Politix Update: GOP Has Uphill Fight Not Just Because Of Idiots Like Cruz

In the last two-plus decades as the Republican Party's drift to the right morphed into a full-blown gallop and the party's base came to be dominated by Bible thumpers and angry white men -- and frequently Bible thumping angry white men -- the GOP has won only two of six presidential elections, one because the Supreme Court gave the Constitution the finger and the other because Republicans had perfected their fear machine message and the Democratic candidate was weak. 

It is probable that Republicans will not halt their losing streak in 2016.  This is less because the first joker out of the gate in the quadrennial clown car race known as the party's presidential primary is Ted Cruz, soon to be followed by Marco Rubio, than good old mathematics.  While Cruz, Rubio and many other GOP stalwarts may insist global warming is a hoax, not even these junk science devotees can deny that despite Hillary Clinton's vulnerabilities, the probable Democratic standard bearer begins the 2016 race a mere 24 electoral votes shy of the 270 needed to win.

The Democrats have 246 electoral votes more or less in the bag: California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), New Hampshire (4), Illinois (20), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Maine (4), Minnesota (10), Michigan (16), New York (29), New Jersey (14), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (20), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Wisconsin (10) and Washington (12).  Sure, you can quibble about a couple of these states, but the fact remains that the Democrats' traditional political base remains as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar and although the eventual Republican nominee will be a conservative in moderate drag like Jeb "Gator" Bush or Mike "We've Got a Perception Problem" Pence, the hardcore right-wing tail wagging this flea-infested dog helps insure that retaking the Oval Office will be illusory.

The conventional wisdom has it that another divisive cage match with Cruz, Rubio and perhaps Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and, if there really is a God, the good doctor Ben Carson not unlike the 2012 Republican primary benefits Democrats generally and Clinton in particular.  But whether the 2016 primary is another battle for the soul of the party, yada yada yada, methinks that whomever gets the nomination (more likely Jeb Bush than not) will need to have a well-oiled campaign machine in order to prevail at the party convention (July 16-21, 2016 in Cleveland), which should toughen him for the fall slugfest against Hillary, while voters (who have notoriously short attention spans) will be more focused on stuff that really matters.

This stuff includes the economy, which could be a winner for the Republican nominee if President Obama's impressive stewardship of the economic recovery necessitated by the (Not Jeb Bush) Bush Recession craps out.  Then there are sure losers for the Republicans, including reproductive rights and racial and gender equity, same-sex marriage and immigration, as well as the inconvenient reality that the U.S. is becoming browner and blacker, which is to say less and less Republican.

But back to the cudgel-wielding Cruz, an egomaniac whose chief credentials are that he has an incurable case of Obama Derangement Syndrome, is widely loathed by his fellow U.S. senators, has repeatedly tried to shut down the U.S. government in actions bordering on the traitorous, and is unrelenting in trying to ram his religion and extremist views down everyone's throats to win brownie points with Tea Partiers and Evangelicals.

If having virtually no public sector experience is a requisite for becoming president, then the Canadian-born (shhh!) Cruz is a natural. 

If embellishing on his credentials to drive the clown car by reading Dr. Seuss's classic Green Eggs and Ham and its "I do not like it" mantra while filibustering a Democratic move to block defunding Obamacare, then he'll fit right in at White House events like the annual Easter egg hunt. 

If opposing net neutrality because it would be another example of "government tyranny," as he puts it, garners big buck donations from Comcast and Time Warner, then he's smarter than I have been willing to give him credit for. 

And if leading opposition to Obama's eminently able surgeon general nominee amidst the ebola public-health crisis because the nominee once had the temerity to suggest that the carnage from gun violence is something of a public health crisis itself, his tenure as a darling in the Fox News echo chamber is guaranteed.

Never mind that "it would take a coordinated series of 16 or so lightning strikes to make Ted Cruz the 45th president of the United States," as my friend Will Bunch puts it.  Cruz is an idiot.  No, make that a dangerous idiot.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON REID/REUTERS

Rick Chamberlain (1952-2015)

There is a common denominator to the tributes that have poured in since the passing of Rick Chamberlain: Beyond his public face as a master trombonist, music teacher and jazz festival organizer, Rick gave selflessly to both those whom he loved and those he merely knew.

