Spring

Spring is teasing us again here in northwest Iowa.

Really, it’s always a bit of a on again, off again proposition with March in Iowa - I don’t care, really. If another snowstorm hits, and there’s always that possibility going into April, I just fired up the Troy Built snowblower and hit it. What else can ya do?

I can’t say much, but I might have an opportunity to teach a class somewhere teaching the king’s English to non-English speakers. Many reasons for attempting to do this, but a small part of me wants to show a certain bit of the populi that there are folks that want to adapt to the assimilation process, whatever the hell that means, here in this country.

For the record, I grew up around the old-timers that got by just fine on a minimal amount of English, made a living, and worked in the community. Those old Italian guys would just as soon throw a can of Schlitz at you if you looked at them sideways for supposedly mangling a sentence of communication. Anyway, there’s a possible opportunity to help others with the language, so we will see if it happens.

Back to spring - I threw down some pre-emergence on the lawn this morning. It’s always a science experiment doing lawn care, again, we only know what we know, so we see what happens.

Growing up in the Highland Park/ Oak Park area of Des Moines back in the 1960’s, it’s been nice, no, GREAT, to see the area under rejuvenation. There are a couple of vinyl record shops, and some bars for live music and gatherings. Growing up, you didn’t realize urbanization, white flight, the suburbs (those probably were the suburbs when I lived there), renewal, cheap rents, and neighborhood rebirth. I saw that area get run down and rise like a phoenix. According to Facebook, this is what I see. Anyone who has lived in a city or parts of a city can testify to this, but I know this might be lost on those who grew up in less populated areas. Oh well, not much that I can do to change minds there. But these new bars and music venues have been giving some of the old and new guard of central Iowa musicians a place to gig. The economics of the music business have, of course changed drastically since back in the day (hey, now I’m over $100 in Bandcamp sales - gotta love it when you hit that bench mark).

Yep, sometimes this column can be old-time boring, I tell ya. To my detractors - you can always move on to the next blog and wake up, I guess.

As I type this, I’m simultaneously watching a You Tube documentary on Chicago blues musician great Buddy Guy. The dude is 89 this year and still tours. Buddy was an early music hero. I would drive the old man’s ‘69 GMC pickup down into DSM and head to the public library to rent a couple albums from their record bins. One album was a Buddy Guy/Junior Wells album that I played incessantly until I earned enough money to purchase my own copy. Many do realize how wild some of these guys were, in performance and life. To quote my buddy, Iowa music great Bob Dorr, that’s the blues, baby!

Time to wrap up. I’ve started releasing tracks for my next project entitled “My Old Man”, which are songs about growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70’s north of Des Moines, the times and characters (always interesting and not always great), and the stories that I saw and heard. I did a demo of a song, “Mrs. Lee”, and I re-wrote from my piss-poor attempt at murder ballad 20 years ago. This is better, I think - minus the murder ballad. Those songs are a centuries old folk tradition - rap and hip-hop carry this on in their form. Frankly, there isn’t much difference from when Public Enemy drops a song of this nature, and Johnny Cash recorded and wrote them (believe me, he wrote more of those songs than what folks think).

Thanks for reading, folks.