My son Smokey and I were on a Bob Dylan vacation last week down in Salt Lake. If memory serves, going back to the Delta Center show with Paul Simon during the late Spring of ’99, we, as a team, hadn’t let any of his Utah shows slip by. Like his old man, Smoke got strung out early. Even quicker, actually.

At the time an Army buddy of mine returned to Fort Benning from “leave” with the first two Dylan LPs, I had pretty much sold my musical soul to jazz and my first couple of go-rounds with these particular slabs of vinyl didn’t exactly change my course. I believe I used “Egad!” in a sentence for the first time in quite a spell.

In the beginning, I found Dylan to be even more of an “acquired taste” than Thelonious Monk or “Grits,” a southern culinary delight that arrived with everything from bacon and eggs to Scotch and soda. By the way, thanks Kingston Trio for that particular ill-conceived and short-lived notion.

In fact, as I look back on the time in question, Dylan might well have also assumed all the “acquired taste” trappings of raw oysters, Salvador Dali, quantum mechanics, bleu cheese, and the “peatyness” of Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky.

But, of course, with time, I would succumb first to the lyrics then to the acoustic guitar flavors of the day. I must admit, however, that the fact that these were times of the civil rights movement and voting rights struggles and with the Georgia-Alabama line pretty much in the middle of it all, a more perfect context to what Dylan had on his mind would be hard to fathom.

Each succeeding effort on his part would further cement our newly-found relationship and by the time “Bringing It all Back Home” entered the fray with those subtly gorgeous Bruce Langhorne riffs and the greatest B-side in recorded music history, I had jumped on the bandwagon.

By the time of my Army discharge, through audio osmosis alone, I also found myself packing substantial interest in the likes of Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. My musical soul appeared to be on the block again.

Once back home in L.A., I also fell under the cultural purview of my brother Dick, then on the cusp of morphing into “OD McGee,” a quantum leap if there ever was one. Once he had plugged me into the neighboring Compton folk scene, the train left the station. It’s now some 50+ years later and my life has yet to return to normal.

Smokey becoming a “Dylan head” however, came as somewhat of a shock. The poor dude grew up with those nasally-challenged vocals charging, not unlike the Light Brigade, up the stairs to infiltrate his bedroom comfort zone at all hours of the day and night. No doubt, if child welfare agencies had gotten nose of it, they would have descended upon our humble digs in SWAT fashion.

It could be mentioned that his first non-Utah exposure to His Bobness occurred more than a decade previous as part of the Dylan tour with Tom Petty which we caught next door to the ’86 World’s Fair in Vancouver, British Columbia. Suffice to say, Smoke was bored.

Of course, he felt the same about Victoria and Banff, et cetera – and most everything else his parents were into. That is to say, he was a perfectly normal kid. And, if the truth be told, a total gas to be around. Later on, he would include me in his posse at AC/DC and Metallica concerts which proved to be some of my best live music experiences ever.

But back to our recent vacation shows at the exquisitely adorned and acoustically

perfect Eccles Theater down in the Valley, the Valley so Low. By having the rapturously ecstatic Mavis Staples kicking things off with her in-your-face joy and love vibe, the evening was left without many options as to which way it would go. Put your hands together. Say hallelujah!

Although Bob scrambled his set list the second night, he and that unbelievably tight instrumental ensemble that surfs his wake remain to die for. They are roots rock n’ roll incarnate, including during the Sinatra-esque portions of the show. Can’t say enough about Tony, Stu, George, Donnie, and, of course, Charlie. Love them boys!

Smokey, who has never been an acquired taste to anyone, continues to stick to the collective ribcage of whomever he encounters. A DNA test would no doubt prove that being “cool” skipped a generation on his paternal side.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: Acquired tastes appeared first on Park Record.

“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

– Carl Sagan

I admit it. I never saw it returning. The Dark Ages were from a past quite distant from our own. It mattered not that the term referenced a paucity of hard data from that seemingly incoherent era following the fall of the Roman Empire. It fits Trump-time like a glove.

Carl Sagan, as many before him, sensed its rebirth, however. Back in the mid-‘90s as his own time on the planet drew to a close, he had seen enough to recognize that history was well on its way to repeating itself: “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.”

Each and every day I am forced to step over the horse stall residuals that litter the philosophical and pseudo-theological landscapes. Ignorance sticks to boot heels like never before. From climate change to wild land drilling, where does it end?

