3 Chords & the Truth

3 Chords and the Truth: It's about the journey

Revolution 21 — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:25:19 GMT

I usually like to surprise people with what I play on 3 Chords & the Truth. SOMETIMES, THOUGH, I just like to throw up the week's playlist to demonstrate that the Big Show ain't exactly what folks are used to nowadays -- at least not when it comes to radio . . . or even to most webcasts or podcasts. 3 Chords & the Truth is not about a format, and it's not about a subculture or a niche. What it's about is the music. Good music. And good music can come from a lot of places, just as righteous mixes can cover a hell of a lot of musical ground in one set. When it comes to this show -- like they say, whomever "they" might be -- we're all about the wonder of the journey. The actual destination is lagniappe. So, that being said, here's this week's playlist: Must Get Out Maroon 5 (Songs About Jane) 2003 Your Heart Is Breaking Down Choo Choo (Choo Choo) 2008 Should I Cry (alternate take) Jackie De Shannon (The Definitive Collection) 1964 Six Days on The Road Dave Dudley (Country USA - 1963) 1963 Straight Eight Spencer Bohren (Born in a Biscayne) 1984 Boris the Spider The Who (My Generation -- The Very Best of the Who) 1966 Real Love Cretones (Thin Red Line) 1980 Lost in the Supermarket The Clash (London Calling) 1979 You're Lost Little Girl The Doors (Strange Days) 1967 Innocence Lost Steve Taylor (I Predict 1990) 1987 Lost My Mind Matthew Sweet (100% Fun) 1995 Departure / Ride My See-Saw The Moody Blues (In Search of the Lost Chord) 1968 Handshake Drugs Wilco (A Ghost Is Born) 2004 Brightly Wound Eisley (Room Noises) 2005 Sole Salvation English Beat (Special Beat Service) 1982 I Do J. Geils Band (Monkey Island) 1977 Easy Does It Count Basie & His Orchestra (The Essential Count Basie, Vol. 2) 1940 Do You Love Me The Contours (The Classic Rhythm & Blues Collection: 1958-1963) 1962 Baby Workout Jackie Wilson (The Classic Rhythm & Blues Collection: 1958-1963) 1963 I Saw Her Standing There Beatles (Meet The Beatles!) 1964 You've Got To Hide Your Love Away The Silkie (British Invasion Gold) 1965 Everything Gonna Be Everything Don Covay (See-Saw) 1966 She May Call You Up Tonight The Left Banke (There's Gonna Be A Storm - The Complete Recordings 1966-1969) 1967 Frankenstein New York Dolls (New York Dolls) 1973 IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords and the Truth: Diversity and all that jazz

Revolution 21 — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:47:48 GMT

When I was in college, LSU's campus radio station, then called WPRG, had what I considered a great format -- pretty much the full spectrum of album rock and college-y alternative fare, plus a minimum of one jazz cut an hour. SOME DJs BALKED at the jazz thing, but I thought it was brilliant, and it made WPRG sound a sophisticated cut above your average college-radio fare. And isn't it funny that -- almost three decades later, during this age of "diversity" -- most areas of our lives aren't very "diverse" at all? What we have is an age of Balkanization, not "diversity." Focus groups of the pathologically self-segregated. Minds closing shut all across the land. ME, I'VE ALWAYS been a freak. I even grew to like a lot of my parent's music, back during a time when there was a wide gulf between "our" music and "theirs." I like rock. I like alt. I like country. And I like jazz. So, today's show is a little like that old WPRG college-radio format. Only more so. If you like real diversity, you'll find it here. It's 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords and the Truth: Favog's Zen garden

Revolution 21 — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 05:52:30 GMT

