Sunday, June 26, 2011

Stuck in Downey with the Texas blues again – Jimmie Vaughn and Dave Alvin LIVE

Had the great good fortune to see two of America’s great roots artists in the last week.  First up was the great Jimmie Vaughn at Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, NH.  The first saw Vaughn when he began his post Fabulous Thunderbird’s solo career he seemed a fish out of water onstage, unsure of himself in the front man role.  I am happy to report those days are gone, Vaughn was amiable and comfortable fronting his fabulous band.  While his voice is not great, it is solid and serviceable and he does a brilliant job of choosing material that compliments it.  We were also thrilled when he brought out Texas roadhouse songbird Lou Ann Barton to sing about half way thru the set.  Barton and Vaught complement each other perfectly. 
Vaughn’s band including sax players Greg Piccolo and Doug James, (from Duke Robillard’s original Roomful of Blues) who have played together for so long they literally sound like 1 horn then they riff!  Then, of course, is the guitar playing – Vaughn is true blues master with tone and taste to spare.  I have been a fan of Vaughn’s straight up Texas blues guitar since the first Fabulous Thunderbirds LP “Girls go Wild” back in 1979.  He is an elegant and tasteful player that never plays a superfluous note and his biting Fender tone is to die for.  I noticed even on fast tunes he never plays fast, just maintains his perfect lean and soulful style.  Vaughn featured a lot of tunes from his fine current CD, “Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites” and his upcoming CD called “More Blues, Ballads and Favorites.”

Next up was one of Americana’s great songwriters and performers Dave Alvin @ Johnny D’s in Somerville.  Dave and his brother Phil roared out of Downey California with “The Blasters” back in 1979 (same year as the first Fabulous Thunderbird’s LP!).  With New Orleans great Lee Allen on tenor sax and Gene Taylor on piano they were, for me, the greatest roots rock band that I ever heard.  Dave was the driving guitar player and main songwriter and Phil was the lead singer.  In his post Blaster’s career Dave has played with X and various other bands prior to beginning his formal solo career in 1987. 

At Johnny D’s Dave and his quartet featured mostly songs from his new CD “Eleven Eleven” (being his 11th album, released in 2011).  The set was, was like all Alvin’s shows a wonderful mix of beautiful working class poetry and ragged but right rock and roll.  Highlights from the superb new CD were “Harlan County Line” and “Johnny Ace is Dead,” but there were great older tunes as well, the elegiac “Abilene” and rip roaring “Marie, Marie” and a menacing and deadly “Out of Control.”      

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Big Man, Master of the Universe, King of the World, able to leap tall women in a single bound!

It is with profound sadness that we learn of the death of Clarence Clemons from the E Street Band.  If  you were lucky enough to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band back in the 1970’s as I was you know that the relationship between Bruce and Clarence went way beyond anything musical and into the realm of the mythic.  Clarence was Bruce’s onstage foil and way beyond a “sidekick” as he has sometimes been characterized.  In thinking about the many wonderful moments I witnessed, the long kiss on the lips, the onstage slide into Clarence’s outstretched arm my favorite was at a show in Saratoga, NY on the “River” tour when Bruce and Clarence did a vignette during the song “Sherry Darling” where Clarence played the psychiatrist counseling Bruce while he declares his profound dislike of his girlfriends mother.   They performed it with Bruce laying on the stage with his head in Clarence’s lap and him this a clipboard in his hand studiously taking notes while Bruce ranted on.  If coarse Clarence loomed large in so many Springsteen onstage stories over the years (thanks to the wonderful folks at www.backsteets.com for this memory): 
 
This was in addition to Clarence's active participation, or at least invocation, in the gamut of stories Bruce told onstage. It was Clarence who walked through the woods with Bruce to find the gypsy woman, or it was Clarence that gave him the directions to find God to ask him whether he should be a writer or a lawyer. It was Clarence with whom Bruce drove through the wind and the snow and the tornado, the car falling apart, until the radio broke. It was Clarence in the forest when they were visited by Little Melvin and the Invaders in the spaceship. Clarence was there when Bruce and Steve sat on the porch trying to get up their nerve to talk to Pretty Flamingo, and it was Clarence on the park bench showing off the pictures of his son.

