Steel Drums Girls: Making the Best of What's Available

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

Kettle drums have come a long way in the past century, from discarded oil drums in the petroleum rich area of the Caribbean, where it is now the national instrument in Trinidad-Tobago, all the way to Arrowhead Lakes, where it is the sound behind the eight-piece group, Steelin' the Night Away.

The group was formed seven years ago by Sarah King, an after-school teacher at Las Brisas Elementary School. Like many of the other members of the group, King came to the steel drums late in life.

"The church I attended had started a steel drum group, with kids and adults," she said. "Then the adults branched out into a trio, and those people are all still members of the band."

With King as director, the group also includes Maureen Fumo, a full-time mom; Marla Phillips, a nurse at Phoenix Baptist Hospital; Christy Johnson, who works in human resources at Pivotal Research; Belinda Lawrence; a consultant from Honeywell; Chris Adler, another nurse at Phoenix Baptist; Blake Olson, 14, the youngest member of the group as a freshman at Sandra Day O'Connor High School; and Robin Morris, who is "retired" from everything but being a mom and playing double-guitar steel drums made and shipped from Trinidad-Tobago.

Like most of the other members of the group, Morris came to become a musician late in life. She has mixed memories of those early days a few years ago as she stayed up in the wee hours of the morning, practicing the pans.

"This is the most wonderful thing, both musically and socially, that I have ever done in my life," she says.

Even as a novice musician, she already had one thing in her favor: hair color. To look at the group's picture, you would wonder if there was some kind of program in the works because all but one of the women in the group is blonde. It comes up a lot as they play, practice and drive themselves to gigs. For example, Boyd, an Englishman whose Liverpool roots make him the sort of official keeper of the rock'n'roll flame with the group, often refers to the experience with the steel drum band this way: "My fantasy is to always play with seven blonde ladies."

Responds Morris: "We let Chris in, but she's not blonde, so we have to work around that."

The good spirits of the band vibe also translates into a multiply mixed up sound.

"In Trinidad-Tobago, their method of creating music was to just work with the things they had," King says. "When oil was discovered in the Caribbean, the discarded oil drums were brought into the mix. They are very enterprising people, musically. Over the decades, people discovered that you can pound on certain parts of the drum to make specific musical notes."

Eventually, it became popularized by such outfits at the U.S. navy steel drum band, Admiral Dan and His Drum Band.

"I have always loved that type of music," King says. "Now you will find steel drum groups playing classical, Christian music, rock ... We are no exception. We do a little bit of everything."

Jethro Tull in the Barrio

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

Mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore, I opened my second-floor window, placing my right speaker on the ledge, to blast Jethro Tull into the barrio. In the early morning light, as this mainly Latino neighborhood was also opening its windows and doors to blast rappers and sweet norteno ballads, I too decided to broadcast in my own way, knowing full well that a Celtic bard is a rough translation in Mexican America.

But hey, what the hell, it made me feel better.

Now, the Tull is on tour again. It is heartening to think that such a wise old muse can muster the strength after all of these years of predicting the apocalypse. Heartening more to think: Hey, there`s still time to change the course we are on. And that the Tull is once again throwing it`s pan lute into the fray, stirring the soul with Bardic prose, ancien` rhyme and all the rest in classic rock, 4/4 time.

Someday I hope to speak to him again. Once, while at Access Internet Magazine, I had a long chat with him over the phone. Ideas flowed through that line like water, and his ideas still resonate in me, just as I refused for several days to take my cassette tape of 20 Years of Jethro Tull out of my car`s player as the oracle insinuated itself into my skin.

And still, despite the dark times, they flow. Ian Anderson is a gift that keeps on giving.