As I mentioned in a previous column, I’ve been oscillating between rooting for Robert Mueller and his crack team of investigators to get the goods on Trump so we can throw the bum out, and somehow keeping him in office so we don’t have to put up with the current succession lineup of Mike Pence, Paul Ryan or Orrin Hatch.

When you look at who would follow in Trump’s footsteps should his veil of smoke and mirrors come crashing down, the deck certainly is stacked in his favor. Up and down the clown line, I don’t see any improvement on the integrity front should the President be forced to step down and the Constitutional succession invoked.

Maybe it’s time to bring in William Butler Yeats from the bullpen. What’s the statute of limitations when it comes to ripping off of a few of his “Second Coming” riffs, anyway? If memory serves, it’s been at least an hour or so since my last blatant broad daylight larceny.

“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST/ ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.” (My caps, by the way.)

I bet it felt good for Yeats to get that off his chest. Lord knows, I very much enjoyed hammering it out. It’s gotten to the point where each new acknowledgement as to the “lowness” of my species adds not a ripple to the waters.

Sagan, again: “Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.”

What are you saying, Carl? That the Neanderthal in us is once again reasserting its world view? That our inability to witness the larger picture has always been present? That we’ve always been only one loaf of bread missing from the shelf away from the twirling bones of “2001?” Say it ain’t so!

Don’t know why I’m so surprised. It’s been a long time coming. It’s just that I feel so boxed-in with “45” on one side and Orrin and the boys on the other. Admittedly, since my misspent youth, I’ve looked to the poets for comfort and understanding.

You know, writers like Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Charles Bukowski, Dorothy Parker, Ed Abbey, Hunter Thompson, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. The usual riff raff. Actually, their collective vision cuts too close to the bone to be of much comfort. They see far too clearly to help during these times.

Well, Dylan’s on deck for the following two nights down in Salt Lake after I hit the “send” button on this so maybe I’ll find some sort of solace in those quarters. You gotta be kidding! Bob’s never been much into sugar coating: “Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb/ I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from/ Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer/It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: A darker matter appeared first on Park Record.

Upon entering, I slid right up to the bar – a default move in such situations on my part and more than likely predicated on anxiety.

Seldom comfortable in crowds of strangers but at the same time unable to stay away, I arrived at the 35th anniversary celebration of the then-designated Park City Mountain Resort mostly to witness a posthumous tribute to longtime friend and mentor Loran Larsen.

Not that I didn’t expect friends to be in attendance but I knew many would be unfamiliar and, no doubt, above my social pay grade. Hence the double scotch with a splash of water.

In an instant, however, even prior to my first slug of liquid sedative, much of my unease would dissipate. Sitting at the front table amid a slew of resort and community movers-and-shakers, a glowing smile held me firmly in its crosshairs.

Nan Chalat-Noaker, editor of The Park Record and a longtime partner in cultural mischief began reeling me in. She had been pitching me to possibly fill an upcoming vacancy on the Opinion page and not much in my writing history had assured me I would be up to the task. Even now, nearly 20 years later, the jury is still out on that.

At the time, as a “Guest Contributor,” I would submit, quite sporadically, brief cultural pieces on, say, an impending live performance of the Irish-American “Trad” super-group “Solas” at the brand new Eccles Center along with career overviews associated with Ernest Hemingway’s 100^th Birthday and Bob Dylan’s upcoming gig at the Delta Center with Paul Simon.

We both knew, however, that meeting a weekly deadline would be another matter entirely. Let’s just say that Nan became my shepherd and kept me, for the most part, from getting tangled-up in the barbed wire.

While attempting to recollect when I first met Nan Chalat and, soon thereafter, her beau and husband to be Tom Noaker, there is this huge wrinkle in time. Fuzziness ensues. You’ll have that. What I do remember about the era, however, is that Park City’s place on the growth curve seemed more inclusive and that I very much felt a part of it.

What isn’t fuzzy at all is the honor I have had being associated with the two of them over the years and the joie de vivre that radiates from their collective aura. Of course, it would be Nan’s impending retirement as editor of The Park Record that is driving this babble. Paraphrasing Duke Ellington here, I’m going to miss her madly.

I’m fairly certain I would have been introduced to Nan at the Main Street digs of The Newspaper, probably not long after the short-lived Park City Coalition got out of the racket.

Although they didn’t overlap production-wise, both papers pandered to the new, hipper readership that had invaded the old mining camp and, while not averse to usurping a slice of its advertising pie, had left the local demographic to the 100-and-some-year-old Park Record.

