Unified Macon Theory: What stays in Macon, dies in Macon

This won't make sense to some of you, at least the part where I'm authoring it. It'll seem contradictory and maybe even contrary to my previously stated beliefs. Hopefully the rest of you will get it.

There are three reasons why I believe so strongly that some of the players in our current music scene will make a significant impact on the music world-at-large (and thusly, the world-at-large). No, reason number one isn't that I believe in magic, or that it's because there's something in the water (though I do believe in magic and think there's something in the water... something magic in the water).

In fact, these three reasons are the same three reasons why I think historic Macon musicians have had such an impact on the world of music, thusly the world.

#1) To be a remotely serious musician in Macon, Ga, means you have dedicated yourself to your music because you know no one is listening, which, in turn, means you're going to be more concerned with your craft than whether or not the people here like it. You probably have more than a little confidence in yourself, which doesn't hurt.

#2) Having relegated yourself to the outskirts of the local population, your friends are likely going to be other remotely serious musicians from whom your learn and take some motivation. Your clique is probably pretty tight and most of your conversations are, at some point or another, about music. Your passion is becoming your life fully.

#3) Being a remotely serious musician in Macon soon leads you to one inevitable question--"How serious am I?"--and depending on your answer--if it is "very serious"--you're then led to another question: "How do I get the fuck out of here?"

The same thing that seems like a problem in Macon is probably what has given Macon its place in history, its advantage over other places like Atlanta, LA or New York. You THINK you're serious about music when you uproot and head to LA, but trying to get someone to pay attention in Macon, you've got to be serious then, right?

More than that, there's the issue of your competency. Just because you're serious (or you think you're serious) doesn't mean that you're any good. In most cases, good just means you've been working on it. Talent or talentless, nothing good comes without practice. In other words, it doesn't matter if there's something in the water here because all the water in the world won't make you worth listening to. So you can go to LA or New York because you're serious (or think you're serious) but if you're in Macon for a little while, you'll find yourself consumed by your music.

Consider Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-Hour theory. He says to be an expert means you've put in 10,000 hours into a subject. For Bill Gates it was computers. For the Beatles it was music. Before they broke big, they spent 10,000 hours at their chosen field.

Think about Little Richard on the Chitlin Circuit, in the bawdy houses and nightclubs performing with drag queens and piano players. Just to eat, he was putting in days and days of shows every week, and the hours started racking up. Same for Otis Redding. Think about how many church services, how many of those talent shows, how many Hamp's Hops... the hours piled up.

You might not know this but Otis Redding didn't sound like the Otis Redding we know today back when he was sweeping those talent shows. He was doing Little Richard knock-offs and Sam Cooke covers. That's why he won them--he did a good job impersonating artists the crowd knew. It wasn't until he started hanging out with Johnny Jenkins (or so Jenkins says) that he tried to break away from that because Jenkins told him to find his own voice, and supposedly, with the help of Johnny's guitar-playing,
Otis did just that.

That's that community of outsiders. It's how the Allman Brothers were formed. Go ye forth and make a jam band out of what you find. Boom! Those outsiders came together with their different influences and made some music stew.

And I don't know if I really need to explain reason number three, but I will elaborate. It seems simple enough to get out of Macon, to pick up and leave town, but it isn't. (Both Little Richard and Otis Redding both recorded on the West Coast before going broke and having to return to Macon.) If you're smart that drive to leave will motivate you to do whatever it takes to be successful because that is your best chance at leaving.

Look at Emmett Miller. I know he's not a popular example because he's most widely known as a blackface minstrel singer, but he is considered an important figure in American music and he is from Macon. And he does illustrate my point.

He so wanted to leave town, to join the minstrelsy circuit, that he dropped out of school and started hanging out with black people so he could be more "authentic". Yes, his caricature of them is absolutely deplorable, but at the turn of the century, when the predominant form of popular music (i.e. - pop music in the early 1900s, which prevailed for nearly 100 years of this country's 233 year existence) was blackface minstrelsy, and white folks weren't supposed to mingle with black folks, he had to be dedicated to what he was doing if he was going to go that far. (By the way, the first all-black blackface minstrelsy group was also formed in Macon, a few decades before Emmett Miller got famous.)

For Otis Redding, it meant serving as Johnny Jenkins roadie on a trip to Memphis because Jenkins and the Pinetoppers--not Redding--had the recording contract with Stax Records. He loaded and unloaded the band's gear and begged (or pestered) the Stax crew until they let him record his song with the 30 minutes left on the session.

I see these parallels now with the folks making music in Macon, GA. I see a handful of passionate and dedicated musicians doing nothing but making music and hanging out with other people who make music. You should already know their names because they're playing here so much. And I see most of them eyeballing the bright lights of the big city. That is as it should be because the only way they'll ever realize their dreams will be to try it out somewhere else.

