For twenty-five years now, Mrs D and I have made it an annual quest to see all of the movies nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The goal is to complete the quest before Oscar Night to better enjoy the festivities. This year, I saw all ten BP noms, while Mrs D saw approximately 8.25; the discrepancy is explained below.

So, that’s our tradition, and for more than ten years now I’ve written about it, with surprisingly few angry complaints. As I always say, I’m no film student or trained critic, just a regular dude who loves movies and likes the sound of his own voice (or the click-clack of his keyboard at least).

Anyway, here come the reviews, listed in the order I saw the films…

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER - Leonardo DiCaprio is endearing as the bumbling ex-revolutionary. Tenaya Taylor is just plain hard to look away from. Visually, the film is beautiful with just the right amount of grit. But the story hits a comic-book level of implausibility, and Sean Penn’s character and portrayal is at times laughably over-the-top right down to the name, Stephen J. Lockjaw. I read that it’s supposed to be a “black comedy action-thriller,” and all I have to say to that is, make up your mind.

SINNERS - Thoroughly disappointing. First of all, I could hardly see most of the picture. It’s seemingly filmed in what is the trendy “natural lighting” technique popular these days. It may have been watchable in the theater, but on my smart 60-inch TV the lighting was so poor the characters’ emotions were essentially unintelligible most of the time. Even the white characters. To me that is just bad storytelling. And I’m not the only one who had this experience. It was easy to find various threads online where many other viewers expressed the same frustration. Secondly, it’s a vampire movie with lots of blood and gore. Plus it features some blues and some ‘bluesy’ show tunes. So, a vampire musical, definitely not my usual jam.

F1 - Old fashioned entertainment of the underdog/iconoclast against the system variety. Has the feel of a good old Paul Newman movie but with Brad Pitt filling in. Long on racing sequences but they’re so well done and so deeply woven into the emotional arc that it’s always engaging. This one will get a second watch down the line.

BUGONIA - Fortunately I already have a subscription to Peacock, so I didn’t have to pay extra to see this one. Billed as a “surreal dark comedy,” but only lived up to the surreal and dark part. The character Don was such an obvious and clumsy device, only in the movie so we could hear the lunacies of his cousin, and then cast off without clear story logic. The twist at the end was predictable and trope-y. I can only surmise that this movie got Oscar attention purely because of the stars involved, which wasn’t enough for me.

MARTY SUPREME - Fast moving and mostly entertaining. Timothy Chalamet is magnetic as hell, but his character Marty is infuriatingly selfish and self-involved and obsessed. He treats everyone around him terribly and without anything resembling remorse. My empathy for him ended when he left the injured dog behind. Also, among writers a popular maxim is that Story is transformation, and usually there are discernible steps or turns along the way; this is known as character arc, but Marty’s transformation is jarringly instantaneous. He’s a complete asshole until he gets what he wants, then he sees his newborn child, then BAM, he’s suddenly a loving partner and involved father and the movie’s over. I found that hard to buy into.

HAMNET- What a lovely, sad, intriguing, devastating film. Jessie Buckley is wonderful as Agnes, dare I say luminous. All the other players excel as well. Visually, it’s beautiful and enchanting in its evocation of Shakespeare’s time and place. And ultimately it’s a stirring tribute to the cathartic and restorative power of art, as well as a work of art itself.

THE SECRET AGENT is largely in Portuguese and German. A bit hard to follow even with subtitles unless you’re a fast reader. So, if you’re a bit dyslexic like Mrs D, you’re SOL. But it is an interesting film from a historical and political standpoint, a sort of ground-level glimpse into authoritarian repression in 1977 Brazil. Critics praise its visual style, which I agree was dynamic and artistic, somehow muted and grainy in a measured way that felt perfect for the geographical and historical setting. But the weird public sex scenes seemed implausible and gratuitous, not in any crucial way connected to the plot, atmospheric at best. I thought it ran a bit long, but I was mostly engaged throughout. Definitely worth a look.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE - Another foreign film that is essentially inaccessible for a dyslexic English-only speaker. This is a poignant, quietly dramatic, probing and realistic study of family dysfunction in the face of tragedy. And also a meditation on art imitating, and even intermingling with, real life. I did find it thought-provoking if somewhat depressing. It’s trying so hard to be profound and insightful that, to some extent, it forgets to entertain.

TRAIN DREAMS - I’m afraid not enough people will see this movie. It’s relatively quiet, patient and understated. There are no huge box-office idols in the cast. The two biggest names involved are usually revered as character actors, not leading men. The setting is the isolated Pacific Northwest in the early 20th Century, not traditionally considered an exciting place and time in history. It has more voice-over narration than any non-documentary film I can remember seeing. On the surface it would seem unmarketable given the current state of the film industry. And yet it’s absolutely amazing. A heart-rending examination of life through the drive and desire and wins and losses and simple pleasures and treasures and scars and consolations of one man’s journey in time. And the peace that must be made with the shortness and incompleteness of it all. The performances throughout are remarkable in their restraint rather than showmanship. The movie is based on a novella by the great writer Denis Johnson, and the great Will Patton brings us Johnson’s sparse but luminous words in the voice-over. The combined effect of the film is thought-provoking but, beyond that, it lingers deep in the heart. This gets my vote for Best Picture. Hope you all see it. (As a side note, the makers of Sinners should’ve watched this movie to see how to light nighttime, twilight and fireside scenes so the viewers aren’t cheated of the characters’ facial expressions.)

FRANKENSTEIN - The latest version of a classic, iconic story that taps into something so primal it won’t go away—there are literally hundreds of films tied to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. From feature films that are close adaptations, to pornographic shorts that are absurd parodies, and everything in between. This version takes some distinct liberties with the book I remember, but not to the point of disrespect for Ms Shelley’s work. And it’s a visually stunning film. The sets, the costume and makeup, and the special effects are all faithful enough to the original but imaginative enough to feel new and wondrous, and yet also recognizable as director Guillermo del Toro’s signature style. The acting struck me as over-the-top at times, but this is a gothic horror-si-fi movie, what do you expect? One thing I missed that I remember from the book is a broader and more explicit sense of warning about the inhumanity of runaway technological development. The book was written during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when that was a major concern of philosophers, writers and other creatives. That may be implied in del Toro’s movie, but he has centered the main thread around a more personal meditation on obsession and megalomania. Still, it works! You can’t take your eyes off this movie.

SNUBBED. Song Sung Blue wasn’t nominated for Best Pic, but it was one of the most entertaining films of the year. As much as I loved Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, I would rather see Kate Hudson win Best Actress for her performance in Song Sung Blue. I’ve never been a huge fan of Neil Diamond, not a hater either, but not a huge fan, but this is a great movie in the old-time-make-me-laugh-cry-think-sing-out-loud vein. Could have easily replaced a couple of the movies above, IMO.

DNFs: A couple flicks we just couldn’t finish, mostly because the main characters were so annoying. In both cases, the actors portraying these characters were nominated for their performances, don’t ask me why. I mean, maybe these movies got better but not soon enough for us! Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You—OMG, put down the wine bottle and get a grip lady! Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon—totally insufferable the way his character droned on and on and on until you just wanted someone else in the movie to shut him up for more than ten seconds.

SOMETHING ELSE TO THINK ABOUT: In the 18th Century, the Catholic Church condemned and forbade the theatrical arts, and refused to marry or bury actors.

The Oscars happen on Sunday, March 15. Now, butter the popcorn and turn down the lights. And Happy Damn Oscars!

Now that the Substack version of Billie is completed, I want to thank all of you for reading… or for putting up with the sixty-something emails at least! And I want to offer you a small reward. The Blues and Billie Armstrong, revised paperback edition, is now available only to my Substack subscribers at a $4.00 DISCOUNT (about 21% off), but only through Christmas Day. AND ONLY BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

BILLIE FOR CHRISTMAS

Serializing the novel here proved to be an invaluable part of the process of refining and polishing the book, and that really shows up in the printed edition, including in a few surprise tweaks here and there for those who read online.

Anyway, thanks again, for reading… or not. ;)

And Happy Merry to all.

— ROY

Once again, Mrs D and I have endeavored to see as many Best Picture nominees as possible, given availability and other constraints. We’ve been doing this now for over 20 years. When we started there were still only five nominees. Since 2009, it’s been ten, and this year we saw eight, and I’ll say again, the Academy never should’ve increased the limit. Not just because it’s hard for fans to see them all, but because some of these movies are simply not worthy of the honor. Especially this year!

Still, it’s Oscar time and it’s a tradition here! Pick your favorites, put on your tuxedoes and sparkly gowns (or in our case, your comfiest PJs), kick back with some soda and butter-soaked popcorn, wow or hiss the latest red carpet fashions, jeer or cheer the awkward, fawning interviews, predict the winners, pat yourself on the back when you’re right and blame woke Hollywood when you’re wrong!

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s what I thought…

Anora - A tale of stupid people doing terrible things stupidly. A whole lot of yelling and screwing failed to make this movie interesting. The nearly feral, selfish youth, the servile, bickering and bumbling Armenians, the contemptible ultra-rich Russians, the ‘dancer’ who accepts payment for sex but insists she’s not a hooker. The constant f-bombs. It all seemed over the top—grasping for gritty realism but approaching absurdity. So what.

The Brutalist - A worthy subject, an intriguing and complicated lead character masterfully brought to life by a supremely talented star, an epic arc of struggle and redemption, a span of decades and locations wonderfully rendered visually and in historical references. And yet, I fell asleep. Had to finish the movie the next day. It’s brutally long and slow. Three and a half hours! Couldn’t trim even a half hour out of that? Come on.

A Complete Unknown - Mrs D and I agreed this was easily and by far the best picture of the nominees we saw. I’m not sure it will stand the test of time as a ‘great’ movie, but it was full of great acting. Timothée Chalamet should win best actor for his amazing and mesmerizing recreation of Dylan’s musical performance and presence. Co-stars Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton should win their categories for the same reasons. The evocation of the time period through set design and other techniques was immersive and entertaining. Of the best-pic noms we’ve seen, this is the only one I’m sure I will watch again.

