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Sweet Flashbacks
(Tom Ballew, Cal Everett, Jeff Severson, George Pittaway)
Visited the glorious past over the weekend as rock band, 4 Out of 5 Doctors, played an intimate venue in Vienna, Virginia to a collection of about 200 of us who grew up together back in the 80’s forming a piece of the fabric of the Washington DC area a quarter century ago.
An occasionally drunken and, uh, free-flowing fabric. Hey, we were young. I admit this because I have pretty much ruled out any future in public office. But I digress.
4 Out of 5 Doctors, if you don’t know them, had a record deal with Nemperor back in the early 80’s (with singles on the CBS and Epic labels as well; all confusingly interrelated). The guys were horribly mismanaged and screwed by the clueless wonders of the record industry at the time and Nemperor failed to pick up their option.
Anyway, these are all friends of mine and for the first time in the history of this blog, I am consciously shilling product. They have a new CD called Post-Op, culled from songs from the 3rd album-that-never-was, demos from the 1st-two-that-were and new material. There’s also a new CD set of their original albums. As the Washington Post noted in a review of one of their reunion concerts a couple of years ago, their music wears very well.
I was laughing as I was thinking how to describe what the Doctors sound like (for the sake of those not indoctrinated). It’s a rather varied list. For me they’re a mix of The Talking Heads, The Cars and Steely Dan with a hint of Beatles and if you do enough mushrooms, probably a little Electric Light Orchestra: the latter two due to their layered ooh-and-ah harmonies and catchy melodies. Add clever, pithy, occasionally twisted lyrics and- what’s not to love? I mean, really: “Had a fight with my car and my girlfriend broke down.” Has a certain perverse ring to it, no? The term “Power Pop” is thrown around to describe the Doctors but they’re deeper than that.
And Opus Ten should have gone down as one of the best rock songs ever. Well, it is; it’s just that a lot of people don’t know about it. There’s a very good article on the Doctors and their sordid history with the music industry here (despite universally rave reviews from critics).
Anyway, as for the tenor of the reunion-ish evening, it was rather amusing to see how old we’re all getting. Another decade and we’ll be showing up in wheelchairs and Depends.
But there remain signs of life. For both the Doctors and their minions. We are clearly not going down without a fight.
Go here to buy their stuff. Go here for the 4 Out of 5 Doctors website.
Fake Nuns, Fake Beatles and Fake Money
Thought I would share a few eye-catching headlines on this hot July day. As my own headline above indicates, there seems to be a theme developing here:
How low can she go? Lindsay Lohan is a gun-licking nun in shocking poster for new movie. Alright, Lindsay! Let me help perpetuate this bad girl image; here’s the poster:
Picture by Splash News
Reminds me of my 4th grade nuns at St. Thomas Moore in Oxon Hill, Maryland in the late 60s. Only they were actually knife-wielding nuns. What happened to this kind of nun?
Fab Four Sue Fab 4
Yes, a Beatles tribute band is suing another Beatle’s tribute band claiming it is the only legitimate fake Beatles group. The lawsuit, filed in Las Vegas (a perfect venue for this), actually alleges that the Fab 4 is “essentially identical in sound and appearance” as the Fab Four. Or as the Las Vegas Sun newspaper puts it:
In other words, The Fab Four doesn’t want The Fab 4 cashing in on The Fab Four’s cashing in on the Beatles.
Here’s what the Fab Four look like in completely original costumes they came up with themselves.
Man Posts Bail with Counterfeit bills
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, it’s not just that 35-year-old Ronald White had the audacity to post phony money on shop lifting charges- the fakes were laughably fake. Like, printed off a color copier-fake.
Detective Sgt. William K. Covert.:
They’re pretty poor. I didn’t have to touch them and I knew they were bad,” said Detective Sgt. William K. Covert. They were almost as obvious as the copies of $1 bills he’s seen created by students trying to fool soda machines. The paper didn’t feel right. It lacked the colored threads. And Andrew Jackson’s face was kind of fuzzy.
You’d a thought Al Pacino’s face might have been the tip-off:
Verbal Narcissists
Narcissism (nahr-suh-siz-em)- noun: Inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. Synonyms: self-centeredness, smugness, egocentrism.
I didn’t want to write about this. I just wanted to ignore them. But, I couldn’t. Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh are very good at getting publicity. This is how they help maintain their respective empires. I don’t mean to give them even more attention.
But when Pat Robertson concludes the people of Haiti deserved what they got because they made a deal with the devil; when Rush Limbaugh criticizes President Obama for acting too quickly on Haiti-I have to add my two cents to much that has already been said about this.
First the record. Here’s Pat Robertson on the 700 Club Tuesday:
Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.
Is he trying to impress us with his facile grasp of world history? Let me get this straight. The Haitian people made a deal with the devil to get the French to leave and are bad because they rebelled against the system of slavery? Exactly what is he trying to say? Is there a hidden message here about practitioners of voodoo? Does anyone really deserve to be crushed by collapsing buildings in a massive earthquake, let alone tens of thousands? Do children deserve to die in their school uniforms because their descendants kicked the French out? What kind of man, what kind of representative of faith and God, reaches such bizarre and cruel conclusions?
Here’s Rush Limbaugh:
This will play right into Obama’s hands. He’s humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, “credibility” with the black community–in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It’s made-to-order for them. That’s why he couldn’t wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.
The worst humanitarian disaster of the last half-century strikes the hemisphere and there’s something suspect about a quick reaction from the United States government- while people lay injured in rubble, and there’s a desperate race against time to save their lives? I ask again- what kind of man reaches such conclusions?
In both these cases, I believe we have the kind of men who are in love with the sound of their own voices but oblivious to the content that actually passes their lips. It’s verbal narcissism. It’s the only way to explain it.
Garcia Media Life 
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