Hear Trini Lopez and think “Johnny Rivers” ......and think “PIZZ”

Gumption and tons of it can be what it takes to become a star.

Don’t think of the dozens of failed singles on dozens of tiny labels all over the United States as a sign of failure for either Trini Lopez ( who recently died of Covid) or Johnny Rivers.

Think  instead of it as a free opportunity to learn about all aspects of the music industry from the inside —- and a chance to make important personal contacts with industry movers and shakers : both from the past and those of the future.

Trini finally scored big first, doing live albums in nightclubs with a rocking latin-like semi acoustic guitar sound : ‘slap rhythm’ is the way Rivers remembered it. 

Johnny had pretty well given up on his ten year old dream to becoming a performing star : he saw himself more as a backroom operator : songwriter/producer/studio musician.

But he did a little favour for a late night Italian restaurant where he liked to hang out (Johnny was Italian American himself).

Play a little guitar and sing —— just till the owner found another jazz trio.

Ok, said Johnny - now what ? I’ll copy Trini’s formula, that's what. 

Overnight he was a world-wide success with his formula : just as the Ventures also found long time world wide success with a similar rhythm oriented  & simple catchy melodies formula.

If you know any songs by Johnny or Trini, you might now begin to see this relatively unknown intimate connection, because the two singer’s overall styles are actually quite different : Trini more adult nightclub and cocktail dresses while Johnny’s music is well suited to sharpen switchblades knives with.

(Just joking - somewhat !)

(Jose Feliciano lies somewhere between the two others but you can perhaps still see the connection : a sound based on a semi acoustic guitar style that is alternatively liltingly fluid or chunkily percussive : folk boogie ?)

I call the stuff “Pizz” myself, and say its era was from about 1957 to 1967 : heavy gauge flatwound strings, reverb, long scale guitars and relatively staccato, clearly articulated, separated notes in catchy lines played  by with a pick mostly on the lower strings. With a bit of mildly overdriven tube distortion and amp reverb.

Heck I sometimes wonder if this trio seriously bent a guitar string in their lives : this is far far far from the post-‘67’s endlessly legato, bent and shaken, heavily distorted, heavily compressed, eternally sustaining guitar sound.

Johnny’s still rockin and no, he does not look 78 despite publicly performing for over 70 years (not a typo !)....

Donald Trump & Gabriel Wortman : money-launderers extraordinaire ?

The biggest single mystery about both President Trump (who helped indirectly kill 200,000 Covid victims) and Gabriel Wortman (who personally killed 23 people) is where did they get the cash to buy the real estate that they did ?

Neither showed the type of income that would allow them to buy the properties they did for cash.

The suspicion - in lieu of firm audited financial information - is that they laundered other people’s money under the cover of their own names.

In the case of medical professional Wortman, he probably laundered the money of “known to police” career criminals. After all, what copper zeroes in on the medical profession when first looking for crooked deals ?

In the case of Trump, he probably laundered the money of shadowy -foreign - billionaires from lands where the cops & courts are corrupt : ie criminals again. 

They didn’t trust that their illegally gotten wealth won’t be in turn stolen by someone else back home (no honour among foreign zillionaires !)  and wanted it parked in the safety of America under the protective aura of “America’s best known business success” *.....

* A registered trademark of the Donald Trump Corporation, Inc.

The LEDE is “$750” and the Grey Lady didn’t bury it : this story will be taught at J-Schools for decades to come

 Its a hugely complex story with the sort of math calculations that even university math profs bail from - but the NYT caught the one tiny detail that really mattered and moved it right to the front of a very large class.

It takes a form of journalistic genius to see that this $750 figure was worse - far, far, worse - in the eyes of most American tax-paying voters than the many, many years he either paid no taxes at all, or even got a massive refund instead.

I didn’t see this at first - I am not journalistic genius.

But I am a great slogan maker.

Let me tell ya, honey, its really really stupid to now see buttons that say “I paid more taxes than President Trump”.

Its what we drones in the backrooms of the comedy & satire industry call “ telling the joke & then explaining the punch line.”

Better, far better, is a button that simply reads “I paid more taxes”.

Come on politicos : credit your would-be supporters with the ability to fill in the blanks....