I didn't expect organic gardening to be this Zen thing for me. ALL I WANTED TO DO was to grow some vegetables in the name of greater self-sufficiency (Take that prepackaged consumerist culture!) and saving a few bucks -- or more -- at the grocery store. And I wanted to accomplish that without putting 47 pounds of MiracleGro and 87 cubic yards of Sevin dust on everything. I also determined to resuse what dishwater I reasonably could to hydrate said garden. After all, that would certainly make getting rid of coffee grounds and grease easier -- dump it all in the pot the dishwater goes into, then dump it all in the garden. Putting organic material back into the earth . . . good. I've even got a little countertop compost box that really, really needs to be transferred into a legit outdoors compost pile. I'll get to it. Anyway, Mrs. Favog calls my horticultural methodology "Nazi death-camp gardening." She'd rather I just unreel a hose pipe to where the tomatoes and pepper plants are, turn on the water, turn on 3 Chords & the Truth and have a cold beer. Let me amend that. She could care less whether I have a cold beer. The missus just doesn't particularly care for carrying a stock pot (or three) full of water across the back yard to the garden, then unloading the H2O into the rows. Heinrich Himmler am I. Or is it Heimlich? I have trouble keeping my genocidal Germans straight. WHATEVER. I GUESS I CAN'T blame her for not having a Catholic Buddhist vibe going when it comes to tomatoes and peppers. Beans, too. If I get them planted in the next week, I think I can get in a crop of pole beans before first frost. For me, carrying pots of recycled water out to the garden -- and hoeing out the weeds and touching up the rows every couple of weeks -- is the Southern Boy Catholic version of raking a big rock bed or tapping sand out of a straw to make a beautiful mandala. The advantage of my Catholic Zen thang over the eastern Zen thang hinges on one thing: You can't eat sand. Or rocks. Tomatoes and peppers are tasty, however. And good for you. What does this have to do with this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth? I frankly have no idea. Maybe it has something to do with crafting sets of songs into something with some meaning -- whatever the meaning happens to be with any grouping of music. Maybe it has something to do with music soothing the savage breast. Maybe it has something to do with being gaga for Joan Jett since I was 16. Yeah, that's the ticket. Listen to 3 Chords & the Truth, the worldwide music service of Revolution 21 -- it's Zen radio. On the Internets. Just go here -- or to the player at the top of this page -- and achieve a higher consciousness. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords and the Truth: The defining lie?

Revolution 21 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:27:52 GMT

What if everything you were supposed to believe about yourself -- and where you are from -- was a lie? That's the gist of our centerpiece musical exploration on this week's 3 Chords & the Truth. What if the glorious "heritage" you were taught to take pride in was, instead, a more compelling case for intense shame? WHAT DO YOU MAKE of that? If you -- if your region and culture -- have been held captive by a defining historical lie, how do you make peace with the present and move on to the future? If you have any good answers, contact me at mail@revolution21.org. Intrigued? You should be. It's a hell of a question, and we meditate upon it through some great -- and diverse -- music this week. Of course, in addition to the seriousness, we have a lot of fun, too. That's because the Big Show is the place where you never know what's going to be thrown at you next. Every song an adventure, I say. And you'll be saying that, too. It's 3 Chords & the Truth, and you can listen right now, right here. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords and the Truth: We goin' old school

Revolution 21 — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:05:45 GMT

This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth came into conceptual being with a blog post by someone who was a few years behind me at Baton Rouge Magnet High. TRANSLATION: Back in the day. Anyway, this young lady -- and any woman younger than me is a "young lady," because I ain't old . . . I don't think -- had been searching for a copy of the U.S. Times' "Wanna Go to London" LP for, oh . . . 26 years. And I just happen to have a mint copy, bought at my second home when I was a student at Louisiana State University. That would be Leisure Landing, the fabulous independent record store that lay just off campus. Naturally, Leisure Landing is no more . . . like most of the great record stores. Anyway, I was able to hook Diane up with a pristine digital copy of my pristine vinyl record. Free of charge. The record Nazis might be able to get me on a lot of stuff, but they ain't gonna get me for out-and-out piracy. You know what I'm sayin'? Thing is, Cap, that got me to thinkin' about old days, and music, and how fortunate many of us were to be drunk . . . er . . . hard-studying, model college students when the punk and New Wave scene was happenin' in a town not usually associated with artistic ferment. There was some good music going on in Red Stick back in the day, let me tell 'ya. DOES THIS POST have a point? How about, "Let's take a trip to Back in the Day and listen to some old school garage, punk and New Wave"? Or, how about "If you're from where I'm from, when I was from it, listen to the Big Show and be transported to a time when we bitched about how the suits ruined 'FMF and we clung to the low-wattage signals of WBRH and WPRG for dear life . . . for that is from whence The Music came"? Alternatively, perhaps the point of this post -- aside from a middle-age man's nostalgic leanings -- is meant to be instructive to a younger generation. A reminder that all new things rarely are as new as we'd like to think. "Indie" came from somewhere . . . and this is as good a place as any to start looking. WHATEVER THE POINT -- assuming there is one here -- just check out the latest 3 Chords & the Truth and listen to some righteous music. Do they say "righteous" anymore? It's 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords and the Truth: Down a country road