Conclave - I really liked this movie at first. It seemed like a taut, understated political intrigue, with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a hidden world—the election of a new pope. But I felt let down by the wild twist at the end. Not being a fan of the Catholic Church, I kind of enjoyed the irony of it, but I found the details strained credibility as presented. By chance I had just read an article about the many possible combinations of chromosomes that occur naturally in humans. So I didn’t doubt that, but it seemed so unlikely the person in question would have ever risen to a high position in the Catholic Church, or that any real circumstance could have resulted in the ending of this film. I just didn’t buy it.

Dune Part Two - I read the book so many years ago that I remembered nothing of it. We saw Part One last year and were a bit lost throughout. So, we watched a couple YouTube summary videos, but then we still watched Part One before pushing play on Part Two. We both thought the investment of time paid off. It helped us sink into the films, with their long list of characters and multiple story threads. I’d rank this as the second best of the nominees. Stunning visuals and the kind of classic, epic storytelling that reminds me of Tolkien or Star Wars.

Emilia Pérez - Lots of negative talk about the star of this one—whatever. I’d like to see it, but I don’t have Netflix right now and my wallet is already suffering from subscription fatigue.

I’m Still Here - The trailer for this one looks really interesting, but the film has not been released for streaming as of this date.

Nickel Boys - I’m not sure if the sheer volume of artsy techniques and effects (or affects?) were always in service of the storytelling in this film. It felt overwrought. All the weird shot angles, the square formatting, the ringing headache soundtrack, the time jumping and the gimmicky point of view thing, especially those back of head shots—I found it interesting but distracting, and wondered if anyone in Hollywood can just tell a story anymore.

The Substance - I’m honestly not sure if it’s a comedy gone wrong or a drama gone wrong, but boy did it suck! If it had a point it was made in the first ten minutes and then beat to death for two more hours, and in the most gruesome fashion imaginable. Jesus, how is this nominated for anything?! How did it even get made?! It’s a perfect example of why many people say Hollywood has lost the ability to make great movies.

Wicked - Loved the book! Never saw the play. The movie did not capture the wonder and delight I remember feeling at the ingenuity and thoughtfulness of the book. The set design and effects were impressive, the vocal talent at times astounding. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was watching a bad episode of Glee with all the cliché mean girl vs. Cinderella stuff. Also, a musical ought to leave you humming or singing a chorus or two on your way out the door. Think: If I Were a Rich Man, Papa Can You Hear Me, I Feel Pretty, Don’t Rain on My Parade, on and on. Wicked is more like sung dialogue but not one catchy, hummable tune. Meh.

Honorable Shoutout

A Real Pain - Should have been nominated. Thoughtful and thought provoking, just funny enough to lighten the weight of the relationships on view, among the characters themselves but also between the characters and the history they are interfacing with. And extremely well played by both Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, making these characters feel real and their oddball behavior believable.

Something to Think About

After the news of the great Gene Hackman’s death, Roy Sr, Mrs D and I all watched Unforgiven the other night, and enjoyed it immensely even though we’ve all seen it more than twice. Everything a Best Picture winner ought to be and then some. Not one of the 2024 movies even comes close.

This Month’s Song: Fire and Dreams

If I was making an album out of The Year of Twelve Songs, Fire and Dreams would be the title cut. It’s also my latest song, and only a few people have heard it at all before this posting. And they heard an earlier, definitely unfinished version. That was a couple years ago, and the song has evolved quite a bit since then. It’s weird how that happens, but it does.

Performance & Production

Over the course of the project, I’ve tried a number of different approaches, and I think this one feels the best for me. I recorded the main guitar part solo (no vocal) to keep my mechanics clean as possible. Once I got a decent take down, I did three takes of the vocals, three takes of the lead guitar and three takes on harmonica. Then I edited out the bad, kept the good, swapped in pieces, mix and match. Like, if I like the vocals on take 1 except for the third chorus, I’ll use the third chorus from take 2 or something. Etcetera. Seems like I get the best results from this workflow. Your mileage may vary.

Lyrics

FIRE AND DREAMS

I wrote these songs in smalltown barrooms

Cheap motels and brokedown cars

On paper napkins and envelopes

Dear John letters and sticky notes

With open chords and easy changes

On old guitars in standard tune

That’s all I know, and all I need

To tell these tales of fire and dreams

Fire and dreams, wind and wonder

Fire and dreams, smoke and fear

Hope and ashes, love like thunder

Fire and dreams, rain and tears

I specialize in sad and lonesome

Minor keys, major confessions

I know the words and the melody

To ease the pain of heartache past

So listen close, these are the hits

You’ve never heard but know so well

Raise a glass and raise your voice

Sing with me of fire and dreams

Sing your sins and ragged scars

Sing your peace and sing your screams

Sing the lies that tell your truth

Sing your heart through fire and dreams, fire and dreams

Fire and dreams, wind and wonder

Fire and dreams, smoke and fear

Hope and ashes, love like thunder

Fire and dreams, rain and tears

INSTRUMENTAL BRIDGE

Fire and dreams, wind and wonder

Fire and dreams, smoke and fear

Hope and ashes, love like thunder

Fire and dreams, rain and tears

Fire and dreams, rain and tears

… ……………… rain and tears

Gear & Software

Guitar: Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Harmonica: East Top Lucky 13, key of C

Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

Thanks for listening!

This is the last month of The Year of Twelve Songs. I posted the first song on January 31, 2024, so I’m happily amazed to say I finished the project within the time I gave myself. I learned an awful lot and had a lot of fun along the way. And now, on to the next thing, whatever that is! Thanks again and again and again to those of you who bothered to listen, like, comment or especially subscribe!

This Month’s Song: When We Get Old

This song is a true-to-life outline of the thirty years my wife and I have lived together as a couple. Like any long relationship, we’ve had many ups and downs, ins and outs, and WTF’s. I wrote it a couple years ago and did a video at the time. This is the same video, with a couple edits, but the musical performance is new.

Performance & Production

This is not how I planned this month’s song, but my wife and I are in the process of prepping to move 2500 miles across the country. So I went all basic, almost primitive. Just me and the guitar, live and one take, no overdubs but some enhancement in the mix and master process, and that’s it.

What I mean by ‘primitive’ is that most of my equipment is packed because of the impending move, so this was recorded straight to iPhone using a Shure MV51 USB/lightning microphone. And mixed and mastered using Apple AirPods.

Lyrics

Do you remember those early days

The old folks said we’d never last

One-room apartment, two broke down cars

And all the loving a man could ask

The years rush by, the lows and highs

The tears we cry and the songs we sung

But we’re still laughing and love’s still fun

When we get old, we’ll still be young

The middle years we worked so hard

The graveyard shifts, the overtime

Nose to the grindstone, no paid vacation

But I was yours and you were mine

The years rush by, the lows and highs

The tears we cry and the songs we sung

But we’re still laughing and love’s still fun

When we get old, we’ll still be young

We bought that big house, that Cadillac

Then times got hard, we lost it all

Now we been downsized, but we don’t mind

Same wedding pictures up on the wall

And time ain’t nothing but an unpaid loan

Love ain’t measured by the rooms it fills

You can’t be happy with a bitter heart

And age ain’t nothing but a tale to tell

Now we’re the old folks, the kids have grown

Paid off the mortgage, walked off the job

Come by on Sunday, drinks on the front porch

Steaks on the grill, corn on the cob

The years rush by, the lows and highs

The tears we cry and the songs we sung

But we’re still laughing and love’s still fun

When we get old, we’ll still be young

Gear & Software

Guitar: Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3

Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Apple AirPods 2

Shure MV51 Large Diaphragm Condenser Microphone

Thanks for listening!

This Month’s Song: The Great Wall

This is the first song I’ve written that is not quite in my voice. Or rather, it’s not in my voice alone. It’s the voice of anyone who’s ever loved an addict, but reached the point where they finally had enough. Mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, lover, who knows? But, whoever it is, they’re done—at least in this snapshot moment, they’re ready to say no.

Of course, addicts present and past might recognize themselves here as well. Having been on both sides of the equation at different points in my past, I know there’s no one in the world more disappointed in the addict than the addict themselves.

Performance & Production

Pressed for time this past month, I took the shortcut on this one. It’s recorded live in the living room straight to video, then the guitar/vocal audio file moved to GarageBand where the harmonica was added on in four takes that were then edited and combined into one track, then the whole thing mixed and mastered before being transferred back to iMovie and synced to the video. So… the end result is sort of a jagged stone lightly polished. And perhaps that’s appropriate for the subject matter.

Lyrics

The voice on the line says this phone call

Comes from an inmate at the county jail

And I say, I’ll accept the charge

You say you’re sorry for the trouble

And now you swear you’re getting clean

You say you’re coming home to me

But I have never felt more right

About the wrongs you’ve done

Your pretty words won’t change my mind

Your pretty words won’t change my mind

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

I’ve thrown away the key

You can’t get to me

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

Dirty needle stuck between your toes

The ashes in your Christmas morning eyes

Your daughter cries herself to sleep

Everything you thought you took from me

I have surrendered willingly

Now I’ll take back my dignity

Once you seemed to weigh a thousand pounds

I carried you, it broke my back

But I’m so much stronger now

I’m so much stronger now

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

I’ve thrown away the key

You can’t get to me

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

The voice on the line says this call is through

You say goodbye, bitter and blue

I say I wish you well, you know that’s true

But the change you need must come from you

I say the change must come from you

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

I’ve thrown away the key

You can’t get to me

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

I’ve thrown away the key

You can’t get to me

And this time I won’t come to you

I won’t come to you

Your words won’t change my mind

I won’t come to you

I’m stronger than that now

I won’t come to you

I built the Great Wall of China around my heart

Gear & Software

Guitar: Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Harmonica: Lee Oskar Harmonica by Tombo, key of Am

Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3

Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

Tonor Q9 USB Condenser Microphone

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

Thanks for listening!

This Month’s Song: Funny God

I had fun with this little ditty, something I mostly wrote I don’t know how many years ago, but only finished off recently. It’s just me musing on the inscrutability of the universe, the consternation it causes us humans, and the interesting consolations we seek. All with tongue slightly in cheek. 

