DOWN

Searching my blog archives, I see I haven’t reviewed this band yet.  They could be considered a supergroup, as the band members had already achieved some notoriety in other bands already, Crowbar being the most prominently represented (and I have NONE of their albums).  They have three full length albums, two EPs, and a live album/DVD.   I never got a chance to see them live in person, but recently they played a live streaming show in which they played NOLA, the first album, in its entirety. 

Of the component bands, I have all of Pantera’s albums and have seen them as an opening act at an Ozzfest, never as a headliner.  I have all of Corrosion of Conformity’s albums and have seen them several times fairly recently after Pepper Keenan returned - never as a three piece and never as the pre-Pepper punk band.  It was Blind and “Vote with a Bullet” which aroused my attention back in the day.  Crowbar I saw fairly recently opening for the Obsessed.  I was unaware they were from New Orleans until the band took the stage with fleur-de-lys symbols pervasive and the drummer wearing a Saints jersey.   With the exception of Crowbar, with whom I’m not familiar, I would actually compare Down’s material favorably to Pantera and Corrosion of Conformity, if only slightly so.  Anyone who likes those bands – or who likes Crowbar – should certainly enjoy Down. 

1.         NOLA    (1995).   Temptation’s Wings; Lifer; Pillars of Eternity; Rehab; Hail the Leaf; Underneath Everything; Eyes of the South; Jail; Losing All; Stone the Crow; Pray for the Locust; Swan Song; Bury Me in Smoke

Lineup:             Phil Anselmo (vocals) (Pantera); Pepper Keenan (guitar) (Corrosion of Conformity); Kirk Windstein (guitar) (Crowbar); Todd Strange (bass) (Crowbar); Jimmy Bower (drums) (Crowbar).

Tour 9/20/95 to 12/30/95.  No DC or Baltimore area show.

2.         II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow (2002).  Lysergik Funeral Procession; There’s Something on My Side; The Man That Follows Hell; Stained Glass Cross; Ghosts Along the Mississippi; Learn From This Mistake; Beautifully Depressed; Where I’m Going; Doobinterlude; New Orleans is a Dying Whore; The Seed; Lies, I Don’t Know What They Say But…; Flambeaux; Dog Tired; Landing on the Mountains of Megiddo

Same lineup except with Rex Brown (Pantera) on bass instead of Todd Strange.

Tour:  4/28/02 to 5/25/02.  No DC or Baltimore area show.  They toured Europe for this album and recorded various shows – see below. 

3.         III: Over the Under (2007).   3 Suns and 1 Star; The Path; N.O.D.; I Scream; On March the Saints; Never Try; Mourn; The Tides; His Majesty the Desert; Pillamyd; In the Thrall of It All; Nothing in Return 

 After Dimebag’s death in 2006. Same lineup as II.

Tour:  9/27/07 to 10/14/08.  This tour went much further, including overseas AND Baltimore (10/31/07 at Sonar).

₊          Diary of a Mad Band (CD/DVD).  Live album recorded in London on the II tour in 2006, but released after III (no songs from that album played).  The DVD portion has different songs filmed in different cities (the band members’ clothing abruptly changes during the songs).

4.         IV Part 1 (The Purple EP) (2012).  Levitation; Witchtripper; Open Coffins; The Curse Is A Lie; This Work is Timeless; Misfortune Teller

Pat Bruders (Crowbar) took over on bass from Rex Brown.

5.         IV Part 2 (EP) (2017).  Steeple; We Knew Him Well; Hogshead/Dogshead; Conjure; Sufferer’s Years; Bacchanalia.

Bobby Landgraf on guitar in place of Kirk Windstein.   The band did not tour either EP.  Having listened to them again I’d say there is a substantial drop off in quality from NOLA/II/III and the IV EPs; while the first three albums were enjoyable, I found the IV EPs to be big time MEH.   Your mileage may vary.

Stoner Jesus.  If there is an iconic image associated with the band, it’s the Stoner Jesus, often featured on t-shirts – and a pint glass.  Browsing through the song titles will give you some idea that herbal remedies are popular as subject matter and among the band members.  Anselmo has a bad reputation as a heroin addict, not sure about the rest.  Overall the musical direction is Lynyrd Skynyrd dialed up as heavy as you can make it (too bad Raging Slab aren’t around anymore:  RIP Elise Steinman).  

Mitt Romney

 

I was going to talk about him last week, but this 9/11 thing interrupted.  We all remember that, don’t we?  Anyhow.  I got an email from a GOP fundraiser claiming that “we don’t need another Mitt Romney”.  Hello, SPAM FOLDER. 

Romney is currently a US Senator from Utah; the other is Mike Lee, who also went to Brigham Young (BYU) and leans Libertarian (or so the Interweb claims).  His prior stints were Governor of Massachusetts from 2002-2006 and the Republican candidate for President in 2012, unsuccessfully running against Barack Obama.  He’s the last Republican candidate I voted for, for President.

