ Too Hard.”
I later knew a guy who had managed the Seeds back then: Jimmy Madden, a minor Hollywood legend for reasons best left to an FBI file. He told me that, concerned about his investment in the band, he took Sky for a spin in his convertible MG one day and impressed upon him the necessity of coming up with a hit song. “Hey man,” Sky supposedly responded, “You’re pushin’ too hard. You’re pushin’ too hard on me!”
“Sky, I think you have a song there!”
The rest is history, or it would be if anybody noticed. “Pushin’ Too Hard” went to No. 36 on the charts; their followup went to No. 72 and that’s all she wrote. In 1967 they were one of the first bands to jump into the electric blues revival, changing their name to the Sky Saxon Blues Band. Their awful album, A Spoonful of Seedy Blues, is best remembered today for its liner notes by Muddy Waters—“These boys have the true blues feeling”—which have left generations of blues fans wondering how many bottles of inducement that took.
After that, Sky pretty well sank from notice. One afternoon in the late 1970s I got a call at the record store I ran-a friend asking if I’d like to play with the New Seeds in Hollywood that night. Why not? After work, I drove home from Anaheim to Costa Mesa, spent five minutes learning the guitar solo to “Pushin’ Too Hard,” loaded the Quilter and and Super Beatle amps into the car and headed with my friend Jon to Hollywood. I think we made it to Carson before the drive shaft fell out of the car.
Instead of being early, by the time we’d dealt with AAA and had a friend come cram us and our looming amps into her far smaller car, we were about 90 minutes late to the gig. They’d held the show for us because it turned out we pretty much were the New Seeds. There was an anorexic bearded hippie named Rainbow on rhythm guitar, a potato-headed drummer they’d checked out of a mental institution, and Sky, who was calling himself Sky Sunlight in those days and looking like an underfed Charles Manson.
We spent a couple of minutes setting up and were off. No tuning, no mention of chord changes or even what key we were in-that wasn’t Rainbow’s bag-he just started in and the rest of us did our best to sort it out. I think I was wearing a shiny green smoking jacket.
We were playing in a grimy former strip club called the Orpheum, across from Tower Records on the Strip. There might have been 12 people in the audience, five of them friends of ours. Sky was the most famous person I’d ever played with.
He was into some sort of religious thing that put a lot of weight on what god spelled backwards. There were rumors of Sky being sighted scampering on all fours around the hills, following a pack of dogs, rooting through the trash. A lot of his lyrics that night dealt with dogs. One line I recall went something like, “Dylan says let your dogs run free, c’mon everybody, be like me.”
It was a hippie nightmare onstage, out of tune and insensate. We finally did one recognizable song, a reworked “Pushin’ Too Hard.” When Sky started singing in the middle of my memorized fuzztone solo, the idol worship had pretty well worn off. I thought, “Screw you, buddy, my drive shaft died for this,” and turned up.
A couple of songs later, the club owner decided to cut his losses and told us to stop. “Oh well, back into the tunnel” Sky said cryptically as he loped offstage. Behind the club a short time later, I saw the owner pay Sky for the gig with a pack of cigarettes. The rest of us got secondhand smoke.
We got a call the next day. Sky had really dug what we’d brought to his music--Did we have that “true blues feeling”?-and wanted us to come up again that night. I could only think of something Scotty had said on Star Trek: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
I read he pulled it together somewhat in later years, hitting the retro circuit with a newer Seeds. According to an obit I read, he was sick last week, but insisted on doing a gig on Saturday. By Monday he was in an Austin, Texas hospital with a raging kidney infection, and passed away on Thursday. No word yet on where he’ll be planted.
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S.Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s Extramarital Wanderlust
by Jim Washburn 2009-06-24
It's hard work trying to save your state from receiving billions in desperately needed federal bailout money. Just ask South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who was so exhausted by the grueling fight with his state's legislature that he went on walkabout, disappearing from his office and home without so much a word as to where he was going or for how long. "He's hiking the Appalachian Trial," his office finally announced, when people noticed their state was without a governor. Healthy, outdoorsy, patriotic even. Davey Crockett probably did the same after some tough legislatin'.
Except, as we know now, the state vehicle he'd borrowed was found at an airport, where he'd been seen boarding a plane. "Oh, he went to Buenos Aires," his aides explained, when people were starting to notice that Sanford had left the state with no plan in place in case there was an emergency in his absence.
When Sanford returned, a reporter at the airport asked him what he'd been doing down there, and he explained he'd spent five days driving along the Buenos Aires coastline. After some other reporters found the coastal road was only a few miles long and started digging, Sanford called a press conference.