Performance & Production

Pretty much a warts and all deal with this one. I didn’t do much extra. Recorded the guitar part with two mics and treated them differently to get a fuller sound, plus panned them right and left to get wider. Did the vocal and the harp tracks separate and both are single takes, except one verse of the vocal needed a punch-in. I wanted to keep it sort of rough and ready like it might sound at a living room party that’s just turned slightly rowdy. ;)

Lyrics

Well, God must be a pretty funny guy

God must have a different sense of humor

Life must be a joke that I might never understand

And God must be a pretty funny guy

Well, I never have been one to put much faith in God

But I understand that many people do

And someone’s got to take responsibility

For all the crazy shit that people do

And God must be a pretty funny guy

God must have a different sense of humor

Life must be a joke that I might never understand

And God must be a pretty funny guy

Well, if there really is someone who runs this show

Well, I wish he would explain what’s on his mind

Cuz sometimes this old life just seems to be so cruel

Well, I wonder if it’s even worth the time

And God must be a pretty funny guy

God must have a different sense of humor than you and I

Life must be a joke that I might never understand

And God must be a pretty funny guy (just sayin’)

And God must be a pretty funny guy (LOL)

And God must be a pretty funny guy (… yuk-yuk)

Gear & Software

Guitar: Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Harmonica: Hohner Special 20, key of F

Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3

Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

AKG P170 Small Condenser Microphones (2)

Thanks for listening!

This Month’s Song

This one is new. Only a few people have heard it before this. I played it live once for a small open-mic crowd in an echoey space full of people talking, so maybe no one really heard it that night. Other than that, only my wife Jacqueline has heard it—over and over while it evolved and while I practiced it.

That’s fitting because, although the song is newly written, it’s reaching back to a moment, an energy, that she and I shared a long time ago. Thirty years ago, in fact. Basically, it’s a just-barely-fictionalized account of how we rescued each other and caused a family scandal by falling in love and running away together.

And I’ll leave it at that.

Performance & Production

I wanted to keep this one bare-bones and warts-and-all to see how much of the emotion I could convey with just the guitar and vocal. I filmed it live in front of my living room bar, straight to iPhone, but with a usb microphone. The audio is un-enhanced with any effects or mixing.

Gear & Software

Guitar: Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Tonor Q9 USB Condenser Microphone

Apple iPhone X, iMovie

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

This Month’s Song

I wrote this song about my sister’s funeral. She died in 1991 of a rare lung disease at the age of 35. I was 33 at the time and had been living with her for a few years during her long and brutal sickness. I’ve written about it before, but in prose, not in song. Her death was a huge transitional moment for me, and during the few years right after that, I tidied up my lifestyle, got serious about making a living, and finally got married at the age of 36. 

The song is transitional, too. After Debi died, in the midst of its after-effects, I put music aside for a while. Oh, I got my harmonica into a jam session once in a while, but that was about it. I put my guitar in a case under the bed and didn’t even touch it for a couple years. And, when I did start playing again, I didn’t write any new songs for years. This song was the first one.

You could also say it’s my humble nod to the great tradition of blues songs about death and dying and people getting buried. Classics like: Death Blues by Lightnin’ Hopkins; Death Letter Blues by Son House; and Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson. 

As always, thanks for listening, and let me know what you think.

Performance & Production

It’s a straight 12-bar blues in G, one voice, two guitars, one harmonica, and a little digital percussion groove. Not too much to say about that. Just trying to keep it simple and on the raw side.

I guess the most interesting thing about the arrangement is that I played the basic guitar on the Taylor T5z, recorded straight to the computer like an electric. Then I layered another slightly different pattern on the Taylor American Dream acoustic guitar but I used a capo on the third fret and played with E chord shapes to add a higher frequency to the sound. I used two small condenser AKGs to x/y mic the guitar, then panned the two signals all the way right and left to widen the mix. That’s a fairly common guitar trick, but also fairly new to me.

See, I am learning something!

Gear & Software

(Tech shit)

Guitars: Taylor T5z, Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Harmonica: Seydel Session Steel in key of C

Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3

Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

AKG P170 Small Condenser Microphones (2)

This Month’s Song

I always wanted to build a song around a gambling or card playing theme. Like The Gambler by Kenny Rogers, or Deal by the Grateful Dead. I love those kind of songs.

I wrote House of Cards back in the 1980s, in various stages of addiction, sobriety, homelessness and relapse. I went through one of those cliche druggie sequences where I lost my job, my apartment, my girlfriend, etcetera. Then I left my home town to clean up, drove to San Diego to get my girl back, that didn’t work, got drunk, went to jail in Santa Barbara, lived in my car for a while, sold the car for drug money, lived in a dive motel, played music on the street, went broke, found a wallet, bought a bus ticket to see my sister in Lodi, worked graveyards at the newspaper there, then moved to Red Bluff, where I finally finished the lyrics to this song one night in a phone booth outside a liquor store after drunk-dialing the girl that left.

At least I got a song out of it!

It’s now the oldest song I’ve written which I still play. I made a video of it several years ago, very early on in my attempts at multi-track home recording. This is a slower version with more emphasis on the lyrics, and hopefully a better performance all around. And a better recording.

As always, thanks for listening. And I’d love to hear what you think out there!

Performance & Production

A pretty straight-forward thing this time. I was recently inspired by that classic Jeff Buckley version of Cohen’s Hallelujah, not lyrically or whatever, but sonically. In that cut, Buckley sings and plays electric guitar, and that’s it. There’s no other instrumentation. So I was going for that kind of sparse clarity in the beginning of my work on this song, but then couldn’t resist adding a few accents on lead guitar and harmonica. Still, no drums or bass or anything else. Just wanted the story to sit on top and out front.

I’m currently using a couple of plug-ins that are very helpful in the mixing process. I’m getting much better results on my vocals using CLA Vocals from Waves. I find you still have to use your ears and tweak knobs, but the presets in CLA Vocals are a great place to start. I’m also mixing entirely with headphones now, using a plug-in that simulates the Abbey Road Studio mixing room. This is a great alternative to mixing in a untreated spare bedroom studio with mid-level monitors. I still check the mix on the monitors in the final stages of the process, but using the headphones and Abbey Road plug-in has really improved my results. It might be considered cheating by some, but that’s okay with me!

I have spent countless hours on YouTube watching videos about all aspects of home recording. Like everything else on YouTube, some sources are better than others. You can waste a lot of time! Two of the best guys I’ve found are Colin Cross for GarageBand, and Joe Gilder for general recording and production.

Gear & Software

(Tech shit)

Guitar: Taylor T5z

Harmonica: Lee Oskar Db

Plug-ins: Waves CLA Vocals; Waves Abbey Road Studio 3

Educational Resources: Colin Cross, TheBandGuide.com; Joe Gilder, HomeStudioCorner.com

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

THE EASY PART: I’ve already written the songs.

THE HARD PART: Everything else. 

I’m a sixty-something, mostly self-taught, amateur wannabe with some songs I want to share—and eventually leave behind.

These songs tell the stories of my life, sometimes quite literally, sometimes less so. But I hope others can find something of their own story in there. I think that’s why we do art of any kind—to connect, right?

This Month’s Song

When I wrote this song, I was living in a 14-ft travel trailer parked in the driveway where my mother and her second husband were renting a two bedroom ranch house. This was 1985 or so, up in Red Bluff CA. I’d landed there because I’d run out of other places to land, I guess.

I told my mother and everyone who’d listen that I was trying to clean up my drug habit. But in truth I was just new in town and temporarily suffering from a lack of connections.

I call this the sad version because the arrangement is gounded in the despair underlying an addict’s promises. With the twist of the knife being the niggling sense of inevitability that, yes, this time I’m really gonna clean up… but you know, not tonight.

In the past, I’ve often done what you might call the party version. More uptempo and with a bit of a wink, in defiance, but also in acknowledgment of the flimsiness of the resolutions all of us make to conquer our stubborn habits, whether drugs, alcohol, tobacco, food or whatever. Sometimes you gotta laugh at human weakness, right? 

Anyway, I didn’t stop using hard drugs for several years after I wrote the song, 1994 to be exact. So the party version got played a lot in the intervening years. My drug buddies seemed to enjoy singing along to the chorus. Most of them are dead now, though.

Performance & Production

I did some more experimenting with this one. It’s still just me on vocals, guitars and harmonicas. Plus the digital drummer. I used two harmonicas, low A and standard A. The main guitar part was played on my Martin 0015e retro. The lead guitar on the Taylor American Dream.

I also used a midi keyboard to add the organ parts, something I’d never tried before. I’d always wanted to hear this song with a bit of organ to give it just a hint of gospel flavor. I’m not a keyboard player at all, but I understand the way the keys are laid out, so I just had to hit the right notes in the right rhythm. Kept it very simple.

And this was my first time adding (or trying to add) background vocals. I don’t have a full understanding of how to sing harmony at this point, so I just made it up by ear. 

It’s All Practice

All this experimentation is part of the journey I’ve chosen. It can be frustrating because, with the monthly deadline I’ve given myself, I’m pushing to finish these songs even though the perfectionist part of me knows I could have done this or that better if I did more takes.

But hey, it’s all practice. I once had a drawing teacher named Steve, who would walk around the class while the students hunkered over their latest assignment, full of tension and self doubt. And Steve would just walk by your table and say, “Remember, it’s all practice. Don’t worry, don’t fuss. It’s all practice.”

That was many years ago now, but it’s become a common saying, almost a mantra, around our house. It’s a comforting way to look at many annoyances in art (and life), so feel free to adopt it yourself. And thanks, Steve.

Gear & Software

(Tech shit)

Guitars: Martin 0015e retro, Taylor American Dream AD11e Grand Theater

Harmonicas: Seydel Session Steel A, Easttop Lucky 13 A

Keyboard: M-Audio Oxygen 25 Midi Keyboard

Digital drums: GarageBand Drummer

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

THE EASY PART: I’ve already written the songs.

THE HARD PART: Everything else. 

I’m a sixty-something, mostly self-taught, amateur wannabe with some songs I want to share—and eventually leave behind.

These songs tell the stories of my life, sometimes quite literally, sometimes less so. But I hope others can find something of their own story in there. I think that’s why we do art of any kind—to connect, right?

This Month’s Song

This inspiration for this song is hard for me to pin down. I don’t remember exactly when I wrote it, about two years ago I guess. I do remember the lyrics came quickly and all in a couple days, which is unusual for me. And not too much revision since, also unusual. It’s not based on a specific true incident or situation, like some of my tunes, either.

So, it’s weird. Maybe it’s about the way people want to make you feel less-than for not falling in line with whatever their bullshit orthodoxy is, whether it’s religious or political or economic or whatever. They want to label you and make you feel shame for shit that doesn’t matter. But I think what really matters is the shame you put on your own heart.