In my own case as jazz fan and journalist, Rick not only blew my socks off during many a Delaware Water Gap (Pa.) Celebration of the Arts performance and at the more intimate Deer Head Inn, he opened many doors for me when I set out to write a book about the life, times and unsolved 1981 murder of his dear friend, Eddie Joubert, the beloved owner of a Delaware Water Gap bar where Rick played as a member of the psychedelic-tinged rock band Asparagus Sunshine and sat in at after-hours jams.

From the Foreword to The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of  Love, Devotion and Cold-Blooded Murder:

"Back in the day, Eddie and two musicians -- trombonist Rick Chamberlain and alto saxophonist Phil Woods -- were known as the 'Unholy Three.'  They came up with the idea of the jazz festival as a way to raise money to fix the Gap's decrepit sewer system on a boozy night on the front porch of the Deer Head Inn jazz club in 1978.  Chamberlain, who Eddie later talked into successfully running for Gap village council, which in turn jumpstarted a lifelong dedication to community service, was eager to talk to me.

"That was such a formative part of our lives," is how Rick put it.

DEBORAH OLSON, BOB DOROUGH, THE AUTHOR AND RICK AT THE 2010 COTA

Long story short, some people were reluctant "to open their Eddie boxes and be interviewed" two decades after the murder, as I put it.  That was until word got around that Rick had talked to me -- several times, in fact.  This was a de facto seal of approval for my mission -- to remember Eddie and shame a Poconos law-enforcement that could care less about a heinous crime that had robbed the Gap of so special a man -- for the tight-knit jazz, arts and crafts and Vietnam veteran communities of which Eddie had been so supportive, and the book took off from there.  Five years on, it remains in print and sells steadily if not spectacularly.

Rick, who was 63, never made a big deal -- or any kind of deal, for that matter -- about all that he gave, and some of his more noble kindnesses and philanthropic gestures are know only to the recipients and a few others.

Rick finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer on March 27 at his Stroudsburg home with family and friends at his side.  A memorial service is being planned.

He was a fighter to the end, and while his illness prevented him from taking his chair as principal trombonist for the New York City Ballet Orchestra for the first time in many years for the ballet's annual holiday production of the The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center, he continued to play, conduct and teach.

This included leading the Deer Head Inn Jazz Orchestra, an 18-piece ensemble of COTA All Stars that will be playing on Monday night for the first time without the peerless Rick Chamberlain. 

 PHOTOGRAPHS © BUD NEALY

John Renbourn (1944-2015)

MORE HERE.

Cartoon du Jour

DAVID FITZSIMMONS/ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Hat tip to Frank at From Pine View Farm

Danny Schecter (1942-2015)

At the end of each broadcast, Schechter exhorted his listeners: 
“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” More here.

PHOTOGRAPH © 1971, 2010 WILLIAM J. SPURLIN

As Frank Zappa Famously Remarked, You Can't Be A Real Country . . .

. . . unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, 
or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. More here. 

Daevid Allen (1938-2015)

MORE HERE.

The Mysterious Life Magazine Photographer Who Loved Animals

MORE HERE.

Nina Leen, © Time Inc, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York

Sir Terry Pratchett (1948-2015)

MORE HERE.

Photograph from The Guardian

The Dalai Lama And A Gaggle Of Chinese Officials Walk Into A Bar . . .

Do you remember that uproarious Monty Python sketch where the Dalai Lama, played by John Cleese, sits cross-legged in saffron robes in a mountaintop cave and declares that he won't have an afterlife, throwing into an uproar the exhausted Chinese Communist Party functionaries who have hiked to the cave?  The officials, played by the other Pythons dressed identically in Mao jackets and clutching little red books, demand that the Dalai Lama reincarnate, dammit, after he dies, but only on their terms.

"You have no say over whether you will be reincarnated!" splutters the official played by Michael Palin. "That is for our government to decide."