There seems to be a new unwritten law in Republican politics that an extramarital affair doesn't count if you call a press conference to admit to it at least five minutes before the news breaks in the press. Sanford did that, admitting to an affair with a "dear, dear friend" and saying he'd spent his five days there crying, which is evidently what one does in Argentina. If only that darned Obama and his free-spending ways hadn't driven Sanford to this!
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Your Father’s In That Glass, Talking to You
by Jim Washburn 2009-06-24
Did your dad drink suntan lotion, and if so, will you?
There seems to be a lot of money riding on that question, since it’s the message of a widespread print ad from Canadian Club.
The full-pager shows a faded color photo of a James Brolinish guy with ’70s hair carrying his gal along the beach slung over his shoulder caveman style, with these lines below:
“Your dad didn’t put on his own lotion. Damn right your dad drank it.”
Now there is some little black text between these lines: “He chose the beach. Picked his spot. And decided it was time for some drinks. C.C. and Gingers. Smooth. Refreshing. And brought to him in his beach chair.”
The idea, as I see it, is to speak to a generation of larval men who missed out on the manly rituals that helped past generations define themselves and their place at the center of the universe. Dadly, un-manscaped men. Decisive. Self-centered. Instinctive. In-command. Didn’t take strap-ons up the ol’ bungport. Drink up, young larvae, and you’ll grow some balls. Like dad’s.
That’s the intended message, but the received message, for the many who can’t bother with small print, is that Dad drank Sea & Ski. Damn right he did.
Canadian Club has been running similar ads for the last two years, soliciting photos of real old school dads from their customers, and pairing them with text to help you grow a pair, if you’d only get out of your dad’s Oldsmobile and into a tall tumbler of CC. That’s a whisky, by the way, not an actual club of Canadians, though the net effect at 2 a.m. is about the same.
Other CC ads tell us, “Your dad was not a metrosexual” and “Your dad had groupies” while the best of the lot crows, “Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first.” The provocative title is accompanied by a photo of a smug guy in a chair, drink in hand, leggy hottie in his lap, the two of them looking about four minutes away from full penetration on the umber shag carpet. That’s right, Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first: Ol’ Pops squirted his semen into a heap of liquored-up furburgers until he got Mom pregnant with you. Let’s celebrate with Canadian Club, on the rocks!
Your dad spat raw oysters at traffic cops.
Your dad had the Saigon drip.
Your dad’s liver looks like the Great Lakes. Damn right he drank it.
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Tragedy & Transportation
by Tony Chavira 2009-06-23
Treehugger has an great article today that tries to keep us all from losing sight of the overall goals. Sure train accidents are massive tragedies deserving national attention, but part of the reason they're so publicized is that they happen very very infrequently. Automobiles, on the other hand, lead to accidents so often that a death by car crash somehow seems commonplace by comparison. That, in many ways, is far more tragic.
Very, very safe, by comparison to other modes of transportation--especially driving. Over 40,000 Americans die each year in car crashes, though most of those accidents don't make the headlines of national news outlets.
By contrast, less than 800 people die from train and subway accidents each year, as of 2005 (many of which are, sadly, workers). And that number has been declining steadily, too, over the last couple decades--even with more people than ever taking public transit.
It's why mayors from the nation's major cities are all battling to get more funding for similar metro systems--it relieves congestion, reduces accidents and fatalities, and cuts carbon emissions to boot.
The point is, taking the train is a truly safe way to travel, and it's getting even safer. New technology (that the DC Metro trains were actually supposed to already have) enables a computer to trigger the train's brakes automatically if it gets too close to another train. So take heart:it's a dangerous world out there, but taking the train is one of the safer--and as we all know, greener--bets you can make.
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Neighborhood: Art by Darlene Campbell
by Nathan Walpow 2009-06-15
Revisiting some housing-related art we’ve featured in the past ...
Southern California artist Darlene Campbell chronicles the physical transformations shaping the Golden State. Images of reconfigured hillsides laced with new roadways, terraced knolls, ridge-top trophy houses, concrete drainage channels, freeway pillars, and the accoutrements of land moving equipment all capture a landscape in transition, suggesting an anonymous sameness and interchangeability that depict a world that is clearly Californian. Employing golden-hued light and dramatic clouds, Campbell coaxes beauty out of the banal and, in so doing, mimics romantic 17th century landscape paintings. However, in contrast to expansive Renaissance paintings, the scale of her work is quite small. Her paintings, which average 9 by 12 inches, provide us with a glimpse of our future, mirrored with disturbing clarity.
Most recently, Campbell’s work has been featured at the San Jose Museum of Art, Loyola Marymount University, the Laguna Art Museum, the Riverside Art Museum, Barnsdall Art Park, and the Frye Art Museum (Seattle). She has also illustrated two books. She lives in Laguna Beach and teaches painting and drawing at the Laguna College of Art and Design.
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