Performance & Production

(The Nerdy Stuff)

As usual, it’s just me on vocals, guitars and harmonica, plus digital drums. I keep saying this because at some point I might have a guest collaborator join me on a song or two for this project. We’ll see.

On the two guitar parts here, I was experimenting with a ‘rubber bridge’ sound that’s popular right now, especially in indy folk music. Rubber bridge guitars actually have bridges made of rubber instead of wood, which give the instrument a sort of muted, plucky sound with limited sustain. Anyway, it’s a cool sound, and it turns out some clever folks on the internet have come up with ways to mimic the sound without buying a specialized guitar or permanently modifying one you already own. What came out of my experiments is not exactly what I had in mind, but it has its own bounce and vibe that I just went with. 

Another experiment here is that the main vocal was recorded using my new Iconic Mars Comet, a foam rubber ball that isolates your microphone from room noise. Supposedly it helps get better vocals without having to acoustically treat your room, which is super expensive and pretty technical. As a test, I recorded another version without the Comet, and the Comet version was definitely cleaner and crisper. Then I used the non-Comet version to double and widen the vocal sound overall. So you’re hearing both, but the Comet version is predominant.

I’ve also added two key enhancements to my process. I’m now using two ‘plug-ins’. These are software add-ons or extensions that help your main software perform certain functions. I’m now using a plug-in called CLA Vocals to process the vocal tracks. And I’m using Abbey Road Studio 3 as a mixing environment—this is a very cool piece of genius that uses headphones and science to simulate the sound as if you were sitting in the mixing room of the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Of course, you’re still stuck with your own knowledge and your own ears, but it’s pretty cool.

That’s all the tech stuff I’ll bore you with this time. I know most readers don’t care about this stuff, but it’s my way of leaving a record of what I did, and hopefully of how I got better at this.

Gear & Software

(Tech shit)

Guitar: Taylor T5z 2016

Hohner Special 20 Harmonica, G

Digital drums: GarageBand Drummer

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

Beyerdynamic DT900 ProX Open-back Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS NOW, Mrs D and I have made it an annual quest to see all of the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars telecast.

It started in 2000, when there were only five nominees (instead of up to 10 like now) and we usually had to see them in a theater, because they weren’t available to rent on VHS yet. (Yes, I said VHS).

And we’ve done it every year since, except for 2019 which was interrupted by Mrs D’s infamous extended hospital stay. We have even ventured to other cities to see movies that weren’t playing at the one theater in our little town. I remember seeing Chocolat in Ukiah and more recently The Revenant in Rohnert Park. But now we can usually stream everything, and this year the whole project ran us around a hundred bucks in streaming rentals and purchases on top of our existing subscriptions to Amazon, etc.

Several years ago I started writing about our tradition on Facebook. Now the writeup itself has become part of the deal. As I’ve said before, I’m no film student, nor expert critic. Just a regular dude who loves movies.

Snap reviews and top picks below.

American Fiction – Bold, wryly funny, contrarian, with the ring of truth. Brilliantly calls out the publishing industry, where retread tropes seem to trump story, art and insight, particularly when it comes to depictions of Black characters and writers. And I feel like there’s an even larger truth here about the way culture is degraded in general through over-commercialization.

Anatomy of a Fall – A French film that moves carefully, piece by piece, and manages to be slow and taut at the same time. I found the characters to be inscrutable. I feel like I need to watch again just to see if maybe this time I would fully understand these people. It left me with a suspicion that perhaps all the story’s secrets have still not been revealed, that the resolution we see on the screen is still not the truth of these characters. And, in this case, that ambiguity is a good thing.

Barbie — Cleverly funny in spots, but also unsubtly preachy in spots, an issue I’ve had with director Greta Gerwig before. But Margot Robbie was perfect and the movie is visually stunning in all its pinkish glory and devoted detail. Still, I think this movie appears in the Best Picture category more on the strength of its perceived politics than its success as an artistic endeavor.

The Holdovers — A darkly funny, entertaining, and deeply reflective odd couple sort of story that’s enjoyable to watch. Maybe a little out of its league in the Best Picture category, but elevated to a higher status by Paul Giamatti’s performance, which is irresistibly engaging as always. Well worth a second watch.

Killers of the Flower Moon — Having read the book, I felt the impact of the true part of this story was diminished by the fictionalized part of the movie. Reading the book I was deeply struck by the callous indifference shown toward the humanity of the Osage Indians. It resonated like an echo of Shindler’s List, underlining the incredible and frightening capacity of humans to rationalize literally any behavior in their fear or greed. But the movie revolves around Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio) and depicts a somewhat tried and true arc of romantic tragedy, a weak-minded man caught up in the schemes of others, pulled along by greed and the need for approval, until he is in the process of killing the only real love he’s ever known. As is often the case, the truth was more complex. And more disturbing.

Maestro – I usually make a conscious effort to limit my preconceptions of these movies. I don’t read reviews or watch trailers. But it’s hard to avoid a relentless ad campaign like the one mounted for Maestro. I’d seen the rousing TV spots touting the performances and the early awards. But I found the movie depressing, its characterization of Bernstein disappointing and unlikeable. But yes, Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan were both outstanding. 

Oppenheimer – Not what I would call a pleasant watch, at times slow and ponderous, even confusing with some of the time jumps. But the acting was so engrossing, immersive, mesmerizing even. Cillian Murphy in the title role was riveting. Robert Downey Jr simply disappeared into the role of Lewis Strauss. Emily Blunt was also captivating as Kitty Oppenheimer. The effects director Christopher Nolan used to heighten the sense of Oppenheimer’s interiority were brilliant and effective. For example when Oppenheimer steps on a charred corpse that only exists in his tortured, guilty mind. But the lasting impact of this film is the way it echoes in the mind afterward—how sad and terrible and absurd it is that we reckless humans have attained the power to destroy the world. It will probably win Best Picture. And it probably should.

Past Lives – Eventually, someone had to do a movie like this — an old romance is rekindled through the internet and complications ensue. In this particular case the past romance is an adolescent crush, cut short by one family’s immigration, and later complicated not just by the years, but also by geographic and cultural distance. This one stayed with me, kept me thinking for days afterward about its larger implications regarding fate, destiny, acceptance, grief and closure. Well worth more than one watch.

Poor Things – Half of this movie was twice as much as I needed. We actually turned it off, extremely rare for us during Oscar season. What we saw played like a terrible excuse for some creepy, gratuitous soft porn. All the weirdness of the sets, costumes, cinematography and makeup felt like a desperate attempt at artistic status. If someone out there actually saw some redeeming value in this thing, feel free to explain in the comments section what I am missing.

The Zone of Interest – This one’s all in German, with subtitles. But the dialog is sparse and the film’s biggest strength is in the fascinating dichotomy presented in its basic premise. It gives us a window into the surprisingly mundane personal lives of a “normal” family literally in the shadow of Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The sense of cognitive dissonance is alarming.

Honorable Mention – I don’t usually do this, but I wanted to mention one film that was not even nominated for Best Picture but, in my opinion, should have been. Nyad has wonderful, engaging performances by Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, and it’s a suspenseful, satisfying, story of friendship, determination, human spirit, and triumph over the longest odds.

Finally, here are my choices for the top awards.

Don’t worry, the Academy almost always disagrees.

Actor in a Leading Role: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer

Actor in a Supporting Role: Robert Downey Jr, Oppenheimer

Actress in a Leading Role: Annette Bening, Nyad

Actress in a Supporting Role: Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer

Best Picture: Oppenheimer

Soon it’s time to pop the popcorn, get cozy on the couch, badmouth the fashion and root for your favorites.

Happy Oscars folks.

The Oscars airs Sunday, March 10 at 4pm, on ABC

THE EASY PART: I’ve already written the songs.

THE HARD PART: Everything else. 

I’m a sixty-something, mostly self-taught, amateur wannabe with some songs I want to share—and eventually leave behind.

These songs tell the stories of my life, sometimes quite literally, sometimes less so. But I hope others can find something of their own story in there. I think that’s why we do art of any kind—to connect, right?

The Second Song

This month’s song is sort of a sad homage to the classic one night stand. What kids today might call a hookup. Or maybe that term is already out of date, I don’t keep up. Anyway, I originally wrote this song back in the 1980s, probably sitting at a bar nursing a hangover. I’ve even done a video of it before. But I always thought it needed a bridge, and I finally got around to writing one last year, and I think it helps crystalize the intent of the lyric. So, here’s a new recording, including the new bridge. 

The structure is fairly simple and classic: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus. The story told in the verses even follows something like three-act structure. 

Musically, it’s an old-school, three-chord country song in the key of C. Just C-F-G with a few frills here and there. I’m arpeggiating the main guitar chords as a counter melody that overlaps and intertwines with the vocal melody.

Performance & Production

(if you’re into the details)

Once again, it’s just me on vocals and instrumentation.

My big learning goal for this production was to incorporate GarageBand’s digital drummer. It’s an unwieldy beast, I’ll say. And like a lot of this stuff, I am on the steep part of the learning curve. 

The bass guitar part was also digitally created, using a GarageBand preset and the Musical Typing feature. I did better with that this time, but I’d like to find a better solution going forward. I might be shopping for a bass guitar. We’ll see.

The main guitar part was recorded with a Taylor T5z hybrid guitar, plugged in directly to the Scarlett audio interface. It was digitally duplicated, and one track drenched in boozy tremolo, the other has a bit of distortion. The vocal was recorded separately with the PreSonus M7 microphone, using the MouKey reflection shield. The lead guitar was also recorded on the T5z direct to the Scarlett, with a “Cool Jazz Combo” effect laid on.

The slide show is a series of shots I found online—mostly from pexels.com—that seemed to evoke the right mood and correspond to the story somewhat. I put it together in iMovie with the audio file from GarageBand. This felt more appropriate for the song than a video of me.

Overall, this song turned into quite an experiment, and thus an adventure. There are aspects I’m quite satisfied with and some I would change with more time. But that’s the beauty of setting a deadline, right? I learned that in 40 years of the newspaper and magazine business. You do the best you can, fuss over it until the last minute if need be. But make the deadline. Anyway, I learned a lot from the process. And that’s the real point.