Revolution 21 — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:12:44 GMT

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, we're going to be thumbing our way down that folk highway, and then take a side trip down a country road. Either way you go, you'll find some of the greatest music America -- and the world -- ever has produced. FOR ME, country music wasn't an instant-gratification kind of thing. Growing up in the Deep South in the 1960s and '70s, it was, to a large extent, the background music of my young life, but it wasn't my background music of choice. That would have been The Who, the Beatles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Billy Preston, the Meters, Irma Thomas and Al Green. And even the Carpenters . . . and (ahem) the Partridge Family. Country music was the background music of my life in the sense that I couldn't avoid it. It was the music the Old Man listened to on the radio -- and you moved the AM dial away from WYNK, WSLG or WLBI at substantial risk to life and limb. Same deal with the Porter Wagoner Show on television every Saturday afternoon. I yearned for "that g**damn hippie music," as the Old Man referred to my generation's soundtrack. But I also ended up knowing the likes of Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones and "pretty Miss Norma Jean." One of my favorites -- albeit something of an ambivalent favorite -- was "Country" Charley Pride. And if you don't know that it's C-H-A-R-L-E-Y instead of C-H-A-R-L-I-E, you're a damn pretender, son. BACK THEN, however, there were two sides to life: yours . . . and your parents'. The existential question of one's young existence -- Which side are you on? -- required exactly no thought. Whatsoever. It's a funny thing. Though the question was simple, all kinds of stuff got mixed up in it that really had no business there. The Beatles vs. Porter Wagoner is not a fundamental question of good and evil. "It's a big world out there," we young'uns constantly told ourselves. Our actions and our prejudices, however, betrayed our lack of believe in our own party line. In fact, while "Which side are you on?" was -- and is -- the central question in any of our lives, we stupidly applied it to all the wrong areas. And not at all to the Right Area. Then again, neither did our parents, by and large. It is possible, and even quite healthy, to like both the Sex Pistols and Ernest Tubb. It's likewise possible to associate with, and even like, both Democrats and Republicans. Squares and hippies both have their virtues . . . and their vices. The world is big. It's our hearts and minds that tend to be small. Too small, as a matter of fact, to apprehend exactly how cosmically huge a question is "Which side are you on?" THAT, IN A NUTSHELL, is what the Big Show happens to be about this week. 3 Chords & the Truth: It's the show where we ask the big questions and where, this week, we're playing ALL FOUR kinds of music. Rock . . . and roll. Not to mention country . . . and western. Be there. Aloha.

