I am a journalist, writer and broadcaster ... lately I've been concentrating on music, I spent many years as a music critic and a travel writer ... I gave up my last editorship a while ago and started concentrating on my blog. I was also asked to join AirTV International as a co host of a new show called Postcard ...
Frail? Bob looks good in this happy birthday vid for Brian Wilson! (See vid inside!)
Well, between them they’re more than 160 years old, true rock survivors … the rockers of ages.
During Bob’s tour people have said his singing with passion and true invention … but he looks frail, moves gingerly and has taken to occassionally sitting on a stage bench.
There’s very little good footage of his Rough and Rowdy tour – but here in this vid, currently flying round the world, Bob looks good, steady and strong for 81… and his sense of humour is right there, dancing away.
Brian’s a year younger than Bob and all The Society has to say is Happy Birthday Brian!
#brianwilson #beachboys #bobdylan #happybirthday
HOME FROM THE BLUES, MANGO MAN TOM – HIS STRANGE FRUIT, PUTIN AND RAW PASSION
Tom Wood is a strange brew … a fairly conservative type of man with a predilection for the heat of the desert. A wanderer in trades too.
Tom is a showman, who a decade ago. took a gamble and moved to Vegas, yet had little interest in the Elvis look-alike culture, its plastic playground cities, its stretch limos and dime-a-dream casinos, fast food-at-the-speed-of-light and the cheap neons of Mammon.
Tom has a driving desire to become recognised for his music …oh, and he adores mangos. So much so, in fact, that he has named his record label Mongomon.
Sweet name that, once you catch on to the hidden meaning, it makes you smile. Mango Man.
And it is on his new label that Tom, now well in his Sixties, has released the strange fruit to come from his powerful and enigmatic creative world.
It is a good set of songs, so good in fact that here at The Society we are promoting his work wholeheartedly … and a mutual friend, LA film editor and director Bob Mori is set to make a video of Tom’s performances.
Bob too has seen the burning glory inside his work.
For instance, Peaceworld is about, yep, a peaceful world.
Tom said: “It’s not too unlike John Lennon’s beautiful Imagine. Mine came with the start of Putin’s war, I was so depressed and saddened by the lack of compassion for Ukrainian citizens’ lives, property, etc. War is only destruction and loss of life. Peace is the opposite of war. I believe that 90 percent of all humans want a peaceful world to live in, raise children, learn, experience, laugh, grow. Imagine!”
His grand view of peace doesn’t make him pull his punches though. He had this to say about Putin: “He is a dictator. He is probably a murderer as well. No compassion for anyone, or life in general. He is like Trump. Hateful. Narcissistic. His war is useless. Nothing good. Only death and destruction has been achieved.”
Tom was brought up in the ‘war zone’ of racism St Louis, but as the son of a middle-class couple in a suburb of the auction block city he says that it was something he mainly caught in his peripheral vision.
The way he tells it, as a boy in the 1950s and 60s Tom Wood never suffered from the St Louis blues.
His mother was an 8th grade English teacher and his dad was a post office supervisor. One way or the other his family had standing in a community where racism burned just around the corner.
He never really suffered from the St Louis blues.
His mother was an 8th grade English teacher and his dad was a post office supervisor. His family had standing in a community.
Lyrics in Where are you Going reflect the security and comfort he was afforded in the city that left blues hero and inveterate drunk WC Handy was ignored as he dossed on the streets. Lyrics like: “The comfort of family, more precious than gold, one love, one heart, loving the young and the old.”
Tom’s parents and he lived in the railway town of Kirkwood Mo, named after James P. Kirkwood who put it on the map when he planned a new route for the Pacific Railroad in 1852.
Tom said: “ My childhood was almost idyllic especially by the standards of today. My parents bought a home in Kirkwood Mo and I was able to walk to my grade school and middle school without worry. “Kirkwood High School is where I received my diploma. But I attended two colleges in the St. Louis metro area where I achieved a degree in Fine Arts.”
But still though, The Klu Klux Klan were all around him like terrifying ghost riders in the sky.
