Category: Blog

This blog contains music, cats, and things of less importance.

First Caturday Of A New Era

What an amazing week. I am in awe of many things. There’s a wonderful moment at the end of Free Solo (spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it), when Alex Honnold stands atop El Capitan and calls his girlfriend (now wife) Sanni McCandless and says he is “so delighted.” So delighted. He free soloed El Cap which is impossible – don’t attempt it because you will die – he spent a lifetime training and climbing and doing pull-ups with his freaking fingers, then years practicing El Cap with ropes and his friends the top climbing partners you can have in the world, and he tries it once and blows it off cos he’s not feeling it (he is, I emphasize, so definitely not a crazy person), comes back a season or so later and one fine morning glides up that sheer wall with the grace and precision of a dancer and ENJOYS it, he’s smiling, grooving on it, loving it, one small misstep would mean certain death and he’s completely focused yet not worried in the least, he’s got this and he knows it, and it’s a beautiful day, he summits and he is alive and tells his lovely lady he is so delighted, so delighted, so delighted. I just love that. I find myself saying it sometimes and no, I have never done or will do anything of that sort! But I can be so delighted sometimes, yes I can.

I watched some classic Ray Charles concert footage this evening, down a rabbit hole that started with Georgia. I had to hear again Brother Ray’s classic take on Hoagy Carmichael’s beautiful lament which became, after a decades-long saga that included the Civil Rights Movement – the Georgia state song. Because Georgia this month turned the senate Blue. Thank you, Georgia. So delighted. Down the rabbit hole from there I watched more Ray Charles – his concert footage is magnificent and I have never really checked it out before. What a great performer in every way, and his bands, so top notch. Watching Ray Charles at the piano dancing seated-ishly and just knowing from a lifetime of doing, where the keys are, where the mic is, flawlessly, gesturing cues to the band with a nod to the left, projecting love to the audience on his right and just shining, uniting everyone and uplifting them, delivering these gifts night after night for so many years, these incredible pieces I watched constituting but a small part of his work. Excellence is so fun to watch. Whether in sport or music or anything else.

I remind myself today that this pandemic is out of control, made so largely because the 45 “administration” was incompetent and malicious. They’re gone but the stink remains, and it will for a while. So I remind myself to mask up, social distance as much as possible, wash hands etc. do the things, don’t let up til this is over and it’s going to take time. I see posts from friends who have COVID, whose friends and family members do, some are having a very bad time of it and some are dead or dying. The freakish reality that so many, many Americans have somehow chosen to deny that this is happening, is so disheartening and maddening. Hopefully now, their imbecile lord banished and facing prosecution, some will resurface from the ocean of bile they’ve been swimming underwater in and see the light.

I’m proud of the millions of people who made our struggling, aspiring, baby democracy work, against terrible, dishonest, hateful, ugly, criminal, and finally seditious opposition, in these recent months at the end of four calamitous years. Made it work. Caused it to work. By showing up. Many in my little corner of FB really showed up. Tens of millions of other folks, most of whom will never meet each other directly, worked with a unity of purpose to prevent the end of our democracy, and the unimaginable disasters which that would have brought. We did it. We have to keep at it, obviously, this ain’t done, but we did it. I think after such a harrowing experience, less people will be apathetic or complacent about their responsibilities as citizens and voters. I hope so.

Much work to be done. And now, we can do it. We won’t be fighting upstream against an evil GOP in power, for now. The future looks brighter to these eyes again suddenly. The air smelled fresh today. Rain forecast in Cali, and the grown-ups are in charge in DC.

So delighted!

2020 Visions, Revisions, and Revelations

In the middle of all this craziness, I’ve somehow had a rather productive year. One big milestone – the early Uptones album! Been wanting to do that for a long time, and the pieces finally fell into place to make it possible. I wrote some posts about it on the Uptones blog. Out now on Liberation Hall records.

Cover art by Peter Montgomery. Liner notes from Sarah Cain. Have at it!

I’ve produced some more songs of my own. The most recent one, Jupiter Girls, I finished this weekend and shared right away on my Bandcamp page. It’s so fun, and in a way, it’s the most Uptones-y thing I’ve done on my own. The brass section, arranged and performed by the mighty Steven Bernstein, launches the track in a way that reminds me of Uptones arrangements. We’d often do these huge, triumphant horn lines as intros and bridges and whatnot, and when Jupiter Girls was all done and mixed the way I wanted it, I laughed and said, hmm, we kinda Uptone’d that! Thank you Steve, and drummer Jay Lane (speaking of Uptones!), and Shannon Wheeler (who drew the cover art), for joining me on this long-distance collaboration. It brought me some real joy, and I see it is doing the same for some folks out there listening to it already. And that of course means the world to me. Humble thanks and love, all!