The onstage relationship between Bruce and Clarence faded over the years as Springsteen grew older, the elaborate stories and vignettes grew rarer.  My good friend Dave Little got it right the other night when I stated that it was a kind of father/son, big brother/little brother relationship and he corrected me (as he often does!).  He said that Clarence was the onstage anchor to his younger, wilder band leader.  Clarence was the steady presence, grounding the band against this young, unpredictable, out of control force of nature, and as such Clarence in the early days was in an odd way the center of the band.  As Bruce grew older this paradigm necessarily changed and thus the onstage relationship changed but was always essential. 
Of course there is no denying that there was an (unstated) racial element to their partnership.  Entering the public consciousness in the 1970’s there was no mistaking that a statement was being made on the iconic cover of “Born to Run.”  Thankfully their public persona was far too rich and deep to ever become bogged down racial politics; after all they were having too much fun!     

And then, of course, is the music – solos that are so truly iconic that it is hard to find a parallel in rock n’ roll, certainly not one that traverses 40 years; "Rosalita," "Backstreets," "Born to Run," "Jungleland," "Badlands," "The Ties that Bind," "Out in the Streets" and right up to "Girls in their Summer Clothes."  Solos that were by design the emotional center and focus of the songs, especially on the concert stage.  Clarence’s saxophone was the key element that tied Springsteen’s rock n' roll songs to their underpinning of the great soul and Rhythm and Blues that Bruce loved.  Springsteen’s music is inexorably changed without the presence and sound of Clarence Clemons’s saxophone.  So ultimately, even though Springsteen is indeed “the Boss” this was a wonderful partnership between these 2 men.  Clarence wrote in his delightful autobiography “Big Man” that “without scooter, there is no big man,” I would also say there without the big man there might have been no scooter (as we know him).  The very fabric and tone of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is altered inexorably in the absence of Clarence Clemons.  

Rest in peace and God bless Clarence Clemons - the best remembrance and obit is found on www.backstreets.com   

Friday, June 17, 2011

Tax reform and how to win the lottery when you file your 1040

At least once every tax season I have a client who is dumbfounded that their federal tax refund is bigger than the amount of income taxes they had withheld, and they invariably say “you mean the Internal Revenue Service will send back more than I paid in, that doesn’t make any sense!”  
Indeed, but in fact (according to a recent nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation report on 2009 Federal tax filings) about 30% of American taxpayers do, in fact, get back all and more of what they paid in for federal income tax.  This happens via something called “refundable tax credits,” credits that directly lower federal income taxes but are then refundable if the credit exceeds the taxpayer’s liability.  In the tax world these refundable credits are often called tax expenditures, i.e. the I.R.S. sends out a refund in excess of the money the taxpayer has actually paid in.  The growth of these refundable credits has produced this 30% of the population that gets back more than they paid in, as well as to the equally shocking 51% of Americans that pay no federal income taxes (according to the same Joint Committee  report).  These refundable credits include the much abused earned income tax credit, adoption credit, American Opportunities education credit and the new home buyer’s credit.  These credits essentially turn the Internal Revenue Service into a quasi-welfare agency for approximately 30% of American taxpayers.

So what is tax reform going to look like?  I suspect it will be modeled on the huge 1986 tax reform bill, and that can best be visualized in this way; if the tax code is a rubber ball, the reform will essentially squash the ball.  It will lower all marginal rates in exchange for eliminating special tax breaks and credits and it will broaden (flatten) the tax base.  Regardless of what one thinks about “tax breaks for the wealthy” no democracy is going to function properly if 51% of its citizens do not pay taxes and 30% see filing their taxes as akin to playing the lottery.  We certainly have poor people in this county that should not be paying taxes, but I have a hard time believing that group is 51% of US tax filers.  I also find it hard to believe that 30% of the American public needs to be collecting what amounts to welfare payments thru their tax filings (a process loaded with opportunities to manipulate income). 

While I am no fan of the Internal Revenue Service part of tax reform should be returning the Service to its proper function; the administration and collection of taxes.  It should not be a welfare agency and it should also not become the traffic cop for the national health reform (a subject for another day).  The I.R.S. should never be sending out checks in excess of what it has collected and most important more Americans have to become tax paying citizens.  I think before we even have the discussion on proper tax rates for “the rich” we desperately need to get more American’s with “skin in the game.”  A capitalist democracy demands and needs a citizenry that sees and understands the relationship between money paid in for taxes and goods and services received from the government.           

