Reflections on Robert Ellis's The Lights from the Chemical Plant

Robert Ellis first album Photographs (2011) was a revelation for me. There are a number of shades to the album. On the one hand, on the B-side you've got the sounds of a "Dim Lights, Big Smoke and Loud, Loud Music" kind of smokey honky tonk, the type of place where there used to be a mechanical bull but it's now rusty and broken because the bar, which serves Bud, PBRs and straight whiskey, couldn't pay the liability insurance on it. On the other hand, you've got the tender stories that begin when looking at old photographs. The album, appropriately titled, features old photographs of  Ellis's parents in their teenage days and inside you've got older photos, the kind that you could spend an afternoon looking at with grandma who has baked some cookies and made some watered down tea. 

I was immediately entranced by Photographs. Maybe it was the nostalgia of looking at old photos or imagining looking at old photos. Being his first commercially released album, Ellis gives us an introduction to himself and name-checks what one would assume are his influences in "Comin' Home" when he sings "I got Lefty, Willie, Hank, and Townes to keep me company, I'm headed back to Houston, headed back to see baby," referring to Lefty Frizzell, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt. One can hear the influence of all of those greats, but given Ellis's youth and the inherent tragedy in some of his songs, I can't help but think that we're hearing a twenty-first century Hank Williams. What a compliment that is, but Ellis is maybe that good; he's like that one-in-a-billion meteor that we got in the short-lived life of Hank. 

Like Hank, Ellis is older than his years. A voice that seems capable of contemplating, of making time-honored affiliations, Ellis connects images beautifully. Coming home, returning to one's roots, seems really important to Ellis, and Lights from the Chemical Plant  (2014) features a song entitled "Houston," the second longest song which features both excellent storytelling and great musicianship. Ellis seems really good at connecting images from the past and this tradition, which he lays out beautifully on Photographs, continues on Lights from the Chemical Plant. I don't know how old Ellis is (really young, though, apparently 22 at the time of Photographs, so 25 now by my basic arithmetic),  and I don't claim to know anything about him, other than what I've heard on his 2 albums. His Wikipedia entry said he recently relocated from Houston to Nashville, but he grew up real baptist in Lake Jackson, Texas, according to an interview I was able to find. On "Houston" he sings "From Houston I'm movin' tonight/I've got to pick up and wipe the slate clean/Oh, Houston I'm losin' the fight/You remind me of too many things." These feelings I've felt myself, too, and the rest of the song does a wonderful job of telling the story of breaking up with a former life, with a city, a place and a time. Reinventing yourself is the most American thing you can do, and we live in a strange, wonderful country where this is possible, and listening to Ellis's music, you know it's possible.

I don't know much about Houston. My only connection to Houston is driving through the city on a long road trip that began driving the Mississippi River Route, starting in Kansas and heading down to New Orleans by way of Memphis and Natchez and then returning to Kansas through Houston. We drove through Houston late at night. I knew it had bad traffic and I didn't even want to know what Houston traffic was like. All I remember was driving through the city listening to the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, one of the most important albums for me, and it was real late. The lights were kinda funny; there was a smokey quality to the air, the music was like a strange space voyage and Houston hit me hard ,though our encounter was brief. 

The other connection to Houston I have is from Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas, one of my favorite films of all time and one that also deals with diving deep into memories. A lot of the film takes place in Houston, as does the climatic scene in which Travis, the main character, converses with an ex-love through the one-way mirror of a Houston striptease club. 

Ellis's music is like this. Coming back to a place,  to a time, speaking to someone through a one-way mirror. It's deep and dark and sad, but it's rooted and focused. When I first heard the title of his new album, The Lights from the Chemical Plant, it once again returned me to that road trip when we drove through Houston, but this time it recalled when we entered Texas through Louisiana and drove through Port Arthur, Texas, and we got lost driving through these old post-industrial chemical factories and oil refineries, and it was awful and strange--it was dusk and the town was a disaster and all these plants were spewing out horrible pollution, but there was something more there,  and it was my first real impression of Texas, and it was wild and I loved it in its wide-open way.  

The musicianship on both albums  is excellent. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the pedal steel guitar, as anybody who has ever loved old timey American music. Jerry Garcia, one of the most impressive practitioners of the pedal steel, famously said "I would love to play the pedal steel if I had another lifetime in which to play it," and yet he still left a wonderful lifetime of work on the instrument-- with his wonderful pedal steel playing with Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills and Nash, and New Riders of the Purple Sage albums. Will Van Horn is also outstanding on Lights from the Chemical Plant and Photographs. I particularly like the playing on "Steady as the Rising Sun" and "Pride" on the new album and "What's in it for me" on Photographs. "Steady as the Rising Sun" is one of the prettiest songs I've heard in a long time and it took a real mature band to make that song because it sounds like it could be from any era--initial impression is 1950s classic country, but there's more there that requires peeling through the onion layers. Another wonderful addition is Ellis's cover of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," a song that has always made me think of Lupe, my border collie mix who is still crazy after all these years. It's a wonderful rendition that reveals some new depth to and a different look at Ellis. 

While Photographs reveres the old timey classic country music that profoundly influenced him, clearly chronicling it, Lights from the Chemical Plant has a more contemporary feel and sets out a new direction for Ellis. The photographs inside the album are reminiscent of the photos on Magnolia Electric Co's Fading Trails and Ellis's music has more of the more somber tones that Jason Molina was able to achieve with Songs:Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. You can tell that there's a lot more to Ellis than just the Hank and Willie and Lefty and Townes, a whole lot more, and Ellis makes reference to this new direction in an interview I found that he gave when touring Photographs. He says, "...at this point, a lot of what we are doing is sometimes a little too far out from what may be expected as 'country.' I find that a lot more of the people who like what we doing are more open-minded, like the younger folks, and are people I would say that would not call themselves fans of country music." 