We defeated the orange apparition of death, and saved American democracy. I have many friends who volunteered, donated, posted and participated so actively in this election. Starting during the primary we had at it, working hard for our preferred candidates (for me it was Bernie). Then in the general election, many of us got behind the Democratic Party ticket hard and strong, and helped put them over the top. We did that. We. It was a WE thing.

Bernie Sanders’ 2020 slogan, “Not me, US” is one of my favorite political slogans ever. I didn’t like his earlier “Join the Political Revolution” slogan at all, though I strongly supported him then. I didn’t like the Obama campaign’s “HOPE” thing, though I understood its appeal, and vigorously supported his run in 2008 and 2012. Did Hillary Clinton’s campaign have a slogan in 2016? Jeez I can’t remember – what was it – (googling..) oh right, “Hillary for America.” Again, I voted for Clinton, and in hindsight after this unspeakable disaster, I WISH I had campaigned for her, donated, volunteered, done something more than vote, but that’s water under the bridge and.. “Hillary for America?” Hoo boy. Dem’s, we have to do better! Forgive me for this tangent, but I’m a songwriter, and I think lyrics matter. 45’s slogan, which I shall not repeat, is a political masterpiece. In the endless autopsy of the 2016 election I will repeat, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a comfortable margin, and we need to revise or remove the Electoral College, so maybe her slogan worked fine for some folks too. I just thought it said nothing. I couldn’t even remember it. Popular songs, you can remember. But enough complaining.

We WON the 2020 presidential election, decisively. And every one of us has our own inner dialog about what that means, and the dark horror of what another 4 years of this bullshit would mean. Me, in my little corner of the universe, what were some of my anxieties? Oh they’re almost embarrassing, so small are they compared to the concerns of people in real peril due to this monstrosity, but I’ll share, why not? You know what? I produced a really joyous, celebratory song, the above Jupiter Girls. I honestly didn’t know if I’d have the creative energy and will to finish the track properly if our fellow men and women put 45 back in office again. No. I would have lost a piece of my faith in humanity, I might have snapped, I would have bailed out and gone to live in a monastery or something, I don’t know. And the Uptones early recordings album, what would that be, in the context of the election, if it had gone the other way? We waited 35 plus years to put it out (the reasons for that far too lengthy to address here) and boom, the release date was… November 6th! I laughed and cried when I saw that date announced just a few months ago, knowing election day is the 3rd. Fun. I doubled down on my support for Biden/Harris and helped them win.

When I look at the results from state to state, I can easily conclude that WITHOUT the massive efforts of so many of us, this would have gone south. Pun accepted. But we won. We won and government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Not this week. Not on our watch. Not this time. Take a breath and let’s see what we can do to help the Democratic senate candidates in Georgia and mute the evil turtle from Kentucky, shall we? What’s the best approach? I’m looking into this.

At the same time as all of the above, I released some great new music from Russ Ellis and friends, Matte Martin, The Recyclists, Comeback Pete and others on my new label, Berkeley Cat Records. And I’ve been working with a wonderful team at Pandora, remotely, all of this remotely, from the same desk, in my COVID outpost. Without keeping busy, I don’t know how I’d cope. I’m very grateful. What a year!

When I was 17 and the Uptones were starting out, a friend of a friend asked me at a party, “Dude, why do you mix politics with music?” “Dude,” I replied, “they’re already mixed.”

Too Many Web Domains Syndrome

Must simplify. Gonna keep this web domain cos it’s my me. I love Berkeley Cat Records cos it’s my label and the first great brand name I’ve had since The Uptones. I am letting my Peace and Love and Rock and Roll domain remain as-is from now on, an artifact. It was a good journey.

Updating the Uptones site lately has been fun. And here I am at my own domain, typing a little blurb as I think of how to tackle some more updates today. We have things. Records, releasing. Both virtual and actual. I like it.

Here is a bunnyrabbit.

