Respect Yourself

Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MGs (with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn), Carla & Rufus Thomas, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Luther Ingram

Over a period of about fifteen years, from 1960 to the mid-1970s, Stax Records had all these artists, pioneering a unique funk and soul sound and, in its early years blending white and black musicians and executives in the most unlikely of places, segregated Memphis, Tennessee.

The story is well-told by Robert Gordon in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (2013) with a foreword by Booker T Jones.  It's a story with a first act and a second act with the first act being the more compelling.

  (Booker T)  It started with Jim Stewart, an aspiring country-music musician who wanted to get in on the growing music recording business in the late 1950s and his sister, Estelle Axton, who  loved music, all types of music.  They came up with the name of their label by combining the first two letters of their last names.  With very little money they purchased their initial recording equipment and rented a closed movie theater which they converted into a recording studio and expanded the ticket office and made it into a record store, run by Estelle. According to Gordon:

The store would be a way to gauge what shoppers were buying, would provide immediate customer response to new and developing songs, and would yield a working library so writers and musicians could keep current.  The initial purpose was plain and simple: cash flow to help pay the rent.

     (Estelle & Jim)
At the time when there was no set template for the record industry or recording labels and to the extent there was any developing template Stax didn't follow it.  There were no union studio musicians, no charts developed before recording sessions; they were making it up as they went along.

What's remarkable is how young everyone was.  What became the core of the studio musical team, Booker T, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, The Bar-Kays and the Mar-Keys were all in high school when they started working at Stax and Booker T and Cropper, in particular, became executives, managing the recording process while still in their teens.

          Gordon entertains us as he tells of how Jim and Estelle became the promoters of soul music and of the growth of Stax from its first hits Walking the Dog by Rufus Thomas and Green Onions by Booker T & the MGs to Cropper and Wilson Pickett writing Midnight Hour in a room at the Lorraine Motel to that magic moment when Otis Redding showed up and changed the destiny of Stax.

Steve Cropper:

He put a spark under Stax.  No question about it  . . . Otis Redding was the one artist that everybody looked forward to recording with.

  (Cropper)
Booker T:

Otis Redding seemed to be a person with a mission and we picked up that mission and it became all of ours.  His intent was so strong and so powerful when we were recording that it translated to more than the music.  

It was Redding who made the break through to a white audience at the Monterrey Pop festival in July 1967 and late that year he and Cropper wrote the song that he was certain would be his first Number One, (Sittin' On) The Dock of The Bay (for the full story see Sittin' In The Morning Sun).  Here's Otis at Monterrey (and stick around for the last minute of the video):

And it was Redding's death (along with most of the Bar-Kays) when his plane crashed into Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin in December 1967 that was the first of three events over six months that transformed Stax and signaled the closing of the curtain on its first act.  Released soon after his death, The Dock of The Bay became one of the best selling singles of 1968.

The second was the revelation of the awful distribution agreement Jim Stewart had entered into with Atlantic Records back in 1965.  Stewart had entered into it without consulting a lawyer.  Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic producer claimed he didn't read it either but there is room for doubt.  In any event, when Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun sold Atlantic it turned out that the contract gave Atlantic control of Stax's masters destroying the economic value of the Stax catalogue.

The third was the murder of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in April 1968.  Throughout Respect Yourself, Gordon weaves the story of race relations in Memphis and, in particular, of the struggle of the black sanitation workers to gain respect and have their unionization efforts recognized by white politicians.  This struggle, which had gone on for several years, was what brought King to Memphis.
    (King in Memphis)
Stax had been an oasis amidst the racial strife.  The one place in Memphis where blacks and white could work together.  Booker T and the MGs was unique, two black and two white musicians.  In the introduction, Booker T writes of Jim Stewart's hiring of a black man, Al Bell, as an executive at Stax:

It was 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee, the heart of the American South.  Throughout this wide region, race mixing was nothing short of an assault on the social realm.  Inside Stax Records, whites and blacks had worked side by side for half a decade.  People who couldn't publicly dine together were making beautiful music, that the public - black and white - loved to hear.  Many times, however they'd step outside the studio and white cops would stop to check on the whites' safety, to hassle the blacks.

One telephone and one desk.  While Al situated himself, Jim made a call.  When he hung up, Al watched as Jim slid that phone across the desk, toward him.
(Al Bell & Jim Stewart)
Al Bell made his call.  When done, like his boss, he slid the phone back across the desk.  It was such a quotidian act, yet revolutionary in 1965. . . In Memphis, thirty three African American men had been recently fired from the sanitation department for fomenting strike talk . . . the City of Memphis defied integration orders by closing its public swimming pools - for two consecutive hot summers - rather than having blacks and whites share the same water.