Here Ellis is at this strange crossroads of making American music but not wanting to be associated with a lot of the horrible commercial country music that seems so popular nowadays. He's smart, gifted and mature, takes time to obsess over the important details, recognizes where he came from, and should give a great new direction to American music. I can't recommend his work enough.

John Coltrane: The Translation of Energy into Sound

If each great musician presents us a thesis, an overarching idea that encompasses all of their work, the thesis behind John Coltrane, what he offers to those of us who listen, his great contribution to the world, is the transfer and translation of energy into sound.

Along with Miles Davis's various groups during the 1950s and 60s, the John Coltrane Quartet and its classic period from 1962-1965 is probably the most influential Jazz group of all time and, in a way, you could say that all Jazz since then has flowed from the influence of the groups formed by Miles and Coltrane. Like all of the Jazz from the Glory Years (the bop and hard bop), Trane's work stems from his contact with Charlie "Bird" Parker. As Trane said, "the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes."

Coltrane's canonical 1957 recording with Blue Note, Blue Train, could be the swingingest album of all time and should be in anybody's record collection, even non-Jazz fans. This period between 1957-1960 is incredibly busy and he plays on Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue (1959), which also should be in the record collection of any self-respecting music appreciator. Here we get some more impressionistic playing on a modal jazz based more on modes than chord changes. And in evidence is what jazz critics have called Coltrane's "sheets of sound" which feature him playing hundreds, almost thousands of notes per minute, streaming by like sheets of sound.

With Cannonball, Miles and Bill Evans recording Kind of Blue (1959)

The most prominent example of the sheets of sound is on Coltrane's album Giant Steps (1960). "Giant Steps" contains probably the most complex and difficult chord progressions of any Jazz composition and features what has become known as "Coltrane changes," which employ chromatic third relations and multi-tonic changes and use substitute chords over common jazz chord progressions. What we get with the sheets of sound is the translation of a mad energy into sound. The original recording from Atlantic records is hilarious because Trane just wails and takes us to another dimension with his sheets of sound and then we get to Tommy Flanagan's turn to solo on the piano and he just flails. He can't keep up with the blistering pace that Trane has set and he just about gives up midway through his chorus.

But to say that Trane stopped there would be selling us short, as he continually evolved these complex changes throughout his career and takes them out further and further until his death in 1967. For me, Coltrane really peaks in 1964 with albums like A Love Supreme, a spiritual about a love supreme for God and my personal favorite Crescent. 

Coltrane's work with the Classic Quartet (1962-65), with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, really is the perfect blend of experimentation, of free jazz and anti-jazz but with a melodic and harmonic form that still gives the group a solid foundation. A Love Supreme is a culmination of his work and is an ode to faith and love for God. This spirituality would continue to influence his playing. The fourth movement of A Love Supreme is "Psalm" and is based on a poem Coltrane wrote to God, with exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, with the phrasing based on the actual words. The story I've heard, which I'm not sure if it's true, is that in 1957 Coltrane quit heroin by locking himself in a room for 3 weeks and just playing his horn. And this refuge  gave him an epiphany. And the way I see it an epiphany that lasted for 10 years until his death--a lucid clarity and sharpness that built on his formidable skills as a musician prior to quitting his addiction. He was already one of the best sax players of all time and then he takes it to a whole new level with the work that just builds and builds until his death. Coltrane found God and his music is a translation of that spiritual energy into sound.

Coltrane was later canonized by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and I remember when I lived in San Francisco going to the St. John Coltrane Church and people would translate God's energy into sound and just blow on instruments. The translation of energy into sound in its purest form. Music is as close to the spiritual as I can get. Coltrane found God. And when you listen carefully, you can find God, too.

Like a lot of Jazz, Coltrane takes standards, reinterprets them in a way that is original and more complex than the original, in such a way that you get a richer appreciation for the composer. This is the case for how Coltrane interprets Rogers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. "My Favorite Things" is featured on a number of Coltrane albums and every time Coltrane takes it deeper and deeper, including an 18-minute version on Newport '63. The trance-like vamp Indian raga achieved by the quartet on the original recording is pulsating, haunting and is a perfect picture of a quartet in total lock-step--Jimmy Garrison propelling the group with a simple but smooth bass line, Elvin Jones quietly but energetically spurring the group on with quiet fills, and McCoy Tyner in the background, never taking over but directing the improvisation of Coltrane with a pulsating vamp that carries the group forward. The version on Live At The Village Vanguard Again! (1966), with wife Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, goes into the ridiculous, hyper-kinetic explosive stuff that borders on the insane and clocks in at 26 minutes with a long intro.

When we think of Coltrane, we usually remember his blistering sheets of sound. But one of his great albums is simply titled Ballads (1963), which features standards like "Too Young to Go Steady," "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Nancy (With the Laughing Face." Coltrane's energy shines through but in softer palettes and at much slower speeds. Coltrane achieved such a wonderful sound--too hard for some, but his playing on other ballads like "Naima" is even deeper, more energetic than the more up tempo tunes associated with him.

With the spiritual Eastern tinge that Coltrane found in the early sixties, McCoy Tyner quietly but elegantly keeps the spirit of John Coltrane's music alive with albums like The Real McCoy (1967), Fly with the Wind (1976) and Extensions (1970), all of which are five-star albums. Extensions features Alice Coltrane on harp and Fly with the Wind puts together unusual instrumentation with oboe and strings and some of the most smoking drumming by Billy Cobham. Coltrane's spirit lives on. His energy continues pulsing in smart, spiritual music that inspires and takes us further.

