Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Road to recovery: the decrease in US job losses.

When I was a little kid, I thought the United States was the greatest country in the world. And in 1976, it very well may have been.

I remember singing Yankee Doodle Dandy in a chorus line at my private elementary school during our end of the year pageant. Being that it was the United States’ bi-centennial celebration, the feeling in the air was quite magnanimous and fantastic. Parades made their way through the Southern Florida streets. In Boca Raton, the Florida town where I spent my first 7 years, many of my schoolmates parents worked at IBM, as did my father, so there was a sense of financial security and middle-class stability as it was still possible to achieve the American Dream.

My father was a hard-working high school valedictorian who ran out of money while attending junior college, yet he was still able to secure good jobs at Lockheed Martin, then later at International Business Machines (IBM). I was proud of my dad when I was a little kid…and I didn’t even really know why. I think I was able to figure out just by watching popular culture that there were not a plethora of African American men working as systems analysts at IBM. Even as a young tyke, I knew my dad was special. Likewise, I quickly picked up that my mother was one of the most gifted high school English teachers in the country.

Now – all these years later – while I think about my country and my president…I feel more pride than I felt in 1976.

And I find it interesting that none of the news cycle pundits are questioning why Congress is voting down party lines – for every vote – for the first time in its history.

If you could put a microphone in the Republican’s caucus meetings, I’m convinced you’d hear: “The Nigger gets none of our votes…not a one…not for anything.”

I can’t wait for that racist, homophobic, sexist baby boomer generation to finally die off.

Lost albums: Jan and Dean’s “Carnival of Sound”

“The music business is a scornful, mirthless lover hellbent on breaking most musicians’ hearts,” said a very wise sage. Actually that’s not true, I just made that sentence up, but I think it’s more often true that not.

No talent pop stars with beautiful smiles often rise to the top of the mediocrity heap while some of the greatest recorded works by the most artful musicians never see the light of day. My friends and their former band Dynamite Hack still watch their greatest creative work collect dust as an unreleased album. Likewise, my old band Schatzi’s sophomore album Snow Is for Saving Hearts remains unreleased, tied up in legal limbo. (The film industry has it’s own version of this scenario – something called “development hell,” or turnaround purgatory – when a project or a great script can never get beyond developmental talks and negotiations.)

That jaded experience aside, Jan and Dean’s lost album Carnival of Sound is an interesting piece of music history that is finally seeing some sunlight thanks to Rhino Records’ Handmade division.

If you enjoy California surf music from the 1960s, you’ll enjoy this creative curiosity that Jan Berry spent 3 years recording after his unfortunate car accident on Dead Man’s Curve, ironically the very same stretch of road that his band  immortalized with their hit song of the same name years earlier.

I love the majority of art created during the fertile period between 1967-1969. And Jan and Dean’s lost tracks are no different. Poppy, whimsical and artfully mixed in mono, Carnival of Sound is a deserving legacy to two musician’s that caught a horrible break during the height of their career.

As distribution becomes more and more available to the masses, albums like Carnival of Sound will hopefully find the appreciative niche audiences that they deserve.