#Ramblin Grand Master

[weirdestreviewsonline-blog]

Retro Rewind: POGS Childhood Gambling Or Harmless Fun??

Like with anything that was a fad of my shared childhood. POGS come to mind first. The game of stacking and smacking.

Apparently their was even a World POG Federation. But that's not what this review is about. This one simply about the POGS themselves.

Theses little round hunks of cardboard. Meant either instant popularity or instant fights. Depending on the kid you were. As for me it went both ways. I remember sneaking mine to school and using them to get other things from kids. Such as lunch money or comic books. I used them like currency. Schools quickly took notice that kids were fighting and acting stupid over these things.

But hey they were a great way to advertise to young consumers. Nowadays it's all about the ADS and viewer ship. Back in our day it was simple slap the logo onto something a child consumer would scream for.

But enough rambling. I'll get to my scoring and the end of my mini review here in a bit.

Nostalgic Feels: A

Likely Hood Of Being Worth Anything: F

Fun: A

Downsides: Were lost easily and lost friends like no tomorrow. But hey at least you got to rep your favorite things back in the day.

[weirdosweirdthoughts]

Just a little FYI...

Hold on 1 sec.

*Turns music on.*

Okay now that I got my music attached.

Shew! *Wipes Forehead.*

I will constantly jump from one topic to the next effortlessly. I don't mean to do this. However; please be aware I'm a grown man living with adult ADD. I'm very bad for day dreaming. Please beware I'll probably take you along for the ride. My "Fiancee" says my phone is in my hands to much. So why not be constructive with it. So I'll probably write out my day dreams for y'all around the interwebs can read it.

Like my strange love of Sleestaks from Sid And Marty Krofft's Land Of The Lost! A great cheesey by today's standards sci-fi kids show from the 70s.

[yostresswritinggirl]

i hope you don't mind me ramblin' for a little bit 😭 but i just. yes.

i saw you reblog about visions and my mind went brr so so. LISTEN LISTEN i thought..... what if venti gives visions to people who kinda. needs freedom in their life. this type of thinkin'. im basin' this purely on jean and xiao cuz i know nothin' about sucrose BUT jean is overwokin' herself and always uses mondstadt as an excuse but... mondstadt would be fine with her takin' a day or two free cuz she really needs it right. and they all would be really fine, jean has knights to help and mondstadt is Strong they can do it. and for xiao-

is freedom still freedom when dictated by a god. are you really free when you are told to protect liyue anyway. is this really freedom. + xiao still isnt free from his past so. is he really really free.

i just think that yes. i might be totally wrong cuz sucrose but 😭

Yes

YES

You're not far off at all, I think that Anemo Visions do have a tint of freedom aspect into their character. This is either they are tied down or in need of breaking free, while I also think there's the aspect of "Choosing your own fate and willing to be placed there". If we put in Sucrose into the equation, she has been researching about bio alchemy because she dreams of a plant continent, a place where she and her old friends promised to go together. Xiao is a Guardian Yaksha who chose to be tied down to Liyue, to his God when he had all the reasons and means to leave just like Bosacius.

Venti is the god of freedom and he also has a grasp of his own life beyond Mond, but in the end he still lingers and looks over the city like his Stanley quest. And Jean's duties as the Dandelion Knight and Acting Grand Master is an honor she willingly puts herself into for the desire to protect Mond. In the end it's like a blessing to those who desire to have their own path chosen, and if they wish to use their Vision to be free, then that's part of it.

All in all, our interpretations seem to be coherent and meeting in the middle anyways. Just different branches and strands, in this sense the upcoming Anemo Kazuha feels like a person who would show the same aspects of a voyager, vagabond? And he'll help expand this more.