Son of Michigan governor and AMC (the car company that gave us the Javelin, Gremlin and Pacer) President George Romney, he was born in Michigan and served time in France in the late ‘60s as a missionary for the Mormons.   There he learned to speak French.  He came back, finished college at BYU, then went to Harvard Law School & Business School, and became a business consultant with Bain.   His track record is mostly positive, though with some missteps here and there.

As governor of Massachusetts his major accomplishment was a state health insurance program which closely resembles what Obama got enacted nationally:  RomneyCare (see also: ObamaCare).  Though a Mormon and a Republican he kept away from being too right-wing and Jesus-y, an important issue in highly liberal Massachusetts.  The last MA governor to run for President was our old friend Michael No-cock-is, who was easily defeated by George H.W. Bush, in the first election I voted in, 1988, the only one in which the candidate I voted for actually won (!).    

As senator from Utah he’s the only GOP senator to vote FOR Trump’s conviction after the House impeached the Orange Fuhrer.   I suppose he might have done so to win favor from Utah Democrats and independents, knowing his GOP comrades in the Senate – including my prior favorite, Rand Paul – would all vote to acquit.  I like to think he really believed Trump should be convicted, and voted accordingly.  He’s also marched with Black Lives Matter.   As a frequent nemesis of Donald Trump, he’s earned some scorn from fellow Republicans, but respect and admiration from Democrats and independents. 

By now I’ve gotten fairly jaded about politics, especially about Republicans.   Sadly, some degree of compromise and pragmatism is necessary to get things done in the real world, so it’s hard to consider any politician as being truly conscientious and principled – except at the extremes of the left wing (Bernie Sanders, Paul Wellstone, Ocasio-Cortez) or right wing (any particularly noxious right-wing, Jesus-y Republican).  And with Trump as President, too many Republicans seem to feel that they have to swallow their distaste for him and support him unconditionally.  Now, more than ever, it’s hard to identify any Republican as really being decent. Having said that, Mitt Romney strikes me as the GOP senator who might most plausibly be considered honest and principled.   In fact, in terms of strength of character and integrity, Romney has likewise surpassed Rand Paul in my regard. 

Getting back to his JD/MBA.  I tried doing that back when I was a senior at UMCP applying for law school, but what I was told is that while law schools will take applicants right out of college (about 50% of my colleagues at GMUSL seemed to be recent college graduates, and my former boss Jerry was only a year out of UPenn before going to USC Law) business schools preferred applicants with some prior real world experience.  The other deal is that Romney had a good background at Bain, but also as governor of Massachusetts.  So it struck me that here was a guy who knew what business ideas and concepts translated to politics and which did not.  The main problem otherwise successful business comrades have when they switch to politics is that they don’t realize that many subordinates can’t simply be fired for failing to follow orders – employment at will is not the way the federal bureaucracy works.  And if anyone could understand this, it would be Romney.  So we have a guy who is (A) successful in the private sector, (B) successful GOP governor in a Democratic state (like Gary Johnson in New Mexico – in fact, Romney considered endorsing Johnson in 2016, he obviously couldn’t do so in 2012 when they were running against each other) and (C) someone who has character and integrity. 

I’m not a resident of Utah, so I’m not in a position to vote for him as senator, though I’d hope he’d follow Nixon’s cue and run for President again notwithstanding his previous loss.  In fact, I’d happily vote for him over Biden if he was the Republican candidate, just as I did in 2012 over Gary Johnson, who for me is the strongest Libertarian candidate to run for President.  Of course, that’s not the situation.  I suppose the best we can hope is that he’ll take the party nomination in 2024.  

We’ll see, won’t we?

Nine Eleven

 

Wow, the date itself gave me the topic!  How convenient.

At the time I was working as an attorney for an older, experienced sole practitioner attorney in Fairfax, Virginia, hereinafter “Bill”.   Bill was down in Richmond that day for a bar meeting.  One of the secretaries came in my office and told me, “a plane hit the World Trade Center”.  [North Tower, 8:46 a.m. EST]  A reporter suggested this might be an accident, but the footage showed the plane flying directly at the tower.  Soon enough, the second plane hit the second tower [South Tower, 9:03 a.m. EST], the third plane hit the Pentagon [9:37 a.m.], and the fourth plane crashed in western Pennsylvania [10:03 a.m.], brought down by the passengers themselves storming the cockpit, one passenger calling his wife to advise her the circumstances and to say goodbye to her.

My girlfriend at the time, Leila, lived in Pentagon City and worked in Rosslyn, a commute which took her past that face of the Pentagon, but she was at the office when the plane hit. 

I think I speak for everyone who remembers that day that we were ALL angry and upset.   This galvanized everyone, even Democrats who didn’t care much for President George W. Bush.   When he decided that we would liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban and track down Osama Bin Laden, he had pretty much unanimous support.   That’s why I’m puzzled by some people on the Book of Faces alleging protests in support of the people responsible for 9/11.

