Alice In Chains Is Free
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Alice In Chains Is Free
Alice In Chains kicked off the North American leg of their world tour Friday night to a sold-out Brady Theater in downtown Tulsa, Okla. The industrial section, brick-street-bordered venue became a fire-and-brimstone rock church with the head pastor bending electric currents of grunge 20-plus years in the making.
Jerry Cantrell, who spends time with his family on an Oklahoma ranch, has risen to the rank of primo rock god of the highest order, slaying the minions of admirers with his certified style that bores dimensional tunnels into the brains of all those within earshot.
Mid set, following the medieval love trance of “Phantom Limb” and the terminal philosophy of “It Ain’t Like That,” Cantrell may have let us in on some band humor, or simply paid homage to idol Jimmy Page, with a few bars of Led Zeppelin’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” And in the heat of the sermon, Cantrell exposed his soul with tight performances that arched eons to tie the millenniums together with guitar string.
Front man William DuVall found the back note on his acoustic guitar for the apparent insider joke before slipping into MTV Acoustic tone with “Nutshell” and “No Excuses.” Duvall carries all the weight of being Layne Staley’s successor effortlessly it seems, plumping his lips and pounding his hip with a balled fist to lay it all down like a modern, cooler Pan. Those close enough to the stage likely noticed the two tendrils of coiled sweaty hair that lay over his forehead like the spiraled horns of that musical, mythological creature.
The music of Alice In Chains finds its place with every listener at various times in their lives. The snaring hooks and melodic dissonance overrides often poignant lyrics that are sharp and focused but resolute to encompass a variety of situations. The broad appeal is evident. Alice In Chains speaks to many. Though her body is bound, her spirit and mind are free.
Their latest album, “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here,” takes on a humorous title poking more fun at the loose knowledge of religious extremists, but the album is far from a political statement. It’s grounded in the common turmoils of life itself. It finds recurrent themes, like Greek tragedy, of all-seeing eyes, Sisyphean struggles, defense of happiness and the certainty of pain. You do what you can and deal with the rest.
Simply said, there is a dichotomous nature to the music of Alice In Chains that reaches deep into the gut with primeval stirrings. It searched to free the listener with the final conclusions that he who denies his maker will be wasted. And when in California, you must check your brain.
The chiseled Sean Kinney could be seen behind a drum set with LSMS emblazoned on the kick drum, a tribute to former leader singer Layne Stayley, who died of an apparent overdose of heroine and cocaine in 2002, and former bassist Mike Starr, who followed suit in 2011 with an overdose of prescription pills.
To AlternativeNation.net Kinney said “Layne Staley Mike Starr, they’re with us.” Cantrell said “There’s been six people in that band and that’s it. And we’re all up there.”
Mike Inez joined up as bassist in 1993 during the tour for “Dirt.” Starr apparently was tired of the road, or wanted drugs more. Inez had a few words for Tulsa Friday night. “Thank you Tulsa,” the long-locked bass player said as speaker of the band after their final encore song, the Vietnam War story of “Rooster.”
It was a special night for Cantrell, whose father Jerry Cantrell Sr., the Vietnam Vet who lives in Oklahoma and likely inspired the song “Rooster,” came out with his long white hair in a pony tail before the encore to wave and say a few welcoming words, like the Greek music god Apollo. He hugged his son and slipped into the darkness with a kiss from his son to the neck.
Below is the song list from that night, which lives etched in my memory as one of the best concerts I’ll probably ever see.
–John Lovett
Them Bones, Dam That River, Again, Check My Brain, Hollow, Confusion, Choke, Man in the Box, Phantom Limb, It Ain’t Like That, Nutshell, No Excuses, We Die Young, Stone, Down in a Hole. Encore: Got Me Wrong, Would? and Rooster.
Finding the Right Way
Every day when we get up in the morning we have a world of opportunity before us. Only a slim minority of us make the most of it. There are so many things to do that some people may even get stuck and not be able to do anything. I have this suggestion for those who can’t figure out what they want to do: Make something you can use.
Making beer is a simple thing that anyone can do and it is guaranteed to improve your life. It hasn’t been proven, because there’s no way to prove it. But, millions of people have found the path that I call “the right way.”
Buying your beer already made is easy and convenient, and there are a lot of brewers out there that do it right. Most of the beer sold, however, is just called “beer” and is really “kinda’ like beer.”
For those wonderful people who appreciate good beer and just don’t have time to make it, you can encourage in some little way those who do make it. And it’s a fair assumption that they will want to share what they’ve done on their day off.
They’ll probably want to get all geeky about it and rattle on about staring at this liquid during an aggressive fermentation process, and being entranced by its wondrous self-propulsion system. Or how during the boil they saw the cosmos in its infancy and felt there truly was a place somewhere out there in the universe where there was a planet with an ocean of beer, or something ridiculous like that.
The Scourge
The Scourge
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This is a picture of the United States in 1860, showing the distribution of the slave population by county. From a distance it resembles the scan of a lung cancer patient. The Delta sold its soul to the Devil for its riches and is has been paying for it ever since.