He rose above them all … but there is a darkness in his new song Rise which, to me at least, invokes the shackles of slavery and race hatred, murder and the postcards of the hangings: “You tell me why
I cannot fly as I ascend into the sky…”
And there is love and loss in 25:“I left behind everything I knew, to learn how to give everything to you.”
When Tom moved to Las Vegas, like we said, he wasn’t necessarily seeking fame and fortune, but went there for love.
Tom said: “I’m not an old bluesman with trauma after trauma behind me, but I have had broken hearts. And it was moving to Las Vegas that finally made me a happy man.”
He was reunited with his former St Louis lover from the 70s Tamara … they met up again in 2010 at a reunion of a band called the Homegrown Harvest One of the members was a mutual friend.
Tom said: “I am happily ‘married’ to my lovely, witty, and fun common-law wife Tamara. We live in a deluxe single story home 25 miles north of Las Vegas. Neither Tam nor I have children. We relish our privacy and home-life to it’s fullest.”
He said: “I worked a three day shift as a customer service representative in Red Rock Canyon.”
Red Rock Canyon, 17 miles from Las Vegas, was Nevada’s first National Conservation Area and is visited by more than two million people each year.
Now he is looking for work in the cannabis industry … and there is no smoke without the burning embers of ambition.
Read them and weep – then stand up and fight. Children are for life, not just for others, our boys and girls are not weapons of crass destruction for the bitter and twisted, children and exes are not there to be bullied … YOU failed in your commitment to a relationship, not YOUR son or daughter
IT’S FATHERS DAY … AND IT IS A FATHER’S RIGHT TO BE WITH HIS CHILDREN …
Below are six stories for today and our future together with those we love:
FOR FATHER’S DAY … AN IMAGINED TRIP ROUND DYLAN AND JAKOB, BY ERIC LASTICK
DYLAN AND SON, JAKOB…LETTERS OF THE RED JACK PINES THIS FATHER’S DAY. IN FULL FAMILY ARTISAN… In a real wind whirl minded Dylan basement avenue of guitar awakenings; Dad lays down all his rhythms and yarns—- wishful a Father’s Day holiday session of Bob and son, Jakob on Strat and old’ telecaster guitar.
A guided and gilded pair of eyes of Dad’s portrait painting of his son, framed and displayed of all good fellowship on the wall. Wallflower and roadie roundup to usher of the ride…form an avenue to the grand pianos of time.
Right round the dusty basement and cobweb of ‘’The Saturday Evening Post’’ A single little Lionel toy train near the corner liquor bar. Red jack pines sway and whistle these Min with the Minnesota winds… Roadie rally of the flags of course, band and structure. Tonight, a roast on a fine dine table for every hero that recipes the sound of Dylan’s footprints and these atmospheric blends of a certain and fine homecoming.
Dad’s tastes of the west coastal ocean waves of the great surf of the free. Poetic be of the pipeline. Photos to the bottom of the sea of dreams…and those that come true. Jakob old’ son, the Minnesota weather certainly will cheer you… and of your effects of home. Midnight never short of an acoustic blend of old and young. Father knows best when it comes to the most important life answers; yet you have already got the questions in lyric… and all the precocious ways to go far. Dad must be proud, as the wallflower rebound of these harmonic planes.
Jakob, with a journey’s pond of the well-fills—-Minnesota ice fish. Wows in all dad’s difference in age…yet we all see and feel the bite, the bitter salt… and the moves of steers of all those roads well guided. Well lifted. In the clearing reflect of the concise patterns of sing and in step—-as if of like minds.
And of both your fans…your writes…your riches are really of the passion of what you hear and what you play.
Embryonic basks too every new dawn you levin—-like a token to all those rows and carpeted across the silver screens. Hop along Cassidy. Share a father and son. One in which you’ve surely have seen… and hopefully together. So, dream steady aback—-to seat us all in your memories of a baby car seat. A safe retreat——straight up Catskill mountains. Overstretch little baby Jakob’s curious eyes of the look about of brown bear. The wonders of a father. Son to teach so much. So noticeably young of the dancing bear act…the circus comes to mind, the love and gift of thinking young. The forever nights of childhood perceptions. The speed of time as we grow old. Now a rest by a cool night and cozy fire; letters of the red jack pines this Father’s Day, you send …
WHO IS ERIC LASTICK?