Don't remember the sketch?   That's because there never was one.

But in an astonishing example of Life Imitating Python, or something, Chinese party leaders meeting this week in Beijing are in high dudgeon over the 14th Dalai Lama's recent speculation -- think of it as a cosmic cream pie aimed at the party's collective face -- that he might end his spiritual lineage as the most prominent leader of Tibetan Buddhism and not reincarnate.  The party has repeatedly warned the 79-year-old holy man that he must play by its rules--  or else. 

The Dalai Lama's obdurance would confound the Communist government's plans to rig a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China's deeply unpopular presence in Tibet, which it invaded without provocation in 1950.  The Dalai Lama fled into exile nine years later and remains deeply revered in his restive homeland, which has never accepted -- and never will accept -- the communist yolk.

Beijing already has rigged a succession following the 1989 death of the 10th Panchen Lama, another senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism.  The Dalai Lama confirmed a Tibetan boy as the next reincarnation in 1995, but the Chinese government hid away the boy and his parents and installed its own choice as the Panchen Lama, a fate that the Dalai Lama has indicated he does not want.

The idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of reincarnation and calling the Dalai Lama a heretic, to boot, is deeply comedic because the party is atheistic to its red core, but beyond the Python riffs and inevitable late night TV show witticisms, the standoff is deadly serious.  Waves of protests and self-immolations in Tibet and abroad have repeatedly brought to the surface deep discontent with the Chinese gulagization, including its attempts to micro-manage Tibet's culture and control the Buddhist tradition.  And Tibetans are sure to reject any future putative Dalai Lama picked by the Chinese government.

SORRY TO BURST YOUR BUBBLE, BUT . . . 

If Americans were asked what foreign country they most admired but never visited, doubtless many would answer Shangri La. But since it was foreclosed in the subprime mortgage meltdown, the second choice probably would be Tibet.  Indeed, the mountainous nation nicknamed "The Roof of the World" holds a special place in the popular imagination because of multiple gauzy Hollywood treatments and, of course, the Dalai Lama.

If you don't want to disturb your Richard Gere version of Tibet, move along please.  But with Tibet back in the news because of the reincarnation brouhaha, it is worth remembering that Tibet's own history is riven with wars between competing Buddhist sects, sexual exploitation, usurious taxation, serfdom and other forms of economic enslavement that extended well into the last half of the 20th century; in other words, on the current Dalai Lama's watch.

This does not forgive the Chinese occupation, which has cost well over a million Tibetan lives, the jailing of millions more and destruction of most of the country's 3,000 monasteries, but does provide some perspective. 

And let's face it, the Dalai Lama is who we want him to be: Head of state. Leader of the best known exile movement on earth. Prolific author. Metaphysician. Cross-cultural icon. Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Oh, and caricature, as well.

Veteran journalist-novelist Pico Iyer offers perspective aplenty in The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, a book that I would highly recommend.

The apothegems of the Dalai Lama that appear on buttons, bumper stickers and t-shirts make no more sense "than a single thread taken out of a Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful," writes Iyer, and one of the Dalai Lama's longtime translators shouts to him that "It's nonsense! All these things you see ascribed to him, others are just making up!"

Indeed, one of the conundrums that the Dalai Lama faces on his world travels (he's in Australia at the moment) is that it is the magically esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism that is the primary source of fascination for non-Tibetans who want to turn away from their own religions. 

I've always been a worship at home guy, so the contradictions don't bother me, while I'm deeply admiring of the Dalai Lama for his stubborn pacifism.  And Tibet has produced some ass-kicking incense as well as a commonsensical pharmacopeia, including a kidney-cleansing compound that may well have saved if not prolonged the life of one of our beloved dogs. 

I do have to note that while the 14th Dalai Lama has been moving the world by example for almost half a century, he has not moved China and now Tibet is almost gone.

But as he has said, "Until the last moment, anything is possible."