The Little Red Scooter
There’s a little red scooter sitting in the yard of my font-door neighbor. It’s a tan house, with a nice, wooden front door and tapered columns. But the inhabitants of this house have shown signs of exhibiting “cracky” behavior, namely sitting out on the front porch, drinking and smoking and working on the scooter until the oddest hours of the night. The man of the house, a shadowy figure who could pass for a prison convict, a trucker, a short-order cook, or a combination of the three, either just likes to work on the scooter or has an obsessive compulsive disorder involving the need to take apart and put back together scooters.
The woman is a bleach-blond Joey Ramone, with hair that hangs over her eyes like a sheep dog. She casts a tall cartoonish outline. She’s usually smoking a cigarette, if she has them. I think she is the grandmother and takes care of the little girl, who seems to be about 9. I say this only because the little girl and a woman in her late 20s knocked on my door one day to ask if I’d seen a little Chihuahua named Baby. It was small. Smaller than most, she said while holding back tears. I said I hadn’t, but there were several Chihuahuas in the neighborhood and I’d seen one just the day before on the other side of the ghetto on a chain in the front yard of an old lady’s house. And I think I heard the lady say she was going to eat it! No, I joking of course. I said it was the woman on the corner with the elephant ear plants, painted tires and wind chimes. I never saw the Chihuahua at that house again, but I saw the little girl carrying one just a few days ago. Maybe she found it. Whatever the case may be, the grandmother had the little girl come over one night and knock on my door to ask for a cigarette. I had none, and wondered if I had would I have even given a cigarette to the little girl for her grandmother? Nah. Probably not.
This was before “the fight.” I was cooking supper when I heard a loud bang. It was loud enough to register on the Richter scale. Our houses are not that far from one another. But still, it’s at least 50 yards. I didn’t think much of the first thud, but then it happened again and I wondered what it was. I walked into the living room and saw in the shadows of the porch a man and a woman arguing with the intensity of a lion fight, but they weren’t really making much noise. It was strange, and I was a little transfixed at this juxtaposition of two people fighting and hardly making any noise. They were obviously professionals. The only noise came when the trucker/mechanic/methy boyfriend hit the wooden tapered column. Hard. So hard he practically bounced back from it, and I could feel the thud from the across this hollow earth of the ghetto.
The boyfriend calmed down, spent from his porch pugilism. And I was surprised not to see a cast on his hand the next day. The scooter sat shining under the porch light.
I still have never seen anyone actually drive the scooter. I’ve only heard it crank up once, and it ran for a minute like and old chainsaw before sputtering out. I could feel the mechanic’s disappointment. He’s out there working on it again. I just saw him push it from one end of the yard back to the porch. I hear him dropping wrenches on the concrete sometimes, and saying things like “give me that wrench.” There’s a boy hanging around the porch these days helping him. And I was this close today to walking over there with my beer in hand and asking them what the hell is wrong with this scooter. I can only imagine that little girl dreams everyday of jumping on the little red scooter and riding away from it all.
‘Let it Ride’ comes from a Rambunctious Road
‘Let it Ride’ comes from a Rambunctious Road
“Let It Ride,” the 1989 horse racing movie starring Richard Dreyfuss, has a winner’s circle spot in Hot Springs history.
A little-known fact is the cult classic comedy is based on a book called “Good Vibes” by Jay Cronley. The prolific Tulsa World columnist wrote it after an epiphany at Oaklawn racetrack in Hot Springs in the late 1970s.
Released in 1978, “Good Vibes” is out of print now. So it’s both hard to find and expensive when you find it. But the movie is just like the book, minus a few continuity errors, Cronley says. So, unless you have about $400 for a copy of “Good Vibes,” it will be a lot faster and easier to rent it for a few good laughs.
“My favorite scene is still when Trotter is asking all the jokers around the place who they like, and he draws a big line straight through it on the program. I laugh at that every time,” Cronley said. “Oh my god, you should’ve seen the bars across from Oaklawn back then.”
After playing several races at Oaklawn that fateful day, Cronley returned to his cabin at Shangri-La Resort on Lake Ouachita. Being a horseplayer, it wasn’t long before he picked back up his Racing Form to scan the late races. He saw a horse he had to bet. He jumped back in his car and drove as fast as he could back to the track, down a curvy, two-mile stretch to Highway 270, speeding 30 miles due east to 2705 Central Ave. At times, he said, he was “passing cars on the right like a madman.”
He got to the track just in time to place a bet on, no joke, a horse named Rambunctious Road. The gamble paid off. He was in the money. Rambunctious Road– born, 1971, sired by Ramblin’ Road with quarter horse Joy San — paid $200, and a novel idea: A book about horse racing like no one has ever seen.
“I thought to myself, there’s gotta’ be an easier way to make money than this,” Cronley said by phone from his home in Tulsa. “That’s when I said I’ll write about it.”
The book “Good Vibes” has been through at least three publishers since hitting out-of-print status. The movie producer and ex-hockey player Ned Dowd (“Slap Shot” with Paul Newman) found a copy of “Good Vibes” though and together with his screenwriter sister, Nancy Dowd, made a movie out of it.