I don’t even have to close my eyes to see me rushing at deadline into The Newspaper office with a fistful of Bic-ink-blotted and wadded-up yellow legal tablet pages filled with the music ramblings of a local Salt Lake disc jockey and substance abuser of note.

Often, upon taking in the chaotic scene, editors Steve Dering and/or David Hampshire would find themselves, with eyes a-roll, somewhat good-naturedly shaking their heads. Who could blame them?

The rest of the staff, including Nan, however, would seem to get more of a kick out of the weekly intrusions of the highly undisciplined and untrained wannabe wordsmith. Anyway, It was probably nothing more than being McGee’s brother that got me in the door in the first place. Later would come the merger of The Newspaper and The Park Record and the deck would be shuffled.

So by the end of this week, the odds of finding myself rising from a chair in Nan’s office at The Park Record to strap on the virtual reality goggles she has just slid across her desk will exit the realm in which mathematics play a role.

In the category of taking burlesque to an art form, however, our clandestine skulking of Main Street after dark during the Sundance Film Festival should remain on the menu. I’m only willing to sacrifice a certain amount of ritual to aid in Nan’s break for freedom no matter how well earned.

She is slouching toward deep breath and speed bumps would be well served to stand aside. Godspeed, my Captain!

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Meehan: O Captain! My captain! appeared first on Park Record.

So here’s the deal. No matter how intellectually I attempt to couch it, I’m a football fan. Neanderthals need love, too. For the most part, what I most emphatically am not, however, is a football-fan fan.

“For the most part” is the operative phrase, here. Like, say, if you, dear reader, are a football fan, you are exempt from my blanket condemnation. Save for you, and my family, who carry the USC Trojan virus, I find them to be somewhat limited in scope.

Myself, I like to watch the offensive line and the linebacker corps to see if I can recognize whatever subtleties may or may not be in play. Truth be known, however, I find baseball to be “chess,” maybe, at times, even “Go,” while I find the rest of them, including football, to be various levels of “checkers.”

That being said, from backyard to the larger venues, I am a fan. Actually, I’d pretty much forgotten about the National Football League. From the moment their uppity white owners gave the go-ahead to move my Los Angeles Rams to the Budweiser-soaked pastures of St. Louis, I had relocated them to the backburner.

I know, L.A. had stolen them in quite similar fashion from Cleveland years before but the almost seamless arrival of the Browns had lessened that impact. L.A. would languish for years in NFL purgatory prior to the Rams’ recent reappearance in southern California, which, by the way, did little to return the NFL to my good graces.

A USC and Utah man was I. The purist pursuit of college ball monopolized my passions for the eleven-man game. I’m not even going to go to how much I miss my weekly jaunts along Park City Mucker rugby sidelines. But, as far as the NFL, I just don’t like ‘em. But, as mentioned more than once, I am a football fan.

Which isn’t to say I don’t follow Ute and Trojan alumni when they go on to the next level. I mean, that’s a given. I just don’t pay nearly as much attention to them as I did during their undergraduate days.

Of course, the dead horse I continually beat about the head and fetlocks relating to the realignment of local high school football continues to nag at my comfort zone. Wandering Wasatch and Park City sidelines, flaunting my Wasp fandom in front of my Miner friends, certainly turned my crank. And, now, that too is gone.

But out of the blue the void I seldom felt reappeared on my internal cathode-ray screen. The NFL, that is. There it was in all its gory. I mean glory. And all it took to bring back those wonderful memories of yore was a genuflection by a San Francisco 49er quarterback of color and the rabid reactions of Caucasian fans – excuse me, I meant patriots.

I ought to be FIRED! But enough of that. I’m being ungrateful. Somehow I never got the memo that we whites had, by birth alone, acquired the moral high ground. Now I feel better. No longer must I accept responsibility for actions done to others by my genetic forefathers.

I especially loved the reference by he-who-shall-remain-nameless that the NFL had morphed into a bunch of unmanly sorts who pay undo attention to head injuries than to providing gladiatorial testosterone boosters to the white demographic that pays their salaries.

All of a sudden, just through one of his momentary rants, he moved me closer to the NFL. Whoda thunkit? I loved seeing Brady, nearly undone by the complexity of the moment, with head bowed, arms linked, and hand over his heart. Not that I, myself, don’t have a history of out-of-sight out-of-mind bigotry associated with the pigskin game.

