Metallica & Diamond Head

Hardwired….to Self-Destruct came out on 11/18, the same day we saw Diamond Head at the Fish Head Cantina in Baltimore.   HTSD was the first Metallica album since Death Magnetic, which was released in September 2008, though the joint venture with Lou Reed, Lulu, dates from November 2011.  The third CD has a bunch of extra stuff, some of which was previously released.  I found it a worthwhile addition at a reasonable price.

Diamond Head.   I’d reviewed them earlier, in 2008, as well as Metallica around the same time.   By now the only original member is guitarist Brian Tatler.  They’re originally from Stourbridge, which is outside Birmingham, England. The band had its original run from 1976-1983, broke up, reformed from 1990-94, and then again from 2000 to the present.  Duncan Scott (drums) and Colin Kimberly (bass) were only in the ’76-83 version, while singer Sean Harris had been with some of the more recent reunions but apparently is permanently estranged from Tatler.  The remainder of the current band is singer Rasmus Born Anderson, rhythm guitarist Andy “Abbz” Abberley, bassist Dean Ashton, and drummer Karl Wilcox.  Tatler is playing a sunburst Les Paul Standard instead of a Flying V these days.  RBA is young and energetic, shaved head with a beard – an extra from “Vikings” – and does an excellent job of copying Sean Harris’ vocals.

They have a new album, self-titled Diamond Head, which sounds like a competently executed 2016 version of their prior material. They played about three songs from it.   Aside from those songs, and one from Canterbury (commercial flop third album, a bone thrown to the hardcore fans in the audience), the set focused on Lightning to the Nations and Living on Borrowed Time, the first two albums, of which the former provides all the best songs that Metallica in their excellent judgment saw fit to cover – including my favorite, “Sucking My Love”.  “Am I Evil” closed the set, with “Streets of Gold” (???) as the encore. 

By the time we got into Metallica – 1985 – they were an opening act at Donington (Ride the Lightning tour) then for Ozzy Osbourne (Master of Puppets).   We never saw them in a club, where you can get close up to the stage.  Their club stage would have been in the San Francisco area back in 1983-84 when Kill ‘Em All was the newest album.

As I noted back in 2008, if you remove Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Def Leppard from the mix of NWOBHM bands – i.e. the three most successful bands which survived the general demise of the genre itself – you’re left with a few worthy mentions.  Of these, thanks to Metallica, DH are probably the best known.   Angel Witch, Witchfynde, and Vardis are the next ones down.  All three have fairly recent albums, Vardis’ (Red Eye) being the newest (2016), Angel Witch As Above, So Below (2012) in the middle, with Witchfynde’s, Play It To Death being the oldest (2008).  Generally the “updated” albums sound like a more modern version of the original material, a balanced blend of them which tends to work, though naturally we’re going to prefer the original material if only out of sentimentality.  I think that holds true no matter how well the band does at putting out new material. 

Hardwired.  By now I’ve heard it three times (twice in the car, once through the videos).  Looking back at my reviews of St. Anger and Death Magnetic, the prior two albums, I see that I liked St. Anger more than Load and Re-Load, and Death Magnetic more than St. Anger.  Likewise, I like this one more than Death Magnetic.  James has his massive riffs, Kirk has his widdly-widdly Satriani solos, I generally ignore Lars & the bassist, and pay some attention to the clever song titles and growling vocals. 

Tracks;  “Hardwired…to Self Destruct”; “Atlas, Rise”; “Now That We’re Dead”; “Moth Into Flame”; “Dream No More” (Cthulhu tribute!), “Halo On Fire”;  “Confusion” (PTSD tribute); “ManUNKind”; “Here Comes Revenge”; “Am I Savage?”: “Murder One” (tribute to Lemmy, though no Hawkwind references - @#^$@#%^); and “Spit Out The Bone”.  The tracks seem to have a little bit of step to them – that extra beat that takes it from just 4/4 to something with a discernable groove, yet without being overtly funky.  Each has its own music video, mostly footage of the band playing with some sort of gimmick.  Despite the awesome subject matter, “Dream No More” had a fairly unimpressive video.  “Halo on Fire” features a female Kurt Cobain, somehow.  In fact, they’re all fairly mundane and unimpressive as music videos go – many of them apparently done by someone who didn’t even bother to read the lyrics – with one notable exception.  The video for “Murder One”, the Lemmy tribute song, is certainly good – and provides the missing Hawkwind references.  :D