Coltrane, along with Miles and Duke Ellington, was one of our greatest American interpreters of music, and what we can do now is celebrate him by playing his music over and over again.

5-14-1974. Missoula, Montana. Dave's Pick 9: A Review

After missing gems like 11-17-1973 and 10-22-71 in the first 2 rounds of the Dave's Picks subscriptions series, I finally succumbed to ordering the third round of subscriptions. Yes, they're CDs. And CDs are dead as a media form. But who cares?

And the beauty is in the surprise. Like being at a concert and waiting for a particular tune and then they either play it or surprise you with something even better, it'll be like Christmas here the 4 times this year that a Dave's Pick, a selection from any one or a combination of the Grateful Dead's 2500+ shows, comes to my house. I'm really game for anything from any era. 60s Primal Dead, the Glory Years of 72-74, with the totally original blend of Americana and jazzy psychedelia, the almost perfectly perfect years of the late 70s, the sometimes off but really-on-when-they're-on shows of the mid-80s, there's always a surprise. I'll even take a pick from the 90s. There is so much to choose from with the huge body of work the Dead left us in their 2500+ shows. Some fans have complained that there is too much emphasis on the 70s with the Dave's Picks series, but there really is a deep, deep well to tap there.

Though I'm a fan of all eras of the Dead, let's be totally honest. I'm totally overjoyed that the first pick is from 1974 and features the Dead at the very peak of their jamming. If you believe in the dichotomy of songs versus jams or 1st set versus 2nd set tunes or warm-ups versus deep spacey space jazz hiatuses, 1974 is the year of some of the most powerful jams, which isn't to say the songs are bad. It's just that the jams are what make the year stand out. But this pick has both wonderful extended jams and tasty songs. 

And as a historical side note, the most recent pick represents the Dead's only show in Montana, which is surprising given that Montana, with its strange country vibe, seems like a very Dead kinda place.

Love the Moose and Dancing Bears here. Perfect for Missoula.

5-14-1974 from Missoula, Montana has arrived and it's time to dig into it a bit here, and here are my impressions after several listening sessions:

The first thing I need to mention about the show is its crystal clear sound. With 23 tons of equipment that took 12 hours to set up, the 459-speaker Wall of Sound wasn't about blasting people's eardrums away but making laser sharp clear sound, which is the case for all recordings from 1974, when the Dead were so ahead of their time in terms of sound. (Check out my post here about the Dead's revolutionary sound equipment.)  All fans of this era know that there is one slight defect with the tinny effect to the vocals. But that's a compromise to be made when there is the huge booming bass of Phil Lesh coming in full effect. I can think of no other time other than '73-'74 when Phil's bass shines so clearly and spectacularly. And I'm the type of guy that if I'm reading reviews of a show and someone chimes in with "Phil's dropping huge bass bombs on this one," then I'm in. And Missoula is no different. Phil explodes across both sets, and so do the rest of the band members. Sound: 5/5 stars.

Setting up the Wall of Sound. Sheer work of genius.

Though "Bertha" is a great opening song, after my first listening I thought that the first set didn't really get cooking until the Dead do their rendition of Johnny Cash's "Big River," and in 1973-74 the Dead's version beats any Grand Ole Opry version--just smoking, it leaves the audience exuberant and the band also seems to take note of the high emotion they created in the crowd. The"Brown Eyed Women" that follows deserves multiple listens, as it doesn't have the long, sweet, smooth Jerry solos of versions from '77 or the more down home country feel of '72 versions, but the Dead are lock tight, playing on all cylinders, and this might be my new favorite version. When I listened to the first set again, I don't know what I was thinking on my first listen: just about every song here is cooking, starting with that "Bertha," one of my personal favorites "Me and My Uncle;" "Loser" is powerful, even "Mexicali Blues" is good. But I must have been sleeping on the new at that time "Scarlet Begonias"-->"It Must Have Been the Roses" played with energy and verve. Even the audience is singing a nice harmony with Jerry and Donna on "It Must Have Been the Roses." Great versions here, folks! 

The "Playing in the Band" that ends the first set is slow, introspective and at one point sloppy. There is a missed transition before the reprise, and because of  it we are treated to not just one but two Donna howls in the reprise of the melody. But the meat in the middle of the song is where it happens.When the drums stop for a bit, Phil, Bobby, Jerry, and even Keith take the spaceship out to the ninth dimension. Phil's bass is, as mentioned before, just booming and grooving, especially on this "Playing." And at no time I can think of is Bobby Weir's comping on rhythm guitar just so rhythmically and harmonically original. Nobody was doing what Bobby was doing. Bobby's big hands give him the ability to construct totally wacky, jazzy chords, and the best comparison I can think of is how his strange chords and heavily rhythmic playing are like those of McCoy Tyner, pianist in John Coltrane's quartet. Missoula is one of the best examples of this unique playing style and this version of "Playing" is just an absolute clinic on Bobby's totally original rhythm guitar strumming. 

"Playing" was always a vehicle for Jerry to display his rich grasp of American music in long solos, and you can identify the Jazz, Folk, Space Rock influences here, just like any of the other just marvelous versions of "Playing" that were consistently on display in the 72-74 period, but it's Phil and Bobby who are really cooking here.The unsung hero of this "Playing," who I do not praise nearly enough on this blog, is Billy, whose drumming is just masterful and defines the genre of Space Jazz drumming. Like a number of Dead songs, "Playing" has a strange time signature, 10/4, and Billy really kills it with hyperkinetic work on the cymbals, snare and high-hat, and really moves the band throughout most of the song. Great version at a slower tempo than the classic '72 versions, and if it weren't for the sloppy transition at the end, which gave the spaceship a bumpy landing, it would really reach into the canon of utter Dead greatness.