What comes most quickly to mind is a Heisman race won by my hero Paul Hornung, a white (goes without saying) quarterback from Notre Dame whose team only won two games against all manner of more statistically-worthy opponents including a man-among-boys from Syracuse by the name of Jim Brown.

That may well have been my initial moment of ecstatic dancing when I got the word that Hornung had won. But as I grew older and better able to actually process what was happening on the field and in the minds of white male fans, my ecstasy took on less of a glow.

My masquerade abides, however. I’ve still got that going for me.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Meehan: The masquerade abides appeared first on Park Record.

I usually don’t see the anniversary of 9/11 coming anymore unless prompted by a random thought or a mention by a friend or in the media.

All of a sudden, like today as I type this, it’s just there, right in front of my face, sort of challenging the measly flag exhibit that lives year around next to the hand-tied wet-fly-decorated tumbleweed on top of my computer desk.

Obviously, I must be uncomfortable with the memory. I recall how elated I felt as a bunch of us rendezvoused at a Vernal motel on 9/12 in preparation for a 5-day river trip beginning with a float through the Gates of Ladore on the Green River. Hiding out in those precious canyons would provide a welcome sanctuary from reality and the horse it rode in on.

I’ve never been a flag person in the sense that it was something I revered. During my highly misspent youth, however, I did fashion from whole cloth a relatively decent rendition of the Confederate flag. Something about the stars-and-bars and color scheme resonated with my 2nd-grade “be the first one on your block” sensibility I suppose.

What triggered today’s reaction is an essay written by the late author David Foster Wallace and reposted this morning by Rolling Stone. Arriving with an alarm-clock-ish alert from my cell phone and much more pastoral in style than his usual stuff, his words kept me pinned to the pillow for no other reason than it was “he” who had written them.

Touring his neighborhood a week or so after the towers fell, DFW waxed upon the various flags displayed upon houses and vehicles and RFD mailboxes and the implied statements thereof. The greater ecosystem of the University of Indiana (where he, no doubt toiled in the Creative Writing Department) provided a flag-rich environment.

Even as I committed to memory various bugle calls associated with flag raising and lowering rituals and such, the process didn’t do much to swell my heart with patriotic pride. It was just that I had a new bugle and, like learning Morse code, it was something fun to do during Boy Scout years.

Same when I joined the Army. No matter where I was stationed, I somehow found myself on whatever ceremonial drill teams, replete with M16 rifles, spit-shined boots, starched and creased fatigues, and spinning flags, beckoned.

I loved the synchronization of marching in step while twirling a rifle in various patterns prior to plopping it down at the ever-moving boot heel in unison with your battalion, company, platoon, or squad mates. We’re talking fun, here, and keeping off KP and guard duty and the rest of those menial enlisted man chores.

That isn’t to say I didn’t and don’t understand the emotions when others, conditioned differently than myself, tear up in joy and love, especially when the unfurled symbols are sufficiently tattered. Hell, I’ve been known to become a chocolate mess over family-value oriented Mormon PSAs on the tube.

Not to mention the first anniversary of 9/11 when I found myself wandering with a longtime friend among the 3,000 or so smallish flags filling the space of Washington Square Park in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. More than anything, I felt the collective pain of the country.

Another mindset that demonstrates my ever-growing separateness from the mainstream is that I’m only drawn to NFL games if I can tune-in early enough to catch players taking a Colin Kaepernick-like knee during the national anthem.

I feel I should do my part to counter the low TV ratings the league has been getting, reportedly, as protest with “Kaep” and those who agree with him. In my humble opinion, of course, the “right” misses the point on both the 1st and 2nd Amendments to that same Constitution they so often hold up and wave as a flag of sorts.

I should add that while I do believe this country has been courageous in its historic fight against fascism, with its history of genocide and slavery, it has never been “great.” It’s MY country too and I love it and hope for it to achieve some kind of moral high ground at some point.

And to the folks out there who have never “served” but who champion war as a way to re-assert America’s place in the nationalistic food chain, I find it difficult to respect your patriotic fervor.

Oh, yeah. And if you believe in America the Beautiful, fight for the protection of Bears Ears and sacred ground everywhere. Bless you all!

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: Patriotic symbols appeared first on Park Record.

I am quite aware as to how we siblings of the clan contracted the virus in question. Up and down the line, we all blame our father Bob, the patriarch. No passing the buck to another sports fan from the family tree, here. We are all USC football fans because of Bob.