Wortman’s connection to Columbian Drug Money might have been more sexual than drugs related

When it was revealed this week that ten years ago Gabriel Wortman went to to his old stomping grounds (criminally speaking) of Fredericton NB to deposit a quarter million in unmarked bills, rumours immediately arose that this was Columbian drug money - that Gabe was a middle level importer.

Perhaps - but a ‘slightly’ more innocent explanation can account for the money.

The money (at least some of it) did come from Columbian drug lords , but as payments for legitimate services provided by someone here in Canada, in Fredericton itself to be precise.

September 1989, to be even more precise....

Coming soon to a fishing bank near you : its not an aboriginal, its a windfarm

The first windfarm on the UK’s famous Dogger Bank in the North Sea will produce as much power as the gigantic Churchill Falls site.

Even on a global scale, that’s super huge and there are plenty more planned for the Dogger Bank, formerly famous only as a place for fishers to get their catches.

So why the push on to put windfarms on the fishers’ precious fishing banks ?

The windmills are there for the same reason the fishers are there - though the banks tend to be offshore a bit, they are still decidedly shallow - usually less than 150 feet deep. Adult fish find far more food in the shallow waters than in the deep and baby fish find it a better place to grow up.

A windmill screwed into the bedrock, conveniently not that far below the waters of fishing banks, is far more secure and far cheaper than a floating model facing the stormy waves of the ocean.

Windmills in the shallows close to shore sim ply face too much negative feedback from claims they are ugly, untrue, and noisy at times, true.

So I repeat : who owns the public waters : us the public or a few local families lucky to hold old fishing licenses?

If the fishers are planning to go out with shotguns to stop windfarms on “their” fishing banks they better bring the deed to the water lot they purchased - or be prepared to buy the water lots at a competitive open auction.

Or they can dial back the aggression and cut a deal : the public ownership of the ocean and ocean bed means all sorts of Canadians have a right to venture out on it, to try to make a living...

Trump to herald in the THIRD american civil war ?

The losers in the SECOND american civil war largely choose to stay in the US, to write lots & lots (books and movies)  —- and to plot their revenge.

(Hint : think GOP & Trump.)

But very few people know about the far more brutal FIRST american civil war, wherein far more civilians per capita were directly murdered than anything that happened in the civil war of 1861-1865.

But most of the sorest losers in the FIRST american civil war, 1775-1783, fled - many to Canada of course, but in fact to all of the many places available within the vast British Empire. By and large they did not write —- or least were not widely read.

So it was left to recent historian like Canadian Walter Stewart (“TRUE BLUE”) and American Thomas B Allen (“TORIES”) to remind us just how brutal that first civil war actually was.

 How brother cold-bloodedly murder brother, sister, mother if they happened to be on the wrong side.

How people were suspected wholesale of being on the other side simply if they happened to be the minority ethnicity or religion in their particular district : panic-driven ethnic cleansing in other words.

I raise all this to express support for my believe that when - not “if” - the THIRD american civil war comes, it too will be on a scale of cruelty that will probably exceed that of the first american civil war, because today there are few few real neutrals or ‘trimmers’ - partisanship is a record high levels and each side tends to see the other as the personification of evil.

And, no, we can’t blame it all on Trump ; this is something very deep and elemental in the american culture.

Something present since the 1780s at least, if not earlier ( recall the earlier witch trials & brutal wars of extermination against Indians) : at its core, it is because American was founded by and has always disproportionally attracted religious fundamentalists, viewers of the world in shades of only black and white...

Except for 23 unfortunates, most people choose to “keep their distance” from Gabriel Wortman : and that’s the f****ing problem

 

Gabriel Wortman had a big family and it can be hard to keep the good guys separated from the bad guys.

But today, let’s talk about one good guy, a close cousin who grew up with Gabe, found his parents to be “bizarre” and Gabe to be violent, almost a career criminal, paranoid, obsessed with money.

This now-retired cousin joined the RCMP, just like two other of Gabe’s uncles, and after the April 18th-19th mass shootings, sat down with some current RCMP members to do an interview -about his old mountie uniform specifically.

I am guessing he never ever thought his interview would be released into the public domain because after describing GW’s evil actions, he offered this up :

As an RCMP officer, I knew I needed to “get his distance” (sic) from this close relative slash criminal.

Over and over, this or something very like it, is what we hear from people who witnessed or heard second hand about Gabriel’s violent and criminal actions.