[ultraheydudemestuff]

Jefferson Community Center

8996 Blue Creek Rd.

Blue Creek, OH 45616

The village of Blue Creek rests amid the rolling hills of Jefferson Township in southeastern Adams County, Ohio. A picturesque and isolated valley town surrounded by rich farm lands and towering hills, Blue Creek inspires both loyalty and a little humor from those who call it home. The older people say that Blue Creek isn’t at the end of the earth – but if you look hard enough you can see it from there. Like many small towns across rural America, Blue Creek has been transformed by economic circumstances that forced the closing of the community’s school. For many decades Jefferson Elementary and Jefferson High School were the hub of community activity and the fuel of community spirit. The old Jefferson High School was torn down. The same forces that precipitated the loss of the village’s school also decimated the community’s businesses. Outside the old Jefferson High School gymnasium – now the town’s Community Center -- the old school bell is standing in front of the gym as a reminder, so instead of an empty lot, the town has a community building that has become a gathering place, where the village conducts the annual Cowboy Copas Memorial Concert, sponsored by the Adams County Historical Society.

Known as “the country gentleman of song,” Copas was a honky tonk singer and member of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. He was born Lloyd Estel Copas in Blue Creek in 1913, and by age 14 he had mastered the guitar and developed his own unique style of playing with a thumb pick. A natural performer with a good sense of humor and an easygoing personality, Copas began performing on stage with another favored son of Blue Creek, Fred Evans, and his Ramblin’ Hen Cacklers String Band. According to some accounts, Copas got his nickname as he walked onto a stage with his guitar while performing with Lester ‘Natchee the Indian’ Storer, a young fiddler from Peebles. “Let’s see what you can do, cowboy,” someone shouted from the audience, and the name stuck. Copas died in a 1963 plane crash that also killed country stars Patsy Cline and Hawkshaw Hawkins as well as his son-in-law, Randy Hughes, who was piloting the plane.

[theloniousbach]

Ornette Coleman, Composer

It is true enough that great music reveals new wonders on each listening.  So it has been for me with Ornette Coleman’s music.  I have likely been a slow learner though (it took me about a decade to see how he sang and cried with this horn), so that now I am finding just how important the compositions are to his sound--and to the wider body of work.

It took a show with Prime Time in the early 1980s to hear the very human voice of his playing over the wonderful churning of the double electric trio (two drums, two basses, two guitars) behind him.  

With that revelation I went back, as always, to the late 1950s/1960s Atlantic albums to start to figure out the glorious weirdness.  Whereas before, I played Coleman in short doses, for the austere angularity of his playing, the conversations with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden’s grand bass, and loose limbed drumming from Billy Higgins and especially Ed Blackwell (or throw in Scott LaFaro, Eric Dolphy, and Freddie Hubbard for “Free Jazz.”).  

How did it work?  Others (Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard, John Coltrane’s “Chasin’ the Trane”) had played without piano, yet Coleman was different, weirder.  A big part of it was the interplay with Cherry, melodies intertwining suggesting off-kilter harmonies.  It helped finally to understand what lay behind Coleman’s plaintive, yearning tone.

And there it sat for years.  He was fascinating, played occasionally, a seasoning to keep my ears big.  But, mysteries remained.  As one of A.B. Spellman’s “Four Lives in Bebop,” he emerged as a sad, lonely man, misunderstood by himself as much as by the world.  That sense was compounded by Shirley Clarke’s documentary, “Ornette: Made in America.”

Mysteries still remain.  But I’ve listened again and made some slight progress.

It started with hearing The Bad Plus perform “The Law Years” and Christian McBride’s New Jawn doing “The Good Life” at our Jazz at the Bistro.  Hmmm, other people were playing these tunes and The Bad Plus (and, as I have found, Marc Copland, Chick Corea, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Geri Allen with the master himself) managed them on piano, reimposing that well-tempered harmony.

Then, I wanted to listen to Don Cherry more closely.  And to hear what we was doing, I finally confronted the framework for the conversations Coleman set up for them to explore.  Those compositions offer great freedom, but they are intelligible, structured, sophisticated, and far from random.