Where I live, Skyline at Bailey’s Crossroads, has a large segment of Muslims.  Whether they’re Sunni or Shi’ite, I don’t know.  None of them have given me any problems.  Nationwide, Muslims are 1% of the US population, 3 million out of 330 million.   The Fort Hood guy and the Boston Marathon bombers were Muslim, but we have plenty of homegrown, non-Muslim screwups blowing things up and shooting people. 

The liberation of Afghanistan went fairly smoothly (October 7 to December 7, 2001), but the Taliban simply retreated to the hills, and in parts of neighboring Pakistan, and continue to cause problems – helped by bounties from their erstwhile opponents the Russians.  Osama Bin Laden himself was taken out in 2011 by US forces – under Barack Obama’s administration. 

Two years later, upon GWB’s insistence (later disproven) that Saddam Hussein and his regime were involved in the 9/11 attacks, we invaded/liberated Iraq.   There, the much-vaunted Republican Guards vanished into the hills and we took the country fairly quickly – March 1 to May 1, 2003.  Then a protracted guerilla war erupted, presumably those Republican Guards taking to the hills instead of facing us directly.  Saddam Hussein himself was captured in December 2003, hiding in a bunker in the ground. 

Aftermath.  As noted, 9/11 certainly unified the country behind GWB and public support for the liberation of Afghanistan was fairly widespread, if not unanimous.   Saddam Hussein’s connection with 9/11 was somewhat more tenuous.  Ironically, one of the justifications for the invasion, that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction”, later turned out to be bogus, and Saddam’s own generals, when our invasion began, asked him to deploy these alleged weapons – only to be told by him his hints of having them were merely a bluff to prevent the US from invading.  D’oh!   I do recall that support for the Iraq invasion was far less widespread than the previous operation in Afghanistan.  Partly this was due to tempers calming down over the two year period between 9/11/2001 and 2003, and partly was a suspicion that GWB was overplaying his hand on the matter.  Much of the goodwill we earned on 9/11 was squandered by our invasion of Iraq.  Having said that, I’m not seeing any domestic sympathy or support for the Taliban in 2020 or any time earlier – or for Al-Qaeda, for that matter.

Conspiracy.  Yeah, I zone out on the conspiracies that “9/11 was an inside job”, “jet fuel can’t possibly melt the internal structure of the WTC tower”, etc.  I put those in the same category as “the Civil War was about states’ rights” for credibility.  Getting back to that Suicide Pact book I’m reading, I’ve yet to reach Posner’s analysis of the Patriot Act; if 9/11 was orchestrated by the CIA or US forces as an excuse to impose a form of fascism on us, ostensibly to fight terrorism, we’d see something like a fascist regime in our country.  As yet, that hasn’t happened, but much of what Posner talks about concerns holding alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Circa 2020 the main fascists are the President and his “he’s an asshole who gets things done” supporters who believe both the President and the police to be infallible.  Anyhow.

All Them Witches

 It’s getting harder to figure out what to write about on my Friday blogs.  I’ll think of something, check my archives, and realize I’ve covered the topic already.  Today’s entry is #755, so I’ve had 754 previous ideas.  Fortunately new band bands come out periodically, allowing me to address them, including this relatively new band from Nashville, Tennessee, All Them Witches.  Their first album, Our Mother Electricity, came out in 2012.

Like many of these newer bands – I’d compare them closest to King Buffalo (from Rochester, NY) and Elder (from Boston, MA) – they vary the songs from mellow to heavy and back again, avoiding getting too monotonous, and the singer/bassist, Charles Michael Parks, actually sings, which is a good point.  His Rickenbacker has the top horn cut off, so we’ll see if this band gets big enough that Rickenbacker makes a CMP signature model.  I know they have an Al Cisneros (Sleep & OM) model.  The guitarist is Ben McLeod and the drummer is Robby Staebler. 

I was fortunate enough to catch them at the Rock’n’Roll Hotel in Washington, DC, on March 23, 2019.  Setlist:  Funeral for a Great Drunken Bird; 3-5-7; Diamond; 1^st vs. 2^nd; Fishbelly 86 Onions; Workhorse; Charles William; When God Comes Back; Rob’s Dream; Alabaster; Swallowed by the Sea; encore:  Blood & Sand/Milk and Endless Waters.

Their newest album, Nothing As The Ideal, was recently released.  I preordered it and received the CD (I reserve vinyl for material released before 1988, as only such material, originally recorded for analog reproduction, will make the transition to premium vinyl).  Excellent, similar to the prior releases, though I fall short of being able to distinguish it, for better or worse, from such albums.  For those of you with Spotify, those releases are available on that medium. 

With the COVID still preventing live shows occurring, and the Clutches and Downs being the exception and not the rule, I won’t hold my breath for ATW to tour this album in the US or have a live online show.  I will play NATI over and over again, and as yet I haven’t gotten fed up.   :D