Thoughts about my new single, Am I Not Alien? b​/​w People I May Know

I’m delighted to announce the release of Am I Not Alien? b​/​w People I May Know on Berkeley Cat Records.

A Tale Of Two Songs

Am I Not Alien started a long time ago. I had the idea when playing in HOBO, a band Paul Jackson and Ben Eastwood and I had (with several wonderful drummers) after the initial breakup of the UpTones. We performed an early version of it once or twice but I wasn’t really satisfied with the verses and it just didn’t sound the way I wanted, so we let it go. Flash forward to COVID19 and I’m hanging out with my guitar and the little bass-sliding riff shows up and I recognize it and think, hey, I can finish this now! And put it together myself.

Spent weeks! Recording and rerecording the parts, methodically inching toward the feeling I wanted from each instrument. See, I’m not really a recording engineer, though I guess I am becoming one. And I have nothing but the “gear” in my laptop – amp models, software synths, “VST” effects (I don’t even know what VST stands for!) googles.. Oh! Virtual Studio Technology. Of course! Yes I work in a virtual studio I have been “building” over the years, and in my spare time now I hang out in it and create things. It’s tremendous fun.

So, I had EVERYTHING on “Alien” cookin’ the way I wanted it EXCEPT the DRUMS!! A month ago, I was frustrated because my ham-fisted attempts at drum “programming” were still falling flat and meanwhile, the guitars, bass, synth and organ, (oh and my vocals!) were right there with the musical image I had in my head all along, having followed an aspiration that started (I counted) in 1994. What’s a home recording geek to DO if you can’t get the DRUMS right!?

Call a drummer.

I thought Jay Lane would have the right instincts for this, and in Quarantineville he has his recording outpost running too so he said “Yeah, send me the tracks!” Which I happily did, wrestling first with printing audio “stems” that he could import into his gizmo, and we back-and-forthed about tech issues before finally he too was able to sit down and rock the drum tracks. He sent them back to me, I imported them, and wow, I heard what I had been after with this elusive, delicate, utterly persistent song that wanted me to write and realize it for basically half my life. Thank you, Jay!

Oh! All along I was sending the “ruffs” to Shannon Wheeler. He’s drawn these beautiful covers for me since I started making and releasing solo records in 2015, and usually the method is – I send him the lyrics and a demo or rough mix and he sends me some sketches. This were no different, I loved his take on it, and even before I called Jay, I had the finished cover on my desk. See so I HAD to finish. I could not put the thing off for another year like I had in the past, I had the dang record cover. Motivational. Thank you, Shannon!

It was a saga and I love how it all came together in the end. The song is about being human, obviously, and it speaks to me in ways that feel urgent and current to me. I hope it may for you as well.

b/w People I May Know – yes! b/w meaning “backed with” as they said with vinyl 45RPM singles – an A side and a B side! I’m so pleased with the B side here and it is an ENTIRELY different story! Had the idea one Sunday morning this July – I can tell you the date actually, it was July 12, 2020. Cracked up when I thought of it, saw someone in my “People you may know” feed in Facebook whom I thought I was FB friends with! Being that I consider them an actual friend I was miffed and I thought, FB, that is some fucked up UI design right there! The way I find out I was UNFRIENDED (gasp, horrors..) is by being ‘splained to that they are, a People I May Know! The song wrote itself. To say nothing of the fact that my friend may have deleted their old profile or any number of other reasonable explanations, the gig was on and I was not letting this one get away. Scrawled out the lyrical ideas in pen, pulled up a drum track I’ve been meaning to recycle, played bass, one guitar track, two vocal tracks – inventing the vocal arrangement as I improvised it to tape – mixed it, and done. So where “Alien” took 25 some years, “People” took just a few hours from conception to completion. A tale of two songs! A tail? A tail of two songs. On Berkeley Cat Records. Of course. Every song is different and like cats, they make their own rules.

I hope you enjoy! Listen, I have been making the songs I share via Bandcamp (we LOVE Bandcamp!) “free or pay what you like.” Reasons for this are simple – I want you to have my records if you want them. Absolutely I love it and appreciate it if you can kick in something to help cover my costs and encourage more of this sort of tomfoolery, but if you don’t have the extra dough right now (WE UNDERSTAND THIS!) please don’t hesitate to put “0” in the download “purchase” amount and save the file. Or, if you’re Jeff Bezos, you can buy it for a million dollars! Thank you, Jeff!