Eric Lastick is a strange man. He looks lived in, like an old rooming house knocked out and loaded from the inside.
He’s spent his life inside this badly-built walk-on-stilts high-rise of rooms called things like Hope, Aspiration, Dream…
… and still, today, he stares from his rain-melting ancient windows into glistening streets and memories.
Eric Lastick was born in Zurich but never became a gnome… instead he went looking for a place to stay in Pennsylvania, a city built on handmade pretzels, whoopie pies and cheesesteaks
Personally, I’ve never been to Pennsylvania. And doubt I ever will, I have more of a New York state of mind, an Elvis poster across the grey-ness of the days, Minnesota moan and an Iron Range resolve.
But Eric is living in Pennsylvania in his rooming-house mind.
And he is writing in there all the time.
It’s as if there comes a knock at the door, the rent man and Eric’s jailer are standing in the rain. an old railway sign in their hand.
Eric drops a poem into a cup…
Here Eric Lastick writes three short pieces on Dylan, analysing the ways of life that made little Bob Zimmerman what he is today.
Once upon a time in Hollywood Brad Pitt decided to go and see his hero Bob Dylan…
Wait!
Yes, that’s what he had to do – because he turned up just too late.
Brad is such a major Dylan fan that he has part of the lyric of “When The Deal Goes Down” tattooed on his arm.
“We live, we die, we know not why, but I’ll be with you,” the tattoo reads.
Bob, who at 81 is turning the music, art, literary, film, live performance – and metal work – worlds on fire with his renewed creativity has for years banned filming and photographs at his concerts.
And latecomers also banned!
So, Angelina’s ex said farewell to a chunk of Bob’s enigmatic and powerful performance at the Pantages Theatre in LA as the doors to the auditorium stayed firmly closed!
It all hit the right note though as Brad finally got in to the concert. Right now there are no reports on who the A-lister was with but we’ll keep you up-dated.
Meanwhile, the show he finally managed to get in to was a stunner.
Los Angeles Times music writer Mikael Wood said: “As a musical experience, this performance felt like nothing so much as a gift: a thoroughly engrossing 90-minute outpouring of pulpy juke-joint roots music and spectral folk-soul balladry, with Dylan in richly expressive voice and his bandmates accompanying him with an almost superhuman sensitivity.”
And the David Lynch lighting and sets Bob has chosen for his Rough and Rowdy tour took on a distinctly Twin Peaks atmosphere and was described as ‘like a dimly lit ballroom’.
The Never-ending tour is parked for now … but the road is beckoning again.
Bob Dylan was photographed in another enigmatic ‘backstage’ outfit.
And the only things missing were his leopard skin boots.
His white Godfather-style Homburg was angled to look rakish and a little roguish, his white T-shirt emblazoned the message Godspeed to You across his skinny chest, black too-long baggy pants flapped like black crows around his legs.
And he finished off the impromptu fashion show with a pair of battered lace-up working man boots.
Somebody had actually brought him his boots and shoes… but his Leopard skin boots would have gone far better with that hat…
His gait too – strong, striding-out and determined – belied his deliberately (I think!) doddery appearance at the beginning of his post-covid Rough and Rowdy Ways tour in America.
Right at the beginning, last November in Milwaukee, he held on to his piano for support and looked unsteady on his feet as he crept towards the centre stage mic. He was often bent in the middle, his white David Burn jacket was too big … but juxtaposition was in the air.
Bob was presenting a new voice to the world. He was singing like a good’n, like the musical maestro he is.
Bob, 81 years old, was also using ancient stage techniques. His face, in the first half started to take on a Mephistophelian quality as the under-stage lighting brought a brittleness to the concerts and the images of the rock n roll hero and his band.
But this wasn’t Bob as the geriatric renegade who bashed out off-key piano riffs and major key cacophonies from the ‘safety zone’ behind his upright piano. This wasn’t the Bob who spent the first ten years of his ‘time out of mind’ comeback confirming to world that his voice was a phlegmy, croaky, up-singing mess.
No. This is Bob – as old as a proverbial dinosaur – coming out of his shadowy kingdom of creativity and serving up a smoke and mirrors, rather bonhomie performance where he (deliberately) gets younger as the concert gets older.