If further proof is needed, a check of his medical records should suffice. Although his sports addictions became manifest in varied ways, the night he woke in a cold sweat with his beloved Trojans involved in a 4th-and-goal from the one-yard line trailing by a touchdown with time running out comes easily to mind.

At the time, when home-games came-a-calling, his weekends were spent as an usher in the LA Memorial Coliseum for the Trojans on Saturday and the Rams on Sunday. At night, his dream world became a film-room for replaying that day’s emotional trauma.

His Doctor informed him in no uncertain terms that one of them had to go. Although he loved checking out the season-ticket holding starlets in his section, he, of course, opted to become Rams-free. No doubt Joan Collins and Natalie Wood and the others missed him madly.

I was shocked, (SHOCKED!), when he first jumped on the USC bandwagon. Being of Irish-Catholic stock from the panhandle of Idaho, we were naturally dyed-in-the-wool Notre Dame fans (from, no doubt, the hardy Blackface Mountain sheep).

I memorized lore of the Fighting Irish probably around the time I first contemplated sin – which is to say, relatively early. I could recite the names of Knute Rockne’s “Four Horsemen” backfield before I could those of “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” whoever they played for.

Matter of fact, we all jumped ship, except for mom. She remained a Notre Dame fan until the end. She kept us in her prayers, however. We had that going for us. And they worked, Mom’s prayers, that is. Unless they are locked in combat with USC, I’m totally rooting for Notre Dame, Utah, BYU, and even UCLA.

The “Utes” are the only one on that short list of secondary college pigskin passions that cause me to lose sleep, however. What with them being in the Southern Division of the Pac-12 Conference along with my Trojans and their habit of soundly thrashing my boys about the head and shoulders as often as not, they occupy my dream-world more than most.

That isn’t to say that the Utes aren’t my second-favorite college team, because they most definitely are — even more so than the University of Idaho Vandals (“Big I”) and the Montana Grizzlies, the scallywag squads of my youth.

So here I sit, awash in the usual dread of being a sports fan, with yet another football season nuzzling up against Major League Baseball pennant races. I refuse to touch upon the fact that my Dodgers have lost 8-of-9. I’m not going there.

I might, however, revisit the fact that my sum total interest in the local Prep gridiron scene continues to languish in the wasteland of negative numbers when it comes to how the Park City Miners, Wasatch Wasps, and both South Summit and North Summit are making out. There was a time, however…

I recall back during those heady days prior to UHSAA upsetting the party cart with the “promotion” of Wasatch from 3A to 4A that, seemingly, forevermore, separated them schedule-wise from Park City.

Back then, everything revolved around “the game.” Even timelines of a spectacular two-week jaunt through southern Utah would be predicated upon a kickoff at Dozier Field between the Miners and the Wasps.

It mattered not if I awoke on Boulder Tops or in the Henry Mountains or at Lake Powell, Hovenweep, Mesa Verde, Monument Valley, Jacob’s Lake, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, or Brianhead, each and every morning the ritual remained the same: making sure that day’s drive didn’t interfere with the “rivalry.”

When the Miners met the Wasps in Hebertown with the tailgating erupting around the pool tables, beer kegs, jukebox, and wall-bound dead animal heads at “Tinks,” well, then, all bets were off. Friends of the Park City High alumnae persuasion would show up with their own thirst and an admittedly often-brilliant stash of trash talk, and the frolic would ensue.
Those days are long gone, of course. With new towns, new teams, and new fans, it’s just not the same. Anyone happen to know of a watering hole similar to “Tinks” up Hyrum way?

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: The DNA of pigskin appeared first on Park Record.

Rolled out of the sack last Saturday morning with residual bruising from the previous night’s Hurricane Harvey news updates coupled with the layered onslaught of Typhoon Trump. Before I even allowed myself time to consider collateral damage wrought by Secretary of Interior Zinke, I groped for the only relief cocktail that came to mind.

Locating the familiar plastic container under a pile of used-napkins, bills, notebooks, newspaper sections, old photos, and the stack of DVDs I hope to get to sometime this millennium (organization is my strong suit)), I quickly poured its contents down the throat of the desktop mounted CD-player.

From the opening Saxophone riffs, the angst and anxiety began melting away. Gotta give self-medication a shout-out here. As with any good drug, I had scored in the shadows of hastening twilight — the exchange of money for product as seamless as the back-and-forth trade-offs of the high-end jazz solos emerging from the speakers.