For Robert Hunter, 'Song Is A Naked, Living And Amorphous Creature'

I RAN DOWN TO THE LEVEE / BUT THE DEVIL CAUGHT ME THERE / TOOK MY TWENTY DOLLAR BILL / AND VANISHED IN THE AIR / SET OUT RUNNING BUT I TAKE MY TIME / A FRIEND OF THE DEVIL IS A FRIEND OF MINE  / IF I GET HOME BEFORE DAYLIGHT / JUST MIGHT GET SOME SLEEP TONIGHT ~ "FRIEND OF THE DEVIL"

Think Burt Bachrach and Hal David.  Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.  Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.  Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.

Robert who?

While even the most casual listener knows Garcia's name if nothing else beyond him being the face of the Grateful Dead, that love 'em or hate 'em psychedelic-tinged juggernaut, Hunter remains a virtual unknown. Despite his prodigious songwriting skills and vast catalog of lyrics, including some 75 songs  written to be sung over Garcia's powerful melodies, his name is not likely to come up even among people familiar with the Great American Songbook, the canon of the most influential and important popular songs of the 20th century. 

The Great American Songbook is, for my money, the paragon of American musical culture, but how Garcia and Hunter fit into it is not immediately apparent even if they are being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame later this year.  (Other new inductees include Toby Keith, Cyndi Lauper, Linda Perry, Bobby Braddock and Willie Dixon.)

Garcia and Hunter are naturals for the Songwriters Hall of Fame not because they collaborated on a lot of stuff, but because that stuff is uniformly good and some of it is undeniably great.  Their songs mine rich veins of Americana -- Appalachian folklore, New Orleans mythos, Memphis blues and Wild West balladry, as well as some biblical narrative, dollops of generational angst and celebrations of the Sixties counterculture from which the Dead evolved, but only very rarely anything overtly political. 

Their songs have been covered by artists ranging from Suzanne Vega to Los Lobos to Burning Spear to Jesse McReynolds to Bob Dylan, in whose hands they  sometimes shine even brighter and seem even more appropriate to the times years after they were written.

WAKE UP TO FIND OUT THAT YOU ARE THE EYES OF THE WORLD / THE HEART HAS ITS BEACHES, ITS HOMELAND AND THOUGHTS OF ITS OWN / WAKE NOW, DISCOVER THAT YOU ARE THE SONG THAT THE MORNIN' BRINGS ' BUT THE HEART HAS ITS SEASONS, ITS EVENIN'S AND SONGS OF ITS OWN ~ "EYES OF THE WORLD"

Although Hunter occasionally drops clues, he avoids labeling his lyrics and never -- as in never -- explains in any depth what a song is about because, don't you know, he believes that the lyrics themselves say all that needs saying.

"I also believe, through experience, that beneath the window dressing of metaphor and rhyme, song is a naked, living and amorphous creature" he has said.  "Where some assume that song is the transcription of self, my more intimate belief is that one goes out in the woods and ketches one, dresses it up and trains it to talk. 

"How the brute is trained is a matter of personal style, but beneath the window dressing the song remains elusively itself, prevented from full expression by the limits of its intended use.  The writer's prejudices, blindsides, and occasional strengths are all utilized in the disguising of the primordial beast into form adequate to its specific purpose."

There also is the small matter of some Garcia-Hunter songs never being played the same way twice, "Dark Star" being a prime example. 

"Dark Star" is a psychedelic infused modal vamp that could run 20 minutes or longer, always toward the end of the second set and usually woven into extended jams.  It includes some of the first lyrics Hunter wrote for the Dead.

DARK STAR CRASHES POURING ITS LIGHT INTO ASHES / REASON TATTERS THE FORCES TEAR LOOSE FROM THE AXIS . . . SHALL WE GO, YOU AND I WHILE WE CAN / THROUGH THE TRANSITIVE NIGHTFALL OF DIAMONDS ~ DARK STAR

Garcia and Hunter met in the early Sixties. 

"We both came from the same place musically," he once told an interviewer.  "We started out as a folk duet and went on to become a bluegrass trio and all kinds of different bands, and I know what songs Jerry liked the best, and I know why he liked them the best.  Lines like, I forget the name of the song, but it’s got this line, 'Ten thousand were drowned that never were born.'  Wow.  It’s got the mystery and a rhythm and a beautiful image.  Jerry was a sucker for that sort of thing, not that there was much of that sort of thing around.

