I’m not sure how to start today’s column. Sitting listening to Eddie Bullen’s smooth jazz and picturing Oregon in my mind. There are long pauses between each sentence I type. Wrapping up someone’s life…..it’s not easy. It’s deeply personal and highly emotional. Frank put everything he had into his writing, almost desperate to “spread the word” about the music and artists he loved. I knew he struggled with his own demons as well so I wasn’t sure what pieces of Frank I was going to find.
I have had this idea in the back of my head for awhile now of writing a column with musical accompaniment. My most fun times at the keyboard are when the mind flows free and the ideas pop up organically— a stream-of-consciousness style, if you will. My old Army buddy Michael Marino does it as a matter of course, cranking out articles of chaotic beauty whilst explaining the positive sides of marijuana and/or wine or the death knell of democracy in Roswell, New Mexico, of all places. He is what I always wanted to be— a freethinker— one who allows the words to write themselves out of a sense of moral obligation or whatever he thinks it is.
Before I begin this, a little heads up. Fort Worth, that bastion of musical lugubriation which has been producing worthy quarter and eighth note treatises since before Rock was born, is gracing us with two projects of which you need to be aware. One involves Jim Colegrove and cohort Roscoe West (and a cast of others) who have come together in a group calling themselves Men of Extinction. With music dipped in Country & Western and old-time Rock with a little Soul thrown in on the side, they have put together a very tasty and sometimes humorous album titled We Made It Ourselves. And they did.
I should be writing about important things but this week I thought I would take a left turn and explain how we got to where we are, musically. Or at least one small leg of the journey.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I printed a piece about reality and each person’s perspective of it. I used Big Star as an example of how reality can be warped (read it here). I used The Wailers and The Sonics in a similar piece (read that here). Is there no end to my ego?
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 