The Good Stuff

The last post, while cathartic, is not the way I want to leave the year. There was plenty of good stuff in 2018 to go along with the bad. Plenty of fun to be had, picking among the cow pies thrown my way. In particular, I got to see at least three excellent live music performances and to travel. It wasn't a great year for concerts in Raleigh, so I wound up going elsewhere.

First up was some sophisticated jazz in the form of the Maria Schneider Orchestra over at Baldwin Auditorium on Duke's East Campus. I didn't know who she was, but any time I see big band jazz playing, more and more uncommon nowadays, count me in. It was a fantastic night with a really great group of musicians. Maria had a way of orchestrating in the most unusual ways. For instance, there was an absolutely fabulous accordion player rocking out in ways that I didn't know an accordion could. And the last piece, with the bass saxophone doing a long bird call solo, was magnificent. If she comes around again, I will definitely be there.

It was a magical night, buying tickets strictly on instinct. Then it snowed, not much, but in North Carolina it doesn't take much for full scale panic. Being in early April, you knew it wasn't going to hang around long. Despite the weather, it was a sell out crowd and a great night of sophisticated jazz.

There were two weeks in Antigua, one each in a different resort. Friends Roger and Carey were there both weeks, great company, and it was great despite the increasing sargassum hitting the shores. The first week was at Pineapple Resort, a beach we had visited many time but a new place to stay. It is the favorite of the locals, and on Sunday there were hundreds enjoying the water.

Roger and Carey were wonderful to hang out with, and Pineapple was more of a party. Located on the northeast corner of the island on Long Beach, it is great for snorkeling and swimming. We did our share, as well as hanging out at the new pool with the giant fan hanging over it. The video for 'Adrift' was all shot at that resort.

The next week we moved to our time share location, the St. James Club on the southeast corner of Antigua. It is rough, windy and remote there, but with over a hundred acres, you have plenty of room to do your own thing. Eric Clapton lives just over the hill, and Timothy Dalton owns the very end and can occasionally be seen kayaking in the bay. It's a great resort and we've been there enough times not to feel like a tourist anymore, having many friends among the other guests and staff.

My brother did meet us there, although I wasn't sure if he ever managed to get his passport or get on the plane. To me delight he arrived, although he had no clothes. I took him to the little store in the resort and outfitted him in the only things big enough to fit him. He seemed content to watch Chinese television all day. Being a true Irish red head, he was afraid of frying like a piece of bacon.

Since I wanted to show my brother the entire island, particularly the Caribbean side, which is totally different, I rented a car. It was a bit challenging to drive on the wrong side of the road, my wife in the back seat telling me everything that I was doing wrong, but after fifteen minutes it really didn't matter. We love Jolly Harbor and Jolly Beach and spent a day walking the huge expanse of sand.

The next day just my brother and I went wandering around the island, avoiding donkeys and goats on the roads. We ended up in Falmouth Harbor at Skullduggery Rum Distillery. After seeing the sign below, we had to try the punch. After about five each, we crawled back to the resort. They were cheap, tasty, and lethal.

Roger and Carey were there with their daughter and her family, making the second week much more of a family affair. We managed a great boat trip to a ecological resort on Green Island full of wind surfers flying through the sky. There was also a big party on the beach and other festivities. We ended our vacation with a nice dinner in a swanky restaurant.

Once back home, I started tearing through the upstairs, emptying each room before I painted. A lot of stuff wound up being donated to charity, if it wasn't simply tossed in the trash. I actually like to paint, but there was a lot of general cleaning as well, not as much fun. Then it was time to put things back, often in a re-organized manner, like in my home studio.

There were a couple of great concerts over the summer, even if we had to do an overnight to Charlotte to see the acts. First up was Jeff Beck and Paul Rogers. We'd had the privilege to see Jeff before in Cary around a dozen or so years before, opening for B.B King. No offence, but, doing an entire instrumental set with just a keyboard player and drummer, he blew the blues master off the stage. In my honest opinion, he is the greatest guitar player on the planet, with a technique that is all touch, absolutely fabulous.