Playing the old man and then rising like a hip Lazarus is something Alice Cooper has been doing fabulously for years… but now it’s part of Bob’s act too. And he does it brilliantly.
Yes, he has, now and again, plonked himself on a bench on stage while performing. But a nice sit-down and a bit of sing-song is fine when you’ve already played 75 venues in a few months.
This photo was taken in Los Angeles a few days ago, as he prepared a soundcheck at Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Bob is expected to wrap up the North American leg on July 6 in Denver.
But then there is the rest of the world beckoning to him.
And, me for one, will be standing in line to see him.
Spare a thought for my lost brother, asks Alan Bennett
Alan wrote: On this day, June 16th, in 1964, four days after Keith’s twelfth birthday, he was going to spend the night at our gran’s house… my mother was going to bingo and she walked with Keith to the zebra crossing at busy Stockport Road.
Once he had crossed and they waved goodbye to each other, they went on their way, Keith was only a few streets away from the safety of gran’s house.
He would have passed a small side street that led through to Westmoreland Street where Brady lived. It is now known that Hindley used to park in that street waiting for Brady to join her.
Somewhere along the familiar route Keith took, the vehicle with both Brady and Hindley inside pulled up alongside Keith. Keith was enticed into the vehicle and then driven to Saddleworth Moor, where Keith was sexually assaulted, murdered and buried.
It is, and always will be, very hard to accept that later that same night the rest of us slept safe and sound in our beds. It was not until the following morning that we all discovered Keith had disappeared. When my gran got to my mother’s house the following morning I heard the question ‘Where is Keith?’
Neither my gran nor my mother had a telephone at home, my mother thought Keith had arrived at my gran’s, my gran thought that Keith had changed his mind and had decided to stay at home.
I will never forget the confusion of that morning that quickly turned to panic and terror.
Please, once again, can I ask you spare a thought of remembrance for Keith today.
Does a writer have the right to write about their world gone wrong?
A few days ago I wrote a short piece looking back at Like a Rolling Stone by the never-ending Bob Dylan. LRS is a song that changed the world … six minutes of angst, anger, vitriol and viciousness.
Bob was a wild skinny foppish wisp of will-and-determination who brought a tortured voice of poetry and accusation to a world slopping its way through the mud and the blood of war, violence and hatred.
That was back in 1965 – the era of short melodic a-doo-ron-ron two minute love songs to your girl, your mum, your car and your dog.
But LRS launched itself out of the mono-speaker in dad’s valve radio like a banshee in shades, howled, melted the wallpaper, came on at your girl, boiled your car, licked your mother and kicked your dog in the b*llocks.
And it shocked, mystified, appalled and frightened your parents, particularly those who extolled the virtues of their working-class background yet aspired to the middling mordancy of the middle-classes who are bit squiffy in Torremolinos and down the Tory club.
The six minute song was based on a blues standard, glistened like a Christmas tree of Phil Spector’s wall of sound, had the hip-ness of The Beats, the arrogance of rock ‘n’ roll and was searingly honest – telling things just how they were.
And that’s the point … writers are told to write about what they know.
So, does that include members of your family or friends, warts and all?
I say yes.
I am first and foremost a writer, but my mainstay has always been journalism and I have always told the truth. That’s my job. And like 95 per cent of my colleagues I have never knowingly published anything untrue.
That’s what writing is about … publish and be damned.
Well, I was damned – by somebody who should be close to me – and they have never spoken to me since.
My literary crime?
I used a figure from their lives to creative the tension of juxtaposition between a Bob Dylan figure and the regular bloke on the street back then.
My memory is clear. I was brought up in a noisy laughter-ridden sometimes brutal big beer drinking back street town of pubs butchers and scruffy terraced houses. Big men, beery men, dripping Park Drive from their bottom lips, proud of their beer bellies that turned the belts of their work-pants into wobbly slings.
Real men liked to look pregnant way back in the 60s.
Real men in the 60s drank and smoked too much, admired celebrity drunks like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, saw women as things to be shouted at and ridiculed regularly… treat’m mean, keep’m keen.