"I knew what he liked, and it was the same thing I liked, and I think a lot of our songs had that quality in it, like almost an ancient folk touch of some sort.  It’s hard to put it into words, but it’s what makes most of our songs unique."

Hugh Cutler, a journalist who first heard the Dead in their infancy, found them too rough around the edges and anything but professional. 

But the more Hunter wrote, Cutler explains in a Kiko's House guest post, "the subtler and more intertwined his images and narratives became, until soon he’d created a unique hybrid of poetic borrowings. And Garcia provided the sweetest sonic envelopes in which to seal them."

Hunter's lyrics seldom referenced current events.  "New Speedway Boogie" is a notable and haunting exception, penned after a star-crossed December 1969 rock concert arranged, in part, by the Dead and headlined by the Rolling Stones during which four people died, one at the hands of a Hell's Angel, a grim event immortalized in the documentary film Gimme Shelter.

 NOW I DON'T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD / IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN A MAN DIED OF COLD / DO WE KEEP ON COMING OR STAND AND WAIT? / WHEN THE SUN SO DARK AND THE HOUR SO LATE? ~ NEW SPEEDWAY BOOGIE

Garcia left this mortal coil in 1995, some eight days after his 53rd birthday.

"Unlike many stars, Garcia did not seek out fame," is how I once summed up his life.  "At heart an unassuming man who just wanted to play music, fame found him. And despite a long career as an extraordinary composer and guitarist that brought him adulation, gold records and eventually wealth, happiness remained elusive. He was never able to get the addictive drug monkey off his back for very long once it climbed on. Technically, heroin finally killed him, or rather his heart, but I believe that fame was the real culprit." 

Hunter, 73, has worked with Jim Lauderdale, Warren Haynes, Little Feat, Los Lobos and Bob Dylan, and on rare occasions done solo concert dates, since Garcia's death.

"Hunter is an old buddy,” Dylan has said.  "We could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there.  He's got a way with words and I do too.  We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting."

Which brings us to "Box of Rain," which along with "Eyes of the World" is one of my two favorite songs with lyrics by Hunter.  And words to live by.

 JUST A BOX OF RAIN / WIND AND WATER / BELIEVE IT IF YOU NEED IT /IF YOU DON'T JUST PASS IT ON / SUN AND SHOWER / WIND AND RAIN / IN AND OUT THE WINDOW / LIKE A MOTH BEFORE A FLAME /  IT'S JUST A BOX OF RAIN / I DON'T KNOW WHO PUT IT THERE / BELIEVE IT IF YOU NEED IT / OR LEAVE IT IF YOU DARE / BUT IT'S JUST A BOX OF RAIN / OR A RIBBON FOR YOUR HAIR / SUCH A LONG LONG TIME TO BE GONE / AND A SHORT TIME TO BE THERE ~ BOX OF RAIN

PHOTOGRAPH BY JAY BLAKESBERG

Musing On Hunter's Hybrid Poetic Borrowings & Garcia's Sonic Envelopes

JERRY GARCIA (1974)

By HUGH CUTLER

When I first saw the Grateful Dead at the Avalon Ballroom in the early summer of 1966, it was because a housemate in the Haight-Ashbury who helped with the Avalon’s light show had proselytized for them – raved, in fact. I was already a Jefferson Airplane fan, having seen them at the Fillmore Auditorium and found them melodic, dynamic and, crucially for me, professional.
    
The Dead at the Avalon were anything but. They were largely fronted then by vocalist-harmonica man Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, an occasional organist who would not have looked out of place on a Harley hog amidst the Oakland Hell’s Angels, and had, in fact, already befriended them. Pigpen, I thought, growled in a fashion that sought to imitate both South-of-the-Border deejay Wolfman Jack and Chicago bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, with a bit of gruff boogie guitarist John Lee Hooker.