Gear & Software

(If you’re a fellow nerd)

Guitar: Taylor T5z 2016

Digital bass: GarageBand Sounds Library/Upright Jazz Bass, operated via Apple’s Musical Typing

Digital drums: GarageBand Drummer

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

THE EASY PART: I’ve already written the songs.

THE HARD PART: Everything else. 

I’m a sixty-something, mostly self-taught, amateur wannabe with some songs I want to share—and eventually leave behind.

These songs tell the stories of my life, sometimes quite literally, sometimes less so. But I hope others can find something of their own story in there. I think that’s why we do art of any kind—to connect, right?

I’ve played around with home recording now and then, and while the basic technology is approachable enough, mastery is a much bigger challenge. At one point I gave up and paid for some time at a local recording studio, but my lack of experience was costing too much money.

Now I’m back in the spare bedroom with my instruments and my desk and bookshelves, where I also work on my novel and other writing projects, and where I pay bills and spend too much time on Facebook and YouTube. And I’m making myself a promise—that’s the way I want to look at it—a promise to produce twelve song videos, one each month, and not only leave a record of the songs themselves but also get better at the music and the technology in the process.

As a musician, I’m starting off with limited talent, training and experience. I mean, I’ve been playing at it a long time, but I’m by no means a pro. With the recording technology, I’m still pretty much a newbie, with nothing but YouTube videos and my ears for guidance. So, I invite you to tag along on the journey, see/hear how it goes, comment, commiserate, encourage, advise, question, critique or simply listen. And, along with the music itself, I’ll try share some of whatever I learn. Here we go.

The First Video

Maybe it’s weird to start off with a song called Finish Strong, but that’s where we start, because this song embodies the spirit of this whole project.

I’ve written a number of sad songs about regret, but this is not one of them. This is more of an anthem, a pep talk if you will, for me and anyone else who needs reminding that, no matter the past, all the missed chances, the failures and wrong turns, the knockdowns and dragouts, we can still shake it off, get up from the floor and Finish Strong.

I wrote the song in 2022, at the tail end of a three-year losing streak that included a botched surgery that almost killed my wife, kept her in various hospitals for months, and forced her into retirement, and us into a downsized life, all followed closely by the pandemic, which eventually killed my own small business thanks to the extended shutdowns. But we came through all of that with a new appreciation for our love and partnership, and with the attitude that change offers opportunity. And I guess it also caused me to reflect on old regrets and second chances.

Lyrically, the song is three verses, each followed by a chorus, with the last chorus extended with repeats—a really traditional folky structure I think. The boxing and nightfall metaphors in the first and last verses respectively are sort of comfortably cliche I’d say. The middle verse is just a little more unique, and it somewhat obliquely references my prose writing pursuits. The chorus is full of common exhortations we all at times tell ourselves, and the familiarity of it all is what I’m going for, because the reason we say these things over and over is because we need to hear them. Over and over. So, I hope that all helps the song land in the hearts of a listener or two.

Musically, it’s a fairly simple three-chord song in the key of G, with only slight variations in the progression. I use some hammer-ons and pull-offs to add spice to the changes but it’s still centered on the I, IV, V chords, in this case G/C9/D. And I arpeggiate and sometimes play partial chords to provide accents at different places. That probably only interests any guitar players out there, but there ya go.

Performance, Gear and Tech

(if you’re into that sort of thing)

It’s just me on guitar, vocal, harmonicas and digital bass. 

Guitar: Taylor American Dream Grand Theater

Harmonicas: Brendan Power Lucky 13, key of C; Lee Oskar, key of Am

Digital bass: GarageBand Sounds Library/Upright Studio Bass, operated via Apple’s Musical Typing

Hardware: MacBook Air 2020, with AOC 27-inch auxiliary monitor.

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro Headphones

PreSonus E5 Studio Monitors

PreSonus M7 Cardioid Condenser Microphone

Tonor Q9 USB Condenser Microphone

Apple iPhone X

Production Notes

(if you’re all the way down the rabbit hole)

The guitar and vocal was recorded live on video, straight into iMovie on iPhone with the Tonor USB mic. This was something I hadn’t tried in previous experiments, an effort to capture a more organic feel, and (truthfully) to make up for my inexperience with playing to a click track or drum track in perfect time, which is something I want to improve on through the course of this project. That audio was then Air-dropped to the MacBook and moved into GarageBand.

The low and high harmonica parts were each recorded separately with the PreSonus mic, into GarageBand via the Scarlett interface. I’d wanted to try the two-harmonica effect on something for a while. My vision was to use the Lucky 13 to help hold down the low end of the rhythm, and the Lee Oskar minor harp to add accents and the main solo.

But the Lucky 13 didn’t feel low enough, so I added the bass track, which was created as a software instrument in GarageBand and input through Musical Typing—something I’d never tried before. I’m not a bass player and was really stretching on this. I knew that the bass traditionally hits the root note of the chords in time with the changes, and I’d seen the Musical Typing thing used in a YouTube, so I watched a couple vids on it and went for it—with modest and limited success I’d say. It was the second-to-last last track added and, if I wasn’t pushing my self-inflicted deadline, I probably would’ve redone it. But that’s the point of the project—to force me to finish the songs, right?

My mixing knowledge is rudimentary, although I’ve recently started a paid online course on mixing in GarageBand. But for this song I mixed all the tracks using GarageBand stock presets, then applied tweaks to the presets to satisfy my own ears. Example: since the vocal and guitar were bound on the same track, I duplicated the track and applied the Classic Vocal preset to one track and the Acoustic Guitar Natural Strum to the other, then panned them to 10 and 2 o’clock to widen the mix. I also duplicated the lower harmonica track and applied two different presets to get slight distortion and as much bass as I could.

And I used the ‘automation' feature to raise and lower volume on certain segments of tracks to add to the dynamics of the song—for instance upping the volume on the A-minor harmonica track just for extra punch during the solo, then lowering it for the rest of the song. Automation is another feature I’d seen in videos but never tried to tackle before.

The final touch was adding the boxing bell sound effect at the end of the song. I had this in my mind even before I started to record the song, but didn’t know if I could pull it off. I got the sound from a video, moved it to GarageBand, edited it to my ear, then fussed with the timing of it until I liked it. I just thought it would be cool. Ding-ding-ding, the fight is over!

Well, February is a short month, with my team playing in Super Bowl in the middle, so I better get to work on the next song, and soon.

Whoever’s out there, big big thanks for listening, reading, liking, sharing, commenting, subscribing or just lurking. And even bigger, huger, gigantic thanks to my paid subscribers for your support. You keep me going.

Remember, in the words of The Grateful Dead…

“Without love in the dream, it’ll never come true.”

This is my 8th annual December ramble about the books of my year. Not necessarily books that came out this year, but books I read (or heard) that moved me, taught me, made me cry or cracked me up. It kind of feels like I’m late with this year’s edition but hey—two-day shipping at your preferred online bookseller, right?

FICTION

Nowadays I often avoid reading the latest best-selling, prize-winning, must-read fiction that everyone’s talking about. Because over the years I’ve learned not to trust hype. I like to wait a few years to see if anyone’s still talking about the book. See if the title comes up in a discussion and someone says, God I loved that book, years after they read it, and they start talking about the character or scene that stuck with them. To me, that’s how you know. Not by critics’ reviews or book trailers or Reese Witherspoon. (However, if Ms Witherspoon is out there somewhere, this does not mean I wouldn’t want MY book on your list someday! Just sayin’). 

But this year I read two of the latest novels from two big names in fiction—because I had loved previous work by both authors, and because multiple writer-friends flat-out raved about these new books. And now I will rave about them myself.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver is the best novel I’ve read in years. The best overall reading experience that delivers in all facets. The sense of total immersion in a world, the intense rooting interest in a main character, the epic scope of historical context, the deep underlying interrogation of the real world, and the sheer delight in artful language. I can’t think of what more to ask from a novel. And, frankly I can say pretty much the same things about The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff, although Groff’s tale delivers in its own particular way. Read them both, and see what you think. 

NON-FICTION

The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History, by John Man. Okay, I admit there are maybe three people reading this who could be marginally interested in this book. One of them is my father, a fellow ink-stained wretch as we used to say in the biz. And the others have similar or adjacent backgrounds. But, even if you don’t have ink and perhaps newsprint in your blood, or an old pica pole in a desk drawer at home, this is a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the twists and turns of fate, greed and genius that resulted in one of humankind’s most impactful technologies, on a par with gunpowder, the electric light or the personal computer.

BONUS NON-FICTION

Beatles 66: The Revolutionary Year, by Steve Turner. An amazingly detailed, month-by-month tour through a year in which the world changed the Beatles and the Beatles changed the world. I went Audible on this one, and listened to most of it in the car on a longish drive to and from a writer’s retreat. It made for great company.

WORDCRAFT

Consider This: Moments in My Life After Which Everything was Different, by Chuck Palahniuk, author of the novel, Fight Club. This is a very different kind of craft book: personal, direct, funny, truth-telling, even illuminating at times. The subtitle hints at one of the biggest takeaways, because Palahniuk is referencing what he sees as the key piece of wisdom he has to pass on—in the end, write about the moment after which everything was different. If that gets your writer-brain running like a hamster, this book’s for you.

And in the GREAT BOOKS BY NICE FOLKS I KNOW category… Farsickness, by writer/teacher/editor Joshua Mohr, who is a huge favorite among scribblers here on the UpperLeft Coast. This slightly demented short novel—a collaboration with Josh’s ten-year-old daughter Ava—seems to live somewhere between the old Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and a Guillermo del Toro film, and this juxtaposition of innocence beside horror is only enhanced by Ava’s charmingly bloody illustrations. But underneath all of that is a heart-wrenching journey through the deepest kind of trauma and regret to somewhere resembling hope. Which is exactly what readers usually get from Josh’s work.

That’s all for this year, folks. Remember, like Stephen King said…

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

Every summer I try to watch the Little League World Series on ESPN. At least a few innings here and there or a game or two in the earlier rounds of the tournament, and then of course the championship game. It always refreshes my love of the game of baseball.

Little Leaguers epitomize the art of trying. No one plays with more heart. Certainly not the professionals who make millions of dollars playing for the corporations masquerading as teams in Major League Baseball. These kids throw and catch and swing and hit with such intensity, they run and jump, they dive and slide, they smile and laugh and cry and scream, and they radiate joy and a full immersion in the moment that seems to elude the professional players, indeed the modern adult in general.

