Audio Is Dead, Long Live Texting

Tonight, I tried to have a conversation with someone on an Apple garble-machine, aka iPhone. Holy crap! What is the point in having a microphone on a device that is that grossly incapable of audio communications? The iPhone owner tried to pronounce the name of the street where I was going several times; “Sturdvant,” “Stirant,” “Sylbant,” “Sylvan,” etc. I asked him to spell it, but that attempt was so distorted that I almost suspected he was including letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. I made my best guess and was wrong, but both Google and Garmin sent me to an address that didn’t exist without even the slightest mention that they had picked a spot in the middle of an intersection where, obviously, there was no house.

Another friend just got a new iPhone last month and has still failed to figure out how that silly device can be used as a telephone. It kicks ass on the web and texting, but talking to people is just not one of its capabilities. I suggested he try using Skype on the phone, just for laughs. He did, but the problem is with both the iPhone’s shit microphone and even worse speaker; although the speaker did work better on Skype than it does through the “phone app.”

It’s easy and unfair to ridicule young people for their texting default. They’ve grown up with telephones that are incapable of being telephones and as their voices have atrophied their thumbs have become nimble. While their thumbs are far more versatile than, for example, mine, the combination of trying to type with a pair of fat digits on a crappy virtual keyboard plus those godawful “helpers” that replace “their” with “there” and “weather” with “whether” and “you’re” with “your” and the rest of the syntax errors we’re being trained to ignore, their English language skills are atrophying into grunts and groans. Just in time for Trump’s “fake news” world to take advantage of a culture of total illiterate fools.

My Momentary Folk Singer Career

In the fall of 1967, my father withdrew about $3,000 from my college savings fund and the family took a “vacation” and dumped me in Dallas, Texas. The plan was that I would be attending a fly-by-night Texas for-profit computer school. The reality was that my father thought I was wasting my life trying to be a musician and he figured I’d follow my money where ever he decided to send it. He was, of course, right; in his weird, passive-aggressive way. I had earned that money throwing newspapers between the ages of 11 and 13 and working at the Dodge City Boot Hill Front Street Replica tourist trap for two summers from age 13 to 14. I, of course, wanted to spend that money on music equipment, but my father would have none of that. Worst case, I figured I would be far enough from Kansas and my fundamentalist whackadoodle family to completely break free from them and start my own life. 

The school, as you would expect, turned out to be a fraudulent joke. The school’s “dormitory” was a 1920’s flophouse full of bums, drunks, thieves, and a dozen-or-so computer school “students.” After a week in the flophouse, a half-dozen of us started looking for a better place to live. We found a house we could rent for about the same money as the flophouse, sans flophouse food. That lasted for a month because one of our roommates ate everything that came into the house and bought nothing. When he tried to “borrow” money for the 2nd month’s rent, we scattered. Two of the guys, twin brothers (Larry and Gary)  from Lawrence, KS, found an apartment in Old East Dallas and I rented a tiny garage apartment from the same landlord. By then, more than half of the school’s students had dropped out and most of them were suing the school for fraud; among other things. One of the more experienced guys had recommended that we join the lawsuit, but my father had already been conned into giving the school a 2nd semester tuition as a payoff for my dropping out. For an accounting teacher, his math skills were consistently suspect. His capacity for critical thinking was never suspect because it was never evident. I kept going to the school, even though most of the instructors had quit and the already obsolete computer equipment had been repossessed. 

About the time I moved into the garage apartment, a friend from Kansas, Ed, who was burning time before his delayed induction into the Army date moved in with me. We had written a few dozen songs together and decided to try some of them as folk songs. There was a bar a few blocks from the apartment and coffee shops from Lakewood Heights to downtown Dallas. Best of all was the Rubaiyat, the premier Texas folk club/coffee shop of the day. Ed stayed for a couple of weeks, just long enough to help me connect to some of the folk music scene. Toward his last few days in Dallas, our act had started to attract a weird collection of “side men” to our act; percussion players, “singers,” guys blowing into bottles and South American flutes, an upright bass player or two. Some characters brought instruments they often couldn’t play at all, so they’d just bang on them. There was no money in any of it, so that act took on a name that included the words “jug band.” That is all I remember about the group name, too. Jug bands were a thing then, for a brief moment. 

Once, we accidentally ended up being one of the intro acts for a major (for the time) folk singer. It kills me that I can’t remember if it was Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, or it could have been someone I have completely forgotten. The first name stated with “T,” I was not a folk music guy at the time, although I loved Bob Dylan and covered several of his pre-electric era songs. I wouldn't have known Rush from Paxton from Buckley at the time, but I did cover Hardin's "Reason to Believe."

Ed and I showed up, but the rest of the menagerie did not, so we did a half-dozen original songs and gave up the stage to the headliner. As I walked off of the stage, whoever that T-guy was said, “You know what it’s supposed to sound like.” 

[The picture at right is just a Rubaiyat poster, not a bill that our group was on.]

I will never know if that was a compliment or sarcasm. If you know me, you would be correct in assuming I lean toward believing it was sarcasm. We were 19 and 20-year-old kids from Kansas.