So I have begun collecting cover versions of such tunes as “Lonely Woman” (the MJQ), “Blues Connotations” (Chick Corea and Marc Copland), “Turnaround” (Joshua Redman), other The Bad Plus forays (“Broken Shadows” and “Street Woman”), and the SF Jazz Collective’s take on “Peace,” “When Will the Blues Leave,” and “Una Muy Bonita.”  I treasure a version of “Ramblin’” by the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood of my youth (John Handy’s Monterey guitarist plays jazzy-country fusion with Mike Finnigan, Clyde Graves, and George Marsh).  And is John Coltrane with Cherry, Haden, and Blackwell doing “Focus on Sanity” and others exactly a cover?  Yes, Coltrane’s completely different improvisational framework highlights the tunes as he converses with the very same band.

It all puts the focus on the compositions.  

The MJQ does the haunting theme of “Lonely Woman” quite well as John Lewis was a real champion of Coleman early on.  His solo though devolves into a too straight ahead blues chorus, but Milt Jackson solos impeccably as always getting into the spirit of the tune and Percy Heath shines.  Okay, it works on piano and vibes.

Corea, Copland, and The Bad Plus too get some of the angularity and subtle discordances.  The shift to keyboard is striking though and helps me see the structure and content of the particular tunes as part of getting how Coleman thinks and writes.  It works, just as pianists of all stripes get inside Theolonious Monk’s music without playing in his own spare, discordant, sometimes stabbing way.

The SF Jazz Collective’s repertory approach lends its own insights.  Here is an all-star large small ensemble (for the Coleman year it was Bobby Hutcherson, Joshua Redman, Miguel Zenon, Nicholas Payton, Rene Rosnes, Josh Roseman, and Robert Hurst) with a wide palette to draw on.  Each improviser also composes and arranges, so they get into the guts of the music in revelatory ways.

Also, encyclopedic are the explorations of John Zorn who made a thorough study of Coleman’s music and incorporated that into his own DNA.

Finally, the uniquely incandescent nature of Coleman’s compositions shows in the work of Old and New Dreams.  Cherry, Dewey Redman, Haden, and Blackwell playing Coleman’s compositions (very very well) and their own.  Their own compositions are strong, exploratory, evocative, but, even from players who have harmolodics in their blood and who contributed to the sound, they are tame, even safe, in a way that Coleman just isn’t.

Ornette himself is gone.  His recordings remain and will continue to reveal new wonders to listeners (even those slower on the uptake like me).  But perhaps other players will find ways to make these brilliant compositions their own, extending an important legacy.

[tomsammon]

Because he gained immense fame and fortune in sunny California as a founding member of the Eagles, many people are unaware that Glenn Frey is a native Michigander and that he started his career here in his home state.

Glenn was born in Detroit on November 6, 1948. He grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan and started taking piano lessons by the age of five at the insistence of his mother, Nellie. Although Glenn found the lessons dreary, they would lay the groundwork for his eventual career in music.

Frey attended Dondero High School, and it was during his sophomore year that the Beatles arrived on the American music scene. Inspired by the Fab Four's concert in 1964 at Detroit’s old Olympia Stadium on Grand River, Glenn stopped taking piano and picked up the guitar. As soon as he had mastered a few chords, Frey put together his first band. The group, which was comprised of Glenn and four of his classmates, went through a couple of name changes before he finally settled on the Subterraneans, named after the novel by his favorite author, Jack Kerouac.

One of Glenn’s main hangouts during his high school days was the Hideout teen club in Harper Woods, Michigan. Besides being a center for the local music scene, it was also an ideal spot for meeting and picking up girls, especially if you were a good-looking guy who just happened to play guitar and sing in a band. Frey would also make his first important music contacts at the Hideout.

