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Doing the Limbo Inside the Beltway

It was during the Kavanaugh hearings, as many friends of mine (conservatives and liberals) asked, “Is this as low as we can go? Is this rock bottom?” After saying “Probably not, unfortunately”, I found myself thinking of a record from the early ’60s. Having scored a mega-hit with “The Twist” and followed up with the requisite “Let’s Twist Again”, Chubby Checker climbed the charts once more in 1962 with “Limbo Rock”.

After singing the first verse, Chubby twice exhorts the dancers to “limbo lower now”, then bellows “How LOW can you GO?!”

Judicial Appointments

How low can we go? The hearings went pretty low, alright, with virtually all involved competing to see who could look worst. I found striking the response to complaints about Senator Feinstein’s apparently strategic use of Dr. Ford’s allegations and Senator Booker’s theatrics, for example, which went something like this: “Are you kidding? What about the Republicans’ refusal to even consider Merrick Garland?”

Well, what about that? Justice Scalia died in February of 2016. President Obama nominated Judge Garland on March 16, 2016. In a recent (1/22), lengthy piece by Charles Homans in the New York Times Magazine, there is (among other things) an account of how Senator McConnell used his renowned skills to block consideration. In the piece, Senator McConnell is quoted as thinking the decision not to fill the Scalia vacancy “the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.” It was President Obama’s constitutional duty to nominate a successor and the Senate’s corresponding duty to provide advice and consent. If a justice were to die a week before a presidential election, no one is reasonably going to expect full consideration for a rushed nomination. But eight months? Where does this end? There is always going to be another presidential election sometime in the future in which we can “let the people decide”.

“Are you kidding?” one can hear the reply. “What about the Democrats introducing the filibuster to obstruct President George W. Bush’s nominees to U.S. Circuit and District Courts?”

And so on.

How Low Can We Go?

Then there is – what else? – the Shutdown. The President of the United States has shut down the government, the executive branch of which it is his job to run. For this one, we get to hear from both the House and the Senate.

Before I get too deeply in the weeds of this foolishness, which has received all the ridicule it deserves elsewhere, (wall? fence? concrete? wood? slatted? continuous? paid for by Mexico? metaphor for border security?), I assume you see where I’m going. Conversations at this level weren’t impressive on the schoolyard playground when in third grade (Oh yeah? Yeah! Oh yeah? Yeah! Sez who? Sez me! Whadda ya gonna do about it? You’ll see! Oh yeah? Yeah!) and are certainly not impressive now. It’s not just the level of the discourse, though; it’s the content.

The Problem

My point here has nothing to do with how we felt or feel about Judges Garland or Kavanaugh, or the “Wall” or immigration. The problem is the people we are sending to Washington to serve in the executive and legislative branches of our government. Why are we talking about $5 billion to be spent on anything now? Is it budget time? Do we even do budgets any more, or is it just a series of never-ending spats over continuing resolutions? As far as I can tell, no one is even suggesting the serious discussion about immigration policy and enforcement we so badly need. The first principles that actually make America special aren’t even in play when grandstanding, obstructing, strategizing, spinning, outright lying, and the like take the place of the most basic functions of governing, like, you know, debating and approving a budget on time, or fairly vetting judges.

Note that this post could just as easily been about this: If it’s a terrible idea for presidents to rule by Executive Order when they can’t get the votes for legislation when it’s YOUR president, how can it be a great idea when it’s OUR president? Is it too much to ask for discussion of important matters on the merits? Why do we put up with this?

Why, indeed?

How low can we go? As low as we’re willing to tolerate. It is we who send these folks to Washington. Can you imagine “leaders” who think it persuasive to say, “The other side’s behavior is as bad, or worse”? Competition can be good when those acting in our interest push each other to greater heights. Lowering the bar – can you bottom this – is what we have had for quite a while. Those of us who are fed up need to make it clear we are paying attention and looking for opportunities to send home those who perform poorly and behave badly.

That’s our duty as citizens. No knock on the Limbo, where lowering the bar brings out greater skill and effort, but we need a new dance.

Ken Bossong

© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong

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Otis Rush: An Appreciation

As Good As It Gets

Any New Year is awash in lists: best movies, best albums, notable deaths. I don’t know how many lists in that last category included him, but we lost one of the all-time greats, the irreplaceable Otis Rush, on September 29, 2018. Considering that he never received his due in either public fame or fortune while alive, the quality of the obits was a pleasant surprise.  Nevertheless, I am compelled to write. If you have never heard him, you owe it to yourself to experience all the Blues can be.

Rush was the singer/guitarist who had it all: a rich, versatile voice, a knowing way with a lyric, and remarkable skill on the guitar. Indeed, he is my second favorite guitarist – just behind Buddy Guy and a hair ahead of T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, and Earl Hooker (John Lee’s cousin and the greatest guitarist you’ve never heard of, unless you are a Blues aficionado; I’ll write about him someday).

Otis either wrote or was drawn to lyrics with a wry wisdom, and he knew what to do with those lyrics.

