Cows with Guns in a Living Room Near You
29 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Dana Lyons, Music
I finally got to see Dana Lyons live a week ago Friday. Dana is most famous for his Cows With Guns song (in fact, his website is cowswithguns.com), but he’s written a lot more leaning toward folk-rock/country, sometimes poignant and often slyly satirical of our so called American way of life and in defense of the environment.
OK, I know others have said the Hootenanny for Haiti with Mike McCready, Duff McKagan and friends was like being in someone’s living room (I said campfire, I know, not very original); but Dana’s concert really was like being in someone’s living room; the community room of Jackson Place Co-Housing, to be exact. I felt like I was crashing someone’s party almost! Once I found it, as the entrance was in an inner courtyard of an apartment complex.
A lot of families, from grandmas to children, and a nice spread of food and drink to graze on. The little girl on the right side of the picture dragged her toy horse out to the center of the room to offer Dana right in the middle of RV (just when he’s getting to accounting for all the kids in the RV, appropriately enough).
No wolf whistles at this show, but we did get in a bit of howling. Dana opened with I Am An Animal, which includes the line, about mammals, “They sing the latest tunes, at night they howl at the moon.” Dana recounted singing that one at a dog park with, I think it was, about 40 people and 80 dogs; and the howling went on a long time!
All Dana’s music is on http://www.cowswithguns.com . One of my favorite verses of I Am An Animal:
The fish dig a whole nother scene
Their whole world is aqua marine
Some are thin and some are fat
Some of their faces are flat
They take trans-Atlantic trips
They do strange things with their lips
Dana’s next song was for the dogs too, from his new cd, Three Legged Coyote, How I Miss Your Dog, “I feel so blue and I miss you too, but I really miss your dog. . .”
Also from his new album, Grandma’s Up in Heaven, Giving Hell to God, dedicated to his late grandmother: “She was a red-headed beauty with big brown eyes/A straight-talking gal who didn’t know how to lie/And from the day she was born everyone knew who was in charge”.
Patagonia Dam Song tells the story of the people Dana met in Chile who are fighting a dam after former dictator Augusto Pinochet sold away their country’s water rights to foreign corporations on the way out.
No one can own a waterfall
No one can own the sky
And I’ve seen the desperate sickness
In the rich men who would try
International Rivers has a current campaign on stopping the dams in Patagonia:
http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/latin-america/patagonia
Older songs included RV:
The tenters watch with wonder, the bikers are afraid,
The rangers take their aspirin, the animals run away,
The truckers see a road block, the wagons see a wall,
The compacts see a mountain, the horses see a stall,
RV
Asked for by one of the kids, TV God:
And the TV God watches over me
Opens up my eyes, shows me how to see
All around the world, every night and day on my TV
Teaches how to love, teaches what is real
Tells what life is of, tells me how to feel
All I need to know I can find and see on my TV
Took me back aways. I was really addicted to TV as a kid. All that stuff stays with you forever. I heard a homeless guy last night near Key Arena berate his buddy “Pyle, you are the worst Marine in this outfit!” I don’t know if it’s disturbing or reassuring that the voices from your tv days past will accompany you on your journeys, no matter where.
Of course in addition to the unreality of our tv friends, there’s the consumerism (“I learned about toys and candy my Mommy should buy”) and then the wars we’re sold:
Everything I know about my country I learned on TV
The man on the screen tells me who is our enemy
They say that we are free and we must fight to be number one
So when the army calls I’ll grab my TV, my car, and my gun
Cows With Guns was just before the break (where we all made like consumers to buy cds and t-shirts).
He was a scrawny calf, who looked rather woozy
No one suspected he was packing an Uzi
Here’s the cartoon video:
Yes, even I know, the male cows with udders. . . OK, that’s a lot of bull!
After the break, Dana did Ride the Lawn (title track off his last cd), revealing that the verse about the dad getting mad at his college son’s ideas about a more environmentally conscious lawn came from his own experience with his dad. “Well, I’ll listen to your politics and your weirdo leftist songs, but when you’re under my roof, don’t you dare speak ill of lawns”.
I’m listening to it on Dana’s cowswithguns.com site and it’s hilarious. I don’t have that album yet! His dad, by the way, loves the song, and requested for the John Deere lawnmower on the album cover.
Turn of the Wrench has long been one of my favorites (since I discovered Dana’s music on the internet a few years back). It’s about a group of farmers in Minnesota taking matters into their own hands when the power company builds a line across their land against their will.