"I was amazed to sit in the same room with this white guy who had been a country fiddle player", says Al . . . "The spirit that came from Jim and his sister Estelle Axton allowed all of us, black and white, to come off the streets, where you had segregation and the negative attitude, and come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony".

King's death changed it all.  The distrust and anger overwhelmed all of the city, including Stax.  THC encountered the way attitudes were impact.  About 20 years ago he managed a team based in Memphis and one of the group was a white Memphis native born in the 1930s who told THC that "things wouldn't be right in Memphis" until the day when everyone, white and black, who was there the day King was murdered had themselves died.  

For Stax it meant changes in the working relationships, in the management and even in the sound of the music.  Over time Estelle Axton and Steve Cropper left and Al Stewart was bought out and the management became explicitly focused on a black audience.  There were some great successes, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers being two of the biggest, but Stax ultimately overexpanded, got out of financial control was finally went bankrupt.  In a sad note, Jim Stewart, who had walked away with enough to make him financially sound for the rest of his life, came back at the end and pledged all his personal assets to help keep Stax afloat.  When it went bankrupt he lost everything. 

(Isaac Hayes)  The second act of Respect Yourself is well told but it is essentially a sad and dreary story after the uplifting first act.  But we all still have the music and we'll leave you with Hold On, I'm Coming by Sam & Dave, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter and you can read Respect Yourself for the story of how the song ended up with its title.

  

Meat Is Good, Beer Makes It Better

We recently reported that Meat Is Good and now comes exciting news - beer makes it even better!  The Economist reports on a recent article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that found adding a dark beer marinade reduces the formation of dangerous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) when grilling meat. 

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Events Have Controlled Me

 

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln sent a letter to Albert G Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor.  Sent on April 4, 1864 at Hodges request, the letter documented the President's comments to Hodges,  Kentucky Governor Thomas Bramlette and Senator Archibald Dixon during their recent White House visit.
[Full text of the letter, courtesy of the University of Michigan online collection, can be found at the end of the post]. 

(Gov Bramlette Dickinson College)
The title of this post is taken from Lincoln's words in its final paragraph:

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

THC finds two aspects of the letter fascinating (apart from the usual enjoyment of reading Lincoln's writings and speeches).

The first is the evidence it gives us of how themes and sentiments could marinate in Lincoln's mind before eventually finding their full and free expression.  After his confession that "events have controlled me", the President ends his letter with these thoughts:

Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Eleven months later, these thoughts were to be embroidered and expanded in Lincoln's somber Second Inaugural Address, or sermon, as THC prefers to categorize it.

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.  Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease . . .

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether. 

The second is Lincoln's discussion of the conflict between his personal views on slavery and his Constitutional obligations as President, which is the issue that triggered Hodges request for the letter. 

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.  

But there is something deeper at work here, despite Lincoln's protestations.  The cause of the war was slavery (for more detail see Forever Free, Part 2: Why?) but while the secessionists fought to preserve and expand slavery, most northerners fought to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery.  Yet, while the newly elected Republican party professed to only advocate for no further expansion of slavery, the secessionist saw this as a ruse.  Why?  Because if no new slave states were admitted to the Union, the South would lose control of the Senate, its bulwark against anti-slavery action at the Federal level.  The South had already lost control of the House many years before (despite the notorious 3/5 rule) and had now lost the Presidency to the upstart Republicans.  Once the Senate was gone, slavery would be slowly and inevitably strangled everywhere in the country.  If the South was adamant about preserving slavery, war was inevitable in this situation unless the remainder of the country decided to let the secessionists go peaceably.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A. G. Hodges, Esq Executive Mansion,
Frankfort, Ky. Washington, April 4, 1864.

My dear Sir: You ask me to put in writing the substance of what I verbally said the other day, in your presence, to Governor Bramlette and Senator Dixon. It was about as follows:

``I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government---that nation---of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together. When, early in the war, Gen. Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When a little later, Gen. Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, Gen. Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March, and May, and July 1862 I made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force,---no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no cavilling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure.

