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Neil Young’s Living With War

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

           neil-young-living-with-war-2006-front-cover-43720DO YOU REMEMBER JUST HOW BLEAK THINGS WERE DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION?  (May we never forget.)   Preemptive War, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Secret Prisons, Special Rendition, warrantless wiretaps, spying on U.S. citizens, our soldiers caught in the middle of a society disintegrating into sectarian violence, Bush talking about the Bill of Rights’ being outmoded, and Blackwater’s making a mercenary army available to him.  Any of that ring a bell?  From my personal perspective, everything was made more interesting by our son Paul’s deciding that it would be a good time to join the Army.  On top of everything else, Bush and Cheney had been cutting the number EPA and OSHA inspectors to ineffectual levels and inviting oil company lobbyists into the White House to advise them on energy policy.  And on and on.  Dark days.  One Christmas around then I received a CD from my sister Linda.  Its cover looked like it’d…

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Windy Con 37

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

I wrote this con report for Bob Jennings’s outstanding SF fanzine Fadeaway back in January. With this year’s Windy Con looming on the horizon, seems like a logical candidate for my first post here.

 

MEANWHILE

BACK AT

THE CON

 

 

            Man, you gotta be really careful what you say around Bob Jennings.  He was gonna email me some info, and I said I might not get back to him till Monday, cause I was gonna be at WindyCon.  Next thing I knew, I was doing a WindyCon con report for Fadeaway.  Which meant I’d have to do more than swill beer in the con suite all weekend, I supposed.  Go to some actual events perhaps.

WindyCon 37 was held at the Westin in the Chicagosuburb of Lombard out in DupageCounty.  So Friday, November 12, I hit the expressways around two in the afternoon and rolled into the hotel parking lot…

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Waitin’ For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

By the 1980’s Z Z Top’s new songs were almost novelty numbers. They still put down some pretty nice grooves and some hot licks, but most of their tunes were cutesy little ditties designed to work well with the goofy vidoes they were grinding out for MTV. If anybody looked down their nose at that, the band cried all the way to the bank, I guess. Back in the seventies, though, Z Z Top was playing playing some strange, serious electric blues. They wore cowboy hats and rhinestone getups and marketed their stuff as southern rock, but it was electric blues. And it was good. For my money, their best album from that time was Tres Hombres, and the best thing on the album was an original medley called “Waitin’ For the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago”, both songs funky and bluesy.

My brother, Doug, and I played that medley many a night ourselves…

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