On the evening in question, the extraordinarily accomplished multi-instrumentalist John Flanders had brought a most-eclectic combo to Heber City for their Thursday Concerts in the Park Series. During intermission, I sought him out to score some of the CD stash that I hoped had arrived with him.

If memory serves, my first contact with John and his seeming mission to embellish organized sound with levels of sophisticated “fills” and solos occurred when attending what I thought would be a “Small House Strings” show.

Speaking of virtuosity, most anytime I had the opportunity to catch the acoustic-duo of Marty Morrison and Drew Frink, doing so had become a given. This particular show, however, with the addition of a third party, became “Small House Trio.”

The new cat on the block turned out to be the aforementioned alchemist John Flanders and he was flat-out having his way with an Electronic Valve Instrument, a somewhat peculiar axe of the woodwind persuasion known in the vernacular as an EVI.

The fit couldn’t have been better. The command of inventiveness, tempo, and ensemble mindset he brought to the table appeared to give Marty and Drew additional creative space within that already quite “heady” musical neighborhood they inhabit.

The first thing I noticed related to the always-cool duo becoming a bit more adventurous with arrangements. The jazz standard “So What” began to sound a bit less like Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s quite-hip interpretation and more like the somewhat complex Sextet take of the original Miles Davis recording.

Later, Marty would introduce me to the live R&B, Latin, and rock rapture of “Sin City Soul,” an ever-evolving ensemble and another of John’s highly popular projects. Goes without saying but this outfit packs a punch. Both the brain and body are called upon to process a sum total of ecstasy that can, when they really get in a groove, approach flood stage.

But back to the surreptitious acquisition of my Saturday morning fix. It was a familiar “bindle,” to be sure. I recognized the packaging of the John Flanders & Double Helix CD “The Go Between” immediately. There was little doubt that its doppelganger reposed somewhere around my digs as a result of “uploading” interactions with iTunes a half-dozen years ago.

There’s also little doubt in these parts about where my first copy came from. My friend Kathleen Taylor, known as “KT” among our musically active peers, is and has long been associated with players within the music scenes of Park City and, seemingly, all of greater northern Utah.

Which brings us to LA tour and studio guitar-slinger-for-hire Mike Miller who sat in on “The Go Between” with Flanders and pianist Mitchel Forman – another whose sideman resume is equally as gaudy. KT is good friends with Flanders and Miller so she’s obviously one of the usual suspects for mysteries involving local talent CD distribution.

There’s also an emotional component that I seem to be sidestepping. “The Go Between” happens to be the final CD Wayne Christiansen worked on prior to his tragic death in an auto accident back in the summer of 2010.

Wayne happened to be one of those people everyone loved and I doubt for those close to him that there will ever be any getting over it. It takes a village to come thru hurricanes and typhoons with much sanity these days. And although it’s been out for years, this CD proved just the village to pull it off.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: A most soothing port in any storm appeared first on Park Record.

Hey Uncle Trumpy! I caught your shtick on the tube the other night and figure you might just be the right guy to steer me through my current malaise. It was the part where you spoke up about hatred and bigotry having no place in America that turned my crank.

You see, I’ve come to totally despise white culture as it’s being practiced on the “right” to the point where, at times, I actually hate individual white people. It’s not healthy, I know. My insides become twisted and I dream of pounding human bone fragments into white-supremacist skulls.

It probably comes from wishful thinking that sense can actually be pounded into these idiots’ heads. Whadaya think? And not only that but I also want to round them up and put them in domed detention camps where the lack of recycled air could, over time, have a rehab effect upon the “climate change denial” that has and continues to sweep their ranks.

It’s the fact that you are a professed true believer in Christianity that gives me faith that you could turn my evil ways around. Maybe you could even baptize me in some “Texas light sweet” grade crude oil until the “Western National Park” grade becomes the underlying commodity of the New York Mercantile Exchange’s oil futures contracts.

I’m sure such a “born again” ceremonial induction into the mindset of the drill-baby-drill bunch will give me enough eureka-moment epiphanies to last until you guys had all drank the kool-aid and hopped rides on the spaceships hiding behind next weeks solar eclipse. It’s a thought, anyway.

By the way, when word got out that I would be corresponding with you, question suggestions from all over the world began pouring in. One of the more interesting ones came from “Mark” in Alexandria, Egypt. He would love to meet you personally and ask you himself but there seems to be a hiccup or two with his visa application.

Anyway, here’s what’s on his mind. “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” That Mark, he’s a deep thinker. I can kind of sense his reasoning for wanting to pose such a question to one of the finest theological minds of our age.