Every show I go to now, I'm thinking about whether or not it's the last time I get to see them here, in the grungy little dive bars, in the ill-suited night clubs, in the basement of an "event center". I don't see them stopping here, not because they're greedy and want lots and lots of money, but because they just want lots and lots of people to be able to hear what they've done.

There is no doubt in my mind that one of these people (and probably more)--Floco Torres, Oh Dorian, Al K!NG, Rolybots, Nomenclature, City Council, Citizen Insane, Abby Owens, etc., etc.,--will make a big splash when they jump into that big pond. No doubt in my mind at all.

The weird part is that this is sort of an argument against supporting the music here. Or maybe, if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, it's just another way to tell you all that it's happening whether or not you like it, support it or even know it exists. In another 20 or 30 years, it'll just be another wonderful facet of our city's cultural contribution that isn't utilized to make the city better, which means in another 20 or 30 years, another crop of musicians will emerge.

And so on and so forth, ad nauseum. Amen.

the Countdown to old age begins...

For my dad's 53rd birthday, I drove him to Augusta to see my brother and his family. We went shoe shopping, ordered pizza, drank beer and watched Al Green get the BET Lifetime Achievement Award. This was during halftime of a game between the Atlanta Falcons and the Colts. Afterward, we watched Harold & Kumar Can't Live Up to the Original, then tried to fall asleep on couches covered in microfiber suede while Sportscenter ran all night, like a looping highlight lullaby.

For my 30^th birthday, which is less than two weeks away, I have slightly different plans, which may still involve a road-trip to Augusta and microfiber suede—though only if I have a REALLY good time.

Saturday, August 30th, there will be a big-ass party beneath the Riverview Ballroom on Walnut Street, next to the somewhat dodgy, gray and maroon motel. It's called The Underground, when it's called anything at all, and this is where I hope to be surrounded by all my favorite people, who I hope will be surrounded by all their favorite people, who I hope will be introducing us all to interesting folks we haven't yet met.

There will be, like, a bunch of my favorite musicians, bands and other sentient noise-making devices... AND WE WILL GO UNTIL DAWN (if we please). Though I'm still awaiting some definites, I know that Nomenclature, Trendlenberg, Al King, Oh No They Didn't, Scott Baston & the News Architects, Oh Dorian, Aaron Irons, Doski Wo and Hank Vegas all want to be there performing for you. And maybe more.

But why? Well, it seems like a good time to celebrate ourselves, which would make an excellent excuse for me to have fun. And why not? We've got this big, beautiful, growing community of weirdoes who register semi- to full-bohemian on the strangeness scale. Plus Monica and Heatherly are going to be hitting milestone birthdays during that same stretch, and don't they deserve to have a bunch of drunk assholes scream-singing Happy Birthday at them too?

Of course they do. And what's better, you deserve to be there when it happens. You deserve to be able to say you were a drunk asshole, that you were singing shit that didn't even make sense at the time—that, in future hindsight, you were just having such a good time that you didn't notice how crazy you got. You deserve to feel like apologizing to people who will probably tell you not to worry about it because they were just about to call and apologize to you too, and then they'll ask if you've seen their keys because they can't find them and they had to sleep on the porch of their place because they passed out trying to break in while the church crowd was driving by. That's what you deserve.

In conclusion, I was raised to believe that Sunday is a day of rest, and I want to make sure that everyone has a damn good reason to still be asleep at 3pm on Sunday.

More details will be forthcoming, I swear. Just go ahead and mark the date, time and location. Saturday, August 30 until sometime Sunday, August 31 at the Underground (beneath the Riverview Ballroom). They'll be serving fried catfish dinner and such at 7pm if you want to come then.

Happy Song

Most times, this blog and its contents will more directly reflect the title it's been given: things I remember not despite of the hangover but because of it. That is, I like going out and drinking, and then writing about it so strangers know a little something of the life that's available in Middle Georgia... and also so my friends can remember the shit I saw them do.

But to put a spin on the title, the "tamed hangover" part--and yes, this is a stretch--I'm sometimes going to go out and still enjoy myself without doing stuff that leaves me hungover. In other words, by taming the instinct to get plastered, I'm taming the hangover before it begins and thusly giving myself a chance to experience a life here that I tend to neglect: the sober nightlife.

This is going to be one of those posts: Hey, I was sober and this is what happened.

Last night, I didn't expect to be -- not with the presence of an open bar and a lot of Otis Redding's music in the forefront. In fact, I envisioned a night of free booze with some boogie thrown in for good measure. That I didn't get that doesn't mean I was disappointed by the Otis Redding tribute, but that it was something different.