Then there was his voice. You don’t need a special voice to be a great Blues singer, but Rush proved that having one is no impediment, either. He could have been a pop star crooner, had he been inclined. Most assuredly, he was not so inclined, and his artistic integrity as a bluesman did his wallet no favors.

It’s tempting to delve deeper into the details of his brilliance. For example, no one could bend a note quite like Otis Rush. I am told that his playing a right-handed guitar upside down gave his note-bending a different sound. (Albert King, another great lefty who played a guitar strung for right-handers, was also justly renowned for bending notes, so there may be something to it.) Rush’s playing, like his singing, was not just different, though, but spine-tingling.

The details are secondary to his total impact as an artist, however. With Rush, the whole clearly exceeds the sum of his considerable parts. Why? What else is going on? All these skills were bound in a package of passion so powerful and authenticity so undeniable as to rivet the listener. He could play as fast as he wanted, but would not do so at the expense of a song’s integrity. Rush integrated the bent notes, the soaring voice, the perfectly chosen notes (and silences) not to show off but to convey feelings triggered by the music. This is Blues at the highest level. It is human communication.

Recordings

Otis neither recorded nor played live as often as would be expected for one so gifted. There were many reasons for this, some of which apparently involved his moods and his health.  The good news is that there are still plenty of opportunities to hear him, most ranging from very good to truly great.

It was a song by Otis Rush that made me a Blues fan long ago. I was very young, probably no more than 10 or 11, but my older cousins had gotten me into rock and roll already. I stumbled upon the Blues Show on Penn’s radio station, WXPN, on a Saturday evening (a show that is ongoing and still very well done, by the way).  It did not take long to have that “So THIS is where all the great stuff comes from” moment. That insight was not enough, however,  to prepare me for what I felt one night on first hearing a spell-binding guitar intro, followed by an impassioned vocal, an even better guitar solo, a clever “punchline“ vocal chorus, and a guitar “outro” that may be the best of all. I was hooked on the Blues for life.

The only problem was that the song was in the middle of a long set and the host never identified the song or the artist. That it was longer than a standard three-minute song and had something to do with gambling was all I knew. Over time, I realized that Otis Rush was the artist, the song was “Gambler’s Blues”, and the album was Mourning in the Morning on Cotillion, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. It took me years to get my hands on that record, the first of many such quests that music fans know well.

The performance remains a marvel. One might have thought that B.B. King’s classic “Gambler’s Blues” on Blues Is King (his second greatest album, in my view, after Live at the Regal) would never be topped. One would have been wrong. The rest of the Mourning album is somewhat controversial among fans – some thinking it overproduced and containing material unworthy of Rush – but, in addition to “Gamblers’ Blues”, there are stellar remakes of two songs that had helped establish his reputation (“It Takes Time”, “My Love Will Never Die”) and his remarkable take on one of the genre’s recurrent themes, “Reap What You Sow”. True story about the latter: Someone for whom I once played it exclaimed, “My goodness! What did she do to him?”

Otis first recorded when bassist and prolific song writer Willie Dixon brought him to Eli Toscano, the owner of Cobra Records in Chicago. The result was a series of landmark recordings in the history of urban blues. Issued from 1956 to 1958, the best of these Cobra recordings, such as “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)”, “Three Times A Fool”, “It Takes Time”, “My Love Will Never Die”, and the astounding “Double Trouble”, are essential listening, and a great place for listeners to start. (Quick aside: Any compilation of Otis’s Cobra recordings that is complete will also include a couple clunkers. Dixon apparently insisted that certain of his own songs be included for Otis to record despite not being up to the quality of others. It’s hard to imagine Rush would have chosen [shudder] “Violent Love”, for instance.)

One of nine artists to participate in a three-record series for Vanguard called Chicago/The Blues/Today!, Otis laid down only five tracks, but they are superb. Rush also shares the bill, with Albert King, on Door to Door (Chess); among his six sides on the album is the magnificent original of “So Many Roads”.

Other studio albums worth considering include: Right Place, Wrong Time (Bullfrog); Troubles, Troubles (Verve); Any Place I’m Going (Evidence); Ain’t Enough Comin’ In (Mercury); and Lost In The Blues (Alligator).

Among albums that capture Rush live: Tops (Blind Pig); Otis Rush and Friends Live at Montreux [the friends being Eric Clapton and Luther Allison] (Eagle Records); Double Trouble (Rock Beat); and Cold Day in Hell, All Your Love I Miss Loving, and So Many Roads, all on Delmark. The last of these was recorded in Tokyo in 1975, and the roar of a very large crowd of fans who really get what they’re hearing is exhilarating.

I’m tempted to say there is no such thing as a bad Otis Rush record. I do have this caution on one, though: Screamin’ and Cryin’ (Evidence) was recorded live at a time when Otis was clearly in a bad place in his life. It makes for uncomfortable listening, at least for me; in that sense, I cannot recommend it.