With bandannas on their faces
Careful not to make a sound
They loosened all the bolts
That held the towers to the ground
And several weeks later, with nobody around
The Minnesota wind blew tower after tower after tower down
I knew it was based on a true story, but didn’t know it was in a book written by the late Senator Paul Wellstone, Powerline:The First Battle of America’s Energy War.
Found it online at Powell’s Books:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780816643844-0
Dana talked about his work with Jane Goodall with Roots & Shoots and the Giant Peace Dove Project before doing Circle the World, with the ambitious plan to circle the world with these giant, hand made, doves.
Further information at: http://www.rootsandshoots.org/campaigns/dove
We had not only a sing-along, but a full participatory routine to Dana tried to teach us for for Swimming in the Big, about a vacationing American “bathing in the waters of de Nile”. I’m afraid the differences in swimming strokes was lost on me, having never really learned to swim, but I had fun trying anyways.
I thought I heard a bomb, it must be a celebration
If anything was wrong, they’d tell me on TV
Sometimes I’m amazed at how perfect things are going
I think I’ll do a little shopping, and take some time for me
Touring in Ireland, Dana was in Belfast and really didn’t want to do this song because of the line about the bomb (in a place that had experienced plenty of real ones); but the local radio dj requested it near the end of his show. The audience totally cracked up at the line. Dana later learned (and everyone else knew) the audience was half Catholic, half Protestant. Music and humor as a bridge!
Closing it out was My Country, about fighting against the destruction of our wildlands as patriotism.
Dana’s currently touring at house parties, granges and children’s museums in places like Langley, Woodinville and Mt. Vernon. He’d like to make it worldwide and play in a living room near you! Booking information on his website, http://www.cowswithguns.com . . .
Behind in my blogging, more music to come. Hidden doors in record stores. . .
Hootenanny for Haiti: Seattle’s Rock & Roll Campfire
07 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Duff McKagan, Duff McKagan's Loaded, Kim Virant, Kristen Ward, Mark Pickerel, Mike McCready, Music, Pearl Jam, Seattle, Star Anna Tags: Brad, Gary Westlake, Haiti, Jeff Rouse, Johnny Thunder, Kim Warnick, Mad Season, Matt Cameron, Mother Love Bone, Partners in Health, Shawn Smith, Showbox, Stone Gossard, The Fastbacks
I went to the Hootenanny for Haiti with Mike McCready, Duff McKagan and friends last Sunday night and it was a blast!
It was kind of like singing around the campfire with 1,100 of your closest friends, who happen to include some of the best musicians in Seattle, and a song list that includes The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Tom Petty and a couple surprises from the deepest vaults of Seattle rock history.
They started the show off, to a sold out and capacity crowd at the Showbox at the Market (the original Showbox), with Wild Horses. Here’s the preview before the show from KISW radio.
Let’s see: Duff McKagan (Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, Duff McKagan’s Loaded), Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Gary Westlake (Kristen Ward, Flight to Mars -the UFO tribute band that also includes Mike), and Jeff Rouse (Duff McKagan’s Loaded, Alien Crime Syndicate); and many more at the actual show.
Maybe it says something about the crowd (including me), that the first good sing along got going with Tom Petty’s Even the Losers (Mark Pickerel taking the lead on this one):
Some of the songs were a real hoot (and totally unexpected)! Jeff Rouse covering Prince’s I Can Never Take the Place of Your Man? Kim Warnick (The Fastbacks) taking the lead on Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth? Actually, Duff warned us this one was coming a couple weeks before on his Reverb blog on The Seattle Weekly site. Still, that he had so much fun playing it. . .
Johnny Thunder’s Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory was another one Duff told us was coming:
Star Anna really stole the show with her version of Otis Redding’s That’s How Strong My Love Is (version below not from the Hootenanny). I’ve said it before, but her voice is just incredible. The amount of emotion that just breaks your heart (but in a good way).
Kim Virant took up the challenge of following Star with Stevie Nicks’ Stop Dragging My Heart Around (doesn’t seem to be any video of that up). I’m not sure which of the guys was singing the dead on Tom Petty part of the duet.
Kristen Ward really held her own, taking the stage early with Hank Williams’ I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry amidst wolf whistles. Here she is with Gary Westlake singing Dolly Parton’s Jolene (and, yes, the drunk guys shouting at the start see Pearl Jam’s Matt Cameron. . .). Some people need to get out more, or maybe not. . .
Now for some pure Seattle moments. River of Deceit, from Mad Season, the super group Mike played in with the late Layne Staley (Alice in Chains), among others. Jeff Rouse takes Layne’s part:
There was also a mini-reunion of one of Pearl Jam member Stone Gossard’s side projects, Brad, after the raffle. Brad is playing at the Showbox on April 14, and that show is already sold out.