This time he had a singer with him and was dong more of a retrospective of his entire career. It wasn't as revelatory as the last time, but he was having to complete for an audience with Paul Rogers. He still plays amazingly well, tender and brutal in equal measures, able to turn on a dime. I can only hold him in the highest regard as a musician.

Paul Rogers was the revelation this time. The consummate front man, he wasn't doing an entire set of Free material as he had in England, probably because American audiences were more familiar with Bad Company. He did mix it up from both eras, and he had the audience in the palm of his hand from the first note to the last. You could understand why they hired him to replace Freddie Mercury in Queen; he might be only one of a handful of people on the planet who could fill those shoes.

My wife got a huge advancement at work, big enough to push back retirement a year. She still loves her job, so there was no reason to sneak out the back door like I did. She is a valuable asset, and when she leaves, they will have big shoes to fill. Unfortunately, the new hob prevented her from going to the second concert we has lined up.

Deep Purple is a group that I saw under the worse circumstances possible, making it through one song before a friend became violently sick from drinking a couple of fifths. It was 1974, Ian Gillan wasn't in the band, so no great loss. When we heard they were coming to town, we got tickets. Susan unable to attend, my friend Jay stepped in.

My brother had just died, so there was some howling at the moon that needed to be done. We had a great time, even enjoying Judas Priest, the opening act, even though I'm really not a metal head, more of a hard rock purist. When Purple came out, without the costume changes or flaming videos in the background, clad in street clothes, just out playing every other band on the planet while having a great time, it was heaven.

These guys have a swing that makes them totally different from either Black Sabbath or even Led Zeppelin, even though the three are always grouped together. Furthermore, Steve Morse is a better guitarist than Ritchie Blackmore, actually having fun on stage, flamers be damned. The real revelation was Don Airey, who has come on strong in recent years, even outplaying the mighty and sorely missed Jon Lord.

Even my bother's funeral, sad and emotional as it was, had its up side. My daughter came home and chipped in, since we had the reception afterwards at our house. My brother's wife family came in large numbers and we made some new connections. It was important to do things our way, to have just a little control over the situation.

Best was catching up with some old friends. My brother had largely isolated himself in the last few years. Meeting Tim and Darlene after twenty years was great, just like we had never been apart. I do think that in another life Tim and I could have been a comedy team. We had the place in stitches, just like an Irish wake should be.

After that, it was Venice. I've already raved about the place, but it cannot be under-emphasized how much that city impressed me. Best, we had enough time to get to know it a little. That's important, because Venice is the easiest location to get lost in that I've ever been to, all alleys and dead ends.

I went there for the art and culture, and I left with an overdose. We went with a group called Road Scholars, and I cannot recommend them enough if you wanting to really get to know a place. I knew a little about the art, but I came away knowing a hell of a lot more about the history and culture. We can't wait to get a chance to return.

Thanksgiving was another chance to see our daughter. Lisa is incredibly successful, living in Oakland and working in San Francisco. She was always fearless as a child, and it's only gotten worse with age. She even has a couple of icons made of her face, talking so often at cyber currency conferences.

We invited my brother's kids over and hosted a low key affair. It was perhaps more important to give thanks in difficult times than in happy ones. The world was spinning down, the days getting shorter and darker. We made it festive, remembering the ones we lost.

All too soon it was Christmas. The year, difficult as it was, ended in the best of all possible ways. No matter what is happening in the outside world, we love each other and take care of each other. Only the dog seemed unhappy.

In the end, I am always reminded of my Mother's advice about life in general. I swear that this is exactly what she said, and it is how I plan of living going into the next phase of my life. 'Living well is the best revenge, and fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." Happy New Year!

Year End Summary

As we sit in the Nestor household this holiday season, listening to the Yoko Ono Christmas album again and again as we repent our sinful ways, it's time to look back at the year in blogging. I began this in early June to test myself, to see if I was as much of a story teller as I thought that I was. Eighty five posts later, that point has been proven. But just what have I been jabbering away at?