The night before they started filming “Let it Ride,” Cronley said he and the cast all went to Hialeah Park and Race Course near Miami to get into the spirit of things and bet on the dog races.
“There was this old lady feeding Dreyfuss tips on which dogs to bet, and he made a fortune,” Cronley said. “He was over there hiding his notes like a school boy in class!”
“Let It Ride” may have not received great reviews when it came out, but it soon became obvious those reviewers were idiots. Popularity for the film picked up after a lengthy run on HBO in the early 1990s. Today, one can find clips at YouTube.com with a list of comments describing it as the “greatest horse racing movie ever,” to “literally, one of the most under-rated comedies of all time.”
“Like Lyle?”
I’ve never met Lyle Lovett, or can stake any honest claim to being related to him. But for many years whenever someone asked “Like Lyle?” after I introduced myself, I would usually reply “Yeah, like Lyle!”
In February, with a little time on my hands and a spark of renewed interest, I set off to see if this longtime claim to a common ancestry with the famous country music star was actually possibly true.
In the olden days, when something like this was to be undertaken you would have to scrawl out a letter longhand and send it off with a postmarked stamp licked and affixed to the upper right hand corner of an envelope. Then wait a few days for it to get there. And then wait a long time for a reply, since it would go in a large bin of fan mail. Nowadays, you can shoot off a letter in a fiber optic tube at nearly the speed of light, and hear back almost instantly. On Feb. 5, 2013 I began my communication with “Cousin Lyle.” (I’ll continue to use quotes until my theory is proven.)
I sent him a note on Facebook. My roommate still does not believe me, and I’m okay with that. She says it’s his assistant, or some weirdo Lyle Lovett wannabe who has studied up everything about him and knows his whole family tree. But, I see that this person has 113,045 likes, so he’s apparently fooling a lot of other people too. Plus, I’ve talked to big names before, in interviews for a newspaper. Charlie Daniels, Lucinda Williams, Mario Lopez, Pauli Shore, Paul Kantner, to name a few. And they are all just people too. Extraordinary and famous, but still people. They like to know about their past as much as the next guy.
Not long before all of this started, my dad and I were talking at the house south of Y City, over there by all those “erratic boulders,” and he mentioned something about Robert Abercrombie Lovett. This was the Secretary of Defense under President Trumann during the Korean War. I hadn’t heard of him before, and was surprised that a Lovett had reached such political heights. In my search on the Secretary I noticed he was from southeast Texas. I knew “Cousin Lyle” was from that region, too, so I used this as my point of entry for a discussion. He replied in the affirmative. Indeed, he was related to the Secretary.
Genealogy is confusing sometimes. You need a good deal of spatial reasoning to comprehend and visualize a tree with a bunch of names on it. As a matter of his privacy, and simple storytelling, I won’t go into all the particulars of our conversation. But how would Lyle Lovett’s assistant know that Robert A. Lovett is Lyle Lovett’s first cousin, twice removed, and the son of a Robert S. Lovett, who left San Jacinto County Texas to go to work for the Union Pacific Railroad, and ultimately end up running it for the Harrimans.
This led to a question from Lyle that I of course had been thinking all along “Where are your Lovetts from? Is there a chance we could be related?” he asks. See what a swell fellow he is?
Through the local library I have been using a database called HeritageQuest. You just type in a name and a year and oftentimes you can find the census report they were listed in. It’s pretty fun to do, and helpful in connecting the dots. Genealogists also like to use tax reports, homestead claims, and slave schedules. I have used slave schedules in my attempt to track down West Bogan, to no avail. But, I have been able to find many of my Lovett and Strom relatives in census reports going as far back as 1870.
Lyle’s Lovetts and my Lovetts are both traced back to Georgia, and then further on to Ireland and England. Neither one of us knew exactly where in Georgia though. There is a Lovett, Ga., in the central eastern part of the state. The county of Laurens, which has Dublin as its county seat. Lyle says his great grandfather Paul’s father, William, was born in Georgia. I’ve been trying to find out exactly where he came from, and have pinned down a good suspect: William H. Lovett of Burke County, Ga., born in 1821-22. However, William is a common name in both of our families, due in part to a connection to William the Conqueror.
Two brothers, Robert and William, son of Richardus de Louvet, accompanied William the Conqueror to England in 1066 in the great raid that changed history. Their names are inscribed over the western door of the Church of Notre Dame, at Dives, in Normandy. From William are descended the Lovetts of Buckinghamshire and Northhamptonshire. From Robert, the Lovetts of Worcestershire. I wonder if he had anything to do with the sauce?
Unfortunately, I am unable at this time to directly connect Lyle’s Lovetts and my Lovetts, who have been in Arkansas since the early 1860s, maybe sooner. But there has to be a connection somewhere. He looks too much like some of my relatives.
Photo of Lyle Lovett…possible relation, now on tour. Click here for tour dates: http://www.lylelovett.com/#/tour_dates/
Miles and Bertha Lovett, my great grandparents, of Mountain Township, Scott County, Arkansas. Ouachita Mountains, near Boles, circa 1940s.
ouachitabeer 