Band.  It’s funny, I’m watching these recent music videos, one per song, and getting a subjective impression of each band member.  JAMES:  Your GF’s Dad.  LARS:  Your GF’s creepy uncle.  KIRK:  Your GF’s ex-BF.  ROBERT: Your GF’s mom’s new BF.

However, I suppose I’m a stick in the mud, because notwithstanding an upward trend in quality after the nadir of Re-Load, I still prefer the first three albums, with Cliff Burton.  Having said that, I will be happy to see Hetfield & co. in concert if and when they bring Hardwired to our local concert venue (DC or NYC areas), however large or small that might be. 

I have a feeling it will be somewhere larger than the Fish Head Cantina.

The Monarchist Party

Now we have President-Elect Donald Trump.   Whoa.

Watching the election night coverage on Tuesday, and seeing Trump’s electoral vote tally rise far faster than Hillary’s, it dawned on me that, “Trump is going to win this.  After all….”  And my first reaction was to think…

“Well, we all have to die someday anyway.”

Now I see that Trump is backtracking on some issues and making a few proposals (Second Amendment) which sound like they came from Mitt Romney or John McCain.  I believe that – bluster and bullshit aside – he did NOT really expect to beat Hillary Clinton and now is faced with the task of actually being President.  That includes a real platform, not this random nonsense he farted out during the election.  I mean, if he didn’t expect to be elected, what difference did it make what he proposed?   YUGE WALL?  Why not?  Repeal Obamacare?  Why not?  Execute Hillary?  Sure.  All under the vague and pompous banner of “Make America Great”. 

Was there anything else?  I don’t recall.  He couldn’t articulate anything more than that and since he contradicted himself daily and had no chance of winning (right?) I paid little attention to this orange Casino Hitler, his stupid speeches, or his Kool Aid Minions.  My vote was locked in for Johnson. 

All this reminds me of the Monarchist Party.   Back at the University of Maryland, College Park (1986-1990, AD), there was student government.  It had very little power and was mostly a joke.  So much so, that a group decided to take that to its logical extreme and actually run AS a Monarchist Party.  Their leader was King Tom, and his #1 campaign promise was building a moat of beer around the campus.  College Park is the main campus of the University of Maryland, mostly on the west side of Route 1 inside the Beltway, though Frat Row, Leonardtown, and Richie Coliseum are on the east side.  I don’t recall seeing a map of this plan, but it would have to involve bridges north and south of College Park for Route 1 to cross.  Nowadays it would be filled with some hipster-approved IPA.  Anyhow. 

Despite – or perhaps because of – these ludicrous campaign promises, the Monarchists did win, and King Tom did become student government president.  Guess what – NO MOAT.  Drive down Route 1 if you don’t believe me.  Nope, so far as I can tell, he simply did what the last student government president did, and most likely what his successor, whoever that was, did after him.   I believe their only power is to distribute student activities fees among the groups.  Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you – except that building moats was probably outside his power.

While I’m on the topic of the election, I’d like to address three issues.

Reasons for Hillary’s Failure.  We went from “Hillary will win in a landslide” to “Trump has been elected.”  Why did this happen?

1.         Many feel that Hillary’s email issues caused Democrats to defect en masse to Trump.  She messed up on email security and you’ll vote for the enemy.  Yeah, I don’t think so.  For every confused Democrat I’m sure there was at least one GOP-er who was horrified that Casino Hitler won his party’s nomination.

2.         Trumpers Drank the Kool Aid.  Actually, Trump won less votes than Mitt Romney.   The GOP candidate won less votes than the prior guy.   GOP voting numbers have been relatively stable for the last few elections.  Try again.