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Brain-dead Liberalism 101

Highly recommended (and now widely read) is David Mamet’s Village Voice piece “Why I am no longer a “Brain-Dead” Liberal.”  This much reviled piece (by the liberal establishment) written back in March of 2008 is a must read, thoughtful and wholly non-partisan (at least as far as our current pathetic 2 party political system is concerned).  He takes a run at the world view of liberalism and conservatism thru a theatrical lens of his (then current) play “November”;
“The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.”

The article reminded me how daunting it is to challenge your own assumptions, especially in these days of instant 24 hour digital news.  It has become all too easy to make sure that your assumptions are never challenged by any alternative views, liberal or conservative.  The Fox News audience makes sure it is fed on a steady diet of “conservative” thinking as the CNBC viewers do the same with it brand of “liberal” swill.

The other issue that Mamet brought to my mind is how ingrained liberal thinking is to those of us “Born in the 50’s” (to quote the song by The Police).  Mamet made me remember a very fine literature teacher I had sitting with me one day “proving” that liberal thought and worldview was inherently more “moral and ethical” then the conservative view.  Thus these ideas become intellectual assumptions that are tough to overcome. 

While we are on the subject of “brain-dead” liberalism was Janeane Garofalo on Bill Mayer’s HBO show the other night who stated that among other things that she did not understand why Representative Anthony Weiner was “being thrown under the bus” as he had not “broken any laws” (this remains to be seen) and that his actions had not “impacted anyone’s life negatively.”  I was struck by this incredibly shallow and vapid ethical view.   This arrogant, lying, unfaithful little worm is only to be judged unfit for a leadership position in the country if he has “broken the law” or “impacted anyone’s life negatively.”  God help us if this is how otherwise intelligent (Ms. Garofalo has always struck me as bright and engaged) Citizens understand ethical leadership in this country.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Looking for a Bad Guy!

'The American people realize they've been robbed. They're just not sure by whom," write Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner in "Reckless Endangerment." But Americans who read this outstanding history of the financial crisis will know, by the end, exactly who created the meltdown of 2008 and how they did it. This is a story, the authors say, "of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home."

Thus begins an excellent review by James Freeman in the WSJ 6/3/11.  The book is an accurate and damming incitement of America’s financial toxic twins Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but it struck me that it is really only half the story. 

Yes, the government was promoting easy mortgage acquisition but Wall Street was hungry for mortgage fodder and wanted all the mortgagees anybody could write because they were making a fortune bundling them as securitized investments.  Then after Wall Street packaged up these securitized mortgages, AIG (the primary culprit in the financial meltdown) was making a fortune insuring these bundles of shit (the infamous “credit default swaps”). 

When writers and pundits go looking for the boogie man under the financial crisis bed the answers are easy to predict.  The right wants the government to be the bad guys (they are!) and the left wants Wall Street to be the bad guys (they are!).  But when you examine all the evidence and watch the flow of money you see a hideous marriage of business and government designed to line everybody's pockets at the brutal expense of the American taxpayer and economy.  Wall Street made a fortune and the Senate Finance Committee collected millions in campaign contributions. 

Of course the sad thing is that it could all happen again tomorrow - only difference will be that Dodd-Frank Financial Reform will have institutionalized the “bail out” so there will not have to be any sick charade in Congress to get the money.  Welcome to the new system of American free enterprise (of you have enough money to buy in) = privatized wealth and socialized failure - heads I win, tails you lose!  

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The great Medicare debate

The recent win in New York’s 26th Congressional race has emboldened Democrats that Paul Ryan’s plan for saving Medicare is a fatal Republican flaw.  Thus this rudderless and intellectually deprived political party has decided that it need not embrace or even offer up a solution to this very serious problem but just highlight the faults of Ryan’s plan and it will win elections. 
This reminds me of how the Republican Party calls for the end of President Obama’s healthcare plan while offering up no solutions to the national disgrace that is our current healthcare system.  If you are still in need of proof of the complete corruption and moral bankruptcy of our 2 main political parties look no further.