Turns out, getting lit on gin n tonic the night before upped my tolerance for gin n tonic, which is what I wanted to drink because I was dressed up and it felt like a dressy drink. I had a few of those, but they didn't come home to roost so I stopped worrying about it and switched to water.

Yes, I was dressed up. It was a chore, but I was excited about it. The week leading up, I didn't shave and my last public appearance, at the infamous Cocktail Hour, I made in holey jeans. I wanted to make sure that my image as a slacker bum was solid before giving myself a makeover.

It worked. Walking up, R.S. was guarding the door and addressed me like a stranger, not recognizing me and saying so, which was just the first time all night I heard that. Several folks had the same revelation. And pictures of it are limited, if they even exist. That was half the fun for me. I like dressing up from time to time, and surprising folks is a form of entertainment in of itself. Plus, I had a lovely lady on my arm, so to speak as I couldn't imagine actually carrying anyone around like that.

Anyway, organizers sat us four 11th Hour people -- Cardigan Slim was in town but Grizzle was not though -- with eight Telegraph people, and it made me smirk. The only Telegraph employee was the office manager, which meant there was no need for small talk about "the biz". Dinner was a nice salad and a whole cornish hen, which was my first attempt at eating what looked like a chicken without using my fingers.

We walked the red carpet in the pouring rain into the City Auditorium, finding our seats in a roped off section for VIPs. Ooo la la. It was fancypants. I made sure to give the finger to all the commoners outside of the special section for special people.

Then I felt like giving the finger to someone else, though I didn't know who. No one was dancing. Later, much later, a young couple (commoners) got up to dance, but no one joined in. I wanted to but there was no dancefloor in the VIP section and I feared going outside of our fiefdom.

Seriously though, how are you going to have the Bar-Kays -- the actual damn Bar-Kays, including Ben Cauley who survived the plane wreck that killed Otis Redding and most of the other Bar-Kays (the other surviving Bar-Kays were on a different plane) -- playing "Green Onions" and their own "Soul Finger" and not have a place for people to dance? How pointless is it to watch people get their groove on, instrumental style, without being able to get your groove on?

It isn't like I can't be happy with what I had because we all had a lot that night -- great music and interesting clips of celebrities talking about how much they love Otis Redding, including Alicia Keys and the Rolling Stones -- but it would've made sense. Other than that, it was lovely.

The vocalist for the Bar-Kays, Larry Hudson, tore it up. He came out in a white silk suit singing Satisfaction. Later, he emerged in a gold suit with coat tails. That's a man that knows the value of showsmanship. Speaking of, Dexter Redding, eldest son of Otis and Zelma, is a charismatic guy, reflecting at least some of the dynamic performance of his father's. Otis Redding III was a different matter. He isn't a bad singer -- neither sounds that much like their dad -- but he was a smoking guitar player. I didn't realize he was that good. And he had great chemistry with Taj Mahal when that blues great came out for his cameo.

The event was emceed by three people who read off a teleprompter, none more egregiously than the dude Kenny Lattimore. Maybe it wasn't noticeable from the balcony but it sure was sitting that close. It wasn't a bad thing, mind you, just a little distracting. It made it more obvious that what they were reading was ridiculously bland. "Otis Redding touched many million lives around the globe..." Blah.

One of the MCs was a former American Idol, Diana Degarmo. She sang "Respect" (or tried to) with the other female host, Alexandria (I think). But they did Aretha Franklin's version -- not a problem, just think it would've been interesting to hear the ladies duet on Otis Redding's version. The problem was that halfway through their song, Diana got flustered -- the band sounded off and the ladies didn't seem comfortable with the lyrics -- and said, "Let's start over." It was an awkward moment, watching them try to rebuild the momentum, but it seemed to make them try harder to work the crowd, which ultimately made it a better performance.

Speaking of awkward moments, when they first announced Otis Redding III, he didn't show up. Almost a full minute passed without anyone showing up, no one knowing what to do about it, and when he did appear, I had to chuckle because in a pair of dark glasses and a black jacket decked out with lots of black sequins Otis III looked almost exactly like Neon Deion Primetime Sanders.

But again, he was a killer on the guitar.

The evening only really bogged down when dedications to Otis and Zelma were being made. It was sweet but probably should've been done earlier. It ain't my party though. Other than that, it was fantastic.

Afterwards, my date and I went to CJs, still dressed up because I'd left my keys and phone at the house and my roommate had gone out after all. We walked in, got carded, looked around and decided to leave. It wasn't a CJs night, but I wish it had been. They were doing a benefit for breast cancer -- Save the Ta-Tas -- and I wanted to be a part, but it wasn't to be. That said, good job looking out CJs (and to all the area bars that donated gift certificates for the raffle). The place was packed, which is why I didn't want to stay, and I'm sure they raised some money for their worthy cause, which is why I wanted to go in the first place.