Seeing Otis Rush Live

I managed to see him twice. The first was at the Commodore Barry Club in Philadelphia, backed by a group of some of the better bluesmen in the Philly area, the Dukes of Destiny. From the looks on their faces, these musicians were as thrilled to play with Otis Rush as I was to finally see him. The second was at a Chicago blues club in Lincoln Park, backed by his Chicago blues band. In each case, he was in total, scintillating command.

No one is going to do better describing what it was like to see Otis Rush at his best than Robert Palmer did in his classic 1981 book Deep Blues (Viking), so I’m not going to try:

“The set…was devastating. The first tune rocked, with Otis snarling the words out of the side of his mouth, and then he settled down to slow, minor-key blues, an idiom in which nobody can touch him. ‘He’s so good, man,’ Muddy Waters had told me, and Muddy does not dispense praise lightly…That night at the Wise Fools [Pub], during one forty-minute set, Otis focused all his extraordinary talents. His grainy, gospelish singing carried the weight of so much passion and frustration, it sounded like the words were being torn from his throat, and his guitar playing hit heights I didn’t think any musician was capable of – notes bent and twisted so delicately and immaculately they seemed to form actual words…The performance, if you could call it that, was shattering and uplifting all at once, the way blues is supposed to be…Otis Rush had something else – an ear for the finest pitch shadings and the ability to execute them on the guitar, not as mere effects but as meaningful components in a personal vocabulary, a musical language. He was playing the deep blues.”

Coda

At the top of his game, Otis Rush had no superiors, and few peers. I have listened to the original “Double Trouble” (Cobra, 1958) dozens of times. The next time it fails to send chills down my spine will be the first. Not for nothing, as they say, did Stevie Ray Vaughan name his band.

Palmer was onto something with his aside “The performance, if you could call it that…” above. Such authenticity is all to the benefit of the lucky listener. Feeling at this depth is a rare, profound treat.

Ken Bossong

© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong

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Welcome to Other Aspects

I am a night owl; it’s how I’m wired. For most of my life, I have done much of my best thinking, creating, and problem solving well after the sun has gone down. While I greatly admire morning people, my light bulb shines brightest in the dark. What keeps me up at night ranges from life’s engaging interests to the problems that beset us.

It really is not all negative, by the way. I remember when a good friend who shares my love of music mentioned that John Coltrane once appeared on the Soupy Sales Show. When I expressed astonishment, he sent me the YouTube link. I made the mistake of opening it around 11:30 that night. Know how YouTube feeds you one related video after another? Next thing I knew, I was watching clips I never knew existed of Django Reinhardt at 3 AM.

There’s a reason why Blues songs are written about 3 o’clock in the morning.

When I’m not being captivated by geniuses playing music, though, I am likely to be contemplating some recent outrage and wondering “How did this become acceptable?” or “We can do better than this, can’t we?”

Welcome to my blog. Why “Other Aspects”?

I write because I must. There are things that need to be said; they include both celebrations of unheralded good and laments of us going off the rails as a people. I don’t anticipate running out of material. Here’s the thing, though: When thinking about what I’ve heard/seen/read that enthralls or infuriates me, I’m often left wondering about other, sometimes crucial, aspects. This is where I aim to go.

Since I’m inviting you to spend some of your precious time here, you deserve a sense of what to expect.

Inevitably, the topics will be those matters that matter enough to me to keep me up at night – public affairs, government, and policy; law; music, language, and cultural trends; and sports. The music usually will be the genres that have most enriched my life, Jazz and Blues. In such posts, the goal will be to share those riches.

On the issues, I’ll not pretend to have all the answers, but I promise to do what I can to get the questions right – always the most important step.

I am tired of people yelling at each other and calling each other names, rather than having discussions on the merits of issues. I am tired of slogans substituting for facts, analysis, and common sense. The seemingly rigid orthodoxies of both the Far Left and the Far Right have little appeal for me. I like to think I take one issue at a time and wherever the merits take me, that’s where I am. I believe civility and respect to be signs of strength, not weakness.

I can’t be the only one who longs for statesmanship and leadership, who thinks facts, fair process and first principles matter, and who finds the unacceptable to be, well, unacceptable.

We can do better, and we must. It’s up to us. This will not be a venture into “ah, shucks” naiveté. (Problems that seem intractable are difficult for a reason.) Yet, much of the bad stuff seems maddeningly unnecessary and potentially fixable. Meanwhile, the underappreciated good in life needs the attention it deserves.

I welcome feedback directed to KenBossong@gmail.com. I considered doing Comments on the blog, but am persuaded that moderating spam, flame-outs, and the like can quickly become quite an undertaking. I’d rather spend the finite time available writing things worth reading. All feedback will be read; items that provide particularly helpful insight or factual info will be mentioned in a separate section following a future posting. If attribution seems appropriate, I’ll seek permission.

To state the obvious, I’m to blame for all opinions I express. I write for no other person or entity. Again, welcome, and thank you for considering other aspects.

Ken Bossong

© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong