This story (CLICK LINK BELOW) appeared in the Manchester Evening News – but so many of us Manc journalists knew Stan Miller, from Sale. He helped so many of us juggling difficult cases and chasing up stories at the same time. Stan – like Manchester muso and writer CP Lee, Star man Harry Pugh, the maddeningly eccentric Tony Wilson and Punk godfather Brendan Mullen – was a good egg, a laugh, a challenge and above all good-hearted and talented. I am glad to have worked with them all … RIP Stan, CP, Harry, Tony and Brendan.
Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Jack Sherman – said to have played on Dylan’s ‘clunker’ album Knocked Out Loaded – has died aged 64.
The group broke the news on Instagram and paid tribute to the ‘unique dude’ who played on their first album.
The band said: “We of the RHCP family would like to wish Jack Sherman smooth sailing into the worlds beyond, for he has passed.”
Jack played on the band’s debut self-titled album and contributed to their albums Freaky Styley, Mother’s Milk and The Abbey Road EP.
The band wrote: ‘Jack played on our debut album as well as our first tour of the USA. He was a unique dude and we thank him for all times good, bad and in between. Peace on the boogie platform.’
Sadly though, the American guitarist was not included when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.
The Hall of Fame said this was because only original members, current members and those who played on multiple albums were eligible for induction.
However, it hurt Jack who blamed the band’s members, telling Billboard: ‘It appeared to be a politically correct way of omitting Dave Navarro and I for whatever reasons they have that are probably the band’s and not the Hall’s.
“It’s really painful to see all this celebrating going on and be excluded. I’m not claiming that I’ve brought anything other to the band… but to have soldiered on under arduous conditions to try to make the thing work.
‘And I think that’s what you do in a job, looking back. And that’s been dishonored. I’m being dishonored, and it sucks.’
Jack was the second guitarist of the band replacing Hillel Slovak, who rejoined after he was fired due to tensions between members and creative differences. The band didn’t think his funk style fitted with their punk rock edge.
Apart from the rock band, Sherman also worked on Tonio K.’s Notes from the Lost Civilization, Bob Dylan’s Knocked Out Loaded, although even here he appears to have been snubbed and doesn’t appear on track listings. The album is generally seen as Dylan least entertaining and is often described as clunker!
The killing of George Floyd has re-ignited fury over the treatment of black people across the world.
And it has been instrumental in raising millions for Black Lives Matter.
George’s killing has also sparked incendiary street protests, deadly shootings and the tearing down of the parts of our history that glorify slavery.
But is the Killing of George in fact the new battle-cry for racial equality?
Or is it a frightening new age of anarchy played out against the coughing and sniffing of Covid.
Do we actually have a deadly epidemic of fear?
Lost empires have always been ravaged by hoards of locust-like anarchists chomping on the flaccid under-belly of a failed society.
Destruction described as building for change, like ripping down Victorian warehouses in Manchester and replacing them with plastic hutches.
Black Lives Matter, as a battle cry, in fact existed long before the Two Blondes of Dystopia launched bombshell after bombshell.
Ezra Furman at home …
BLM was founded by communities for good. But immediately drew bad publicity when one of the three co-founders said blithely in 2015 that she and another co-founder “are trained Marxists”.
What’s a trained Marxist? A svelte and ripped bloke with a beard, knowledgable eye and a floppy hat?
Still, Black Lives Matter has grown into a national anti-racism movement supported by millions of Americans.
And BLM has also become a cash cow for black political activism… much of the money coming from white people who are quite rightly desperate to wipe out racism finally and forever.
Money has come in so fast that some groups are reported to have turned fortunes away. But sadly fewer and fewer people have money to throw at ideals.
Social media has continued blistering and burning with fake news supported by the madness of King Donald and the wobbling of Humpty Dumpty Boris perched on his wall of uncertainty.
The pandemic has destabilised ordinary lives, rocked businesses, commerce, politics and hopes and dreams.
And now people are looking for somebody blame.
As far as Covid is concerned the blame is aimed predictably – but scatalogically – at China.
As far as anarchy is concerned, it is black people on the streets of Henderson and other small-towns where racism is a way of life.
It is also of course the French and the refugees washing up on the White Cliffs of the UK.