They did nothing, said nothing, gossiped yes - but in general just “kept their distance” ; decades after decades...

Fleetingly rare were the few who called the cops and kept calling the cops, when they heard about his evil ways.

Hats off then to those that did —- here’s looking at you Brenda !

And as for the rest, my un-solicited advice is that you make a modest mea culpa now - here on earth - because that is always better that making a forced one before the Big Judge Up in the Sky, later on...

Wortman, Gabriel : one uncle in the federal Pen & father accused of dog-napping VS two uncles & a cousin in RCMP !

An uncanny ability to “bury the lede” must be what it takes to qualify as a professional journalist these days.

The journalistic “lede” is what us pop songwriters would call “the hook” and what Hollywood green-lighters call “the high concept”.

For me the ordinary newspaper reader, what really jumped out and grabbed me about the latest few semi-un-re-dacted search warrants released this week by a former Crown Prosecutor was startling new revelations about an ongoing human interest story : the really really messed up extended family of mass killer Gabriel Wortman.

All of us have extended families with successful and not so successful close relatives, so who can resist reading about someone else’s messed up family ?

Not I, anyway. Maybe, not you either.

Wortman’s family is beginning to remind me of one of those Hollywood movies set in South Boston, you know the ones : where one Irish brother becomes a federal cop and the other an organized criminal ; then years later they meet up with separate orders to ‘take down’ each other.

Anyway, one of the RCMP interviews that was reluctantly allowed out into the public’s domain by the former Crown was a recollection by Gabriel Wortman’s common law partner, Lisa Banfield, of the quiet drive in the country that the pair took, just before the buildings began being torched and the bodies started dropping.

Lisa told the RCMP that GW drove by a federal prison and casually remarked that was the federal Pen that had once housed his uncle Glynn. The same prison where one of GW’s later murdered victims was employed.

Another interview involved a close cousin of GW who basically grew up with Gabriel, a cousin who later became a career mountie - as did two of his other uncles. The cousin said Gabe was paranoid, violent, obsessed with money and that his parents were , quote, “bizarre”.

Maybe he meant because Gabriel’s father was once accused by Moncton police of being a dog kidnapper - or because he used to “ride the rails” all over North America while his young teenage bride struggled, with no money, to raise Gabe on her own  —- with another kid on the way. 

Unfortunately, with twenty four dead, there is no way this family saga could ever be massaged into a feel-good Hollywood thriller, but wow : to peak inside the family of Doris & Stanley Wortman and to see so much good and so much bad in their kids and their offspring !

Gabriel Wortman’s parents were “bizarre” & he a “strange little guy”, “paranoid” & obsessed with “money” - Mountie cousin

 Nothing of what  Gabe’s mountie cousin (that’s mountie close relative #3 , if you’re keeping score !) told the RCMP - after 24 people lay dead - surprises me.

I believe today what I believed initially more than five months ago : Gabe’s constellation of obsessions pointed to the very unsettled first six years of life he had in the United States.

I am not not saying he caught some endemic American infection that makes people resident there more likely to obsess about guns, money & mass shootings.

(Although it is worth noting that the America safety net for people who are poor and out of work is far, far worse than it is in Canada and the rest of the developed world - leading to huge increases in stress for its people living unsettled lives with reduced income.)

I simply feel that what ever made Gabriel do what he did April 18th-19th 2020 had its beginnings in the very unsettled - and unsettling - life his parents made for him between 1968 and 1974.

Wortman’s adult behaviour reminds me of nothing more than that of a tiny child constantly losing his toys, pets, home, friends, over and over, during those early years when a child’s mind is so plastic and so open to being permanently warped.

Anyone appearing to be threatening to take away his is property - his toys - could set off Gabriel’s violent streak in ways that few other issues could : his common law partner Lisa Banfield told the RCMP that the latest person appearing as a threat to Gabe’s “toys” was Justin Trudeau’s government’s mid-March 2020 musings about banning paper money to reduce it spreading Covid-19.

(A possibility you might remember that I raised in an earlier post as a factor behind GW’s decision to withdraw masses of cash.)

A month later on April 18th, Trudeau still had not banned paper money - Gabriel’s all important untraceable cash - so it is hard to see this as the final tipping point  that led to his decision to destroy all that he had built up over the years, killing two dozen people along the way.

