Bettye Lavette LIVE @ The Regattabar

On March 10th we went to the Regatta Bar to see the amazing Bettye Lavette, a true force of nature. With the modern soul world inhabited by poseurs, Lavette is the real deal, the absolute paradigm for the term “soul survivor.” In her mid-sixties she is still beautiful and sexy with an uncompromising stage presence, she made me think of the lettering emblazoned across the top of James Brown’s 1962 LP “Excitement;” “Cool – Tough – Pure,” that, in a nutshell is Bettye Lavette.


She made her first record in the early 1960’s at age 16, with real success just missing her until late in life. While I like Ms. Lavette’s records to me she is someone you need to see live where you get the whole package. She was backed by her tight band that easily conjured up the deep soul groove that she needed while not attempting to re-create any earlier era. I think that might be what is special about Ms. Lavette, she is not attempting to reproduce 1960’s soul music but simply taking that style that she was forged in and adapt it to contemporary material (much like the late, great Solomon Burke did). So you hear genuine “soulful” takes on material written by John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams, Fiona Apple, Pete Townsend, Sinead O’Connor and Elton John (stylistic versions that they themselves could never pull off). Lavette’s performances cut like a laser beam straight to the emotional heart of every song, wrenching every bit of feeling out of them and letting you know that she is one of the soul greats regardless of what the record charts ever said about her.

Heads I Win, Tails you Lose

The White House as put up a “Federal Tax Receipt” calculator that will print you a “receipt” of where your tax dollars were spent in 2010 (www.whitehouse.gov/issues/taxes/tax-receipt). Ingenious, I was kinda hoping they might add a second calculator that would add up what my 6 year old daughter, her children and grandchildren might end up paying on the dollars that the federal reserve is busily printing up – maybe some enterprising Republican (are there any??) will do that. I’ll make this easy for you: 26.3% goes to defense, 24.3% to healthcare (largely Medicare), 21.9% for Job and Family Security (mostly Social Security) and 7.4% to federal interest payments.


I was thinking of all this while reading Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece in the recent issue of Rolling Stone “The Real Housewives of Wall Street.” Taibbi writes about the “secret” budget maintained by the Federal Reserve (cue Ron Paul – maybe he isn’t so crazy after all!):

What they (the public) don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

With the media overrun with stories about public anger over unions, public employees & their pensions, the NEA, Planned Parenthood and other idiotic nonsense we have Cretans such as Tim “nobody ever told me about self-employment taxes!” Geithner, Ben “I know a lot about the Great Depression” Bernanke, and Larry “the markets are completely self-regulating” Summers printing up money at will, and handing it out to anyone they want to with NO oversight and NO accountability (including millions to off shore “companies” in the Caymen Islands – that’s right, publically funded tax evaders). Couple this with the fact that 26.3% of our tax dollars went to the defense of our country when we have no real formal “enemies” that require this level of traditional warfare and hardware and all I could think of is the great Walt Kelly quote “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

In response to calculating my “Federal Tax Receipt” this year I would ask the President one question; is any chance that some of the 26.3% going to defense could be reallocated to protecting us from our elected (and unelected) officials?

Tax Season 2011 Music - C.J. Chenier comes to Newburyport!

On March 4^th (thanks to my good friend Dave Little) we went to the Bellville Church in Newburyport to hear C.J. Chenier and his Red Hot Louisiana Band.  C.J. is the son of Zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier (think of what Bill Monroe is to Bluegrass music or Louis Armstrong to Jazz to understand Clifton’s role in Zydeco music).  I told Dave, “I am not really that into Zydeco” when he asked if I was going to the show, to which he responded “I bought you tickets, you’re going.”  Smart man, certainly not the first time I might have missed something truly great without his prompting!  C.J. was fabulous, so much better than any zydeco I have ever heard, even in New Orleans, the show became a real epiphany for me.  His band was razor sharp and you could not have slipped a piece of paper between the drummer and the bass player they were so tight. The smokin’ band and C.J.’s towering presence was all that was needed to keep the locals jumpin’ that cold winter night.  Babysitting time limits caused my wife and me to leave a little early that night and we had a wonderful moment standing in the snowy street outside the church and listening to this great Louisiana party music blasting out of the open windows of the hot church.  I closed my eyes and imagined myself back at the Rock n’ Bowl in New Orleans and it all seemed perfectly natural.