But back to the money.
Black Lives Matter is not a charity and says that all the money it has been showered with will go towards changes in the law, developing and distributing educational resources and healing black communities.
And that is a good thing.
But the killing of George has created an intensity of heckling and hate not seen since since the 1950s and 60s.
Boris Johnson has stood up for black communities by saying “there is a feeling that people from black and minority ethnic groups do face discrimination: in education, in employment, in the application of the criminal law.
“And we who lead and who govern simply can’t ignore those feelings because in too many cases, I am afraid, they will be founded on a cold reality.”
However, disingenuously, Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote and chair of the Downing Street race disparity unit advisory group, said: “Whilst an acknowledgement of racism within our society is to be welcomed, the real deal is having a plan to effectively deal with it – and that was missing.”
So, with statements like this – and the untold millions in the coffers of BLM – why can’t we all get together, socially distanced of course, wipe our noses and put our cash and cards on the table and work something out?
Don’t forget what racism is – it’s a brain-dead act. It treats another person differently because their skin colour is not the same as ours, they speak a different language and have different religious beliefs.
Racism is about the most heinous pointless, clod-hopping, backwards-baseball cap-wearing, tattooed thuggery in the world.
And countries go to war over it.
In recognition of racism’s awfulness, Oxford’s Oriel College decided to take down the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist accused of laying the foundations of apartheid in South Africa.
In Australia, where the hashtag #aboriginallivesmatter is trending, the focus of protests has been on the treatment of an indigenous population subjected to mass killings, eviction and incarceration since the 18th century when white settlers landed there.
In Poland there were talks about the use of Murzyn, a term for black people that has its roots in the same word as the English “moor”. Poles generally consider neutral while others regard it as offensive.
All this is good and should be capitalised on … But Black Lives Matter UK put this on their GoFundMe page: “We’re guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world. We build deep relationships across the diaspora and strategise to challenge the rise of the authoritarian right-wing across the world, from Brazil to Britain.”
So,, it is true then. We are living in a world of new anarchy but nobody seems to be able to affect change.
So, the anarchistic failure of our own government, the anarchy of King Donald and his hatred, to the beer-swilling kebab-eating drongo throwing empty beer cans in to his UK beer garden and to the anarchy of the gun-totting dystopian killer stalking middle-mad America, all say we need to change.
All of us!
But the wheels of the BLM are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion they have created with their money and wild claims.
At first politicians were eager to be photographed ‘taking the knee’ in solidarity. Now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement is demanding.
And these things are things like moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to kill off crime.
In June 13, 2020, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to call for the eradication of racism and white supremacy. With their fists raised high, the activists chanted “Black power”
It really could have been a scene straight from the 1960s.
Activists around the world in the 60s connected their own struggles to those of African Americans who challenged segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and police brutality.
But nothing really happened and look at us now, almost a century later.
Many tend to think of that era’s push for civil rights and Black power as a distinctly American phenomenon.
But it was a global movement—and so is BLM today.
Although much has changed since the 1960s, racism continues to shape every aspect of Black life in the United States.
The pattern of police killings of unarmed Black Americans has created today’s uprisings – and anarchistic opportunism – but these problems are not only within the borders of the United States.
They are the global anarchy of the police.
BLM was launched seven years ago by activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi after the acquittal on murder charges of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American boy from Florida.
Following the 2014 police shooting of another Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, BLM evolved into a nationwide and global protest movement.
In a matter of months, activists had established BLM chapters in several major cities outside the United States.
In Toronto, for example following the police killing of Jermaine Carby, a 33-year-old Black man in Brampton, Ontario.
A few months later, a group in Japan launched an Afro-Asian solidarity march called “Tokyo for Ferguson”.
And in the following months, BLM demonstrations swept cities across Europe, including Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Paris.
Why can’t we all … governments, BLM, people on the streets… finally draw this centuries-old battle-wagon to the side of these sickly streets and tell the world that we all matter, everybody from China to Calais, the Black Hills of Dakota to the White Cliffs of Dover.
Last year Bob Dylan sold his entire catalogue of 600 songs, including Blowin’ in the Wind and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, to Universal Music in the biggest music publishing deal in decades.