This was to be used to ramble on about those topics that interested me, and what interests me is usually music, movies, art and literature. I promised to keep away from politics, and despite all the provocation from D.C., I have managed to do so most of the time, only slipping up once or twice. This blog has also allowed me to find a new outlet for my own music videos, even though, as an art form, they can be so random as to cause questions about my sanity. Then again, in insane times, it doesn't pay to be sane.

Perhaps the best trend that has emerged are long strings of interrelated postings about a single topic. In these days of shorter and shorter communication, reducing information way past the point of meaninglessness, completely expressing myself at the risk of being wordy feels satisfyingly contrary. It took a couple of months for that to become a focus, but I absolutely no reason to be terse. If you want instant messaging, you've come to the wrong place.

It's been simultaneously a very tough year and a really great time to be alive. In the loss column, my job became a thing of the past. As a video producer, I was used to walking on glass. When things started to get political, working in state government, it became impossible to do my job. No great loss at all. Time to move on and do new things.

A much greater tragedy was the death of my brother. I haven't talked about it much on this blog, although I did post a version of the eulogy I spoke at his funeral service. He was five years older and often not a nice person to me. As a youth, much of my time was spent either in direct conflict with him, watching him get in trouble repeatedly in every manner imaginable, or suffering from the destruction of my parent's marriage. It wasn't a particularly happy youth.

Not that I cared. It may say a lot about me that I learned to live for myself early on, traveling through a debris field left by my brother that often felt like Godzilla waded through the neighborhood. Moving at sixteen allowed me to start again in isolation, becoming immersed in all forms of art. Joining bands, writing for fanzines, making movies behind and in front of the camera, going first to art school, decades later to film school; all part of my journey away from anything that either my father or brother had anything to do with.

There were no family traditions growing up. If I had an interest in something, I pursued it until it ran it's course. Having a knack for staying out of trouble, the biggest difference between my brother and I, was the real game changer. I wasn't necessarily a better person; I simply didn't antagonize the law or get caught.

That may sound simple, but my brother never learned that simple trick. What he did learn was to shrink his world until problems no longer came from outside. But that doesn't insure that shit won't happen within your inner perimeter. His wife died in a car accident, leaving him to raise two boys by himself. He tried, but he was not prepared.

Not that I could have done any better if faced with the same situation. I was lucky enough to find somebody who loves me. My wife is a formidable woman; smart, educated, disciplined, someone who loves structure and is constantly trying to plan her life five years in advance. I'm often the exact opposite, willing to let things happen, quick witted enough to deal with the ensuing chaos. Together, we are the grasshopper and the ant. Fortunately, grasshoppers have more fun, so she sticks around.

Once I retired, both my wife and I vowed to help my brother. We could see that he was in trouble, but he won't talk directly about what was bothering him. We took him to Antigua for a week, where he wandered around lost, unable to integrate with either the Brits or the whole 'vacation in paradise' mindset. He was grateful, anyway.

He started coming over once a week, mostly to watch me work on the house. I spent most of the summer furiously painting and downsizing, getting the house ready for when we sell it and move in about a year. The upstairs hadn't been gone through in seventeen years. Closets were full of stuff we didn't need or use. It was a big task and I had the time to do it.

He would talk to me, always about the past, about being a kid in Long Island, about friends he hadn't seen for 50 years. He was also retired and flush with cash, so I kept asking him why he didn't go back and find them. Most were dead, a few very successful. My brother was overwhelmed with inertia.

I don't have the same fascination with my own past. My focus on the 1960s and 1970s concerns art, movies and most especially music, not about what I did. In truth, I was pretty insignificant back then. Still am. I had my fun, but it burned up around me. No need to search through the ashes.

That in a nutshell was the difference between us. He was always searching for clues in the past. I was always busy with the present. He wasn't fundamentally the same person that he was at twenty. I was, just more polished.