[``]And now let any Union man who complains of the measure, test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth.['']

I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Yours truly
A. LINCOLN

The Broken Road

Seventy nine years after completing his walk from Holland to Constantinople, the final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his youthful ramble has been published.  The first two volumes, A Time For Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) are considered literary masterpieces (THC has previously written about these books as well as Fermor's other exploits in Leigh Fermor), taking Paddy, as he was known, through Germany, Austria (with a side trip to Prague), Hungary and the Transylvania region of Rumania leaving us just after his passage through the Iron Gates, on the Danube, between Rumania and Yugoslavia and near the border of Bulgaria.  Though long anticipated, it had been thought at the time of his death in 2011 at the age of 96 that the final volume completing his journey was still incomplete and would never be published.

The Broken Road does not complete the journey in a manner consistent with the prior two volumes, and thus its title.  Instead, it is a bit of a patchwork as Leigh Fermor's literary executors, Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, tell us in their introduction to the new book which consists of three distinct parts (like Caesar's Gaul).  The first recounts Leigh Fermor's journey from the Iron Gates through Bulgaria, with a side trip to Bucharest, Romania ending in Burgas, Bulgaria still a hundred miles short of Constantinople.  The origin of this section lies in Paddy's attempt in 1962 to write a magazine piece about the pleasures of walking which morphed into an account of his journeys in Bulgaria.  By early 1965 he had written an incomplete manuscript which he set aside to build his house on the Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese (for pictures see the end of the Leigh Fermor post).  When that project was completed he decided to go back to writing of his journey from the start rather than complete the manuscript about the last portion of the walk.

Though he tried to complete the book in the late 1980s his efforts faltered.  Then in 2008, Artemis Cooper found a typescript of the unfinished manuscript from the 1960s in the office of Paddy's publisher in London and Paddy asked for it to be sent to him in Greece.  Now in his early nineties and with limited vision he began slowly revising with the aid of a magnifying glass.  He was still editing almost up to the time of his death.  It is this version that serves as the basis for the first, and longest, section of The Broken Road.

How must it have felt for a man in his nineties to be editing and revising a manuscript written in his late forties about an adventure undertaken when he was 18 and 19 years old?   More than in the prior two volumes Paddy occasionally inserts himself as an older man into the narrative, providing his reflections on the events.  He is particularly wistful reflecting on the fate of those he met and befriended in Eastern Europe throughout 1934 who would face the twin catastrophe of the Nazis and WWII followed by the Soviet occupation:

Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings.

A sentiment that puts THC in mind of Rebecca West's dedication for her epic book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) based upon her 1937 journey to Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, a journey into the newly-created Yugoslavia and into its dark, haunted past:

To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved

Leigh Fermor reflects on the challenge of writing a memoir so many years removed from the events:

My first memories, therefore, are overlaid with many more, and it is hard to exclude the inklings gleaned later when writing of these first encounters . . . I am almost irresistibly tempted to slip in one or two balloons from a later date in the pages that lie ahead . . . if I see an apt occasion . . . I may, but not without warning the reader, let it rip.  After all, I am not likely to pass this way again in print . . . 

. . . two main problems beset the very curious and enjoyable task of compiling this private archaeology.  The first is a sudden blur, when exact memory conks out, and a stretch of the itinerary looms eventlessly ahead and no pencil mark on the map comes to my help. . . .The cheerful obverse of all these lacunae is that they save us both from drowning in the indiscriminate flood of total recall.  

The second problem is the opposite of all this: while piecing together fragments which have lain undisturbed for two decades and more, all at once a detail will surface which acts as potently as the taste of madeleine which made the whole of Proust's childhood unfurl.  The haul of irrelevant detail, interlocking trains of thought and associations, and the echoes of echoes re-echoed and ricocheted, is overwhelming, and in the hopes of attaining some redeeming shadow of symmetry and balance, a lot of this irrelevant catch must be thrown away again to swim back to the dark pools where it has been lurking all this time.

Even with these limitations The Broken Road contains many of the set pieces we've come to expect from the previous volumes though there are not quite as many memorable moments.  At its best, as you read marvelous descriptive passages, particularly about his trek in Bulgaria, it makes one yearn to be young and on the road tramping about in the remote back roads of your imagination.  We can feel the wonder when Paddy describes being on a wild path through a pass in the Balkan Mountains as a massive flight of storks pass overhead, heading south as they flee the oncoming winter.  The character sketches of both small towns and the people he encounters (including a crazed barber who follows him throughout northern Bulgaria) are delightful.

In typical Paddyesque fashion his accommodations change radically from day to day.  Here's one sequence of lodgings:

In the village of either Gorni Pasarel or Dolni Pasarel in Bulgaria.