This is a personal appreciation of Bob Dylan, businessman, performer lyricist and man by former Fleet Street writer Leigh G Banks. The article was originally written in 2011for a leading British newspaper…
HALF a century ago Bob Dylan was a motor-psycho nightmare pilloried for trying to subvert the great American Dream. But in reality he was kicking and screaming as he metamorphosed into a Kafka-esque god.
Like a crazed but foppish scarecrow he was shining lights into the beds of the supposedly great and the good, seeing through their walls and getting his followers on their feet screaming as he roared: “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”
But now as he reaches 70, many see him as the king of the condominiums, a Jewish money machine who owns a string of baby shops and, once, even a little coffee shop in his iron-and-steel hometown in Minnesota. Selling Times they are a-Changin’ to an insurance company in the mid-90s was the first sign of a sell-out by the man who never wanted to be king.
Let’s face it, the Golden Boy of the revolutionary Sixties – a child with a voice like rocks and gravel – spent almost half of his career working hard at failure. His concerts were very often car crashes with this drunken harmonicarist in the driving seat. His voice too was going through so many changes that it was like listening to Tom Waits going through puberty.
And his songwriting? Well, it just wasn’t what people were expecting any more from the man who wrote the ultimate rock n roll anthem, Like a Rolling Stone. Songs like Wiggle Wiggle and Tweedly Dum and Tweedly Dee were just wistful and nostalgic, few bothered to listen closely enough to catch the subversiveness he had now riven in the world of nursery rhymes.
One of the problems with his Royal Bobness is his need to reinvent himself over and over. He might still know exactly what he is doing, but throughout his often-catastrophic career generations haven’t caught on. He’s been the Chaplinesque folk singer, the wild amphetamine fop. He’s been the jokerman, the nasal family man, the womaniser and he’s been Lenny Bruce.
He has also been the golfer, the preacher of middle-class religion and the purveyor of corporate entertainment. Nowadays he’s the riverboat captain singing about the Mississippi and the Red River Shore – and he’s the good old granddad croaking out classics like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Little Drummer Boy.
He’s paid the price for being the quintessential rebel without a pause who deliberately howled and hissed the life out of most of his classic songs. And yet, even at his lowest ebb in the 80s he caused heart-stopping moments – and sometimes there were only moments out of mammoth shows – a split second when the genius that allowed him to invent himself in the first place glowed through. Very often that split second of genius was enough to rescue the whole show.
Witness 1987 when he played the NEC with Tom Petty. They stood stock still for 86 minutes and groaned mournfully through Senor, Joey and Emotionally Yours with Dylan refusing to lower the hood of his parka or lift the peak of his baseball cap. It was the direst of shows until he hit his Christian classic In the Garden and everyone left the venue that night knowing that Dylan could still be the shaman he had once been in the 60s.
Then witness Aston Villa in 1995 when he stumbled onto the stage in high-heeled crocodile skin boots with his hair as alive as if he’d got a head full of snakes. First thing that struck you was that he didn’t have his guitar. Next thing that struck you was that he held his right hand waving above his head. But when he blew the harp solo on Mr Tambourine man (yep, that’s why the hand was waving above his head) you knew this was going to be a show like nobody had ever given before.
And it was.
One moment he was as old as Willie Nelson, the next he was as sensual as Marlon Brando, that other rebellious god he was rumoured to have had a gay flirtation with. He smoldered through You’re a Big Girl Now and when finally he picked up his guitar he blistered through Silvio and Jokerman.
It was a secret for the next decade that in fact Mr Dylan had severed the tendons in his wrist in what was put down to a gardening accident. But then everything about the man is a mystery, like the motorcycle crash in 1966 which also apparently almost killed him. Some conspiracy theorists still claim that the accident was manufactured to avoid him being knocked off by the CIA. After all a whole world of dissident political leaders were winding up dead at the time, John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the unholy rot was setting in rock’n’roll too: Jimi, Mama Cass. The list would go on to get Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Keith Moon.
Bob Dylan is one of the few surviving geniuses of the 20th century. And this is why. As he considered finally packing in his hard won fame, he reinvented himself once more, this time as Millennium Man. Bob Dylan ended the century with the critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind and welcomed in the 21st century with a major award for his film theme Things Have Changed.