Real men gauged each other’s worth by how much beer they could drink, how many cigarettes they smoked and how many husbands they claimed to have cuckolded behind their own wife’s back.
I wrote about a real man just like this … a man I watched go apoplectic when out-of-the-blue Dylan’s anthem burst from the airwaves. His re-action was madness. And terribly frightening for any child already flying head-long into the exotic horrors of puberty.
This man was the juxtaposition … Bob, spooky, androgynous, mysterious, artistic. Skinny as a rake … on the other hand, our 60s artisan was a big general construction worker, bluff, inarticulate, angry, uncomprehending, humourless and dark, dark, dark.
And he drank cider on the privacy of his own couch.
I mentioned this in the LRS piece … I mentioned it because men – and women – drank to excess back in the 60s, it was just a way of life. Men got drunk. Women got migraines.
And this is where the conundrum raised its hyenic head. And screamed at me.
I had apparently betrayed this man by telling the truth about him.
I hadn’t said he was a sober, even-tempered, witty, caring, loving, intelligent, articulate, gentle, thoughtful, generous, spiritual or even demonstrably loving person, because he wasn’t.
No. I’d taken the essence he showed to the world and depicted him on his couch with a glass of cider in his hand objecting in words of no more than four letters about a song on the radio.
That’s the way so many working class, drinking class, bad tempered class men were in the 60s. I never suggested he was a drunk or a bully. But so many men were way back then.
So, as a writer, a man who delves invited or uninvited in to other peoples’ live for a living – a man whose job has always been to challenge liars, cheats, thieves, conmen, politicians, businessmen, princes and kings – I was being ‘spiked’, edited by a member of my own family for telling the truth.
A truth they didn’t want to come out, despite the fact that this man who drank at home and had a vile temper was a secret all over the place. Also, let’s face it, he chose to be a drinking man and never bothered to address his vile temper.
A member of my family was asking me to tell lies about a man I hadn’t even insulted as far as I was concerned. Yet, he had insulted me all his life.
So, should writers write about the rights and wrongs in their own families?
I say yes.
It is honest.
And why should family not be looked at through the arrow of light in a prism?
Your life is made up of good and bad, angst and fear, love and loss, unfairness and luck … but it is also made up of the influences of those around you, the good, the bad and the ugly, the cousins, the uncles and the aunties, the vicar at the local church, the teachers and the lawyers.
Write about those who have done you good and those who did you wrong.
Tell the truth as a writer, always.
And never ever be afraid of showing the world about the truth of your life and of those who influenced you … these people are the teachers.
Those who need to know the truth about how their lives affected the lives of others.
And that’s the truth.
#writers #writing #honesty #truth #secretsandlies
Keith Bennett could be retired and a grandpa today. He would be 70… but Brady and Hindley stole him away
Here his brother, Alan, talks succinctly and movingly about the horrifying tragedy that has blighted so many lives, just like his
How a barber’s shop conversation about the loss of Keith helped lift brother’s battered spirits …
They say that on the streets of Manchester you are never more than six feet away from a rat … well, Brady and Hindley weren’t rats, they were pure evil. And even now, dead as they are they still send a shiver down the spine of this city.
Brady and Hindley took to their graves the moorland location of Keith Bennett’s body. He may never be found.
In
a moving piece written by Keith’s brother, Alan, he reveals his
feelings and he has given the Preservation Society the right to
reproduce it:
Alan writes: “I
have been going to the same barber for many years now and I went
again yesterday. It was very quiet, just one man already on one of
the chairs and I sat down on the one next to him.
All normal so far
and I expected the usual conversation about football, the weather,
politics, health etc. The bloke that was already there left so there
was just me and the two barbers.
“Alan, after all
these years I had no idea until I saw an article in the media the
other day.” I was taken by surprise a little bit, ”m so sorry
about Keith and my condolences to you, those evil bastards should
never have been allowed to live.”
I knew I had some
explaining to do, “That David Smith was some character as well.”