3.         Hold on, who is voting?  I think the biggest issue was that since the election was said to be a foregone conclusion, why bother voting?  This lulled too many voters – most of them Democrats - who normally would have come out to vote in a close race, to stay away from the long lines at the voting booths on Tuesday.  I find that the most plausible explanation for Trump’s victory over Hillary.

The Protests.  Apparently not everyone is happy that Trump won.   So we have protests.   A few observations about this.

1.         Your proper time to “protest” was on election day.

2.         If you didn’t actually vote for Hillary, and stayed home, what business do you have protesting?

3.         Let’s assume that 100% of the protesters did in fact turn out to vote, and voted for Hillary Clinton.  Despite that, Trump still won.  Doesn’t that show that more people wanted Trump to be president?

4.         The protests will not convince Trump to step down.  They won’t induce Congress – controlled by the GOP – to change the election.  They won’t induce the electors to change their votes.  They won’t convince the Trump voters.  They won’t convince the third party voters.  And they won’t convince all those people who stayed home instead of voting.  So who will it influence?  The protesters themselves.  If they can get this crap out of their systems without interfering with the rest of us, fine.  Whatever makes you feel better.  But don’t try to prevent the rest of us from getting on with our lives.

5.         Stories of people dying because an ambulance couldn’t get through traffic blocked by protesters appear to be recycled stories of Black Lives Matters protesters causing similar fates, themselves originally made up.

6.         People have a right to protest for whatever reason they want, no matter how stupid or unpopular the cause.  This includes KKK marchers.  What they don’t have a right to do is block traffic, kill people, beat people up, or destroy property.   None of that endears the protesters to the nation at large and is in fact counterproductive.

7.         As asinine as I find these protests, the litany of Trumpers telling protesters to get back to work – if they have jobs – is equally annoying.  The Trumpers are showing just as much arrogance and cluelessness as the PC crowd and SJWs they bitch about. 

Not My President.  For the last eight years we’ve endured the anti-Obama crowd whining, “not MY President”, “it’s the WHITE House!”, “kick out the Kenyan”, etc.  Now that Trump has won, his supporters somehow expect us all to fall in love with the guy and shut up.  Nope.  Facebook – among other forums for public opinion - will be full of anti-Trump stuff for the next 4-8 years.  We’ll make fun of his bizarre orange tan, his Boris Johnson hair, his tiny hands, his thin skin, his bankrupt casinos, his hot immigrant wife, his spoiled kids, and whatever mistakes he makes will be blown up 100x.  The slightest hint of dishonesty and corruption will be grounds for incessant demands for impeachment.  Turnabout is fair play.  If the Trumpers want to deny they’re fascists who expect complete obedience to authority and no tolerance for dissent, they can prove it by showing the same thick skin to criticism and complaints as Obama had to all this time.  From what I’ve seen so far, Trump is incapable of laughing at himself – unlike Obama – and his followers likewise do a poor job of tolerating opposing viewpoints.   It’s like they need trigger warnings and safe spaces.  Trump won?  Tough s**t for everyone who didn’t vote for him.  Trump is ridiculed and made fun of?  Tough s**t for him and his minions.  Consistency is all we ask for….

Anyhow.

As of November 18, it’s still two months to go before Obama moves out and Trump moves in.  That’s two months for him to figure out what the hell he’s going to do for the next four years.  My subjective impression – and we’ll see how accurate my prediction works out to be – is that his more outlandish proposals will fall into the same oblivion as King Tom’s moat of beer, leaving us with a platform of politically feasible policies indistinguishable from what any other conservative Republican president – e.g. Mitt Romney, John McCain, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, etc. (except for outliers like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul) – would do.  If that’s the case, I think we can all sleep a little easier.  We survived 8 years of Reagan, 4 years of George H.W. Bush, and 8 years of Dubya.  A properly restrained Trump – assuming that’s possible – is not something to worry about.   And if it is? 

“Well, we all have to die someday anyway.”

US Model 1917 Enfield

I’ve mentioned the Mauser 98K rifle already, now it’s time to talk – briefly – about this one.  Fittingly, it’s November 11, Veteran’s Day.