Today he’s back at the top, with two chart-topping albums, a best-selling book, a world-renowned travelling art exhibition, a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize. So, what can we expect? Something different for a start. Remember he once played saxophone to a packed auditorium.
Here he is in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a few weeks ago. I was there:
“The band looks slouchy and dissolute. Electricity fizzes in the shadows around them. They exchange glances, Tony Garnier spins his bass and the stage erupts into a foundry of noise and spitting fire. Drums rattle down the canyon. Then the diamond-studded rim of a ten-gallon hat flashes as a figure as thin as a blade flickers into view. He nods to the band and takes his place at the keyboard.
“The band swings in to a country version of Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat and it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before, stately. Pensioner Bob is as unstoppable as a freight train. Gone is the Chaplinesque folk singer – so is the wild amphetamine fop of the Sixties. Gone too is the grungy Eighties s king of stadium rock. Bob Dylan now embodies the ghosts of John Jacob Niles, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Woody Guthrie.
“His trademark guitar is rarely seen and he plays the keyboards standing up with his Stetson pushed lazily to the back of his head. His voice, the most controversial in the history of popular music, has thrown caution to the wind.
There were times in the last forty years when he would hit a note as clear as the ring in a bell. But not any more. His voice has become the soundtrack of America’s history. He howls like a dog across the ancient prairies, he strangles the lightning, regurgitates the rolling of thunder. He is a storm across the face of the moon.”
There is also the mystery of why he is he still on one of the most grueling international tour schedules in the history of performing? Why does he tour something like 150 nights a year?
He doesn’t need the money – his back catalogue is worth a not-so poor country’s national debt and something in the region of a million people a year pay a fortune to see him. He must be one of the richest performers in the world today.
And of course this all gives a lie to what Dylan still represents to people – he was at one point in the mid-1960s the ultimate hippie, the rebel with a cause, the wild child with an incisive wit, poetry better than Rimbaud or Verlaine and a wall of sound that made Phil Spector’s seem like a ghostly imitation.
But that’s where he let all us other lesser hippies down. While we went on to carve careers out for ourselves and went on the hunt for mammon and security, guess what, so did he. And just like he’d been sexier, wilder, more poetic, more romantic, more exciting, more stylish than we had, he was ultimately more successful too.
And while we got older and made more mistakes, so did he. We got divorced. So did he – the most expensive in America at the time, it cost him £2m. We may have had our dalliances with drink or drugs or both, so did he. Our careers might have languished in the doldrums. Well, so did his.
And you know what? We hated ourselves for allowing all these things to happen to us. And we hated him even more for allowing them to happen to him. We forgot that man and god has to suffer. We didn’t want Dylan to shine a light in our own beds and reflect our own decadence back at us. But that’s exactly what he did. You see, Dylan has the true romance of artistry. We generally don’t.
His creativity has allowed him to span two centuries, ours rarely spans more than a few seconds of passing thought.
Yet, it’s that creativity that he’s been universally condemned for. Take his Christian period.
Well, now that was a mistake on old Bobbie’s side wasn’t it? To start extolling the virtues of Christianity to the predominantly Christian world. The Christians threw him to the lions.
It was just that it wasn’t the done thing to talk about God in such an honest way. Things like “by the blood of the Lord, I’ve been saved” or When They Came for Him in the Garden from the album Saved were too overt, not subtle like With God on Our Side, Dear Landlord or almost all of John Wesley Harding and Slow Train Comin’. Dylan’s always sung about God – for Godsake! He says openly that he sold his soul to God.
You see, and here’s another of those old Dylan dichotomies, his rebellion comes out of absolute home-spun tradition. Every croaky wild and crazy sound that comes up out of his throat and every note that flirts off his guitar or keyboard is based on the very routes and history of the cotton fields, of the blues, gospel, blue grass, country, folk, Cajun, rock n roll, Tin Pan Alley, Elvis, Little Richard and Hank Williams. There’s reggae in there, rock opera, Frank Sinatra, John Lee Hooker. The list is as long as music itself. And we crucified him.
The fans wrote him off, although his concerts were still selling out across the world. So, he turned his tour into a rant. From being the man who thought it uncool to speak to his audience, he’d preach to them 45 minutes at a time, sometimes rambling, sometimes drunk or stoned or both. But he believed in his message. And we didn’t.