Every Friday afternoon around lunch he would come over. I would try to be finishing whatever I was doing, so that it wouldn't be in the way of my wife when she was home for the weekend. I might get him to help a little, but usually he sat down and watched me work. I would listen to him rant like a psychiatrist.

Maybe I wasn't paying attention. He never was specific about his problems. Later, I would learn that he had an addiction to fentanyl. He had always liked drugs, the source of many of his problems when he was young. There had been some heroin use, but I always thought that the move to North Carolina put distance to that. I was wrong.

He would always leave before my wife would come home. It was August, and she hadn't seen him since the trip to Antigua in May. She wanted him to stay the night, eat dinner with us. She wanted to check him out for herself.

That final Friday, it rained hard all day. He didn't show at lunch. I was cooking a special meal for the three of us. My wife kept calling, and I kept delivering bad news. Maybe he wasn't showing up.

I tended not to drink in front of my brother. He had an addictive personality and he always professed to having trouble with alcohol, although I can't ever recall him being a problem drinker. Nevertheless, I don't like to enable other people's problems. We gave up on him. It won't be that out on line with his behavior to be a no-show.

I was sitting down to a margarita when he pulled up a seven that evening. He said that he had gone to Topsail Beach to be by himself for a few days. In reality, he had gone to Baltimore to score opioids. We ate, he sat in front of the television, kept excusing himself for long periods, then fell out. I left him asleep in the chair, snoring loudly.

The next day, he and the wife talked over breakfast. When she left, we sat on the screen porch in the August heat, talking for a long time. He sang me a song by the Fugs, 'I Couldn't Get High', telling me that's how he felt. I didn't say much, not having that same craving.

He was dead by Monday morning. An overdose of fentanyl, a street opioid, in his room, collapsed on the floor, face first. His sons found him. I've been straightening out his estate ever since, the thing that's been consuming my life that I've never talked about in this blog.

Maybe that's why I've gone into so much detail on certain obscure topics. A distraction, a way to keep sane when things have gone bad. Even though I was the youngest, in my family I was always the fixer. Now I'm doing the final fix for my brother Jim. Just thought you might like to know.

Saragossa

Time for another video album, this time focusing on my 2017 album 'Saragossa', which is a strange but mostly relaxed series of vaguely nautically themed songs. By this time I was getting pretty comfortable with themed albums, having done many in both blues and prog. Trying to branch out and test myself, I had done a Latin themed album, augmented by a few pieces of world music. Time to expand beyond my comfort zone.

The single biggest influence on this album was going to Antigua repeatedly over a number of years. The wife and I found our happy place in the Caribbean and spent at least two weeks a year there. We'd tried Mexico, but to really relax on the beach, float like a jellyfish in the water, Antigua is the place. It's beautiful and different, actually partially desert. The people are friendly and intelligent, and even more important they want you there.

We go on the off season, not being anywhere close to high rollers. That means not being there in the high season, December 15 to about April 15, but it also means not usually being there from June through October, the off season. We sneak in during November or early December or early May, still nice but affordable. It also means sometimes being there when the sargassum hits the shores.

The Sargasso Sea is a weird global phenomenon that has been around since recorded time, yet it seems to be getting worse. Depending on your belief in Global Warming, this is only to get worse. The established fact is that is has gotten worse in the last few decades. The Sargasso Sea is the only ocean in the world that does not have a shore, being completely within the North Atlantic. It's a huge 500 mile wide batch of seaweed created by the doldrums, not the kind of place you'd want to steer your boat into.

As the oceans warm, the Sargasso Sea has expanded. The real problem is twofold. First, there are more hurricanes flying across the Atlantic, and those that don't threaten land tend to hit this giant clump of weed, breaking parts of it loose, sending strands floating with the tide. But there is also a second giant batch of weed forming in the Southern Atlantic as a result of all the nutrients being released by the Amazon and all the exploitation happening up stream.