The next 10 minutes
were spent in a sort of question and answer session. Along the
lines of answering to the questions he asked: if they had been hanged
we would never have known where to search for Keith, although I
understand your reaction; a detailed description of where and when
Keith was taken; my age and Keith’s age at the time; the horror of
realising Keith had not turned up at my gran’s house and the
aftermath; the barber having met mam in the past when there used to
be a ladies hairdressers there; the fact D Smith never socialised
with Brady and Hindley until after Keith was taken and the way he was
led to witness the death of Edward Evans; where mam had last seen
Keith after crossing Stockport road at the zebra crossing; where
Hindley could have been parked as Keith crossed their path; the
actions of Brady’s inhumane solicitor and the locked cases; the
search of the moor and anything else the barber could think of before
the next customer entered the shop and things returned to normal…
Time for me to go
but not before getting a man-hug on the way out and another, ‘I’m so
sorry about what happened, take care and see you again soon,’ from
the barber.
The other customer
sat on the chair, looking on through the refection in the mirror,
must have been wondering what was going on.
I know things will
never be quite the anonymous same for me next time I go there but,
once again, I had seen the care and compassion for Keith and his
family and I felt my spirits lifted once again by that.
However, I was also
left wondering how too many people with the power and clout to do
something more for Keith failed him time after time when we really
needed them and we still do.
The passing years
have been a mixture of emotions, frustrations, disbelief, witnessing
so much pain and tears, anger and so many other bad things.
The thing that keeps
us going is the care, love, compassion and genuine feelings for Keith
shown by so many of the ‘average’ people over the years.
I’m not sure if I
have expressed my thoughts as I meant to here but I’m hoping anybody
reading this will understand how much more those ‘average’ people
mean to me as compared to the faceless people in power that need
constantly reminding of the ongoing struggle we face and the need we
have for their help and not just their ‘Understanding.’
Sorry for rambling but I had to try to express the feelings I was left with after just a normal and regular visit to the barbers.”
Average price of a litre of petrol at UK forecourts reached 185p
Average price of diesel also reached 190.9p
Filling up a family car hit £100 for first time in UK
Do you know, Britain’s home fires are still burning – but in these, the cyber-technic Noughties, they are incandescent with shock, horror and fear.
SHOCK that our lying politicians – like bouffanted buffoon Boris and that simperingly limp lawman Sneer Starmer – partied while the rest of us sweated, vegetated and wasted away in the gently settling detritus of our coronavirus prison homes.
Two years of living locked away like we were kow-towing to Maggie’s Protect and Survive pamphlet on how to live in a nuclear war … it was a dress rehearsal rag.
And a red rag to those of us whose lives had been burned down to the ground by an incendiary little blobby greasy bug.
Talking of blobby greasy bugs, there is always the HORROR of the blobulous, snake-eyed monster man … the man who was even willing to lose Moscow’s McDonald’s franchise so that he could see his final days out wiping a neighbour off the face of the Earth over a boundary dispute.
And as he contemplates his naval – and his army and his air force – we wait with growing FEAR that Mr Put-it-in will press his nuclear belly button and simply f*rt the world away in a Red cloud of stinking air and trembling haemorrhoids…
Talking of f*rts – Boris is actually pumping up the volume on that other major thing that’s putting the wind up us too!
Fuel prices…
Boris and his fellow buffoons are thinking about setting a “pumpwatch”. Yep, a pump watch! They’re not ‘f*rting’ about are they!
No, in fact the scheme will target the absolute ar*oles who are swindling drivers on the forcourts.
It will point drivers to cheap petrol stations and avoid the twisted rip-off merchants.
Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said: “We are looking at all possible options and transparency may have a role to play in that.”
Transparency may have a role to play?
Well, that’s some ground-breaking statement from a Boris bozzo eh? Tranparency…
The move comes after twisted, uncaring petrol stations failed to pass on the 5p fuel duty cut.
And now, petrol has made its biggest daily jump in almost 20 years.
It now costs me an £129 to fill up my diesel saloon – and apparantly Downing Street is furious that garages are ‘taking the p*ss …’
Petrol stations have only passed on around half of the 5p fuel duty cut to hard-pressed motorists.
The Pumpwatch option is a website where drivers can look at a map showing them the average price for petrol and diesel in every town.
This would be run by the Competitions and Markets Authority.
Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed that this Shocky Horror Show we are all have bit parts in will soon play to the world and we are given all the transparency we deserve in our journey through democracy and downright lies.