I had sloshed through a yard full of pigsties and offered, perhaps, out of wetness and fatigue . . . to pay for a night's lodging . . . I was in the most primitive village house I had so far seen . . . on entering one went down several steps into a single, semi-troglodytic and windowless room, with a damp earthen floor . . . It was the world of Gurth and Wamba, a Saxon swineherd's hut just after curfew.

As the sole boarder in a small hotel in the Danube river town of Rustchuk, run by Rosa, its head maid, with whom he goes out dining and drinking.

In a small village in Rumania where he stays for a night with a Jewish grocer, Domnul David.

At what he takes to be a small hotel in the outskirts of Bucharest when, after arising from a good night's sleep, he realizes is primarily a brothel where he is promptly taken under the wings of its attractive residents (though he is admirably discreet as to precisely how far under their wings he is taken).

And finally, staying for several days with Josias von Rantzau, one of the secretaries for the German Legation in Bucharest to whom he had been given a letter of introduction by one of the acquaintances he had made during the Transylvanian sojourn described in Between the Woods and the Water.  The head of the Legation, whom von Rantzau greatly admired, was Count Friederich von der Schulenburg who later became German ambassador to the Soviet Union and was eventually executed for his part in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.  Leigh Fermor does not talk much about politics but this was only a year after Hitler came to power and he recounts a conversation with von Rantzau, a descendant of a noble family from Holstein, near Denmark:

One evening when we had been talking for hours, Josias said, after a pause, rather seriously, fixing me with large, blue eyes: 'Here's a silly question.  Do you believe in the English phrase "Right or wrong, my country"'?

Losing contact with von Rantzau, Paddy then tells us:

A few days after the end of the war, in command of a team of the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force, bumping over the rubble and the cinders of Hamburg (a sight and a smell which made us all fall silent, and dimmed for a while the exhilaration of victory), I found myself at Flensburg in the north of Holstein.  Marked on the map near the town of Itzehoe, was a point reading 'Schloss Rantzau, and I headed for it next day . . .

He finds a second cousin of von Rantzau who tells him: "Dear Josias?  Yes, he was in Eastern Europe somewhere.  We've no news of him for ages.  I think the Russians must have snapped him up . . . ".  In fact, von Rantzau, who became a Wehrmacht officer, died in Russian captivity in 1952.

And the other two sections of the book?

Next are some fragments from Paddy's diary during his short stay in Constantinople.  Not very illuminating and one wishes he had devoted some of his descriptive powers to that city.

The final segment is the diary of his month long tour of the Orthodox monasteries of the Mount Athos peninsula to which Paddy had wangled a letter of introduction from the Orthodox Patriarch while in Constantinople.   Unaffected by later editing it is the unadorned writing of a young man who has just turned twenty and an appropriate way to bring his journey full circle.
    (one of the Mt Athos monasteries)
We'll conclude in a fitting way with Paddy's evening in a cave along the Black Sea shore of Bulgaria where he stumbles across a group of Greek sailors and Bulgarian shepherds and joins them in a night of singing, dancing and drinking:

On a rock near where I sat was the heavy, low round table that I had eaten from. Revolving past it, Costa leant forward: suddenly the table levitated into the air, sailed past us and pivoted at right angles to his head in a sequence of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held there by nothing but his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a flying carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of woodsmoke, so fast at some moments that the four glasses on it, the chap-fallen bagpipe with its perforated cow’s horn dangling, the raki flask, the knives and spoons, the earthenware saucepan that held the lentils and the backbones of the two mackerels with their heads and tails dangling over the edge of the tin plate, all dissolved for a few swift revolutions into a circular blur, then redefined themselves, as the pace dwindled, into a still life travelling in wide rings along the cave. As Costa sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table from above, then he soared into the dark so that only the underside glowed. Simultaneously he quickened his pace and reduced the circumference of the circle by rotating faster and faster on the spot, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto, which quickly rose to an uproar. His head was flung back and his streaming features corrugated with veins and muscles, his balancing arms outflung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself seemed to melt into a vast disc twice its own diameter spinning in the cave’s centre at a speed, which should have scattered its whirling still life into the nether shadows. Slowly the speed slackened.  . . . Not once had the dancer’s hands touched it; but, the moment before it resettled in its place, he retrieved the stub of the cigarette he had left burning on the rock, and danced slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, tapping away the long ash with the fourth finger of his upraised left hand. He replaced it in his mouth, gyrated, sank, and unwound into his sober initial steps . . . then having regained his motionless starting point, straight as an arrow and on tip toe, he broke off, sauntered smoking to the re-established table, picked up his raki glass, took a meditative sip, deaf to the clamour, and subsided unhurriedly among the rest of us.