My grandfather (mother’s father) served in the US Army, the AEF, during WWI, fighting in France.  Unfortunately he died when I was very little – and I have no memory of him alive – so I didn’t get a chance to ask him about this.  According to my mom, my grandmother threw out all his WWI stuff and he never talked about it.  His discharge papers, dating from May 1919, indicate he served in the 307 Infantry Division.

The AEF is typically shown carrying the 1903 Springfield rifle.  But due to production issues, 75% of US soldiers fighting in WWI were actually issued this one, the 1917 Enfield.  Both rifles are chambered in .30-06 (the .30 caliber rifle round, spitzer, introduced in 1906) – as are the Browning 1917 (water cooled) and 1919 (air cooled) machine guns, the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), and last but not least, the famous M1 Garand.

I don’t know for a fact which rifle my grandfather carried, but odds are it was the Enfield.  Even Alvin York, the famous US soldier, carried one, though in popular culture he’s shown with a Springfield, the more popular rifle.

  Apparently, the Springfield Armory could not make enough Springfields (the rifle) to supply the whole AEF, so Winchester and Remington stepped in to produce this model, a .30-06 version of a British rifle originally in .303.  I stopped by the Armory when I visited Springfield a few years ago, and it’s not that big.  The museum is nice.

Anyhow.  Generally bolt action rifles are slammed as long, heavy guns, but I didn’t find this one to be.  It’s not that big, heavy, or long, and is about as fun to fire as any other bolt action rifle.  As noted, it takes .30-06, which is a fairly popular round.  Personally, I find working the bolt after each shot to be fun, so semi-auto rifles like the AR15 and AK47 are not as enjoyable to fire.  The heavy wood, the bolt, even the bayonet, make the bolt-action rifle seem more like a real weapon.  With its combination of steel and plastic, I can see why Vietnam-era soldiers called the M16 “the Mattel gun”.  However, with 30 round magazines and a quicker rate of fire, each of those is clearly a superior military weapon, or a “shit hits the fan” civilian weapon, than any bolt-action.  I do have the bayonet, though, which is long and bad-ass.

After WWI it was effectively retired.  WWII use was limited to UK Home Guards, plus some of the US troops in the Philippines who defended the islands against the Japanese in 1942 were equipped with these.   Nationalist Chinese troops sometimes used them – though they’re usually equipped with Mausers.  Denmark's Sirius Patrol in Greenland still uses this rifle. 

Someone wrote into the National Rifleman about what appeared to be a 1917 Enfield bayonet with plastic grips and a 1960s date marking.  It turns out they used the same bayonet on the 1897 Winchester shotgun.  In the trenches, the US soldiers would hold the trigger down and pump the gun, quickly sweeping any Germans out of that traverse - much to the annoyance of the Germans.  While the rifle was well out of the US arsenal by the time Vietnam rolled around, the shotgun was still in use, so they issued brand new bayonets for it.  Mystery solved!

FYI:  US troops fighting in the North Russia group used Mosin-Nagants, both because it was the local rifle (7.62x54R) and because the US had a surplus of them left over from a contract with the Tsar which could not be delivered before the Russian Revolution.  US troops sent to Vladivostok (east Russia) used Springfields. 

Vs. Springfield.  My understanding is that US troops preferred the Springfield, and most gun writers (self-professed experts) seem to agree that the Springfield is the better rifle, though for all I know much of this could be one writer simply repeating what another said, and so on, until an “everyone knows” consensus is reached which no one bothers to question.  It’s supposedly heavier than a Springfield, but to me it’s a light rifle anyway, so that issue doesn’t ring with me.  To me, a Springfield reminds me heavily of my Mauser 98K, hardly surprising as they simply copied the Gewehr 98 (the WWI version of the 98k) to make the Springfield.  My wishlist for guns includes the Gewehr 98, the Gewehr 43, an FN FAL, and a few others.  If I win the lottery, it’s time to look into Class IIIs.  In the meantime, bolt actions are fun to fire and cheap to buy: including this one.