A day or two later, Ed headed off to basic training. I ended up dropping out of my bogus computer school, shacking up with my wife, Robbye, diving into the Dallas hippie world (sans drugs), and almost giving up music entirely. I really wanted to be an R&B guitarist, but couldn’t cut it in that competitive environment. I loved playing guitar or bass in an R&B band, but playing solo folk music scared the crap out of me. Still does. Occasionally, I would stop in at the Rubaiyat and play with one of the other groups or do a couple original songs. One of those songs, “Dixie Lead,” was recorded at the club and got a little late night FM radio play, as a protest against one of the many grossly polluting factories in east Dallas. And that was my first experience in the big city.

Double-Edged Swords

A friend recently ended a jam session complaining, “I’m worried that musicians today don’t even know the names of the people I grew up idolizing and imitating.” (Or something close to that.) 

I responded with, “That goes both ways, with most of the folks in our generation pretending that no good music has happened since the 70’s or 80’s.” That was not received well. 

I just reviewed a book that I, mostly, disliked for the same reasons, A Craftsman’s Legacy by Eric Gorges, and you can read my opinion of that book on my Geezer with A Grudge blog. Every old generation imagines that it not only invented the wheels of society but perfected them so that every following generation can only screw up the work that went before them. It takes a special sort of arrogant blindness to believe that, but humans are really good at both arrogance and blind belief. It’s one of many things that has always convinced me that the natural state of human “civilization” is chaos. I wrapped up my review of A Craftsman’s Legacy with this: 

“Finally, I firmly believe that everything that requires skill is improved by every generation. You may be one of those addled characters who imagines that ‘good music’ stopped being made in 1960, 1970, 1980, or whenever, but you’re wrong. Likewise, most 1970’s era pro basketball players wouldn’t make the team for, even the freakin’ Clippers, today. Even Michael Jordan would have a hard time playing on a winning team today. It’s true that many people knew how to repair their cars and motorcycles in the 1950’s; because they needed to. A vehicle that lasted 25,000 miles without needing major work in 1950’s was a rarity. Today, we call any vehicle that fails before 200,000 miles a ‘lemon.’ Today, if I had to go to battle with a 15th Century sword I’d just use it on myself to get it over with efficiently. Vintage ‘skills’ are that because they are no longer state-of-the-art and, as such, are obsolete. If you think someone with a hammer and coal-fired forge can turn out a better steel tool than a modern factory, you’re only fooling yourself. If you don’t think a modern adventure touring motorcycle isn’t as well crafted as one of Gorge’s hippo-bikes, you don’t know what the word ‘craftsmanship’ means. If you think someone cobbling out plodding, non-functional ‘choppers, bobbers, and diggers’ could get a job on a modern factory motorcycle race team doing . . . anything, you are probably the ideal reader for A Craftsman’s Legacy.”

I absolutely believe all of that and even a moderate amount of exposure to the best of today’s young musicians would force almost anyone to acknowledge that the “good old” stuff is practically unlistenable in comparison. I admit that I’m not a typical Boomer in my tastes. I didn’t like the Beatles (but I am a huge George Martin fan, he could turn sow's ears into silk purses, repeatedly) or much of the British Invasion in the 60’s and I like most of that stuff even less now. A lot of great music, from R&B to jazz, was bounced off of popular radio by “yeah, yeah, yeah” and other teenybopper bullshit between 1964 and the early 80’s and I don’t think popular music has ever recovered from the damage done. Another Boomer friend commented on the “trivial character” of current music lyrics, as if songs-about-nothing like the Beatle’s “Hey Jude” or “Long and Winding Road” or “Number 9” and pretty much every Led Zeppelin song that wasn’t stolen aren’t only trivial but annoying. At least the Stones had “Street Fightin’ Man” had a point. 

That is such a lame complaint. It’s pop music, dude; music for kids by kids. Don’t expect poetry or meaningful commentary on the state of humanity from kids. 

Just because we’re old and full of ourselves now doesn’t mean that we were solid citizens or brilliantly insightful and creative 50 years ago. I am a firm believer in Theodore Sturgeon’s “90% of everything is crap” rule. I can’t think of a period where the overwhelming majority of popular music wasn’t garbage. For example, the furthest up the US pop singles charts Jimi Hendrix ever made it was #20 with “All Along the Watchtower” in late 1968. The chart topper at that time was “Harper Valley PTA” followed by the Beatles’ lamest ever “Hey Jude.”  Hendrix had 4 successful albums, If you look at almost any moment in pop music history, you’ll be discouraged at how generally mediocre the “hits” are. It was true in 1920 and it will be true in 2020 and 2050. The tastes of the average imbecile are predictably dismal. That casts no reflection on that period’s best and brightest, who will likely be an improvement on the skills and creativity of previous generations until humans vanish from the planet.

Qulter MicroBlock 45 Guitar Amplifier

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Another brilliant product from the amazing mind of Patrick Quilter. Sticking with tubes just keep getting sillier, but the silliness just took an amazing turn to ridiculous.