They also remind me of how I fell for the game in the first place.

It started when my dad took me to Candlestick Park when I was little. Five years old, Giants and Cards, 1963. I saw Willie Mays and I was awestruck by his speed, his grace, his power and magnetism. Unforgettable. But it really took hold a few years later when I started playing the game myself. And watching the kids in the Little League World Series always takes me back to that.

Three Flies Up on the playground during recess. Saturday pick-up games with five guys on a side. Playing catch with Dad in the front yard. Wiffle ball at the neighbor’s house. Imaginary games played in my head while bouncing a beat-up dirt-brown hardball against the retaining wall until holes broke open in the cinderblock. Eight years old on my first team, looking at my coach like some mythical hero. Breaking in a new mitt with glove oil, an old ball and two shoelaces. Ten years old in my first full uni, real cleats, stirrup socks.

In the late 70s, I coached a Farm League team (there was still no such thing as Tee-ball, at least in my town) for a couple years with some buddies, a few guys I knew from school or work. Man, we were a motley crew. Bunch of hard-drinking working class heroes, some of us barely into our twenties, none of us great players or even great students of the game. But every one of us had played and loved the game as children, and every one of us loved passing that on to the kids we coached.

Our team never went to the Little League World Series, but our kids played with the same joy and the same all-out effort. To the limit of their skills (or perhaps their coaches’ skills), and with every bit of their hearts. And I’m willing to bet many of them came away with a deep and abiding love of the game.

In recent years, Major League Baseball officals have been in the workshed, frantically tinkering with the game, turning this screw, hammering that nail, wrenching on bolts. All in the name of attracting more fans, specifically younger fans. They’ve made a series of rule changes to speed up play and create more offense in the game. They’ve even hooked up with a huge gaming firm to juice up fan engagement. That’s right, MLB, for all intents and purposes, now has an official league bookie (but that’s another rant all by itself).

Individual teams have also made changes to their product, changes designed to appeal to a younger crowd. At their ballparks, they’ve added huge video screens and booming sound systems and countless promotional gimmicks.

I saw this first-hand when my wife and I took my father and a friend to a Giants game this year. I’ve been to my share of games over the years, both at Candlestick and Pac-Bell/AT&T/Oracle Park, although I hadn’t been in awhile. We live 2.5 hours from San Francisco, so it’s always something of a project to get to a game. And man, it’s gotten expensive. Even though I got the tickets fairly cheap, the travel and the food and drink kicked my wallet’s ass. (For example: just four dogs and four beers, $108.) Throw in another round and a little merch and my VISA card was crying uncle.

And the experience this time was… different.

I’ve always enjoyed the roomy rhythm of live baseball. You know—it’s a breezy shirt-sleeve salty beerfoam day. You start up a conversation with the stranger in the next seat. Maybe someone on the other side of you is patiently, diligently—and quietly—recording the details of the game on their scorecard. You laugh at the heckler several rows down. Hey Blue, he says, Try using both eyes. There’s a guy coming down the stairs yelling, Beer here, cold beer. You can actually hear the pop of a fastball hitting the catcher’s mitt and the umpire yelling, Stee-rike! The organ player plays the intro and the crowd yells, Charge! right on cue. At the crack of the bat, the whole place roars or groans in unison. 

If you’re an attentive fan, you’re watching to see how the players adjust to every pitch. Is the centerfielder playing deep or shallow, straightaway or cheating left or right? Are the infielders at double-play depth, or drawn in to prevent a score from third? Does the batter adjust his stance or grip with two strikes on him? Where is the catcher holding the target for the pitcher? How big of a lead is the runner taking off first?

And I’ve always found there was time for all of that and more during a day at the ballpark. Not just time but space, as in mindspace, or call it the capacity to process stimuli. Like I love it when you see someone taking a nap at a baseball game. I don’t think of them as being bored; I think of them as being relaxed. You never see someone nodding out at an NFL game, right? I’ve been there. Way too loud and crazed for a nap.

Anyway, that whole feeling of comfort was missing from this last trip to Oracle Park. Don’t get me wrong—the park is still beautiful and inviting, and the staff was wonderfully personable and accommodating to my 90-year-old father. But the overall experience felt cluttered, uncentered, diluted. Like a novel without a main plot.

There is a nearly constant roaring jumble of sounds that distracts from rather than enhances the game. Incredibly loud, pounding music in five-second snatches before and after almost every single pitch, piped-in beat-heavy pop music at a volume that completely precludes normal conversation with your friends, much less strangers. I honestly think there was more music than game. There is so much music the poor old organ player can hardly get a chord in edgewise.

The crack of the bat seemed diminished by comparison. The game itself seemed smaller.

I’m actually okay with most of the new rules. I was feeling puritanical about a couple of them at first, but oh well. On TV, I do appreciate the quicker pace. I mean, we all had enough of the guys who stepped out every pitch to get all OCD with their batting gloves. And I think, on the field this is still essentially the game of baseball. But in the stands, I don’t know. In the stands it feels more like a carnival or a disco surrounding a nearby baseball game.

All of this makes me wonder, does MLB even like baseball?

They’ve taken some of the pastoral nature out of the game. I’ve always heard, in a competitive business environment you need to differentiate your product, market what makes you special. But MLB and its team owners are making baseball more and more like every other sport. Loud, fast, powerful and showy on the surface, boom, crash, bang.

And maybe that’s not how you create real baseball fans. Not with louder music, or in-game betting come-ons, or even by tweaking the game for quicker play or more offense. Even though I hear attendance is up this year, I’m skeptical any of that will directly result in more hardcore baseball fans in the future.

Because maybe true baseball fans are made not in the stands, but on the field.

In playgrounds and sandlots, in front yards and neighborhood streets. With fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends and teammates and teachers and coaches and the heroes among them. With taped-up bats and mud-stained balls and hand-me-down mitts and the jackets our mothers made us wear thrown down for bases. Or in our first full uniform, our first pair of cleats. Those stirrup socks. Chatter from the dugout, a fresh-raked diamond, chalk on the baselines, a new-mown outfield.

Yep, I think that’s the easiest way to get it, that lifelong bone-deep baseball jones. Not in the stands or on TV, but playing the game. Like the kids in the Little League World Series and the kids I coached back in the 70s. And like me.

I still love watching the Giants, and I treasure all the memories I have, from The Stick to Oracle and Mays to Posey. I’ll still be on the couch with Krukow and Kuiper talking ball in the booth and the Orange and Black on the diamond. But now I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll ever go back to an MLB ballpark.

And that makes me a little sad.

I was no longer a late-middle-aged man reclined on my couch watching Reese Witherspoon’s hit movie. I was eight or nine years old, and it was 1966 or 67. My older sister Debi and I were staying with our grandparents somewhere in Sacramento. I don’t remember why or for how long, yet I’m sure I could draw an accurate floorplan of the tiny one-bedroom bungalow they had. Memory is such a rickety contraption.

My mother’s father was of Irish-Mexican-Yaqui descent. His surname was Irish, but he was raised by his mother Jesuscita Yberra. He was born in 1911, grew up as a migrant field worker, kicked around Arizona and Texas, did a stint in the Navy, a couple years in San Quentin for running a bar that was also a brothel, and spent most of his working life in fields and canneries up and down California. 

But, that summer in Sacramento, I didn’t know any of that. I knew his name was Art Kelly, but everyone in the family just called him Papa, his kids, his grandkids, his nieces and nephews, even his kids’ spouses. And I knew he worked as a foreman at the Hunt’s Cannery.

Late in the afternoons he came home in his mustard yellow Chevy pickup, and sometimes he brought Mexican sweet breads or real chicharrones for Debi and me.

It was hot, and the little bungalow didn’t have anything but a small electric fan that sat on a table. Not even a swamp cooler. Dorothy Gramma actually did that thing where you put a bowl of ice in front of the fan. As the ice melts the cool air rises above the bowl and is dispersed by the fan. Old-school poor man’s AC.

But the little house would still be hot and miserable, and Papa would say “Let’s take a shorty,” and we would load up in the truck, him and Dorothy Gramma in the front, Debi and me in the pickup bed. Yes, that’s really how it was done in those days—no seat belts, no air bags, not even a pillow or a blanket against the wood and metal of the truck bed, just two kids lifted up by two strong arms, plopped into the truck and told to sit down and hold on. 

We would stop at a corner store and pick up cold beer and sodas. Papa always drank Olympia, and Gramma always poured hers into the Tupperware cup she kept in the glove compartment. We would wind our way out into the wider valley on narrow roads with orchards and crops on both sides, a right turn here, a left there. He knew all the backroads, and we would always end up down by the Sacramento River, where Papa and Gramma sipped their beers and Debi and I skipped rocks on the water.

As evening came on, we would ride back home, and Papa would cook chorizo and eggs or maybe rice and refried beans with tortillas. I don’t remember a television in that house. They had a small plastic clock radio that sat on the green formica table in the little dining area. The dial was always tuned to 1140 KRAK Radio in Sacramento—Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones. Papa did all the cooking and he always cooked with the radio on. And he always drank while he cooked.

After dinner and several more beers, when the summer sky was finally darkening and the house was cool and still, Papa would pull out an old gut-string guitar. He would tune it up by ear and strum loudly and sing Cielito Lindo, the traditional Mexican party song.

Ay-yai-yai-yai, canta y no llores, porque cantando se alagran, cielito lindo, los corazones. (Sing and don’t be tearful, because singing gladdens, my pretty darling, the hearts.) At the time, Debi and I had no idea what the song meant but we loved to sing along with the ay-yai-yai-yai’s.

Then he would sing Red River Valley in a quiet, scratchy and nasal tenor with his hint of a Mexican accent. He stood in the middle of the cramped living room—Papa rarely sat down anyway and claimed standing allowed him to drink more—and somehow he held the guitar up without a strap, and he sang the song soft and sad and brimming with memory.

I remember the squarish gray sofa with the white doilies on its flat, broad armrests. And the two-and-a-half-foot-long stuffed baby alligator that sat on the coffee table along with the huge ceramic ashtray and a stack of Gramma’s True Detective magazines. I don’t mean stuffed like a fuzzy toy, I mean a real baby alligator preserved by a taxidermist. (Apparently these were a popular decorative item in Mexico back in the day, who knows why.)