Then, back deeper into Seattle’s past – Crown of Thorns, from Mother Love Bone (a band before Pearl Jam that Stone and Jeff Ament were part of before their lead singer, Andrew Wood, ODed when they were on the brink of fame). Shawn Smith, from Brad, took the lead vocals. Holy Cow!
Then Duff and Star Anna did a duet of Bob Dylan’s Knocking on Heavens Door. Even Duff was in awe of her Otis Redding cover, and really embarrasses her (but in a good way) going on about it.
Sweet!
Closing out, Duff taking the lead on Iggy Pop’s I Wanna Be Your Dog, followed by the ladies taking the lead on I’ll Fly Away.
Awesome show for a great cause!
With the packed house and raffle tickets ($5 for one, $20 for 5), they must have raised a lot for Partners in Health and their work for Haiti. There is still supposed to be an autographed guitar that was played by Mike and Duff at the Hootenanny coming up on Charity Buzz. If you have $1000 or so lying around, it should be coming up this week at: http://www.charitybuzz.com/auctions . Search for Hootenanny for Haiti.
Obligatory late night transit story for this concert:
They’ve got police posted at the Westlake tunnel late nights. A cop was dragging a guy away in handcuffs for. . .(cue Dragnet theme). . .smoking a cigarette? OK, I’m not a big fan of second hand smoke, but . . . “You’re busted!”? I can see a ticket. He deserves a ticket (the officer helpfully pointed out the sign on the way out when the guy claimed he didn’t see any rule about it).
At least with the cops there, people aren’t getting the crap beaten out of them and getting robbed with everyone including the security guards standing around. Looks like the police are looking for something to do, though; so I’d suggest not lighting that cigarette and throw away your trash properly! Granted, a good idea anyways. . .
Judge Garzon – Human Rights vs Historical Amnesia
04 Mar 2010 1 Comment
in Human Rights Tags: Augusto Pinochet, Chile, Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain, Spanish Civil War
Judge Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who tried to bring Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to justice, spoke at the UW Law School last week. Unfortunately, a lot was lost in the translation (by headset) and I really regret not speaking Spanish.
Judge Garzon spoke on the importance of justice and of not forgetting the human rights abuses for the victims and society. Of course, the trouble is, that societies want to forget; or are pressured into forgetting. Amnesty is granted for human rights abuses in order to move forward.
None of which deters Judge Garzon, who is willing to take on human rights violations by anybody.
According to the LA Times:
Spain’s world-famous magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, has made many enemies over the years. He has indicted Osama bin Laden. He has gone after Spanish paramilitaries, Basque separatists and members of drug mafias. On this side of the Atlantic, Garzon is best known as the judge who pushed the frontiers of international law, trying to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from London and launching an inquiry into the suspected torture of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo.
Which has now got him in trouble with his own country, for investigating Spanish Civil War atrocities.
After all that, it is perhaps ironic that the biggest threat to Garzon right now comes not from some hit man but from his own judiciary, which alleges that the judge has overreached at home by trying to probe Spanish Civil War atrocities that were covered by an amnesty the country’s parliament passed in 1977. Many of Garzon’s adversaries on the right and the left have come together in support of the case against him.
Talk about historical amnesia – 70 years later and still there are many who don’t want to look at the truth.
Tens of thousands of Spaniards died or disappeared in the civil war, which ushered in the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco in 1939. When Franco died in 1975, the amnesty was widely seen as essential for a transition to democracy. But many of the victims have never been accounted for, and the country has not fully come to terms with its violent past. Garzon opened the case on behalf of relatives who sought to exhume and identify the dead. After right-wing groups filed a complaint, an investigative judge concluded that Garzon “consciously decided to ignore” the will of parliament in pursuing the case, and now a five-judge panel must decide whether to put him on trial for criminal intent. Garzon denies wrongdoing; the disappearances, he says, were crimes against humanity and, therefore, cannot be covered by an amnesty.
Can human rights just be negotiated away or forgotten to move forward? What about the victims? Judge Garzon spoke about the victims and their families, and how it is now not only the Mothers of the Plaza in Argentina, but their grandchildren, the children of the disappeared, who are the loudest calling for justice.
Of course, that kind of amnesia is happening in the U.S. as well, as the Obama administration avoids investigating or prosecuting members of the Bush administration for their involvement in torture. Judge Garzon is willing to bring that case to court. First, he has to deal with the charges that he refuses to forget that Spanish Civil War human rights violations.
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