However it is also much much harder to otherwise explain why anyone convinced they are about to die (from Covid) and who still very much loves his wife of twenty years, the woman he left all his estate to in his current last will and testament, still intends to leave this beloved wife nothing from his estate but smoke and ashes.

It was almost as if Gabriel Wortman, still 5 years old inside his warped head, felt that ‘if I can’t have my toys (real estate & vehicles) after I am gone, I am at least going to see to it that - finally - no one else can never ever take them away from me’...

Wortman's 3 Mountie relatives seem to have kept their beliefs that he was a violent paranoid career criminal to themselves

How many relatives you got that are cops ? Me too.  How many of them are close relatives? Ditto, ditto.

Most of us are not career criminals with a violent, paranoid streak. And most of us don’t have any relatives that are cops - let alone a whole pile of close relatives that are cops.

But career-criminal-since-his-teens Gabriel Wortman had at least three relatives (that we know about so far) that were RCMP lifers : two uncles and a cousin !

Odd isn’t then that these police, who knew Gabe the very best of all - these cops who had grown up with him, were totally unable to convince their fellow officers to keep a extra-vigilant eye out for their wayward relative.

Far from it, Gabriel Wortman skated again and again away from crimes for which you and I would have been sent up river for a long stretch.

If I were a lawyer preparing a wrongful death civil suit I’d be looking very closely indeed at these three Mountie relatives to find out why their close personal knowledge of career criminal Wortman never seemed to have motivated their police force - or indeed any police force - to keep Gabriel front and centre on their “watch closely” list...

How did NS DENTURISTS feel about Gabriel Wortman undercutting them with under-table cash deals ?

 

I mean did they cotton onto his scam, hearing about it from former patients ?

Did they - or maybe third party payers ( Insurance Companies)  - hire a private investigator to pose as a customer to catch him in the act?

Did the Denturists’ Licensing Board then suspend his license for a year but keep everything on the QT : not telling the police - or the public ?

Who knows ?

What we do know for certain was that 2010-2011 was a very bad, not good, terrible year for Gabe.

He drank a lot, got violent a lot, talked about committing suicide by cop, wrote out his last will and testament, leaving it all to his devoted beloved, Lisa Banfield.

Was that the year he was unable to work, at loose ends ?

The year he really got into re-storing police style motorbikes and cop cars ?

The year he looked into a big league grow-op ?

Got more (illegal) guns for protection in his proposed new occupation ?

Its all a mystery to me, but these are questions worth asking.

When I was involved in the world of free enterprise - and to a large extent, licensed professionals adhering to a posted price list are still free enterprisers - me and my bosses were always acutely aware of what our competition was up to.

(Customers who get great deals are rarely good at keeping the news to themselves.)

I can’t imagine denturists, totally dependent upon walk-in traffic for business, are any different.

But to date, its been easier getting one of Jesus’s rich men through the eye of a very small needle, than it has to get a public response from both the either the Denturists Society or the government-anointed Denturist Licensing Board on all those media reports that Denturist Society VP Wortman was operating a cut-rate under-table cash-only scheme....

Sousa - LIVE ! - and EDM DJs are just peas from the same pod...

 If you still think Sousa concert marches and EDM DJ performances live on separate musical universes : congratulations, tenure at some university or other surely awaits you.

But you would be wrong.

One can’t, for example, read eye witness accounts of actual Sousa concerts without feeling that the words “breakdown” and “drop” - heck even “risers” and “stings” et al, were originally invented to describe the effects the highly theatrical band leader always sought to give audiences throughout his long career.

Sousa made his living in three directly opposing ways.

 (A) by selling sheet music of his original material - marches mostly - in watered down, straight and simple , versions for the home piano or the local small town marching band to perform, (B) making hundreds of low quality recording by the original limited acoustic method and (C) by delivering his own far superior arrangements of this somewhat bland starter material - live and in person - at a concert put on by his own highly trained band.

For as a composer, Sousa was merely ‘okay’ but as a dynamic and highly creative ‘arranger’, Sousa was simply one of the best ever. It is Sousa the arranger, not Sousa the composer, that I wish to emulate.

He and his musicians took pride in never writing down their special arranging techniques, memorizing them instead - to be delivered instantly whenever coach-conductor Sousa delivered the inside-football hand signals from the bandstand.