So here`s to you, O Bard, O Prophet of Doom. May your words sing wisdom into the night, as we now sing together (as Bono stole from Bruce Cockburn, and I steal it now) to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

And now, for this week`s reviews, all blasted this am to the barrio:

REM
Around the Sun
(BMI)
Been having mixed feelings about this one, by far one of the most somber REM releases ever, and that`s pretty somber. After listening to it more than 20 times, falling in love with it over and over again, I sold it back to the music store from which it came, not so much because it sucked (unless you are one of those pathetic I-Like-the-Old-REM-That-Rocked hardliners), but because the emotional content of Stipe`s almost Swedenborgian zeitgeist cut too close to what I was going through before, during and after the presidential election. This lush, down-pace, bittersweet to love and its many levels was simply more than I could bear. But after I got a few bucks for it as a resale, I made up with my paramore, and then bought it back from the record store (so far, I am down about $23 during the history of this series of transactions), and then handed it over to her, knowing full well her love was a safer place to keep it. Anyway, you are not a real REM fan if you don`t appreciate the luminosity of this release. Stipe`s voice and message considers to blossom until the fullness of that sun, his brand of love, which has never dimmed. If the guitar parts that quaked have well, diminished, blame Peter Buck for just phoning it in. Maybe the whole world`s earthquake has been just too heavy for him lately? Who can blame him for taking a pass? I can`t. Of those songs I would like to hear over the radio: Wanderlust is my fave. The song that should also be played endlessly to render the global listeners into piles of heartbroken muck: Leaving New York.

Social Distortion
Sex, Love and Rock`n`Roll
(Time Bomb/BMG)
This is your new Johnny Cash; this is your new Johnny Cash being fried in a skillet called Social Distortion. I have discerned that lead singer Mike Ness is the male answer to a man-hating, deep dark man-worshipper like PJ Harvey, who I also love, despite all of her darkness and gloom and anger. Like PJ, Ness pushes his eviscerated soul through the meatgrinder of the heart, and while both artists find similar forms of victory in their release, to listen closely can be a terrible thing to bear. Especially if you don`t have a sweetie around to cling to in the storm. To no surprise, the band maintains it`s pure, straightforward integrity of drums, bass and scorching guitars. There is no compromise in the sound. However, notice: Ness is more loving, and life affirming, despite the wreckage, than I can remember. The big surprise here: Optimism unleashed, no longer gathering force.

The Tragically Hip
In Between Evolution
(Zoe Records)
Yet another spotty record by this Canadian wondercrew (the previous, In Violet Light, seems to be a mere retreat into the woods after 9/11) only kicks off by the third song, Gus the Polar Bear from Central Park, and then really starts to cook with the next REM-like (the old REM-like) rocker, Vaccination Scar. At its best, that Byronesque tragic hero, Gordon Downie, continues to shout about things totally self-referential from the top of the rafters, and so, upon the first listening, the rest of the band is doing most of the work. At least here, for the most of the record, cohorts Ron Baker, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois and Gord Sinclair have reaffirmed their collaborative muscle. Polar Bear`s tragic riffs seer Downie`s heroic poesy home while the drum and bassline push the music up above those Blame Canada trees. Still, it has been a long time since Fully, Completely, which will always remain as one of the best rock documents of the 1990s. But at least here their are still remembrances of the source of their original buckskinned moose call conceits.

Trampled By Turtles
Songs From a Ghost Town
(Banjodad Records)
This topical bluegrass band out of Duluth, Minnesota also has some sort of connection to Decorah, Iowa, and hearing it makes me long to go there, bad, and meet all of them folks living off living off the grid and picking away at their instruments on their porches as the soon goes down on Amerika the wounded. I love the title because I love ghost towns. I love the sound because it reminds me of my own heart-home, Telluride, Colorado (or the San Juan mountain range, anyway). The vocals are sonorous and clear, the band backs lightly and sprightly and fast with inspired mandolin and grooving riffs that would challenge a lot of guitar players. In fact, there is nothing complicated about any of this. In its delivery of vanquished pain, dancing out of heartbreak as the mandolins and banjos tinkle away, I find peace. My favorite tune: My Brother Works for the CIA. He should quit his day job, que no? There ain`t no easy answers when the circus is in town, they sing. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree.