The acne-riddled lead guitar man, Jerry Garcia, stood back a bit, grinning Cheshire-like, and played rather pedestrian rhythm and blues licks, while the pretty-boy rhythm guitarist Bob Weir and foppish bassist Phil Lesh seemed more like extras for a high school production of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Only drummer Bill Kreutzmann seemed competent.

At the end of each Stax or Motown cover tune – and I say that advisedly because they bore slight lyric resemblance and the tunes meandered via extended noodling until the band members’ limited improvisational skills seemed to exhausted – the band would halt and then retune their instruments for nearly as long as the song itself had lasted. Dancers sought either to recoup their breath or recapture lost momentum in the wait between songs.

To say I was unimpressed would be kind. I found the Grateful Dead largely repugnant to my eye and dissonant and amateurish to my ear.  Still, I saw the Dead several more times during that period, usually as they joined neighborhood bands in free outdoor concerts in the Haight’s Panhandle, and grew to appreciate the leaps forward they seemed to be making both in their musicianship and in reducing their retuning time.
    
Within the year, though, I had left San Francisco, returned home to the East Coast and enlisted in the Air Force, which sent me to San Antonio, Texas; Indianapolis; and eventually to Tokyo, Japan. When I stopped in San Francisco again while homebound two years later, I learned that virtually all the bands had moved out of the city, usually to bucolic Marin County across the Golden Gate, and the scene in the Haight had been collapsed by hard narcotics and an overwhelming influx of young homeless.

Yet the Airplane and the Dead, along with a few other bands, soldiered on, landing recording contracts and starting to tour nationally.

The Dead’s self-titled debut album had come from Warner Brothers in March 1967, and I defy any fan to say it faithfully reflected what their shows were like. The vocal sound was muddy and instruments sonically constrained. Still, I bought it as a faint replica of my time in the Haight.
    
I encountered Live Dead, their first live album and fourth overall, almost immediately upon my October 1969 Stateside return. By this time, Robert Hunter had signed on full-time as the Dead’s chief lyricist, and the band’s original songs were growing shapely because of his collaborations with Garcia, whose melodies were increasingly masterful and his improvisations on guitar and pedal steel more focused. “China Cat Sunflower” and “Dark Star” became permanent parts of the repertoire, and elevated everything else, as well. Even Weir, the rhythm guitarist who fancied himself a rock-star singer by imitation long before he became one, was learning to pen original tunes and to actually provide compelling counterpoint guitar backup.
    
Hunter’s verses cross-referenced an array of source material, from Western cowboy lore to Eastern mysticism, astrology to mythology, the I Ching to voodoo magic, Elizabethan balladry to Mississippi blues legends, T.S. Eliot to Jack Kerouac. And then he’d mix and match. The more he wrote, the subtler and more intertwined his images and narratives became, until soon he’d created a unique hybrid of poetic borrowings. And Garcia provided the sweetest sonic envelopes in which to seal them.

Once David Crosby taught the band how to blend their voices for Workingman’s Dead and then American Beauty, both released in 1970, the Grateful Dead gained a whole new level of vocal and musical acumen. And those two albums’ songs, largely Hunter lyrics that traded in deep pioneering grit, framed its live shows for the rest of the band’s days.

The next two years saw more live recordings, especially the epic Europe ‘72 three-disc set, which showcased the enhanced harmonic possibilities once they’d added the majestic keyboard stylings of Keith Godcheaux and the mellifluous backup vocals of his wife, Donna.
    
But by 1973, it was time for a new studio recording, on their own label, after they’d been performing most of the songs for several months. Five of the seven tracks on Wake of the Flood are by Hunter-Garcia, and a sixth is by Hunter with Keith Godcheaux. Six of the seven album tracks became career mainstays — the whirlwinds that carried Deadheads onto their psychic waves.

Wake has many worthy and beautiful tunes, but one shone above the rest.

Hunter has said he wrote “Stella Blue” in 1970, in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and Arthur Miller penned “After the Fall,” two other masterpieces that have had potent impact on many and me over the years.
    