Soon after graduating in 1966, Glenn joined the popular Birmingham, Michigan, folk-rock band called the Four Of Us. Loosely patterned after the Byrds, the Four Of Us had already cut two singles on Dave Leone’s Hideout record label when Glenn joined the band, and they were considered big local stars. One thing that set the Four Of Us apart from their local competition was its stress on vocal harmony. According to band leader Gary Burrows, “Jeff Alborell, Glenn Frey, and I practiced harmony parts every day. That was something our band had that a lotta bands weren’t doing”. It was also a skill that Glenn would put to very good use in his future groups.

It was during this time that Glenn became friends with Bob Seger, who emerged as the Hideout label’s biggest star after his first single, “East Side Story”, became a hit in Detroit. Seger had a good ear for talent and recognized it in Glenn. Bob let Frey sit in on some of his early sessions and had Glenn play maracas and acoustic guitar on two of Seger’s early recordings.

In 1967, Glenn put together the Mushrooms with Gary Burrows’ bother Jeff on keyboards, Bill Barnes and Doug Gunch on guitars, and Larry Mintz on drums. The band scored a major coup by having Bob Seger write both sides of their first single, “Such A Lovely Child” and “Burned” and produce the session as well. Although the record was not a hit, Glenn and the Mushrooms went on Robin Seymour’s Swingin’ Time television show twice to promote it. The Mushrooms also appeared on the Hy Lit Show which was filmed in Cleveland. It was Glenn’s first taste of the big time.

By the end of 1967, Frey had put together another band called the Heavy Metal Kids comprised of Mushroom holdover Jeff Burrows, along with bassist Jeff Alborell from the Four Of Us, Paul Kelcouse on lead guitar, and drummer Lance Dickerson from the band Billy C. & The Sunshine.

During 1968, Bob Seger renamed his band the Bob Seger System and signed with Capitol Records. Glenn was invited to sit in on one of Seger’s early Capitol sessions and ended up singing backup on “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”, which became Bob Seger’s first national hit, reaching # 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1969.

By the time “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” was climbing the charts, however, Glenn had already left Michigan for California. Supposedly, Frey was inspired by the fact that one of his many girlfriends, Joanie Sliwyn, had decided to go to the West Coast with her sister Alexandria to become singers. Glenn has also stated that he and two of his bandmates from the Heavy Metal Kids were anxious to travel to California because of a Life magazine expose of California’s youth culture and its embrace of the concept of free love and use of psychotropic drugs such as marijuana and L.S.D.

Once in California, Glenn met a fellow Detroit native named John David (J.D.) Souther who was dating Joanie Sliwyn’s sister. Frey and Souther became fast friends and formed a band called the Longbranch Pennywhistle. They signed a recording contract with Amos Records and released a self-title album in 1969. Despite the fact that “Longbranch Pennywhistle” featured stellar musicians such as guitarists James Burton and Ry Cooder, the record was a complete flop. The songwriting partnership that Frey and Souther had established, however, would turn out to be highly successful during the next decade.

Glenn’s next big step on the ladder to success was meeting singer Linda Ronstadt at L.A.’s hip music club, the Troubador, in 1971. Ronstadt, who was on the brink of stardom, invited Frey to play guitar in her touring band. Around the same time, Glenn befriended drummer Don Henley, whose group Shiloh was in the process of breaking up, and brought him in to drum in Linda’s band. When bassist Randy Meisner and guitarist Bernie Leadon were also recruited for the tour, the line-up that would become the Eagles played together for the first time.

After completing the tour with Linda Ronstadt, Frey and the rest of the band signed with Asylum Records. They released their first album, “The Eagles”, in 1972. Their debut was a hit, and it produced three charting singles. Two of them, “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” featured Glenn as the lead singer...

[weirdosweirdthoughts]

This Is New...

Hey this is my personal blog where you'll learn about more about the "Ramblin Grand Master". Me "Weirdo" as you get know over the course of our journey. These are some of my favorite things. You'll also learn about me through posts about memories. The names will be changed just like my own is. To protect their identities.