Frank Racioppi's Blog

There was a time about 50 years ago when music journalists were the social media influencers of their day - well known and well respected. Record sales lived and died on their reviews, and music fans flocked to music magazines such as Billboard, Cashbox, Melody Maker, Record World, and, of course, Rolling Stone to read these music journalists.

Today, music journalists are not as widely known, and record sales do not hinge on their reviews, yet they are still relevant as they interpret music for us and attach cultural significance to the music we hear.

One of the best music journalists writing today is a Vermont native Ray Padgett. He is the author of Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time (2017) and, in the 33 1/3 series, I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (2020). He writes the Substack newsletter Flagging Down the Double E’s, about Bob Dylan in concert, and is the founder of the cover-songs blog Cover Me. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, SPIN, Vice, and MOJO.

In short, Padgett has what it takes to write about music in its multiple forms. In his latest book, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, he collects 40 original, in-depth interviews from the perspective of the musicians standing a few feet away from him on stage – from his earliest days in the ‘60s all the way through the 21st century Never Ending Tour.

The book is significant because the world of Dylan’s bands and his road life has seemed fairly obtuse for decades now. Many people in this book have never spoken before about their time with Dylan, or certainly not in as much depth. Interviewees span every era of Dylan’s career, from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Martin Carthy talking about the early folk scene up through Benmont Tench and Alan Pasqua talking about recording Rough and Rowdy Ways. This guest list guiding the backstage tour also includes one-off sit-ins, behind- the-scenes touring personnel, and even a notable Grammy Awards stage-crasher.

Padgett is the ideal interviewer—he really knows his stuff, so he can draw the best out of every musician he talks to. Padgett has done the grunt work of tracking down Dylan’s many collaborators over the years and getting the inside story.

Here's a quote that defines what this book means to Dylan fans.

"If you're like me, you've waited your entire adult life for this book. Padgett digs deep and shines a spotlight on the people standing (and sitting) behind the man behind the shades," says Jon Wurster, writer/performer/drummer (Mountain Goats, Bob Mould, Superchunk).

As Padgett notes in the book, these sidemen and sidewomen are the only ones who can answer questions such as (paraphrasing a Dylan song): “How does it feel … to stand onstage next to Dylan and realize he’s just launched into a song you’ve never rehearsed?” “How does it feel … to spend months on end riding buses and planes with Bob Dylan from town to town?” “How does it feel … to be expected to keep those songs fresh every night, with little explicit direction from the boss?” As Padgett points out, Dylan has made it clear over the years that “his heart is first and foremost in live performance, so the musicians with the closest access to Dylan’s creative force are those that have logged miles with him on the road.”

Padgett arranges the interviews in roughly chronological order, running from Dylan’s days in Greenwich Village in the early ’60s — interviews with Noel Paul Stookey, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Happy Traum, for example — up to his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, addressed in an interview with Benmont Tench. Readers can dip into the interviews with artists who interest them the most, or they can read from first interview to last. As with any book of interviews, there is some overlap and repetition, but each interviewee offers a singular enough perspective that the repetition is not bothersome.

Padgett includes interviews with people who did not share the stage with Dylan, but who came to know him by booking him and creating spaces for him. Betsy Siggins, for example, who was a founder of iconic Cambridge, Massachusetts, folk club Club 47, first meets Dylan at her club and later at the Newport Folk Festival. She recalls her impressions of Dylan in ’63 and ’64: “He was a magnet. When he performed with Joan [Baez] in workshops, those were stunning performances. … People were curious about his ability to write prolifically."