And that’s where I went when the little boy in the movie sang to Reese Witherspoon. I was sitting on that couch in that living room, next to my sister, transfixed by my grandfather standing in the lamplight with that old beatup guitar, singing Red River Valley like he’d lived every word.

Somewhere in a shoebox I still have a photograph where I’m so small he carried me on one shoulder… Once, he walked and talked me through a field of wildflowers and bumblebees to show me how to be brave… In 1969, he sent me a cheesy “3-D” postcard of Neil Armstrong on the moon… When I was eleven, he let me shoot his .30.06 rifle and laughed when the kick knocked me on my ass… My parents threw a party when I graduated high school, and they gave me a portable TV, and some of their friends gave me Hallmark cards and money, and Papa gave me a twelve pack of Oly… Another time he invited me to help myself to a beer from his fridge, where I discovered the head of a goat he was prepping for soup. He laughed then too.

Years later, after Gramma died, his drinking got hardcore and full-time and he could be mean and bitter in the afternoons, hanging out in local dives, getting into fights with men half his age. And the last time I saw him he blasted me for being strung out on speed and bumming off my mom—and I was guilty of both in those days. But I said no matter what he thought, I still loved him. And those were the last words between us. He died of cancer in 1984 while I was living in a car in Santa Barbara trying to get clean. I didn’t know until weeks later.

A few days after seeing the Wild movie, I got online and learned the chords to Red River Valley. It’s a lovely folk song of unconfirmed origins, probably Canadian according to Wikipedia, but first commercially popularized in the American Southwest in the 1920s. It perfectly captures the wistful sorrow of saying goodbye to a departing lover. 

When I sing it, I’m in that living room again with Papa, and all those other memories are in orbit around me, in the rhythm and the chords and the plaintive melody and the sad story of parting. For me, no other single song is as inextricably connected to one particular person as Red River Valley is connected to my grandfather.

That’s what songs can do. You know what I mean.

After I wrapped up this piece I filled a glass and made this video. It’s lo-fi and half-whisky’d, and I suppose that’s as it should be. Here’s to you Papa.

Seems like now’s the time to give it a proper telling…

I won the acid in an all-night poker game in the student lounge of Farley House at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

This was late May 1976, and we were celebrating the end of the school year—final papers and final exams finally out of the way—and I believe it was Doug who ran out of cash as the night turned into morning, and so he pushed two hits of amber windowpane into an already sizable pile of coins and bills and IOUs.

Whoever was dealing had called baseball—seven card stud, threes and nines are wild, fours you get an extra card—and Doug probably had one of those tempting hands you can get in that game, four of a kind or a straight flush, something real pretty that had to be bet strong. But I took the pot with five jacks, three natural, and I scooped up the cash and took the acid up to my room on the third floor and stashed it in a desk drawer in a Glad sandwich bag.

About a week later I was riding shotgun in a 1959 Volkswagen bus pointed toward Idaho.

Full panel, split window with a DIY paint job that was supposed to be gold but ended up somewhere between gold and dirt. My good buddy Porter was on vacation from his daily grind in the pressroom at the Lake County Record-Bee, my hometown newsrag, and I was tagging along on his sentimental journey to visit family in Idaho and Washington. Along the way we planned to see four national parks and the great city of Seattle. 

In the bus we had each stashed a sleeping bag and a duffle stuffed with a couple changes of clothes and not much more. Porter had an old beatup Hondo guitar and half a bottle of pharmaceutical speed—black beauties. I brought a few harmonicas and a paperback copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the acid in the Glad bag. We filled a 120qt ice chest with Budweiser, we probably had some pot, and I suppose we brought some food, although I really don’t remember eating. I was just 18 years old, Porter was maybe 22, and our priorities were thusly distorted.

I was still baby-faced, couldn’t grow a beard, girlish dark brown hair down to my shoulders, thin and wiry, habitually dressed in overalls, no shirt. I was young, dumb and full of Kerouac. Intrepid. Invincible. Seeking. Ready at all times to put Hell Yes and Why Not into action.

Oh yeah—and there was the dog. Porter’s dog, named in memory of the dearly departed Grateful Dead keyboard and harmonica player Ron McKernan, AKA Pig Pen.

Pig Pen the man was a bit of a role model for Porter, being a not-so-attractive person who nevertheless had enough charm for the saucy Janis Joplin. Porter himself was not conventionally handsome and had been, you might say, unlucky in love. He stood around five-foot-four and carried a wrestler’s physique, but what you noticed—what you couldn’t forget—was his nearly albino complexion, combined with the long, straight, bright orange hair that hung all the way to the belt loops of his ink-stained Levis.

Pig Pen the dog was a sweet and sometimes skittish Australian Shepherd mix, sorta rusty blond with white patches, who really didn’t deserve to be named after a legendary, albeit lovable, slob. He liked to sleep in the back of the bus, close to the warm rattle of the VW engine. And he could run like the prairie wind.

I’m pretty sure we brought food for the dog.

We drove that bus for 15 hours, stopping only for gas and so the three of us could pee.

Well, truthfully, Porter drove and I studied the road atlas (now there’s an anachronism for ya), played harmonica, managed the eight-track tape deck, and read aloud from Fear and Loathing. Pig Pen slept in the back, running happily through his dreams.

Our first landing was a tourist bar just barely into Montana, in the little town of West Yellowstone, where it is said the men are men and the sheep are nervous, and where the dominant architectural theme is Mid-Twentieth-Century Pseudo Pioneer Cabin. 

In the great state of Montana at the time, the legal drinking age was 18 and Porter, considerate friend that he was, wanted to introduce me to the pleasures of a beverage or three in the friendly confines of a roadside drinking establishment—without the imminent threat of incarceration. 

We arrived around 10pm at the Elkhorn Bar or the Buffalo Saloon or the Itchy Bear Inn or something like that. We made fast friends with a guy named Dusty or Slim or Ranger or something like that, a bushy-bearded troubadour who looked like a younger version of Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon, and who happened to be the hired entertainment. I jammed harmonica with a few of his tunes and Porter handed him one of those black capsules, and the management had to shoo us out the door around 3am, still speed-talking and raggedly singing John Prine songs.

Porter, Pig Pen and I woke up late morning on the thinly carpeted floor of the one-room Pseudo Pioneer Cabin that Dusty Slim Ranger had been provided as a perk of his employment. We said our goodbyes, loaded into the dirt-colored bus and headed for Yellowstone—the park not the town.

Yellowstone the park is the original national park, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, about a hundred years before we showed up to sit on a bench and slurp hangover beers among the Mom and Pop tourists who were faithfully (and soberly) waiting, with their Kodak Instamatic cameras around their necks, for Old Faithful to do its geyserly best.

What I remember most about Yellowstone Park is the bubbling ground.

Nerdly hippies that we were, Porter and I took a docent-guided tour of the mud pots and boiling pools, a wonderfully hellish landscape where old Mother Earth is thin-skinned and cranky and threatening to spit in your face or burn off a leg if you forget your place in this world. 

The second park on our itinerary was Grand Teton, just ten minutes from Yellowstone and famous for its jagged snowcapped peaks and its lush valley floor featuring the Snake River. After the mud pots tour, we set up camp in that valley, near a lake named Jenny, and we built a fire and Porter pulled out the Hondo and I blew harmonica to a couple songs.

I don’t remember what we played. Porter once wrote a song about the time we and a couple galfriends ran naked through our local fairgrounds. Yep, running through public events without your clothes, AKA streaking, was a popular activity back then—another Google-worthy anachronism for the unforgivably-young among us. Anyway, it was a great song, appropriately titled Streaking the Lake County Fair, and I like to think we played it that night in the fire-lit shadows of the Grand Tetons.

We must’ve eaten the acid in the morning.

I say that because the part I actually remember is bathed in sparkling daylight. It’s weird. I remember all the stuff I’ve told you about what led up to this acid trip. But I remember nothing of the experience itself except for the one indelible moment that I’ve been telling people about for years. I don’t remember eating the acid. I don’t remember how the rest of the trip went, whether good or bad or how intense, or what if anything Porter had to say about his own trip. Out of several hours of tripping in the untamed magnificence of Grand Teton National Park, I remember roughly one minute. If that.

But I’ll remember that minute forever.

Porter and I were walking on a trail deep in the forest. A well-maintained trail about half as wide as a one-lane road. Pig Pen the dog scouted ahead as dogs will do, trotting off around the bend, then circling back to check on us, then trotting off again. The sky directly overhead was pale blue, muted by morning mist. The trail was shaded by a thicket of trees on the steep embankment to our right, maybe 40 feet high and covered with pine and fir and blue spruce and more, crowded close and standing tall, allowing only splashes of sunlight to fall on the trail and shimmer at our feet like fireflies when the breeze blew across the ridge above.

Suddenly the sun broke over the hill and light came streaming through the trees, spotlighting the trail like some UFO abduction fantasy. It poured down the hill like a waterfall of light, a lightfall, that made everything it touched—the dark trees, the dense undergrowth, the fallen decaying limbs and the green hairy lichen clinging to their sides—glow fluorescent and throb with the tremulous breath of the world.

I saw it as a path, I don’t know why, there was no path, the forest there was a forbidding tangle of clawing obstacles, but I saw it as a path and an invitation. A beckoning.

I heard the sunlight hum. And I took a step toward the hill.

I don’t know if Porter even noticed that I’d stopped walking the trail, but Pig Pen had shown up at my side and seemed to sense my impulse. He sprung away from the trail, brushed past me, then stopped and looked back quickly, tail a-waggin. It was clear to me that the dog, with the spark in his eyes and the hop in his shifting stance, was playfully challenging me to run up the hill, like one kid saying to another kid, Come on, I’ll race ya.

In the past I’ve always told people I really don’t know how I made it to the top of the hill before Pig Pen. I mean, there was no way I should’ve outrun that dog. He was a young and healthy full-grown dog. Athletic, surefooted, speedy, energetic and smart as hell. It defied logic and precedent, controverted natural law, suggested the superhuman, like when a mother gets on the news for lifting a car off her child. It just didn’t make sense.