Movie.  The Lost Battalion (2001) featuring Ricky Schroeder, portrays a unit of the 308 Division which was cut off by the Germans in the Argonne Forest in 1918.  Mostly New York bastards, they refused to surrender even after being not only surrounded but attacked several times.  A German officer complains, "these Americans don't retreat when they're supposed to," to which his superior sarcastically remarks, "how inconsiderate of them."  The main rifle featured - by US soldiers - is the Enfield.

A Face In The Crowd

Thanks to Reason Magazine for a brief article describing this film, and another, “Meet John Doe”, both of which I had been unaware of previously.

This was a 1957 film which brought Andy Griffith to stardom and led to him getting his famous TV show.  More recently he was known for “Matlock”.  He died fairly recently, in 2012.   He was born in North Carolina, died there, and went to UNC-Chapel Hill.

Anyhow.  A radio exec, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal, who I recall from “The Fountainhead” as Dominique Francon, alongside Gary Cooper as Howard Roark) discovers “Lonesome” Rhodes (Griffith) in the drunk tank of the local jail in northeast Arkansas.  She quickly realizes that he’s a flamboyant, charismatic personality and catapults him to local stardom.  Soon he’s in Memphis and impresses Mel Miller (a younger – but still looking old – Walter Matthau) who he thereafter refers to as “Vanderbilt ‘44” when Miller reveals his academic credentials. 

Eventually Rhodes winds up in New York and befriends some powerful people, including Senator “Curly” Fuller, who is running for President but isn’t particularly popular.  Rhodes cultivates a Will Rogers persona of an honest, simple country boy from Arkansas but shows considerable guile and duplicity behind the scenes and no compunction about hawking patent medicines of dubious value – the company’s own medical expert considers the product to be worthless and the best that can be said about it is that “it won’t kill you.”   

Marcia falls in love with him, and he proposes to her, then his wife (???) shows up and warns her about his wandering penis.  When confronted he claims he received a Mexican divorce but will return to Mexico to straighten it out.  Sure enough he does – and brings back a new, 17 year old bride (Lee Remick).  D’oh! 

The final straw for Marcia comes when Rhodes succeeds at improving Fuller’s poll numbers and brags that his contribution should be rewarded with a cabinet level position.  Defrauding America with sugar pills is one thing, but this clown will now be in the President’s cabinet?  Give me a break.  Marcia sabotages him by putting him ON THE AIR when he thinks he’s off the air - then he boasts that his fans are idiots and he could sell them rotten meat without an issue.  When his audience hears this the phones ring off the hook and his career takes an immediate nosedive – during the time he’s in the elevator from the top floor down to the lobby.  Even his own staff – a team of black servants – can’t help laughing at him.  We don’t see whether he kills himself – Marcia herself tells him “JUMP!” – but in any case you can stick a fork in him, he’s DONE.

It’s tempting to compare him to Trump, which was Reason’s point in bringing up the movie at this particular time.  Hillary’s campaign has succeeded at revealing some fairly unsavory remarks DT made in private, in particular his bragging about grabbing women intimately.  So far he hasn’t come out and expressed his own contempt for his followers, and so far they seem to write off whatever he says, no matter how outrageous and politically incorrect, as “locker room talk”, as if all men brag in the locker room that they simply walk up to women and grab their vaginas.  It’s moot: even if he confessed to murder or child molesting, his backers would whine “BENGHAZI!  EMAILS!” and still support him.   

For me the movie is remarkable for several reasons.  First, I’ve only seen Griffith as “Andy” and “Matlock”, never in this particularly loathesome role.  Give him credit for knowing how to act, huh?  (Jon Lovitz: ACTING!) Second, the movie is astonishingly cynical for 1957, when I imagined Hollywood was wholesome and innocent until the Vietnam War 10 years later ruined everything – at least until Reagan came around in 1980.  Third, I like Matthau and appreciate seeing him yet again.  Fourth - check out a much younger Mike Wallace (pre-60 Minutes) in this film. Thank you,