Regina McCrary of The McCrary Sisters sang with Dylan for three years, from 1979 to 1981, during his “born again” period. She recalls getting a call from a friend asking if she wanted to audition for Dylan: “I did not know who Bob Dylan was if he was standing next to me on the bus stop. Other than a few songs, I never knew who he was.” When she showed up for the audition, she sang three songs: “Everything Must Change,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and “Amazing Grace.” “The first song I don’t think moved him,” McCrary says. “The second song made him look, and the third song he jumped up and said, ‘That’s what I want.’” McCrary also reveals her method for keeping up with Dylan on stage: “Bob really never did the same song the same way all the time. There were times that he walked up on stage, and you could tell that he was feeling and thinking different. I learned to watch his mouth and watch his feet. That helped me as far as if he changed the phrasing of how he did a song, or he wanted a beat to change, or to slow down or speed up, or to put another feel on it. You would watch him, and you could just kick right in.”

Other reviewers of the book have noted that, "You don’t want big names in a book such as this. Most of them have already told their stories many times. You want Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Happy Traum, David Mansfield, Spooner Oldham, Fred Tackett, Stan Lynch, Christopher Parker, Dickey Betts, Larry Campbell and Benmont Tench, whose impressions are not worn thin by overexposure. You want someone like Jim Keltner, with a lifetime of service to music and a deep love of how it feels to explore it in Dylan’s company."

In the book, Keltner opines, “The thing I love about Bob is his fearlessness. There’s a fearlessness from some artists that transmits to the musicians playing. When that happens, you get the best from the musicians, because the musicians are not worried about tempo or about whether they’re rushing or they’re dragging or whether they’re not in the pocket. It’s not about finding a pocket. It’s more about searching for the vibe, searching for the thing that makes the song live.”

Let's be clear. This is no stuffy, exhaustive biography or a ponderous tome of music criticism. Pledging My Time brings Dylan to life in a way that he’s never come to life before.

Padgett is a superior interviewer. He's enthusiastic, sympathetic, alert and perceptive, equally good at prompting and just letting people talk. In essence, he draws the best from the people interviewed. 

More than most people, Bob Dylan presents himself to the world as a jigsaw puzzle, full of complexities and seeming contradictions and bits that are hard to fit together. Maybe some missing bits, too, and others that once fitted but no longer do. Each of us assembles the puzzle as best we can. The keyboards player Benmont Tench, closes the book with words that seem to express the feelings of many who’ve worked with Dylan.

“You can read about Bob’s life,” he says, “and you can pay attention to what he says, and you can learn from it, but when you play music with somebody of that caliber, you learn something entirely different. It can only be passed on by that person. And those of us who have the opportunity to play with that person can pass on what we took away, but we only each take away a certain part of our experience with someone like that. Long may he live, because he’s something else.” 

 Dylan has released more than 50 albums and has written more than 600 songs, some of the most famous being “Blowin' in the Wind,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “All Along The Watchtower,” “Knockin' On Heaven's Door” and “Make You Feel My Love.”

For me, Bob Dylan revealed his courage in the 1960s when he went electric despite the boos from his avid folk fans who excoriated him. Dylan proved that you could couple folk introspection with the visceral edge of rock ‘n’ roll, showing that individualistic expression counted for far more than any preordained notions of what ‘authenticity’ should sound like.  

 I highly recommend Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members by Ray Padgett for music and Dylan fans. It's a great book about a great man.

Author Ray Padgett and his latest book.

 

 A 21-year-old white man walks into a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, Florida, and executes three black people after being turned away from a nearby historically black university.

A man shoots a clothing store owner in Cedar Glen, California because she is flying a Pride flag.

In Sudan's West Darfur region, more than 1,200 non-combatants have been killed in the last month in a bloody civil war. 

In Ukraine, the Russian army have committed over 400 war crimes in just 2022.

Evil wraps its tentacles around the world, as the innate goodness of people battles the darkness spreading in these turbulent times.

With such an epic battle between good and evil being played out in the news every day, I've written a novel about the clash between these two seminal forces.

 The novel was just published on Amazon, and there is a free book promotion from August 31 to September 4.

 While we sleep and dream, we are all transported to The Deep World, an ethereal universe where the primal forces of Evil and Good are locked in an eternal battle for supremacy in the physical world.

