June 2023 New Moon Edition

MERSEY

Where were we in 63? I was bumming around Boulder, Colorado, couch surfing with friends – those few that had sofas – or snoring in the 9th Street cemetery cozy in my Holubar sleeping bag, confident that tomorrow was another day.

Next step was to find a place of my own, the first of which was a large walk-in closet with a pretty comfortable mattress on the floor in an apartment shared by six or seven of us at 12th and Pennsylvania, across the street from the Delta Gamma house, which provided some amusing scenery late at night.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the Beatles were headed our way. That was the next step in rock ‘n’ roll, which made our lives more interesting and a lot more fun. One step followed another and 60 years later, here we are in Ashland, Oregon, with a couple of sofas and a walk-in closet of our own, sending this newsletter via Substack instead of Mailchimp, which is another step forward. Thanks for coming with me.

MIRTHY

People often ask me which was the best concert I ever attended, but no one ever asks which was the loudest. In 1967, I was trying to get a job at The Denver Post, which led a year later to becoming that paper’s first rock columnist at the tender age of 23.

Along the way, I met a guy named Barry Fey, who was on his way to becoming a big time rock promoter, but for now he was booking shows for Chet Helms at a new club in Denver called The Family Dog, which was about to open September 8th and 9th with Big Brother and the Holding Company, fronted by the extraordinary Janis Joplin, and the band Blue Cheer.

I happened to be with Fey when Blue Cheer did its sound check that first afternoon. It was literally deafening. When we walked out to the parking lot afterward, my poor ears were ringing so badly I couldn’t be certain what I heard, but I believe Fey said, “I could feel my thigh bones vibrating.” To this day, I attribute my loss of hearing to two nights of Blue Cheer playing Summertime Blues at The Dog. You gotta suffer if you wanna hear the blues.

MERCY

Here we are nearly 90 years later and things haven’t changed all that much for migrant workers in America. Still the long hours laboring in the hot sun, the squalid housing, poverty, fear, anguish, hopelessness, just getting from one day to the next.

There was a time our farmers claimed they needed slaves to economically produce crops. Now they need migrants, cheap labor, no benefits, hazardous conditions, zero opportunity to better their station, barely able to feed themselves and their children even as they feed the nation.

Can we really do no better? Can we not afford to pay a living wage to people who harvest our crops? Is this democracy merely a commocracy where base commerce is reason enough for corporate agribusiness to do as it does? The oilman H.L. Hunt proposed that votes should be apportioned one for each dollar of a person’s net worth, so he would have a whole lot of influence and this migrant woman would have none. Perhaps after all he’s gotten his way.