What this means to me is that a couple of times I have been in Antigua when the Sargassum arrives and litters the shore. It depends on what side of the island you are on, whether you are facing into the trade wind, which means you are vulnerable, or whether you are leeward, which means no wind and no weed. We like the wind, and the Atlantic is a little rougher and wilder, but the Caribbean side is calmer and has it charms as well.

Some people freak out when the sargassum hits, but the place that we stay has a bay as well, not to mention a lot of pools, so I tend to just have another drink and sit it out. It can get bad enough to close the beach, and it doesn't smell very nice. I have been there when it has been a minor nuisance and when it has hit really hard. It can close resorts for months at a time.

When I am in Antigua, it can means that I have just finished a recording project. If I have two weeks away, I'm smart enough to realize that it often - although not always - all the momentum to make music comes to a crashing halt. There have been times, particularly in May, when I either start after I return or can pick up where I left. I use the down time to listen and write about what I have just created, often doing the sequencing using a tablet and headphones. It has proven invaluable to clarify my thoughts about what I just produced, enabling me to see both the big picture as well as the immediate problem of putting together albums out of anything from 45 to 60 different tracks.

It's not the only thing I do. Most of the time, I'm partying with the wife and the Brits. We are lucky, being included as the token Americans in a large group of English and Scottish couples. Antigua was part of the British Empire until the 1960s and is a well know place for middle class couples to get some sun during the long winters. There are people we meet nearly every time we go, and sometimes we even share a two bedroom villa with another couple to cut costs.

I've learned a lot from the Brits, especially on how to plan and enjoy a vacation. They think that Americans are crazy; we get vacation a lot of time but don't use it all, feeling guilty if asking for two consecutive weeks. Since the wife and I were at the tail end of our career, we had no problem and asking for two weeks. You could see our bosses trying to figure out a politically correct way to get us to change our mind. No way - put it writing.

So Antigua was a frame of mind as well as a place, and I wanted to explore trying to do that in music. A new approach, something different. Not really reggae, although it could make an appearance. There could be progressive elements, but more like Ravel doing program music, telling stories through sound. And there might be a few cover songs that would have to be chosen.

'Saragossa' is a rare case of the lyric coming first, then having to write music to fit the words. Often I'm not even sure if words are needed, and they can be like pulling teeth. Here. I had a poem that I kept humming to myself, having to come up with an arrangement. I kept this one very light and airy, trying to set up the mood for the rest of the album.

Definitely heavier, 'Flotsam' was an instrumental that just had the rhythm of the sea in it. Plus, the bass in one part really felt like a nautical theme. I'm using an orchestral drum kit, which has deep toms, almost kettle drums, as well as splashier cymbals. Another one where I think things turned out very well, building to a very effective climax.

'Open Water' just came to me one Saturday morning, drinking coffee and playing. I was deep into the sessions, popping up with a quick idea early in a weekend day is nothing unusual. This one was recorded, at least the acoustic guitar part, very quickly. The ska drumming took a little longer, but not much. there was maybe two hours total from sitting down to having a mixed master, the most spontaneous track on the album.

'Land Ho!' is a slightly obscure song by the Doors, but it is from my favorite album, 'Morrison Hotel'. It wasn't planned; in fact, I was playing electric slide for a blues song when I started playing this by accident. Figuring it out fairly quickly, I gave it a shot, and it worked. 'Horse Latitudes' was perfect for the sequence, and remains about the only poem that I can recite from memory. The entire song is a radical re-arrangement of the two pieces, but it flows well.

'Adrift' is what I like to call a conceptual piece, something that was planned almost philosophically instead of musically. Going into that 'Amazing Pudding' Pink Floyd territory is much more difficult than you realize; keeping the drums floating would be perfect for the album, but creating interest in that environment can be a struggle. I've tried this type of song since the very beginning, maybe half a dozen variations,. This is the first time that I really nailed it, throwing on more subtle guitar overdubs, making the song build to a big finish.