UC Santa Cruz archivist David Dodd, in his online version of Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, has much to say in musings and references related to the song’s verses. The first is to note that “stella” is Latin for star, hence “blue star,” harking back to “dark star.” But then, more plausibly to me from the first, Dodd notes that Stella guitars were popular among blues players such as Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell.

 When I first dropped the needle on “Stella Blue,” I conjured a poignant image of a woeful and weary tunesmith, beaten but once proud -- his battered, chipped and rustic ax stuck off in a corner of a dusty downtown lodging as its owner mulls better days and imagines one last chance to relive them. I only read of the Chelsea link later, and didn’t meet Hunter until much later, but the picture fits, though he was then a much younger man (28 or 29).

I like that Dodd also quotes a Wallace Stevens poem:

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

Hunter has had a special way of putting us (me) into his scenes, be it holding a pat hand at a poker game, riding the range with desperadoes or, in this saga, smacked with the realization you can’t win for trying, once more sunk with smashed hopes in a fleabag with an eerie blue cast to your even bluer surroundings. The song somehow reminded me, too, of a Wyeth painting I wrote about in my high school days, when a print of it hung on a school wall: “The Blue Dump,” a gravel cart Andy saw at his Maine getaway; its peeling veneer is sort of how I imagined that guitar might look.

When Garcia first sang “Stella Blue,” the renderings were delicate and yearning on the early verses, frustrated and then stoically determined on the bridge, then wistful as he closes it out. That seemed to change, though, as he tackled the lyric again and again, finding fresh nooks to explore.

I read one online reviewer underscoring its “gentle melody and dreamy environment,” even as he suggested it could put some listeners to sleep like a “boring, sappy lullaby.” Yet he saluted it as “absolutely the most downright gorgeous song the Dead ever wrote.”

After mainlining the vinyl version, I’m glad that my first “Stella Blue” concert experience was at the Philadelphia Civic Center show that Kiko’s House blogger Shaun Mullen and I shared on August 5, 1974. It was certainly no lullaby, but more pained and compelling. It drained me.
    
I discovered in auditing various versions chronologically from my home collection that “Stella Blue” churned anthem-like as years passed, perhaps as its title chorus in concert more constantly elicited a rousing cheer – at every chorus. By the 1990s, Garcia sang and played the song emphatically, even stridently, and the once-shimmering guitar-solo coda eventually morphed to bombastic. My sense was that the later stylings no longer fit Hunter’s initial atmospherics, though Garcia may have decided he was indeed “dust[ing] off those rusty strings just one more time [to] make them shine.” Or perhaps he was just seeking to avoid presenting a “boring, sappy lullaby.”
      
For me, delicacy and wistfulness, dreaminess and “downright gorgeousness” better suit the tale. How better to come “crying like the night” or “crying like the wind,” as Hunter envisions twice?
    
That final verse smacks of every Zen Buddhist koan I’ve ever read:

It all rolls into one, and nothing comes for free;
There’s nothing you can hold for very long. …
It seems like all this life was just a dream.

I can almost hear the Master then intoning: "Go wash your bowl."

And if I were to be fully transparent, “Stella Blue” rests today all the more emotionally, almost clairvoyantly on Hunter’s part, on that opening figure, that Cheshire China cat at the mike through all the vanished years: “A broken angel sings from a guitar. . . . ”

Plain Talk On The Criminal Justice System, Obamacare & That Bad Old CIA

WASHINGTON STATE POT GROWERS FACE PRISON WHILE TRAITOROUS FORMER GENERAL WILL WALK

On March 3, 2015, there was brutal cold and the hangover from several major snow storms to contend with in the Northeast and Midwest, unseasonably chilly weather in Florida that had natives and tourists alike bundling up, and intermittent rain and fog in the Pacific Northwest, but none of this kept the American criminal justice system from grinding along -- from sea to shining sea -- as it does no matter the weather.