Jerry and Bobby circa 1974 in deep jam form

1st set: 5/5 stars

Another song that requires multiple listens to really appreciate is "Row Jimmy" in the second slot of the second set. Slow, tender, felt, you could miss it if you weren't paying attention, but it's subtle swaying beauty and Jerry's slide solo are a real treat. The band, once again, is lock tight with a shy groove.

Then we move into the real meat of the show: the spacey jam section. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Bobby Weir mentions how songs grow and age and take on a life of their own. Songs are living things and this notion is especially true with the Dead, who play a song differently every night. Weir even mentions how some songs go to sleep for awhile. ""Dark Star" went to sleep for a long time and then came back," Weir said, referring to how the Dead stopped playing one of their most requested tunes between 1974 and 1978 (and at other times). 

The Dead only played "Dark Star" 4 times in 1974 and this version is as deep and as dark as they come during an era when the Dead were peaking in their ability to explore deep space with long jams. The Dead weren't just playing in paragraphs but long, detailed and textured novels. And the "Dark Star" from Missoula is an outstanding example of the Dead's ability to play novels. It comes in a wonderful sandwich squeezed between "Weather Report Suite" and "China Doll," so that we get just under 52 minutes of uninterrupted brilliance from the band at the peak of their abilities to extend long-winded improvisation together. "Weather Report Suite" just streams out of the mountains crystal clear, exploratory but tight and then the deep, dark pull of "Dark Star" pulls us out of the perfect Western landscape of the "Suite" and takes us, once again, way out to outer space. The "Weather Report Suite" is so good it almost made me cry on first listen and rivals the wonderful '73 Winterland versions of it, but the 6-28-74 version captured on Dick's Picks 12 and the 28-minute medley jam that follows it still might take the cake. The "Suite" builds and we have a quick transition into "Dark Star" that builds slowly but deliberately in the 12-minute prelude to the first verse and is filled with very intricate rhythm guitar work from Bobby and delicate, masterful soloing from Jerry and some polyrhythmic drumming from Billy. Minutes 10-12 are extraordinary with some subtle work by Phil who plays his bass like a cello or the tenor in the quartet: swift, in line with the guitars, rather than below them. Keith is quietly shining here, too, on the keys as he does in most of this show, standing out in his "Loser" fills, a "Big River" solo that cooks and at a few other moments, like the "Not Fade Away" that will come after the "Dark Star." 

At about 19 minutes into the "Dark Star," we hear Jerry's fingers going warp speed across the fretboard, taking us to one of the weirdest sounds I've heard since the wild droning of the space rocket engines taking off in the middle of the "Other One" jam from 12-19-73, which is quite literally the most interesting sound I've ever heard in my life and is something I can only listen to about once or twice a year because the sound makes my bones tingle in such a strange way. This is the most out I have ever heard the Dead play and is really not for the uninitiated. The sounds made in minutes 19-21 of the "Dark Star" are about as weird as they come. 

The last 4 minutes of this "Dark Star" come at a blustering pace--hyperkinetic, polyrhythmic, explosive, this is the Dead taking music and sound to another level--and then suddenly, magically, we transition into the quietest, prettiest moment of the show as "China Doll" begins. One wonders what hand signals or musical cues are given between the band members because this switch between wild, chaotic, exuberant playing to a quiet, clear "China Doll" happens so smoothly and quickly and really reveals the band playing as a collective unit--beyond telepathic, one mind, completely focused.

What's hilarious is how a reviewer of the concert from the Missoulian just didn't get what the Dead were all about and wrote of this section: "But the night was not all roses. One incoherent jam in the four-hour concert rambled on for 40 minutes." Just listening to the recording of this "Dark Star" 40 years later is frightening, but it must have been truly mind-bending at the show, and easily impossible to grasp for the uninitiated. Had I been there, I might have run out of the building screaming in absolute fear. The ethereal quality of a well-played "Dark Star" can be almost too much to handle. But really that's what the Dead were really about: Taking music to places it had never been before. And as much as I love this version of "Dark Star," and the wonderful places it can take the listener, it's the Dead's ability to follow the seeming "rambling incoherence" of a deeply spacey "Dark Star" with a song that is so crystal clear, so pristine, so focused with such rich poignant purpose in "China Doll" that does it. The Dead could go from the ninth dimension of a universe far, far away to a deeply rooted laudanum-laden country western tale about a pistol play gone bad told with an absolute precision at the turn of a dime. 

Missoula's version of "Dark Star," by the way, belongs in the canon of 2/27/69, 2/13/70, 10/31/71, 8/27/72, 9/21/72, and 11/11/73 "Dark Stars," all perfect but different. We can see a natural progression over the years and the growth of the song over time. And wow did it grow. It's nearly impossible for me to pick a favorite from these--lately I've been partial to 11/11/73, but re-listening to this Missoula version and especially the last 5 minutes shows the total progression of the Dead and their dedication to each other and to improvisation. Absolutely spellbinding. Each "Dark Star" shows a deep development and this one fits into the progression. 

What's crazy is that after 50 of the most intensely serious minutes of music, we get a rousing, barn-burning, totally un-serious version of Chuck Berry's 1964 "Promised Land," which is just a warm-up for a "Not Fade Away"-->"Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" that knocks the socks off. If Jerry was at an 11 for the earlier part of the show, following the logic of Nigel in the mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" (check this link to watch the discussion of amps going to 11), Jerry goes to 13 during both Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad." He really knocks it out of the park here, folks! What's amazing is that after the spacey section of the second set, we go from Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly to Woody Guthrie, 3 of the most important American composers I can think of. Second set: 7 out of 5 stars.