And he’s back courting controversy still. Remember when he went to the Vatican wearing Cuban heels and a Stetson? How the press crowed and poked fun. But nobody mentioned the fact that the Pope was wearing robes and a skull cap and talking about religion.
The population of Earth is already diminishing – the end of our planet of the apes will in future be recorded as the beginning of the Planet of the Invisible.
Everything starts with a question.
Out of billions of rocks rotating in space how can just one, Earth, support life? And if others do we shouldn’t assume that their own evolution has some form of eyes, ears and voice.
From amoeba to fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, apes and finally homo sapiens, it’s unlikely. We cannot be the only pattern of evolution.
In millions of years no other planet’s creatures would evolve identically to ours.
But in 2020 something happened, not flying saucers but aliens. Almost invisible aliens.
The first time we knew they were here was when we realized that something was taking over our world, our lives, our very ‘being’.
Something was stopping living our lives.
Then the scientists got out their microscopes, and saw the aliens, tiny spheres covered in spikes and they were making their homes in our bodies. And within weeks they would take over our planet.
They are to us so tiny only because our sense of sight is so weak and ultimately because we are huge creatures. By their standards our eyes are set, like windows at the top of a block of high rise flats. We are, to them, giants.
Wherever they come from these are pioneers looking for a new planet for their future.
Somewhere there is a wise, superior strain of these aliens. They lead and organize the billions, the gun-fodder, the expendable.
Our scientists mistakenly think they can control these hordes. We, the followers, are trying to escape the aliens by cowering in our houses, or pretending we don’t care.
The year of 2020 will never really end. We shall fight back – slay the aliens, as we have always slain our enemies. But the aliens will return.
The normally joyous and inspiring fireworks of New Year over Poprad seemed bombastic and bad-tempered, almost as if we were trying to blast 2020 to kingdom come.
For hours before midnight this beleaguered mountainside city shook and reverberated to what sounded like bombs and the rattle of heavy gunfire. And by the time the clocks turned the year from hell upside down, the air was thick with cordite.
And a ghastly pall of smoke hung over the tenements and high rises like gathering ghosts.
Maybe it was the thunder and rattle of the fireworks drowning them out but we didn’t even hear a church bell ring.
No. We weren’t welcoming in a new year, we were shooting down one that had gone so dreadfully wrong.
The fact that the Slovak government had felt it right to announce a few hours earlier that they were being forced to tighten restrictions on our lives as a surge in new coronavirus infections hit ‘record levels’.
Health Minister Marek Krajci had just said the new restrictions include a ban on meeting of people from different households, including relatives.
Ski resorts and churches had to be closed too, he said.
Slovakia has 179,543 confirmed cases with 2,138 deaths. The increase hit a record of 6,315 cases last Wednesday.
The new clampdown comes in to force on New Year’s Day at 5:00pm and remains until January 24.
“Given that the critical epidemiological situation in Slovakia and the measures adopted on December 12 have not had sufficient effect, I’m glad that the cabinet unanimously agreed on stricter measures,” Health Minister Marek Krajčí was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, the pandemic caused London’s annual New Years’ Eve fireworks display to be cancelled.
But there was a light and fireworks display over the River Thames broadcast by the BBC just before midnight. It ended with David Attenborough asking everyone to work in 2021 to help our “fragile” planet.
In the Vatican City Pope Francis missed a New Year’s Eve prayer service. It was apparently because he was suffering back pain.
Pope Francis asked people to help those in need.
President Emmanuel Macron used his New Year’s speech to confirm a his health ministry tweet that shots would be offered to health care workers. There is a lot of scepticism in France over the safety of the new vaccines.
Let’s drum up some happiness for the New Year! A Happy New Year from the Andrea and Leigh at the leighgbankspreservationsociety – we’ll keep on going and doing our best to make a difference … so, let’s biff covid, bash fears for the future and have a good time! We did a couple of years ago when we found the Caledonians rattling their drums at the future in Buchanan Street, Glasgow. And if you can’t get out because of lockdown – don’t be in tiers … let’s rock the lounge with this inspiring BIG BASH FOR THE FUTURE!