Bands THC Would Like To See

The bands you would like to see don't necessarily include all those with your favorite songs.  A live act needs to brings something exciting to the table and can't be too dependent on studio magic for their sound.  Oh, and no lip syncing or backup tracks (unless you are The Who).

THC has raved before about his favorite contemporary live act, Robert Randolph & The Family Band and also seen and enjoyed Los Lonely Boys.  Here are his top three acts that he has not yet seen live and each has a New England link.

TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND

Fronted by the husband and wife team of Derek Trucks on slide guitar (and nephew of Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks) and singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi (from East Boston).  They've played in separate bands but more recently have been recording together.  The current configuration of the band is so strong that the former lead singer, Mike Mattison (who is excellent, listen to him here) is doing backup now and occasionally pinch-hitting on lead. Here they are with a tune from their newest album that displays Susan's smoky vocals and Derek's fluid and soaring slide.

DROPKICK MURPHYS

Official band of Red Sox Nation and best known for I'm Shipping Up To Boston.  My favorite; the tough-love rocker State of Massachusetts. 

She had excuses and she chose to use them
She was the victim of unspeakable abuses
Her husband was violent, malicious and distant
Her kids now belong to the state of Massachusetts

They've been taken away! Hey!
They've been taken away!

Billy was a bright one, Tommy's off his head
Mother loved them both the same, at least that's what she said
I don't predict the future, I don't care about the past
Send them both to DSS, now you've had your chance

The poison stole your babies
The judges took your rights
You can have your children or the night

I suppose you've been a victim, I suspect you may have lied
Have you lost all ambition, won't you give this thing a try
If you can't and you fail, you won't be the only loser
These kids don't stand a chance with you in their future

They've been taken away! Hey!
They've been taken away!

GRACE POTTER & THE NOCTURNALS

Out of Vermont.  Grace Potter on vocals and keyboard with a hard pounding band.  Here they are on a studio cut: They also do some terrific covers.  This is White Rabbit: Grace has also done some good stuff with other artists.  Listen to her on Neil Young's Cortez The Killer with Joe Satriani contributing astounding guitar work.

Harvard Goes Egalitarian

THC was alerted to this breaking story by the Liberty & Law Blog on Harvard's actions to address this pressing issue:

In a move designed to foster diversity and to create a university that “thinks like America,” Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the President of Harvard University announced yesterday that the school will embrace egalitarian admissions. The school will no longer give priority to students with good grades, high SAT scores, and impressive extra-curricular activities. Such policies have, Dr. Faust acknowledged, created an “elitist” and “inegalitarian” atmosphere at the college. “It is unacceptable in 2014 to be favoring the intelligent over the unlearned, and the energetic over the slothful,” she proclaimed. Starting next year Harvard’s incoming class will have SAT scores ranging from six to sixteen hundred to produce, for the first time, a truly diverse freshman class. The class’ scores will resemble the distribution of scores across the United States. This mission will extend beyond admissions: “Harvard is now dedicated to fighting ‘thinkism” in all its guises".

The word is that Harvard is considering yet another daring step to address inequality.  According to US News & World Report, America's 1,141 universities and colleges have a total endowment of approximately $370 billion.  However, 10 universities (0.9%) have more than 35% of all endowments with Harvard alone accounting for more than 8% of the total!  Harvard's endowment is so large that it is almost 100 times the size of the average college endowment.  Sources are reporting that Harvard is planning to disband its endowment and distribute all of it to community colleges and trade schools across the United States with one Harvard insider reporting remarking "We simply must address this outrageous inequality - it's, it's unfair! ".  What a magnanimous gesture this would be!
(Harvard endowment)
Not to be outdone, Harvard's rival in Cambridge, MA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is launching an initiative under the leadership of Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the policy experts behind the creation of the Affordable Care Act.  Gruber, who has been adamant in denouncing "winners of the genetic lottery", has decided to "walk the talk" and recently announced he is voluntarily giving up his tenured position at MIT and that the University has agreed to annually rotate in a new professor selected at random from the Boston phone book.  MIT and Gruber are urging other tenured professors to follow his noble example.       (former tenured Prof Gruber)


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