It's this sort of versatility displayed in the "Weather Report Suite"-->"Dark Star"-->"China Doll" collective stream of consciousness that makes me believe that the Dead probably had/have the richest repertoire in American music. Their songwriting is genius in its storytelling abilities, both in a musical and a lyrical way, as Hunter's lyrics tell the story of the nomadic West in a way that is poignant but leaves so much up to the imagination. It's not just their songwriting but their interpretation of other American classics, like those of Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry.The Dead took their songs and made them their own. They were deliberately apolitical and the power of their message was so palpable because it didn't conk the listener over the head with a social or political agenda, leaving the listener to make it up in his/her head and blend into the creative design of the Dead world. For me, the Dead tell a more complete story of the West, of a wild America of the sixties and seventies and times before, like the gold mining days in California, with just as much richness as the best of the folk troubadours. 

The Dead's creativity still seems under-appreciated, as their ability to create utterly new music with new twists and turns every night left us with a body of work that is staggeringly immense, unique and utterly telling of us as a people: the American West in its most purest form. 

What we get in '74 is a band that has been together at least 200 nights a year for almost 10 years straight, who'd see one key band member die and another leave (temporarily), whose bonds of brotherhood must have been so incredibly strong (almost frayed and fatigued by 1974, which is why they took their hiatus in 1975 and 1976. But the word hiatus is a strange because of the sheer volume of work they were able to achieve in those "hiatus" years.) And because of those bonds the band's collective mindset was perfect for orchestrating longwinded, incredibly sophisticated and drawn-out Jams that I believe are the peak of American improvisatory music, rivaling even the works of two of my favorite Jazzers, Miles Davis and John Coltrane and all of the players who played with them, who also are at the pinnacle of improvisational music. But what also surprises with Missoula is not just the jams, but the songs are really at their peak here, too. Between "Row Jimmy,""Brown-Eyed Women,""Loser," a brand new "Scarlet Begonias," even "Tennessee Jed" impresses, you've got some subtle yet distinctively beautiful tunes for the American songbook. The Wild West at its best. 

There have been many "jam bands" that have followed in the wake of the Dead--some, more technically proficient--but they pale in comparison with the rich body of work the Dead have offered us. The Dead were master imitators, and I mean this in the best way, before they had many imitators themselves. They were studied scholars of American musical history, perfectly synthesizing so many genres that are distinctly American--country, bluegrass, Jazz, minstrel, blues--in a totally unique way. The "Weather Report Suite"-->"Dark Star"-->"China Doll" stream is really the American West at its best. Wild with reckless abandon, one sees landscapes beyond description in their mind's eye while listening. 

Like all meaningful music and most music by the Dead, Missoula demands multiple listens in order to appreciate. And it's staggering once you appreciate it. Unfathomable that it hadn't been released commercially before. 



kendall.whitney@gmail.com

Will you take me as I am, California?

I recently went back home to California and it's taken me a while to chew on my visit, because it hit me hard, like it always does, because it's home and it's so much more than home. Like all returns, the trip back reminded me of who I am and not just where I came from, but how far I've gone since leaving home, yet how badly I need home because it's me. It's in my blood. It flows through me and when I'm there I feel alive. California's home and it's so much more. It's the pain of knowing what could have been had I stayed, of seeing a Paradise Lost. 

When I left California, I did the most Californian thing I could possibly have done. Because California is about the spirit of going further, the spirit of adventure, seeking life and the exuberant joys and deep pains it brings you. Leaving California and being on the run, I've lived in 2 continents and traveled many tens of thousands of miles through all the states west of the Mississippi. And I've experienced places of beauty, like the Northern Cascades, and places that made me feel at home, like Lawrence, Kansas, but no place has marked me, formed me, hurt me, yet made me feel the exquisite ecstasy quite like California. And I take it with me everywhere I go. 

People have come to California since it became California and it's been a melting pot and the United States's most diverse state since the times of the Gold Rush. California's name came from a mythical island populated by Amazons from a 16th century chivalric novel Las Sergas de Esplandián. Caliph is a word that came to Spain, like many Spanish words, from the Arabic, and means the caliph's domain, a place of infidel rebellion. 

In 1849, prosperous farmers crossed the continent putting themselves at risk of cholera and starvation--Indian raids, contrary to popular belief, were rarer than lightning strikes--just to make it to the Promised Land and the place of infidel rebellion. 

Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" should be California's anthem, but no artist captures the spirit of California quite like Joni Mitchell in her song "California" from the 1971 album Blue. Blue is one of human creativity's greatest achievements and has always been an album that has hit me devastatingly hard. Anybody who has felt the deep pangs of love--the joy, the tremendous sorrow, the pain that aches in your heart years later, will be hit by Blue like a freight train. Joni bares it all, giving us everything, the honest view of a 28-year-old who has loved and lost. The album's 6th song is "California" and it always makes me a bit homesick. I remember listening to its opening lines during a cold winter living in Barcelona--the cold was made horrible by the thin walls of the ancient building I lived in--as Joni describes sitting on a park in Paris and thinking about how "old and cold and settled in its ways" Europe is and it struck a deep chord with me in my homesickness, making my heart ache for California, which is just the opposite of those old, cold, settled ways. 