So to really enjoy the Sousa ‘brand’, you had to hear it from the one and only Sousa band and hear it live - the magic produced instantly before you and just as quickly disappearing.

Isn’t that exactly why people today still pay the big bucks to see the top DJs perform their magic live, even in this era of digital streaming ?

I think it only goes to show that while perhaps music changes -  people - performers AND audiences - don’t....

Me giving money to terrorist civil liberties group, stupidest decision of my life

 I only did it just that once - and I am all better now.

I was too naive to see that there was an un-balanced bias, an unconsciously AMERICAN bias, in the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA)’s pattern of activities.

You see, like most people, I sometimes want to do my own thing, irregardless of whether other people approve or not and other times I am want someone to step in to stop other people from doing their own thing, because it is seriously harming me.

In other words, I - like you but never ever the CCLA -  have a daily struggle to strike a balance between my rights to myself and my responsibilities to others.

Generally I believe all citizens (but not mere residents, as it happens) of Canada should be able to move freely about the entire country - except in special circumstances, when doing so will harm innocent others.

I thus agree with Newfoundland’s restriction on who may enter that province during a global deadly Covid pandemic.

But not the CCLA : Canadians they told the NL court, must be able to exercise their right to travel freely throughout the entire country, spreading their covid viruses willy-nilly, other innocent peoples’ lives be damned.

I am thus glad, glad I say, that the NL Supreme Court ruled it was okay to temporarily restrict freedom of movement to save lives during a pandemic.

But I wish the court had gone further and suggested the federal government look into banning the CCLA as a terrorist organization , for promoting a wicked ideology right up there with ISIS and QAnon.

The covid death toll in America is the worst in the world - in a country that leads the world in medical technology - and its entirely down to about half its population drinking the deadly and selfish Kool-Aid that the CCLA is peddling here at home.

We are very lucky, that so far only a large minority here in Canada have been drinking steadily at the CCLA’s fount of poison.

We need to stop these people before they drag us down the the American gutter of exercising absolute unchecked personal freedom over our duties to protect innocent others...

JOHN DIEFENBAKER didn’t believe in hyphenated-people : he would have said “All Lives Matter”

 

Former Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Diefenbaker isn’t around to ask but I feel, if he were consistent, he would oppose the idea that ‘cis-women are cis-women and that trans-women are trans-women’. He’d be on the side of the conventional right now, at least in book-publishing circles in the UK.

Diefenbaker never liked using the terms Aboriginal-Canadians and Black-Canadians, some  Canadians with some special concerns, even when he agreed that they did have special concerns !

 He’d thunder, on public platforms,  “we are ALL Canadians and we should all be treated equally”, sounding exactly like today’s American conservatives in their fevered opposition to BLM.

But words, alone, aren’t enough : people who say “we are all equal” with their mouth too often say “but you and you are less than equal” with the force of their fist.

But I digress.

The main problem is that we submerge the good with the bad when we work hard to reduce categories of distinction in the mistaken belief this is a unquestionable good thing.

We actually always need to hold several categories in our mind, at the one and the same time.

Yes all humans are humans, with equal rights to a happy existence, but some humans - like child humans - sometimes need some additional protections not afforded to adult humans.

Similarly, not all trans women and trans men want to be considered only and always as a woman and a man : they might instead argue that it very much depends, that circumstances alter cases....

Thanks to QAnon, Billy-From-Arichat is suddenly a SOMEBODY

 Billy Joyce, Youtube star and People’s Party candidate, and I have a lot more in common than you might imagine.

For a start, we both attended an Acadian catholic church, grew up in rural Nova Scotia, have francophone relatives.

God knows we aren’t hot with chicks or stuffed with cash and we live far off the beaten path from those with beauty, wealth and fame.

But now, thanks to an internet account, we able to offer up our opinions - we both have an awfully lot of them - to the entire world.

(A lot lot more so in Billy’s case), we are both now known around the world to an astute few - we are both now able to bask in the dim but warm glow of our viewers’ adulation.

QAnon’s theories on what this world is really about (hint : drinking kids’ blood) have brought Billy-from-remote-Cape-Breton to the whole world’s attention : here is a SOMEBODY, to whom attention must be paid !

I doubt anything anyone says against QAnon’s theories are going to move Billy in the least : he has ,at last, found his route to his anointed 15 minutes of fame...