Music the way God intended. Sweet Sioux City Sue! (an ‘Ioway’ song)

Yeah so its Monday and I need a padded bar stool with a back (the armrests were a bonus) for many hours at a hobby bench. The hard seat of a wooden stool with no back just wasn’t cutting it (I can’t believe how many years I put up with it). There’s a snotty little charity thrift shop called Overflow Thrift just up the street so I go up there. “Closed on Mondays”. So I look up the number for the Gilbert Consignment Shop; “Closed on Mondays”. So I came home, went to Walmart.com, found this beauty that’s just perfect (padded/swivel/adjustable/with armrests) for $120. The only downside is it won’t be here for a week. I guess I can wait a week rather than drive all over creation and settling for something that isn’t quite what I wanted!

[9/7/21 update: Online can’t get it here either. How do you operate in a mail order business for years and be so incompetent at the art of shipping? It was supposed to be here today, Tuesday. 5 pm comes so I check online to see where its at; “delayed“. Now its set for Thursday 9/9. The Fed Ex facility in Grimes, Iowa let me down. They’re holding it hostage. I haven’t received a ransom note yet. See that’s the part that kills be, there weren’t any delays in taking my money, boom! They did that first day. No the delay is why it took the warehouse 3 days to give it to the Fed Ex man? And secondly, why did it sit in Grimes for 3 days?]

Boone-o’clock at the Fairgrounds! (“You’ll shoot your eye out kid!”) The most sought after item? More rare than even printer ink? Pistol primers! Can you use too many exclamation points in one paragraph? I don’t think so! Then you have the gun show equivalent of a loaf of bread, 115 gr FMJ 9mm, what will its price be? Ammo Seek has it at .33 cents a round, which works out to $16.50 a box. But as there is a godawful amount of shipping charge tacked onto that ($20), say 5 boxes ($82.50), it then makes it $102.50, or $20.50 a box. I bet the gun show people will be trying for $30.

Pistol primers? As elusive as Elvis, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster? (spellcheck doesn’t recognize “Loch Ness”) I bet they don’t even have any! I’ll update tonight. Mainly the sellers are old farts who just like to take around the same hunks a junk forever, just loading and unloading from one show to the next. Swear to God they don’t seem all that interested in whether they sell stuff or not. Besides, most “gun shows” for the last 18 months have been selling mostly jerky and jelly!

[8/27 6:30 pm update: Oh my gawd the criminal class never changes! Gypsies, tramps and thieves. 1 guy had primers, $125 per 1,000. Mail order (if they had them) have them priced averaging $80 bucks a box. As I drove over there I said to myself “I’ll pay $100”. But gun runners always have to squeeze a little bit more. .45 Colt on the box said $40.21, that’s fair. When I handed him 2 boxes he went to his computer and said “$86.00”. Well you keep them buddy. 9 mm was around $23. One guy had 100 rounds of Winchester white box for $56. Dude, I can get 100 rounds for $44.]

And why did so much of it come from England? I mean the English don’t get anything else right (food, basketball, war fighting), why music? Okay they do pretty good with movies and tennis, but they ruled the world with their music. I think I just answered my own question: “Where did all the music go?” I kept looking at America, when it was really the collapse of English society that made music disappear.

Hell, they don’t even call themselves ‘England’ anymore. What’s up with that? Now they’re “Brits”. I think their society collapsed when they kicked Winston Churchill to the curb. They were some alright blokes up until then. And when I talk about their musical dominance I’m not even talking about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. I just found another one last night, the Dave Clark 5.

Its kind of like the Jewish control of Hollywood, I didn’t realize the extent of it for years. In this case (I might get one wrong) The Fortunes, Yes, The Who, Elo, Black Sabbath, Queen, The Kinks, The Clash, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Genesis, The Kinks, Elton John, Cream, Bad Company, Derek and the Dominos, Ten Years After, Status Quo, Cliff Richards, Chris Rea, Badfinger, Polly Browne & Pickettywitch …

Then you get into Canadian groups, what the hell’s that about?? Rush, Guess Who, BTO? William Shatner, well, he’s like a group, and he did have an album. I always wondered what happened to “American” music, and a large part of it was never American to begin with! I thought Fleetwood Mac was at least American, but its part British too! And completely ridiculous!

I have said forever (only half jokingly) that music died in 1976 with Foghat’s ‘Slow Ride‘. That’s not too far from the truth. I finally had to do a post on it when last night I stumbled upon the above video, ‘I’m Just a Singer in a Rock & Roll Band!’. Watch that video, its genius on so many levels, and the drummer’s an animal. Thanks to the comment section I found out the genesis for that song was the god-like importance they were being given by their fans (life was a little weird in the late 60’s and 70’s).

But until this morning, I thought the collapse was solely American, and now I see music disappeared from the entire globe. Why is that? Is it just me? I’m sorry but I look back to that era, and I see giants: Three Dog Night, Doobie Brothers, CCR, Eagles, Supremes, Shirelles, Earth Wind & Fire, Fifth Dimension, America, Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, The Ronettes, The Chiffons, The Four Seasons, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Temptations, Seals and Crofts, The Carpenters, Dan Fogelberg, Rare Earth. I don’t see anyone like that today. All I see are Munchkins! Damn little hairy Munchkins! No giants, none! Zero, zip, nadda.

Anyway, I don’t know where it went, I just know its gone.

[I didn’t even really get into the solo artists, Elvis, Billy Joel, B.J. Thomas, John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Peter Frampton, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Mama Cass, Otis Redding, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Linda Ronstadt, Judy Collins, Dick Dale, Todd Rundgren, Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash. And I forgot a ton of groups, Van Halen, ZZ Top, Beach Boys, Jay and the Americans, The Lettermen, The Osmonds, Alan Parsons Project, Bellamy Brothers, Poison, Snake (white snake?), Raspberries, Spiral Staircase, The Hollies, Righteous Brothers, Ike & Tina Turner, Santana, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds, Bay City Rollers, KC & the Sunshine Band, Bee Gees, Danny and the Juniors and on and on and on. I even see it in the comment section on YouTube, twenty something’s saying, “Man, I wish I grew up in that era.” I don’t think its just me. It just occurred to me that back then your “entertainment” (outside of friends and sports activities) was movies, music on the radio, 3 channels on the television, books, magazines and church. Now you have the entire world of the internet. Another indicator of the time was Woodstock (‘music in the mud’), that could never happen today. Not no way, not no how.]

[Just saw this in YouTube comments: “Whenever I hear songs like Whiter Shade of Pale I am struck by how awful today’s music really is. The current crop of performers (not really singer’s, are they?) could never write songs of this calibre, let alone an entire album containing such greatness. So glad I was an 80’s/90’s teen, the last great era of modern music.”]