What is poignant is how Joni, from a small town in Saskatchewan sings about California as if it's her home.  In my last year living in California, I was with a Irish girl and what struck me when I first played her Joni's "California" was that she said California was the only home she could have known except for Ireland, a place for which she had deep nationalistic feelings. And that sentiment, which Joni expresses so well in the song and with the line "Will you take me as I am, California?" is something that resonates. California, for better or worse, will take people as they are. And it's an exuberant love that comes with calling California home for those many millions who have made the pilgrimage to call it their home. California will take people as they are. It will take those pilgrims as they are, even if it was the state that most systematically exterminated the Indians to make room for these people coming from around the globe.

Despite the mass extermination of  more than 130,000 Indians, California has been a land of acceptance, of taking people as they are. We can talk about the gold rush and the internet, but California's main business has been as a refuge for the freaks, the weirdos and anybody who wasn’t accepted wherever they came from and found a home, a paradise, in California. When you arrive in California, it's like you made it. A paradise beyond description, where even extreme hyperbole does not do it justice. The redwoods, bigger than your imagination, the deserts at the edge of extreme, the decadence of the old palaces and miners' bars in what was the Emporium of the Pacific, San Francisco, and LA, not a city but 100s of square miles of just about everything, from the most popular and extravagant celebrities to the most down and out desperados, and just about anything in between. 

A Golgotha of sin, California’s air of transience makes resonate the idea that anything’s possible. Any wild long journey across a continent will do that to you. It infects you with optimism.  It's the American Dream on steroids, and when it gets weird and strange and colorful, it’s like the American Dream on highly potent acid.

The California Dream

California is still reinventing itself, taking the 21st century gold miners who come to the state to build apps and make the devices that control our thoughts and start the companies that are reinventing our world. 

What's special about California is that it will take you as you are. What's also true is the notion that when you're in California, you can say to anybody, "I came here from somewhere else, just like everybody else." And it's true. Everybody is from somewhere else. Even the legacy Californians who may have 4 or 5 generations of Californian in them, they're so rare, and their families still came from somewhere else.  

Starting with my fishing buddy Anthony and his family from Italy, everybody in California is from somewhere else. And we started by going to a fishing spot we call the House. I call it the Compound. We’ve always seen it with the windows closed and it looked like a compound to me. But Anthony’s boss knew the guy who built the House, the last one on the utility grid between Pescadero and Santa Cruz. The guy who built the strange house was an Economics professor at Stanford who predicted the 2008-09 housing crisis and all of its implications and wrote a book about it in the early 70s whose name I can’t remember. And he died before he could enjoy the strange house, which is really a long, long hall with elegant rooms straight out of Sunset Magazine that are practically pure windows. And when you’re inside the windows are made of some glass that truly enhances your vision of the ocean below, making the light of the sea dance. 

The Compound

As we drove down to the Compound, somewhere between San Gregorio and Pescadero, we saw a school of hundreds and hundreds of dolphins, jumping in the air. They were intermixed with seals who also must have been chasing a bait fish of some kind. Anthony’s boss made us some delicious Bloody Mary’s and his wife made some delicious sandwiches which were made more delicious after sitting by the blustery sea air.

And then we spent the afternoon at Sam’s Chowder House drinking cocktails. With a sunset over the satellite dish by Maverick’s Beach, where Kirk Lombard, the Intertidal Harvester, sea forager of epic proportions searches for horseneck clams. I’ll even kiss the sunset...

And then it was golf in paradise. And below the magnificent Ritz-Carlton, right under the golf course, we get the remains of a strange brokedown palace reminiscent of the head of the Statue of Liberty in the classic Planet of Apes, the climatic scene at the end when we see what remains after the destruction of Earth that takes place. It’s a great revelation--this horrible strange world where the Apes rule and humans are subjects is actually Earth and we see the remains on this remote beach not too different from the beach in Half Moon Bay right under the Ritz-Carlton. This apocalyptic future right under the decadence of the Ritz. 

Punto Mónico Sur: the Brokedown Palace

And karaoke in Korea Town in Santa Clara after a smashing Korean meal. Guns n’ Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Patience,” every Johnny Cash song in the book. Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock.” And last but not least “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

The beggar man in front of my home town coffee shop who has been there just about all of my 30-some years--He probably takes the train in from his 1.3 million dollar house in Hillsborough, we’ve all said my whole life and maybe it’s true.

And before leaving, drinks at my first local, the Dutch Goose, with my junior high gym teacher.

With Mr. I

California never fails to impress. It’s just beyond dreams.

Beyond Dreams

Canonical Business Books: The Checklist Manifesto

The problem with business books is that they are like lessons on how to draw an owl. (See Seth Godin's blog post on this subject, but the diagram below should explain what I mean.) 

My beef with business books is that they tend to promise so much and oversimplify a solution while providing too many details to support a thesis that is usually based on generalities. Like, "if you do this (author's thesis here), your business will be wildly successful." The supporting examples provided are usually squished in to prove the author's thesis, but taken in a different context could prove other entirely different theses. 

Usually, a business book will make a fine point, one that could be synthesized into a 2-page document, while the rest of the book will leave me feeling like I wasted my time. After making its point, there are chapters of support (always good) but the examples given, even while they seem like "classic" examples that occur in every company, never seem to resonate well. The chapters will end with a conclusion like..."See? All you have to do is x, y, and z and your company can follow in the glory of [stereotypical big companies here]." 

The problem is...in reality, there's always a whole lot more tweaking to do. There's no easy, one-size-fits-all answer.  

Nevertheless, there are some good business books that offer some great lessons. Dr. Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto is not really a business book, as the author writes more about medicine than business, but it's a book about doing better work. And in the end that's what all business books do. 