We recommend selecting FLAC because it is lossless, highest resolution (sounds best) but honestly MP3s are fine too and my kittycat ears often can’t tell the difference.

I set the streaming services release date to Caturday, Sept. 26! This gives us a little time to promote the songs and see if we can get them on some popular playlists. That’s about it. You can click through the song title links on:

https://ericdin.bandcamp.com/album/am-i-not-alien-b-w-people-i-may-know

to read the lyrics and credits. Thank you for your time, please stay well and safe, and of course feel free to share this all any ol’ which way you may care to.

Much love

The Long Vacation by Alex Panasenko

I read Alex Panasenko’s memoir, The Long Vacation, this weekend. A delightful romp through the moral simplicities of Europe in the mid 20th century. If you believe that, the Golden Gate Bridge is for sale. Really it’s an entertaining and horrifying and funny and shocking and profound and vulgar and appalling ride to hell and back repeatedly. Then comes the second chapter!

Spoiler-ish alert. The final paragraph is so devastatingly bleak and funny at once, that I couldn’t decide whether to laugh hysterically or give up on humanity altogether, so I did a bit of both. But overall, the book helped restore my own will that we treat each other well, and ourselves well, regardless of what negative bullshit anyone may ever tell us about ourselves or others.

The author was, years after the events portrayed in the book, my biology teacher at Berkeley High School. The jovial, engaging and brilliant teacher I knew as a teenager, came up from a childhood worlds different from mine. I’m glad he wrote this book, or I would never have known his story. A story which also happens to be relevant to current events in terrible and important ways.

War is crazy. Bigotry is crazy. These things are crazy and ridiculous, yet they persist in being such large pieces of the human experience. After I closed the book, I had an unexpected musing: “The worst things people ever did were done by people.” And quickly reminded myself that the opposite is also true.

My Journey With Bernie

I started supporting Bernie Sanders for president on the day he announced his run in 2015. My friends here may remember I ran a fundraising page thru ActBlue called the Bernie Bus. (I updated the link here, to a current Bernie campaign donation page.)

To my amazement, my small corner of the larger fundraising effort ended up raising over $3500, mostly from donations from my friends on FB! I was disappointed when he didn’t win the nomination, but I got over it quickly and voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. (Which she won, absent the awful outdated Electoral College, which we should abolish.)

For the 2020 election, I support Bernie Sanders again, and now, our volunteer organization and small-donor base is huge, unique and unprecedented.

Today, I attended the Bernie rally in Richmond, CA, and it was everything I hoped for and more. Absolutely giant turnout. The line went on forever it seemed, and the beautiful Craneway Pavilion at Richmond Harbor filled to capacity. I got there early so I was not very far from the stage. Photos below. It was great to hear Bernie speak and see him in person, finally. He’s a fantastic orator, something more easily appreciated up close.

The speakers and musicians who preceded him were also marvelous, and after the room could hold no more, the still very long lines of folks were directed to an outdoor area where they could see (maybe!) and hear the speeches. It was downright inspiring. Completely peaceful, empowering, diverse, inclusive, and massive.

My dad and I agreed on Bernie. My father, John Dinwiddie, died in 2015, but I feel he’s with me on this journey, hocus-pocus though that may sound. We’re on the Bernie Bus, more than ever. I feel Sanders is the candidate to win, and, small detail, he’s winning!

I support Bernie Sanders because I agree with him. On basically everything. Other candidates, I agree with much, especially Elizabeth Warren, to whom I had signed numerous petitions urging her to run in 2015, before Bernie declared. Warren didn’t run, Bernie did. And in the years since then, the Bernie volunteer organization has grown into something extraordinary.

All of the other candidates have taken some verses from Bernie’s song book. And that’s great. I’m glad to see it. But Bernie has been singing these songs consistently through his entire life and career of public service. Now that he’s winning, there’s an inevitable backlash and hand-wringing from (for lack of a better word) “mainstream” Democrats. Their notion seems to be, “Oh no! Bernie’s winning! That can’t be! He can’t win!” Which seems absurd to me, due in small part, to the fact that, he’s winning.

Rather than try and second-guess other voters, the fabled “swing-voters” for example, I choose to support the candidate I most strongly agree with. And I urge progressives and moderates and liberals and others to do the same, and increase the momentum of Bernie’s campaign, all the way to the nomination and the presidency.