And now for a bit of open sorcery, as in, free lyrics to whoever can figure out how to make this mistake a plus, instead, to throw barbs right back at the beast:

Social Darwinist
By Douglas McDaniel
To the sound of silent cyberpunk (or Wilco-style bluegrass, your choice) we go:

Spent seventy two hours as a social Darwinist
Gotta get ahead of you (Seventy two hours)
Seventy two hours as a Social Darwinist
Gotta get an edge over the loss,
vengeance is hip you know
Gotta get a handle on the guilt I miss
gotta get a multiple set a girlies to kiss

Spent seventy two hours as a social Darwinist
Gotta get over you (seventy two, seventy two, seventy two hours)
Seventy two fucking shitty hours as a Social Darwinist
As you tried to convince me of your Know Nothing bliss,
I let my eyes look away, if for just a minute (Seventy two, seventy two seventy two)
Being anti-social ain`t darlin little Darwin
You won`t like the feeling, your empty hand will be shaking (seventy two, seventy two)
Won`t like the smell as the whole world is quaking (seventy two, seventy two seventy seventy seventy two)

(Refrain)
On the third day I flew across the sky
rebuilt the temple of love, I did pray
Sure, I fell, makin` a hell of her heaven,
and man O man let the bunker busters fly.

I ran for cover, O sweet Sweet Twenty Three Skidoo (Twenty three, twenty three twenty three skidoo)
By the sixty-ninth hour as a social Darwinist
I ran for cover, looking for the way you look at me,
hoping and I`m praying to look up to you.

(Jaggedy Guitar riffs here)

Three more hours as a social Darwinist,
for just three days I forgot about you (seventy two, O, seventy two, yeah)
Seventy two hours of living from your hand to my fist
Seperate but equal, sure, gotta get a step on you.
Treated every living thing like my private little toy
Dreamin of the cosmos now, when I was just a boy (Darwinist)
Wore your love like a glove but there was no joy (Darwinist)
Gotta get around these blank walls, gotta get over you (Darwinist)

Douglas McDaniel is publisher of Mythville.com and his blogger site, Mythville.blogspot.com, as well as about 10 books (although at times he loses count, since he always intends to make more). A Phoenix-based freelance writer, he can be e-mailed at mythville@yahoo.com for as long as the empire supplies electricity.

Sage Gentle-Wing : Portrait of the Artist as a Complete Unknown

Sage Gentle-Wing : Portrait of the Artist as a Complete Unknown

GFR`s Knight Lost

TERRY KNIGHT was murdered defending his daughter at his home in Killeen, TX on the night of Nov. 1. (Read more ...)
It is with sadness that Grand Funk Railroad issues a statement regarding the death of Terry Knight.
"We were shocked to here that Terry had been murdered. Even though we have not had a friendly relationship with Terry over the last 30 years it still was very distressing to hear of his death.
"Terry Knight was instrumental in the birth and early success of Grand Funk Railroad from 1969 to 1972. Having been a former bandmate in previous bands with Grand Funk's Don Brewer and Mark Farner (The Pack, and Terry Knight and the Pack) Knight later became manager and producer of Grand Funk Railroad. During those years Grand Funk sold millions of records and toured the world as one of the biggest rock bands of all time even selling out Shea Stadium in NYC faster than The Beatles.
"There was a major falling out between the members of Grand Funk and Terry in 1972 and Terry was fired. This led to huge lawsuits and lasting discord between GFR and Terry.
"Grand Funk moved on and continued to have great success with million selling hits 'We're An American Band,' 'Locomotion,' 'Some Kind Of Wonderful' and 'Bad Time.'
"We have had very little personal contact with Terry over the last 30 years.
"We deeply regret Terry's death and our sympathy goes out to his family."

- Don Brewer
Grand Funk Railroad, Nov. 2, 200