The Checklist Manifesto identifies the greatest problem of our age: Information. We have too much of it. Complexity is the very real and detrimental side effect of this technological world we have created. While it's tempting to go hide in the mountains--I do this every weekend--we have to deal with the complexity we created and the disappointing fact that we created all this technology to make our lives easier but in essence our lives are palpably more complicated than they were even 10 years ago. Though we aren't serfs working on a plantation, we do still spend an inordinate amount of time working, despite the fact that technology is a tool, meaning that it should help us accomplish tasks faster. But don't fret about all the work we've created for ourselves. There is a solution to the work we have created for ourselves and it's a simple one: The Checklist. 

The Checklist Manifesto's premise is that up until recently humanity's greatest problem was ignorance. Now it's ineptitude. Or eptitude, making sure that we apply the knowledge that we do have consistently and correctly to whatever problem we are trying to solve. The most recent anecdote I can offer that illustrates this principle is what happened during a meeting at work a few weeks ago when somebody stated that we don't have the specs for the approved products of Big Time Customer X. A colleague quickly got on his Smartphone and bam, there were the engineering specs for approved products for Big Time Customer X. There is too much information out there and it's too easy to Google it, and yet sometimes it's so overwhelming we don't even think to look, nor do we know how to filter the bullshit, and apply the knowledge that to which we have such easy access.

The goal is not to be crushed by this information but to learn how to synthesize it, communicate it, and use it well. 

Following the lead offered by aviation, Dr. Gawande offers some evidence of the power of checklists and proffers advice, given his experience in medicine working with the World Health Organization, on how to effectively implement checklists in our complicated lives. 

The idea of using checklists stems from the early history of aviation. After the test flight of the B-17, which crashed killing several people, pilots realized that, with 4 engines and all the related controls and gauges, there was too much information for one pilot to handle. Pilots have been well aware of the idea that memory and judgement are unreliable and fallible, and it's interesting that other professions have been slow to realize this important point.

Checklists have now become an essential element of aviation. Dr. Gawande narrates his visit with Boeing's "checklist writer," who relates  the thousands of situations for which there are checklists and the very scientific process of writing checklists. There is an inherent tension between brevity and effectiveness. Too short and there's no guidance. Too long and it's not a checklist--it's a novel (tl;dr might be the response). 

Once you have everybody's input and analyzed all possible situations, you get it onto one page, with big, clear font, and you laminate it. 

Writing checklists involves the two basic principles of writing: 1) Know your audience; and 2) Anticipate reader questions. And it's really an art. Especially given how much information we have to do deal with. 

Another point Gawande makes is that that we don't just need checklists but co-pilots to read them to us. "That's not my problem" is the worst thing you can hear when working with a team and step 1 to avoid hearing this statement is to know each member of your team and to understand the purpose of your team, so you don't have to hear that awful phrase. When the team knows each other and has a shared purpose, an awful lot of problems can be avoided. It's surprising how many surgeries take place without doctors and nurses knowing each others' names, as Gawande describes operations he has observed and gives statistics on how often not introducing each other takes place in the operating theater. Shocking!

Indeed, the greater the improvement in teamwork, the greater the drop in complications. 

There's also importance in what you don't need to put on checklists. There needs to be room for judgement, especially in complex operations. 

Dr. Gawande distinguishes between simple (several steps, baking a cake), complicated (multiple moving parts, launching a rocket), and complex (dealing with the human element), and it's an important distinction. Complex processes require the greatest room for judgement.

It's amazing how a one-page document can have such a huge effect. Subsidiary benefits of checklists include standardization, which makes it easier to develop metrics and measure progress. Gawande describes how incorporating checklists at one hospital reduced their line-infection rate from 11 percent to zero. In this particular hospital they prevented 43 infections, 8 deaths and saved $2 million. Just with a one-page checklist. 

My favorite anecdote from the book involved the rock band Van Halen, who was very specific in their extremely detailed contracts with concert venues. Each step was very critical to setting up and accommodating their sound equipment. They would write deep in their contracts on like page 17 that in their dressing room they wanted a bowl of M&Ms, but without a single brown M&M. In other words, someone would have to remove each brown M&M by hand. This demand wasn't because the band was made up of egomaniacs (or maybe it was), but because not following this step showed if a venue followed the band's very specific, step-by-step process. Van Halen ended up cancelling a show in Colorado when the venue forgot to remove the brown M&Ms, because they knew that the venue was not detail-oriented enough to follow their process. 

Another excellent point is Dr. Gawande's observation that we are obsessed with having great components but pay little attention to making them fit together well. This is true of medicine, which is what he is referring to with this point. Optimizing a system isn't about optimizing parts, but making things work well together. He gives the example of trying to build the world's greatest car with car parts: the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo. And what we get is a really expensive piece of junk. The same is true of putting together teams of workers or athletes or even musicians. It's always how you put together the talent, rather than the individual talents of each member. 

In a world in which we live with too much information, it's important to make things as short and clear as possible. Use bullet points. Anticipate reader's questions. If the inquisitive reader wants to know more, give them a link. But, otherwise, repeat the mantra with me: 

• One page
• Massive font 
• Big space between points 
• Laminate it!

Dr. Gawande's thesis (Life is complex. We need checklists) is spot on and you should read his book if making checklists is truly an interest of yours, but I just saved you 200 pages of his detailed  descriptions of surgical operations, which are very interesting and insightful, but let's face it: There's too much to read out there. Which is why we need checklists! 

Data Movers: The Pipes Our Information Travels

Unseen, unnoticed concrete buildings, the kind you pass every day but never consider, these are the places where our data are moved. Make a call, send a text message, post an update on your Facebook page, your bits and bytes are moving through a glass tube about as thick as one of your hairs. 

Hub

Pumped underground or overhead, hanging from telephone poles, all of this information hovers in a critical balance. 