Actually, I was hoping maybe he’d “work the corners” with a bit more nuance rather than put it waist-high and right down the middle of the plate. But, you’ll have that. I tried to warn him that, notwithstanding epic portions of anti-Semitism, you and your Old Testament Neanderthals would sweep aside such Jesus-ish gibberish.

He was after all the dude who tossed the money-changers out of the Temple. Now, what’s up with that? And all that “feeding the poor” crap? What was it about entitlements that this hippie can’t wrap his hairy head around?

By the way, congratulations on recent poll numbers which show that it wouldn’t bother your “base” one iota if it is found through the current investigations encircling the White House that you and yours engaged in quantum skullduggery to get elected. It seems to be beside the point, as it were.

As I ramble on here, I just assume that you have chosen to move past my referring to you in columns as a Nazi scum profiteer and a cancer upon the land. I hope it wasn’t any more offensive than, say, when I mentioned you were tearing our country apart while endearing yourself to those enlisting further corporate welfare and resource extraction.

How’s Vlad, by the way, Uncle Donny? Don’t recall if I mentioned that I caught your new campaign ad, mine Führer. What top-shelf art. I’d never seen “See Dick and Jane Run” done in a more Film Noir fashion. Did James Wong Howe light that for you? The neon shadows through the louvered shutters took me back to “Murder, My Sweet,” not to mention that the elongated dolly shot seemed very much like a homage to “Out of the Past.”

Well, it’s probably about time to submerge my crawling skin into a mineral bath. If I don’t hurry, he’ll pardon Sheriff Joe before I get this shipped out.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: The Trump tumor appeared first on Park Record.

“Each passing hour brings the solar system 43,000 miles closer to Globular Cluster M-13 in Hercules and still there remain misfits who insist there is no such thing as progress.”
~ Ransom K. Fern

One thing is for sure. Trump is not going to use Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s soon to be acted upon review of National Monuments as a way of implementing back-door support for cleaning up air pollution on the Colorado Plateau.

No, things are going to get much worse before they get better. Coal-fired power plant emissions will thicken the air even more so as male Caucasian onslaughts upon public lands continue.

An over-the-top sweeping generalization you say? I agree. I’ve really got to get a handle on my obvious racial and gender biases. I’ve attempted this before, of course, but I keep bumping into my antecedents’ history of slavery and genocide coupled with their general lack of atonement. If only I could rationalize as easily as they.

Not that I’m throwing in the towel on debates over climate change or what many of us consider sacred lands. It’s just that I have this overriding need at the moment to re-imprint memories of times spent with eyes, ears, nose, and feet on the ground of this quite special uplifted-and-eroded western panorama.

No doubt anger will keep me from accomplishing this feat with any sort of moderation but I’ll give it a shot. It may help that the memories are beautiful and cleansing and that, when pressed, the cerebral cortex has shown very little pushback at laying out the welcome mat.

I realize in the geological long-term it is my species and not the planet that is most at risk. I’m reminded of the Old Testament verse “You reap what you sow.” I love the way biblical quotes can bolster one’s points-of-view.

The earth will recover and continue upon its journey through space-time completely unaware of the comings and goings of both recent life-forms to which it has played host and the verses they have left behind. That said, somehow personal solace remains at arm’s length.

I’m unsure what, if anything, jostled my satisfied yet continually plotting mindset into consciousness the particular morning in question. Whatever, it didn’t take long at all to recall arriving at the campsite the evening previous after stashing our trusty craft up at Wahweap. We were now in Navajo country on the Big Rez.

Adopting a similar trail to one taken by Cactus Ed Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, we had roughly followed the tracks of the Lake Powell & Black Mesa railroad from the Navajo Power Station at Page to Black Mesa prior to ascending to our historic campsite and catch a bit of shuteye.

It bore all the trappings of a scouting mission behind enemy lines, that much was a given. After all, we were ensconced at Navajo National Monument, the very same sanctuary where the Gang holed up following their mischievous encounter with that hated electric coal train.

This was the late ‘80s and back then we tree-huggers didn’t feel as threatened as we do under the present administration. There was fear, of course, but, for whatever reason, we felt that the most chilling of the environmental horrors were behind us. Naïvité can do that.

Following a Ranger orientation on the Ancestral Puebloan ruins of Betatakin and Keet Seel, we hauled out Leaporn’s “Indian Country” map and began to plan the following day’s assault.