Elections are not a spectator sport. Pundits’ predictions are historically, consistently unreliable and so often wrong. Either by our action, or inaction, we decide the outcome. Let’s be pro-active and vote our conscience, vote inclusively, vote our best interests, and elect Bernie Sanders president, and a Blue majority in the House and Senate, and put our nation on a better course, for all our benefit, and the benefit of our unique and beautiful and only world.

Democracy is not something that happens to us, it is something that we do.
Bernie Sanders for president. Thank you.

Long Live Ska – Aaron Carnes catches up with the UpTones

Somehow I neglected to add this article here when it ran a year or so ago. The author, Aaron Carnes, is currently finishing up a book about how ska music evolved after the Two-Tone era, in the US and Mexico and beyond. Aaron told me a little about the impact of the movie Dance Craze, after I had shared with him what a huge influence it was on the early UpTones. Not surprisingly, it turns out Dance Craze was also a key piece to many of the other bands whom Aaron interviewed, and there’s a whole backstory to how the movie flopped in the UK and almost never saw release in the US. I look forward to reading more about all that! Meanwhile, adding this East Bay Express article to the “Press” section here on my Interbloggy. Time to update the things. All of the things.


Ranty McRantface Loves Football

Today they play the sport where they crash into each other with their heads. You can’t get across town in Berkeley on game days, because so many people enjoy watching young men giving each other concussions. Our higher learning institutions are happy to host the very intelligent running at each other with their heads business. It’s a family affair. We gather in the blazing sun to drink beer and watch young men crash into each other with their heads. I mean, why wouldn’t you, if you could? Dress up in a padded suit with a helmet in 90° heat and charge at each other and crash your heads together repeatedly? I can see no downside to it. The spectacle is made complete by young women in the sidelines dancing and cheering on the young men, as they bash their heads together. Concussions are awesome, and we celebrate, with beer. Colleges wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t smart. Some of the boys, if they are really good at this, and their knees still work, go on to play in the NFL. Where they’re paid lots of money to crash into each other even harder, until their bodies are destroyed and they spend their retirements trying to manage chronic pain, opioid addiction and brain damage. It’s totally awesome. If it wasn’t totally awesome, why would Americans love it? It’s the number one thing. Our single largest entertainment product. It’s nothing new, but today, I see people flocking to the stadium, old and young alike, with their “Bears” gear and I think, how wonderful that we have such a grand tradition. We should expand on it. It should just be the way we greet each other in public. Just straight run at each other and crash into each other with our heads. Then we can be even smarter. Because obviously this is smart. Or we wouldn’t do it. We certainly wouldn’t encourage young men to do it, at our universities, where we do the smart-being. It’s so wonderful, that today, I’m taking a shortcut, because I want to join the fun. I’ve purchased a six-pack of Budweiser and Hank Williams Jr.’s entire catalog to play while beating myself over the head with a mallet. Hey, when I get into something, I tend to go large. I want to be part of this. I’ve avoided this piece of American culture for too long. If only I had a son, I would encourage him to play football and tell him he’ll never be worth anything if he doesn’t win State, like the asshole drunk dad in Friday Night Lights. It’s the life for me now, I don’t know why I missed it. The new game is streamlined, however. To hell with these safety measures they keep talking about, trying to make the game less dangerous. Bunch of pussies. In the new version, the players will all have mallets and clobber themselves mercilessly until they’re passed out or dead. We need to stop coddling these boys. They need to man up and beat themselves to death. I’m excited about the possibilities. We’ll sell a lot of beer. Think of the cheers you could write for that! “RA! RA! SIS BOOM DIE! DIE! DIE!” It can’t miss. Sponsors will firehose money at this. Branded mallets will be the rage. You wont be able to go anywhere without seeing young men diligently beating themselves over the head, perfecting their technique. It’s Football Plus. Football distilled to its essence. Simplified, perfected. Girls can get into the act, too. No more gender bias in New Football, no. Anyone can beat themself over the head with a mallet. We’ll sing the national anthem and then just start right in a’self-clobberin’ and save a lot of hassle and time, not having to mess with helmets and medics and all that snowflakey nonsense. A more advanced player can simply behead himself, as his beloved coach yells, “PLAY THROUGH THE PAIN!” and the drunk dad bellows, “THIS IS IT, SON! YOUR MOMENT OF GLORY! IT WILL NEVER GET BETTER THAN THIS!”