Traffic jams start at times when most people turn on their computers and connect to the world outside their own, slowing down the arrival of this information or dampening its quality. 

Aerial view of information traffic

All of this information relies on power. Not all power is alike. Noise, blips and blurps are all words that take on a whole new meaning when we work with electricity. Total Harmonic Distortion isn't the name of a thrashing speed metal band but is what happens when we don't have a quality source of energy. Because we’re bandwidth hogs, consuming data from numerous devices just about anywhere we want to, we’re also energy hogs.

DC Plant

The name of the game is five 9s reliability. 99.999%. But even still our information is vulnerable and its path can be easily interrupted by little things we never think of: a glass pipe bent at a funny angle, a bad drop from the utility lines to our house, a generator that doesn't turn on when it was supposed to because of a bad transfer switch, a brownout in the grid caused by a heat wave that triggered 100s of air conditioners to turn on at the same time. 

Our information is just going through pipes. And there are leaks and clogs just like with water. Everything flows when there is a clear path. But there's always impedance. 

DC Cabling

The next time your phone drops a call or your YouTube video takes a long time to buffer, think about the long path that information has to go. It's going through these buildings and huts in places you'd never think of. Climate controlled with blinking lights flashing on and off, humming with daily activity. The constant drone of a busy freeway outside your airport motel window. 

Rainbow Spaghetti

These are the Data Movers. And they're working 24 x 7 x 365, relying on thousands of pieces of computing and power equipment. In one of these huts, maybe 35 square feet in area, you can see the names of 30 big and small  manufacturers of conductors, resistors, capacitors, chips, copper, silicon, and plastic. In the large master information centers, you've got thousands of square feet of rainbow spaghetti wires, fiber coming in from underground and information blasted through satellite dishes.

Data Movers

And this is where our lives hang in a strange balance between what's real and what's virtual and where these realms overlap. 

Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest, Vol. 2: Cerrando el hoyo/Closing the Loop. Linking some lesser known trails in the Chuckanuts.

With my hiking partner, I'm working on book project number 2: Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest. Everybody knows about the great hiking in the region, but what about all of those great roads, which are wonderful not only to drive  and ride bikes on but just plain walk. Together, we have a list of some 15-20 roads that we will pare down for a book that will serve as a sort of anti(guide). Entry 1 was on the Endless Road to Soggy Saddle. 

Here's entry number 2 in our notebook. And it's a route that we have given the name "Cerrando el hoyo" or Closing the Loop. Below, I offer 2 maps indicating the general and specific location of The Loop, which begins at the Clayton Beach parking lot off of Chuckanut Drive.

The Triangle by my name is approximately where we had lunch, near the top and a massive clearcut. We call it the site of the Battle of the Bulge

Heading east from the Clayton Beach parking lot, we head up an old logging road,  Fragrance Lake Road. According to an old guy in the parking lot, you used to be able to drive this road straight to the lake and he was bummed that he couldn't do that anymore, but we couldn't share his disappointment, as walking roads is what we live for.

Finding peace in the Chuckanuts

About a mile up the road, there is a point where the road splits and we take the road less traveled, the road that doesn't go to Fragrance Lake. We head head right or Southeast more or less off another spur. This road leads to a fairly well-known lookout where, on an especially clear day after a rain, Mount Rainier looms enormous to the South. Experiencing Mount Rainier from this spot is rare but great views of the San Juan islands and the Olympic Mountains can be had most days of the year.

After this spot, the road gets weird. Only mountain bikers go beyond this lookout and midwinter it's rare even to see them. The road continues up and up through various stages of forest growth. Somewhere on the drive from Bellingham to the Clayton Beach parking lot you cross from Whatcom into Skagit County, where the logging policies are a bit more aggressive, which makes for spottier clumps of forest. There's also a unique light, which is difficult to capture with a camera, that is caused by the space between the trees--mostly hemlocks and doug firs with the occasional cedar.

Where the road starts getting weird. I like the spacey light between the trees

On the map above, the spot indicated with an arrow and my name is approximately where we eat lunch, near the top of a mountain and a very apocalyptic scene of a clearcut that we call the site of the Battle of the Bulge.

The site of the Battle of the Bulge. The trees lost. Doomsday Scenery at its finest.

The walk continues through this doomsday scenery of slash pile destruction and then descends down a spur of the Lost Lake trail seen on the above map, which is a beautiful section of deep, dark, mossy forest and then connects back to Fragrance Lake Road, which leads us back down to the parking lot at Clayton Beach. All in all, the Loop encompasses about 8 miles with an elevation gain of approximately 1700 feet with lots of ups and downs in between.

Deep, dark, spooky and green. Just how I like it.

A cold, cloudy January morning didn’t stop us from traversing this loop on the Chuckanut Mountain ridge. Chuckanut is an interpretation of a Lummi word meaning “Long beach far from a narrow entrance,” and these mountains represent the only place where the Cascade mountain range stretches down to the sea. Famous for their leaf fossils from the Tertiary Age, the Chuckanuts also have a lot of glacial erratics, which I call “erotics” and make wonderful jungle gyms for Lupe. 

What's nice about this jaunt is that it's relatively calm for being in the Chuckanuts where there are so many trails densely packed together, all with parking lots full, even on rainy days. There are loads of hikes  to be had on the very developed trail network that criss-crosses over the Chuckanut range. Nevertheless, just about everybody here does the same dang hikes. The most popular of which is the Oysterdome hike where, on fair weather days, people are lined up as if it were an amusement park ride. Oysterdome is a wonderful hike with a great view, but there are better views to be had in the Chuckanuts, one of which I'll save for another post because it requires traversing a strange road to get there.