The carnage of the coal extraction operation on Black Mesa is hard to miss. And digest. But, finding a way to whistle past that graveyard, we headed toward a rendezvous with film folk at Tuba City. Famed documentarian Errol Morris was directing Tony Hillerman’s “Dark Wind” with friends of ours as accomplices before, during, and after the fact.

By now we flaunted the swagger of “Rez Rats.” We were in our element. Even the roaming packs of dogs could sense it.

The low hanging fog of our war to come provided accent but it was far from the Navajo way of “hozho naasha.” They walked in beauty to a different drummer.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: Smoke signals appeared first on Park Record.

Two things were clear. The stage at the Eccles Center was vibrating and the 2016 Sundance Film Festival was about to wrap.

It appeared from the seats down front that T Bone Burnett had gone just about as far as comfort allowed with a particular point in his explanation as to the physical and emotional bonds between humans and music. He found himself actually teetering on the cusp of Quantum Mechanics before he thought better of it.

The microphone being passed back and forth between Taj Mahal, Jack White and Burnett had stopped at T Bone in order for him to embellish further upon the thread the other two were stitching into a fabric that was the premiere of the HBO historical music documentary “American Epic.”

Without getting too deep into the more-advanced elements of “string theory,” Burnett had his hands closing in on one another with fingers aquiver. He wasn’t doing all that bad, actually, as he attempted to explain how theoretical physicists, beginning back in the ‘70s, had postulated a reality whereby “everything” was composed of vibrating strings.

The behavior of these “strings” and the frequency with which they vibrated were all that kept us from falling through the floor and through space and time, as it were. That’s sort of where T Bone left it and, with my own comfort zone giving me that look, I’ll take his lead.

Burnett’s point that as inhabitants of a universe wherein the building blocks of all “matter” are vibrating strings, then, naturally, humankind would tend to organize some of them under the umbrella of “pleasure” and, once they massaged a specific aesthetic, call it “music.”

And that, dear readers, is what we find on our plate today. Good vibrations maintaining integrity within and upon the aforementioned fabric. Virtuoso humanoids once again demonstrating grace under pressure in support of the general good. Rising to the occasion, as it were. Rubbin’ resin on their riggin’ and such.

Which brings us to “American Acoustic” and its final-gig-of-the-tour stop at Deer Valley’s Snow Park Amphitheater next Tuesday evening, Aug. 15. When it comes to exercising improvisational acoustic virtuosity the likes of which populate both the “Punch Brothers” and “I’m With Her” ensembles, this is nothing short of string-theory overkill.

And that’s just two parts of this awesome aural triptych. I haven’t even mentioned jazz guitarist Julian Lage, who has also been doing his part since the beginning of the tour to forestall any mechanical malfunctions within the good-vibration network that keeps all involved from falling through the rabbit hole of space-time.

Prior to getting carried away with the sheer instrumental brilliance of this bunch, let me call at least a bit of attention to the ease with which they interact. Over the years Park City has gotten somewhat used to experiencing the onstage humor of more than one act with Chris Thiele at the helm.

The American Acoustic tour has not just provided time away from his Bach Trio antics with Yo Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer but also his now regular gig as host of Public Radio’s “Prairie Home Companion,” which has his second season ready to launch.

He also keeps dipping his toe into the culturally cool waters of Nickel Creek, that over-the-top adolescent trio that back in the day had bluegrass fans running to their collective thesaurus in search of more emphatic synonyms for being talented beyond their years. “Precociousness” no longer seemed to pack enough, should I say, “punch.”

Anyway, with fellow Nickel-Creeker Sara Watkins along on the tour as part of “I’m With Her,” he’s been able to satisfy a segment of that musical “jones” most every night. And speaking of I’m With Her, how ’bout having Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan as part of the mix? Have I got your attention?

So lest you think the evening-in-question will be nothing more than a quorum of top-flight pickers-and-grinners being paraded out onstage for your cultural erudition, keep in mind the tour’s previously mentioned interactive component.

The show, including the space usually reserved for an opening act, will feature everyone on the bus, no matter their affiliation, taking turns improvising with each other. Maybe I should rephrase that. Ah, no worries. And don’t forget “Pickles.” It’ll be a banjo-rich evening.

As convoluted as these sentences have been, I’m sure their vibration has been such that they fit right in with T Bone Burnett’s quivering-fingers take on string theory. And that works for me.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years.

The post Jay Meehan: String theory appeared first on Park Record.