Four Songs: Yesterday Once More

Revolution 21 — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:40:41 GMT

This week on Four Songs: five songs. It was necessary, one of the songs is by John Denver, and a "make good" was in order. IN MY DEFENSE, I didn't pick the music. That was done according to what was hot with the record-buying public . . . in April 1975. Unfortunately, John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" was big back then. Unsurprisingly, I would have picked differently. But they don't let 14-year-old kids program Top-40 radio stations, and that's how old I was when this episode of Four Songs was done. Live. Through the facilities of the Big 91, WLCS radio in Baton Rouge, La. In all its amplitude-modulated glory. And glorious it was. So glorious that I was sitting at the kitchen table, early the morning of April 17, 1975, with my portable reel-to-reel tape recorder patched into the earphone jack of my clock radio to preserve a piece of WLCS forever. It was a Thursday. Gary King was the morning man. WLCS was one of Baton Rouge's two Top-40 blowtorches. Radio 13 -- WIBR -- was the other. 'IBR had some great jocks, and a friend of mine even was a part-timer there when I was in high school . . . but I was an 'LCS man. No offense to WIBR. Of course, by 1976, I was firmly in the camp of Loose Radio (WFMF during its album-oriented rock salad days). But I'll always love Double-U ELLLLLLL CEE Ess . . . even though it died in 1983, a few months after I married a KOIL woman from Omaha. And if you're under, say, 30, you're not getting this conversation at all, are you? LET ME EXPLAIN. Once upon a time, there was this thing called radio -- AM radio -- and we listened to it on "transistors," which were like iPods, only affordable. And better. An iPod only can bring you the few hundred songs you load into it after illegally downloading them off the Internet or legally buying them on iTunes. But a transistor radio, that could bring you the world, baby. All for free. And without the threat of a lawsuit by the music cops. The world first came to my bedroom on a transistor radio tuned to WLCS. I also could tune in the whole wide world on WIBR, or maybe WTIX in New Orleans -- and sometimes KAAY through the ether from Little Rock at night -- but I mostly dug those rhythm and blues . . . and rock 'n' roll . . . and countrypolitan . . . and a bit of ring-a-ding-ding, too, on the Big 91. What it was, was the breadth of American popular culture at my fingertips. And British Invasion, too. Never was education so fun. I turned on the radio just to listen to some tunes, and I found myself under the spell of a thousand different tutors -- friendly voices from morning to overnight -- playing for me the breadth of musical expression . . . or at least the musical expression that charted well. It is because of 'LCS, 'IBR, 'TIX (and later, 'FMF) that this Catholic Boy has catholic tastes. Your iPod is cool and all, but it can't do that. SEE, THE DEAL IS that I can't repay the debt I owe to WLCS, for one. I can't repay the debt I owe to Gary King, that friendly morning voice on this episode of Four Songs. For a spell there, King's was the voice I woke up to, got ready for school to and ate breakfast to. He played the hits and told me what the weather was outside, and Gene Perry gave the news at the top and bottom of the hour. Back in the day, radio was a well-rounded affair. King's also was the friendly voice that answered the studio line when an awkward teen-ager in junior-high hell would call to request a song. And his was the friendly voice that would take time to chat for a bit when that kid -- or his mother -- sometimes thought he had nothing better to do . . . like put on a morning show. I didn't know it then, and Gary King (real name: Gary Cox) probably didn't know it, either, but what he was doing was being Christ, in a sense, to a lonely kid and his -- come to think of it -- lonely mother. I shudder to think what one of today's "morning zoo" shows would do with rich material like me and Mama. That is, if they answered the studio line at all. Via the AM airwaves, I made a human connection with WLCS and Gary King. I needed that. We all need that. And you can't get that from your iPod, though some of us will try to give it, because you have to work with what you have. BEFORE APRIL 1975 was done, Gary King was gone. He originally was from Kentucky, and one day the call came from WAKY, the Top-40 powerhouse in Louisville that Gary grew up listening to. On his last show, Gary's ending bit was "convincing" Gene Perry that he could catch a bullet in his teeth if the newsman would just help him out on the gun end. It didn't work as planned . . . which means it worked perfectly in radio's "theater of the mind." I think I shed a tear or two. And a couple of years later, I was learning the ropes at WBRH, Baton Rouge High's student-run FM station. And 33 years later -- after various pit stops on the air and hot off the press -- here we are at Revolution 21, trying to figure out what "radio" will be in this new millennium . . . right here on the Internet. Thanks, Gary. I can't repay you in full, but maybe this will make a nice down payment.

On dem first day of Christmas . . .

Revolution 21 — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:52:40 GMT

Here's another special audio presentation: A bit of nostalgia recorded off the TV in the early '70s in Baton Rouge. I remembered this recording when I heard of the death of Jules d'Hemecourt, a journalism professor when I was in school at LSU . . . and the man behind "The Cajun 12 Days of Christmas" when he was news director at Channel 33 in Baton Rouge. This must have been recorded by me, off the air, sometime around Christmas 1973. Maybe '74. D'Hemecourt, who also was the Channel 33 news anchor at the time, introduces the recording on a holiday newscast. Back in the day. Enjoy.

The tale of the tape

Revolution 21 — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:33:55 GMT

Here's a special audio presentation -- don't worry, the podcast will post as usual Friday -- from Revolution 21. I thought you just might want to hear this . . . a ghost in the machine, as it were. What it is, is a recording of legendary Alabama radio host Joe Rumore from Oct. 28, 1949 on WVOK, Birmingham. And it's an extraordinary look back 58 years across the tidal wave of change and cultural revolution that radically transformed America. It's a look at who we used to be, and at a kinder, more gentle and humane era of broadcasting that -- to today's ears -- sounds like a just-received transmission across many light-years of interstellar space from a star system far, far away. You can read more about it on "Revolution 21's Blog for the People" at http://revolution-21.blogspot.com/2007/03/way-we-were-1949.html. Enjoy.