This being the very middle of the album, it usually is time to 'hinge' the sequencing, putting something in that completely changes things up for a few songs. 'Kraken Attack' was perfect, a brutal instrumental that I had been playing around with, adding new bits to the middle to make it more interesting. The Sargasso Sea has it's share of monstrous legends, so this could fit, adding heavy prog right in the middle of some softer sounds. It becomes the centerpiece, every other song revolving around it, a key sequencing trick.

'Trade Wind' was the genesis for the entire 'Saragossa' project, written right as I was taking a ten day vacation in November 2014, ending a mammoth recording project. I vowed not to record anything more, although I immediately wrote two songs that hung around for three years. That extra time enabled me to develop this piece into a very intricate chamber piece, somewhere between creepy and a Bossa Nova. I'm most proud of this recording on the album, a perfect realization of my concept. Nice video, too.

'Tidal Surge' is the best performance on the album as opposed to the best composition, although both songs are a close one-two in both departments. This time I'm able to really pound the drums with complete abandon. There's a great deal of melody as well, a hard trick to pull off when things start to get heavy. Another fabulous composition and performance, it was here that I knew things would come together for a complete album.

'Rippling Reflections' was created late in the recording process, when I realized that I needed a song that was more about soloing than ensemble playing. After throwing together a chord progression and then finding a few progressions to keep it interesting, I chose a specific sound for my guitar. I'm borrowing the sound of Robert Fripp's solo on 'Sailor's Tale' from King Crimson's 'Islands', although I wasn't aware of the nautical references at the time. That shattered glass effect, a very quick and fast digital delay, was perfect, and it let me fly with some tasty guitar licks.

In an effort to give the album more of a sense of spontaneity, I let loose on the drums in isolation, creating a song on top of my rather frantic beat. The result was 'Surfing Chaos'. The electric piano and bass came early, and after listening to it for about a month, I felt it needed something.  The slide, surfing across the chord changes, came much later, but was a perfect addition.

'Tales of Brave Ulysses' would be the perfect song to finish the album with, but I had serious reservations about my ability to play the song by Cream. I gave it a whack anyway, and after some massaging, it came out alright. People respond to it, thinking it a great cover, and I'm not inclined to disagree, although I usually deviate more when doing a cover. But it was the perfect ending for this project, bringing things to a successful conclusion.

Finally, mention must be made of the title of this album, where I got things so wrong that it turned out all right in the end. There is a Polish novel from around 1815 called 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' that was turned into a very strange film called 'The Saragossa Manuscript' in 1965. I have both and both read the novel and watched the film multiple times. Both come highly recommended, but both are very unusual.

The novel starts out in the Napoleonic Wars, with a retreating officer finding the manuscript. As he reads it, we keep going from one reminiscence to another one to another one, each inside the previous, until the reader is hopelessly lost in a maze of flashbacks. The novel seems an exercise in not just creating an unreliable narrator, but an unreliable world. By the end, after byzantine adventures with a giant casts of characters, very episodic, things come to a quick conclusion, as if the writer just needed to get the thing tied together.

The movie retains a few of the plot points from the opening and closing, then jettisons the middle. It' more of a misadventure than an adventure, with our main luckless hero stumbling from one disaster to another, yet he remains likable. At the end, after many topless or near topless women,  a real eye opener back in 1965, he winds up winning great fortune, mostly by sheer accident. Both the movie and book have very circular plot structures.

How I confused 'Saragossa', the anglicized version of the Spanish town Zaragoza, and 'Sargasso', remains a mystery. Even more miraculous is that it doesn't really matter. As I've said before, Sargasso doesn't scan and would be a bitch to sing. Saragossa has a musicality than made it easy to write a song about. Anyway, the entire thing is really about a magical state of mind, being relaxed, away from the troubles of the world (although troubles may come up from the deep), so naming it after an imaginary place in the Caribbean is probably better. Who needs an album about seaweed?

Anyway, that's my story and I'm stickling with it. Enjoy!