In Spokane, Washington, a white family of three medical marijuana patients -- father, mother and daughter -- faced several years in prison after being convicted of growing more pot plants than the law allowed.  In Panama City, Florida, a 21-year-old black man was expected to be sentenced to prison after being found guilty of selling a small quantity of marijuana to an undercover agent, while in Washington, D.C., the Justice Department announced that an investigation had concluded that the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead last summer by a white officer, regularly uses force almost exclusively on blacks and stops them without probable cause.  In fact, although blacks make up 67 percent of Ferguson's population, blacks account for 95 percent of all arrests. The city's court system, the report found, routinely jails blacks for even the most minor infractions.

But the big criminal justice news on March 3 was that David H. Petraeus had reached a plea deal after admitting that he had provided his highly classified personal journals to a mistress when he was CIA director, a crime that in another day and age would have been considered treasonous and in this day and age would have resulted in a court martial and hard time in a brig -- if not an appointment with a firing squad -- for a lesser ranking soldier.  

The family in Spokane and the young man in Panama City, neither affluent or socially connected, are facing prison time, their lives effectively put on hold if not destroyed, while Petraeus, the ultimate insider with many politician friends, including the man in the White House, coped a misdemeanor plea and will pay a $40,000 fine and serve two years of prison-free probation while keeping his job as a lavishly compensated financial industry mover and shaker.  

The contrast between the fates of these marijuana malefactors and a highly decorated four-star general who is the best-known military commander of his generation, speaks volumes about how deeply dysfunctional American society is in a most fundamental respect -- that courts and juries, aided and abetted by their police and prosecutorial helpmates, as well as attorneys who get filthy rich off of this cancer, dispense "justice" according to social rank, influence and affluence, outdated mores and, of course, race.

Any clear-eyed student of American jurisprudence knows that the way the law is applied in these United States has always been skewed, but that view is profoundly short-sighted in a contemporary context.  Of course it always has been skewed, yet despite laws and policies of recent vintage prohibiting favoritism toward certain defendants because of their standing and wealth, your chances of being treated fairly is more of an abstraction than ever.

OBAMACARE: YOU READ IT HERE FIRST

The conservative wing of the Roberts Supreme Court, too often joined by Justice Kennedy, has jumped the shark as throwing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush and the Citizens United decision have shown.  So when the high court agreed against good sense to hear King vs. Burwell, in which the right-wing litigants argue that four errant words in the Affordable Care Act demand that this highly successful program be gutted, those of us of the left-of-center persuasion started casing out windows to jump from.

But oral arguments last week -- despite some of the silliest legal posturing in modern court history and nary a mention of the more the 8 million people who would lose access to health insurance because of the "death spiral" that would result if the absurdist architects of the King case get their way -- provided a glimmer of hope.

So here's my prediction: King will be thrown out in a 6-3 ruling with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy joining the four justices who believe that access to affordable health care trumps reverse-engineered legal flapdoodle. 

While Roberts and Kennedy are not cut from the altruistic cloth that Justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Kagan and Sotomayor might be, perhaps they don't want those 8 million-plus people, a goodly number with life-threatening conditions, on their consciences.  That Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas have no such scruples -- and perhaps have no scruples whatsoever -- is what the King litigants counted on. They're just going to fall a couple of rifles short of a full firing squad.

WHY THE CIA REFORM INITIATIVE IS DOOMED

CIA Director John O. Brennan's bold plan to reassign thousands of spies and intelligence analysts into new departments to make it more successful against modern threats and crises (the Cold War really is over, lads) is brilliant because it is so bloody logical.  Getting spooks and analysts on the same page, instead of being in their own compartmentalized worlds as they long have in the agency's troubled 67-year-old history, is bound to get results.

But won't.

That is because the CIA, like Britain's MI5, is first and foremost an old boy's club where the independence of the individual is more important than fealty to president and country, or queen and country.  And that law of nature is not about to be revoked.

Had the CIA been organized along the lines that Brennan envisions, the 9/11 attacks probably would have never happened.  But CIA operatives were hunkered down in their various compartments, vital information was not shared within the agency, let alone with the FBI, and despite myriad warnings of an impending attack using commercial airliners as weapons, Osama bin Laden's henchmen pretty much had clear sailing. 

As will the next bunch of terrorists who still will have little to fear from the CIA.