But somehow I did, in fact, reach the ridge ahead of the dog, and I think Pig Pen understood that he’d been bested. It confused him—he gave me the universally recognized WTF head-tilt. But I believe he sensed what had happened, and I like to think he was somewhat impressed. Or at least as mystified as I.

So, what does it mean?

Was I really faster than an Australian Shepherd that day? Did LSD juice my strength and coordination far beyond my normal abilities? I don’t think that was it. LSD can act as a stimulant of the nervous system, so my muscle control was no doubt enhanced. But not to the point of outracing a dog up the side of a small mountain!

I don’t think the main factor in my elevated performance was muscle power or control. I think, in that moment, I was just more capable of picking the right path up the hill and through the trees. There was an extraordinary sharpening of my focus and ability to see the next move—the right rock or log to step on, the right limb to duck under or bush to jump over. The shale underfoot was unstable, the foliage wild and overgrown, and Pig Pen hesitated more than once. I never did. I saw every step before it happened.

I’d felt something close to this once before, rock-hopping across the Merced River in Yosemite Valley. I wasn’t tripping then and the river was flat and I was not competing with a dog. But I experienced a heightened capacity for pattern recognition, a state of mind that allowed me to instinctively make decisions that were beyond my intellectual abilities. I’m guessing this is something akin to what elite athletes refer to as “the zone.” Still, what happened at Grand Teton that day with Porter and Pig Pen was another level up from my experience at the river. This was something a notch past what I had thought was humanly possible, at least for me.

And I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I believe I got something—a certain knowing in the belly—from LSD that I don’t think I could’ve have gained any other way.

To me, the discovery that I possessed unidentified capacities beyond my understanding was profound. Not just to be told and accept that proposition in an abstract, intellectual way, but to experience and assimilate it deep down as empirical evidence of my own mysterious untapped potential, and by implication all of humanity’s untapped potential. 

In a strange way, it gave this lifelong nonbeliever a kind of faith.

Not in gods, demons or prophets, but in the ceaseless yearning of human beings to survive, to triumph, and to better ourselves. And the possibility that we can.

Later in life I was not so unacquainted with doubt and regret and shame and sorrow, and the many tricks that life can play on a person with a heart, and plans. I’ve been frustrated, beat up, beat down, confused, avalanched by change, stress, misfortune, sometimes through my own failures. And I have used this fundamental sense of possibility, this faith in human capacities, to remind me there are paths through even the thickest brambles of life, and over the steepest hills. This self-belief has been a treasured resource for which I am grateful.

Now there’s a lot of talk about using LSD and other hallucinogens to treat PTSD and other mental health issues. I support any legitimate scientific research in that area. But I wouldn’t recommend LSD for recreational use nowadays. I have the suspicion that acquiring drugs on the street is far more dangerous and risky than it was in the good ole Grateful Dead parking lots or dormitory poker games of the 1970s. And, frankly, it wasn’t all that safe then. 

So-called “bad trips” are a real thing. I’ve had a couple. Plus, I think it’s just generally risky to take large quantities of these drugs, particularly acid. I have known people who, as the saying goes, fried their brains on the shit. So, it’s not my job to tell anyone what not to do, but I will say… be careful out there, fellow seekers. There are reasons these substances have been treated as transformative sacrament by many cultures and religions. There are reasons people speak of their “consciousness-expanding” effects. But there are also reasons to tread lightly. 

I’ll leave you with someone else’s words…

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.” —Hunter S. Thompson

More stuff at: roydufrain.substack.com

Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sport. That is the accepted and acknowledged barroom and living room wisdom.

Regular Joe down at the end of the bar says, “Look man, you got a round ball that’s three inches wide, it’s closing on you almost a hundred miles an hour and you’re supposed to hit it with a stick that’s even smaller around than the ball. That’s why you’re a freakin allstar if you can pull it off just three out of every ten times.”

It’s never exactly clear what things are being compared, but nonetheless it’s an article of faith that hitting a baseball is the most difficult among said unsaid things.

But is it?

Cut to my living room just a few Sundays ago, when my father, Roy Sr, sometimes referred to as Old Roy, or more delicately as Roy 1.0, joined me to watch the Giants game and bask in each other’s considerable baseball expertise. Fortunately, on this particular Sunday, Mrs D was visiting relatives somewhere across the continent, thus the living room was temporarily an eye-roll-free zone vis-a-vis the running of our expert mouths.

Friendly beverages were involved, the Giants were losing in the late innings, and soon talk turned to our superior understanding of the game of baseball compared to the hopeless, flailing, trend-following, stat-blind, blockheaded ignorance of, you know, pretty much everyone ever professionally employed at the highest levels of the sport. Such is the cross borne by every long-suffering couchbound sports fan. 

So, after yet another Giant struck out to end an inning with the bases loaded, one of us sighed in resignation and threw the old bromide out there, “Well, like they say, it’s the hardest thing to do in sport.”

And of course we went through the whole litany: three inches wide, rounded bat, hundred miles an hour, seven out of ten failure rate.

Incidentally, it’s not just barroom—or living room—wisdom. Even the venerated Popular Science has published an article claiming, “A unique blend of physics and neuroscience makes the skill astronomically difficult.” (www.popsci.com/story/science/why-is-hitting-a-baseball-so-hard/?)

But what are we really talking about here? What, in fact, are the aforementioned ‘things’ we might fairly compare to hitting a baseball? Let’s define them. Let’s say, for instance, completing a pass in the NFL. Or let’s say, making a basket in the NBA. Or hitting the fairway in professional golf. These are all discrete, repeatable accomplishments required on a regular basis for a top-level player to be deemed successful in their respective sport.

And I suddenly got a clear look at the fly in the logic—or the flaw in the ointment, whatever. I realized this dog couldn’t hunt. Or, more importantly, count. You see, when you throw a pass in the NFL, that’s one throw, one single attempt, with one positive or negative result: complete or incomplete. When you take a shot in the NBA, it’s one shot, make or miss. In golf, you hit one shot from the tee, your ball either lands in the fairway (or on the green) or it doesn’t. These are all straightforward one-for-one records of accountability.

And it’s true, by all the accepted measurements these skills are less difficult on average than hitting a baseball. Top passers have completion rates above 60%. Top shooters make baskets around 50% of the time. Top golfers hit the fairway on up to 70% of their drives.

However, in baseball, when we say someone’s an allstar for hitting the ball 30% of the time, we’re not talking about a one-for-one relationship.

We’re talking about hits per ‘at-bat.’ And in any single at-bat a player could see multiple pitches and make an unknown number of swings. Plus, the 30% only counts the number of times a batter hits ‘safely.’ When the batter hits the ball but makes an out, it’s not counted. Even though the batter has, in fact, achieved the illustrious feat of hitting the baseball, that achievement is ignored in the calculation of their standard batting average.

That doesn’t seem fair.

When a quarterback completes a third-down pass but it’s short of the first down, he’s still credited with a completion. If the forward dunks the ball at the buzzer but the team loses by one, the basket still counts. When a golfer hits the fairway but bogies the hole, the record book will still say he hit the fairway. 

So I says to Old Roy, “What if you counted every single time the batter puts the ball in play? After all, isn’t that the physical act of hitting the baseball, which is what we’re supposedly measuring?”

He goes, “Yeah, that only makes sense. Even if you’re out, you’ve already done the job, you’ve hit the baseball. Why shouldn’t that count?” And he takes a drink.

I’m wondering, jeez, did we just out-think the entire history of barroom pundits? Because, if you count every time the batter actually puts the ball in play, there is no way that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in all of sport. No way. Right?

Now I’m thinking, yes, these two Sunday blabbermouths in their recliners just completely overturned conventional wisdom. Over cocktails during the seventh inning stretch we had apparently debunked one of the greatest and oldest truisms in baseball lore. If only the skeptical Mrs D were here to appreciate our brilliant insight! I mean, I better write a nice wordy essay to impress my friends and anyone else who will listen.

First, I go to baseball-reference.com and look up the 2022 National League Batting Champion, Jeff McNeil of the New York Mets. In 589 plate appearances, McNeil had 538 official at-bats (subtracting walks, hit by pitch, sacrifices, reaching base on a fielding error). In those 533 at-bats, his 174 hits yield a .326 average or a 33% success rate. But to calculate a more accurate success rate, let’s include all the times he put the ball in play but made an out. To get that figure, simply subtract his total strikeouts from total at-bats, and you’d pretty much have it.

In McNeil’s case that’s 533 at-bats minus 61 strikeouts = 472 balls in play. That is approximately an 89% success rate. In 89% of his at-bats, McNeil hit the baseball, supposedly the hardest thing to do in all of sport. WTF!?

But then it suddenly dawned on me, Oh shit! Each swing is an attempt. Not each at-bat. Each swing. To truly measure the difficulty of hitting a baseball against those other sports skills, you need to calculate swings vs balls in play. In this discussion, nothing else really matters.

I won’t begin to list all the crazy anal-retentive baseball stats you can find online nowadays. If you looked long enough you could probably learn how often your favorite shortstop scratches his balls during the ninth inning of Tuesday night games in Oracle Park. And yet, I scoured more than a dozen sites before I found something close to what I was looking for, and not surprisingly I found it at billjamesonline.com

Here’s a simple breakdown of swings vs balls in play for McNeil’s 2022 season. 1110 swings, 477 balls in play. What about other high caliber players? That guy Aaron Judge had a pretty good year in 2022, didn’t he? 1240 swings, 400 balls in play (of which quite a few of them went over the fence). Luis Arraez led the American League in batting: 1034 swings, 507 balls in play. World Series Champion and perennial allstar Jose Altuve, 1022 swings, 441 balls in play. Among my beloved Giants, Brandon Crawford, 872 swings, 313 balls in play. And among the hated (although in case highly respected) Dodgers, Mookie Betts, 1072 swings, 472 balls in play.

And—drum roll—the corresponding success rates: McNeil 42.97%; Judge 32.25%; Arraez 49.03%; Altuve 43.15%; Crawford 35.89%; Betts 44.02%.

The Inescapable Conclusions:

• The best hitters succeed at hitting the baseball on only 30-50% of their attempts.

• The barroom pundits were right after all, although for the wrong reasons.

• It’s very hard to hit a baseball. You might call it the hardest thing to do in sports.

• Old Roy and Marginally Younger Roy are nearly as full of it as Mrs D’s eye rolls would suggest. We will now return to our recliners and cocktails, thank you.

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