In the novel, Colin, a mixed-race teenager from Kentucky, battles demons from his white father, who has turned to white supremacy, residual anger from his parents' divorce years ago, and the inability to identify with black or white students. In Northern Virginia, Madison is a high school sophomore who is confused about her shifting sexuality, shunned by a lifelong friend because of it, and convinced her father is cheating on her mother. In Colorado, David is an introverted computer geek who just happens to have two extroverted, overachieving parents who do not understand him at all. Through cyber snooping, David discovered financial misconduct in his father's law firm.

One night, all three teens go to sleep and are awakened by three warriors: Dimiseus, a Greek warrior from the golden age of Athens; Ahuic, a female Aztec warrior who battled the Spanish invaders; and Mahmoud, a general in the army of an Arab warrior-queen Mavia, who battled Goth armies about a century before the fall of Rome.

The Deep World is the first in a series of novels about this universe composed of Defenders, Guardians, Marauders, Ravagers, the Sentinels, and The Gatekeeper. In each successive novel, new teenage characters will be anointed Guardians and trained to defend the physical world against the incursion of evil. The Deep World is available now on Amazon.
 
 

 The opioid crisis has so many tentacles that slither unseen and wrap our society in its cruel embrace of anguished addiction, unfettered corporate greed, and government guilt via neglect. 

The sordid tale can be told through numerous many eyes, perspectives, and stakeholders. Beth Macy's Dopesick in 2018 focused more on the victims of the opioid crisis. Former NY Times reporter Barry Meier was prescient in his early recognition of this party of misery with his book Pain Killer in 2004, where he first introduced the super villains of this saga -- the Sackler family.

Empire Of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe goes all in on a tale of greed, moral blindness, ethical villainy, and criminal behavior by one family -- the Sacklers.

While other accounts of the opioid crisis have tended to focus on the victims, Empire of Pain limits its focus to the "perps." The first part of the book chronicles the life of the family’s patriarch, Arthur Sackler, the eldest of three brothers born in the early 1900s to Jewish immigrant parents in working-class Brooklyn. Arthur has little, if any, connection to the modern-day Purdue Pharma other than the fact that he owned a third of the company’s first incarnation, Purdue Frederick, until his death in 1987. 

Keefe reveals how Arthur Sackler developed the strategy to market prescription drugs that became the gospel for Purdue Pharma salespeople in the early 2000s and beyond. 

In an earlier echo to tragedies to come, Arthur and his "Mad Men" promoted Valium in the early 1970s, making much of his multi-million dollar fortune as the adman who marketed the tranquilizer Valium with the convenient exclusion of information about the drug's addictive nature.

Amazon's description of the book goes as such: "Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability."

The book has generated a Netflix limted series called Painkiller.

The show stars Aduba, Broderick, Kitsch, West Duchovny, Dina Shihabi, John Rothman and Tyler Ritter. Aduba (Orange Is the New Black, The Residence) plays Edie Flowers, a lawyer working for the US attorney’s office who’s investigating the new drug OxyContin. 

Broderick (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Election) portrays Richard Sackler, scion of the billionaire family and senior executive at Purdue Pharma, and Kitsch (Friday Night Lights, True Detective) plays Glen Kryger, a hardworking family man and business owner whose life is upended after an injury. 

Duchovny takes on the role of Shannon Schaeffer, an ex-college athlete and new recruit to the Purdue sales team, while Shihabi plays Britt Hufford, a veteran sales rep who mentors Shannon. Rothman plays Mortimer Sackler, co-owner of Purdue Pharma and Richard Sackler’s uncle, with Ritter playing US Attorney John Brownlee, Edie Flowers’ new boss.

Keefe has done extensive research on the Sacklers, and his narrative is compelling and engrossing. The ultimate achievement of the book, however, isn't the history of the family.

It's the utter lack of contrition, penitence, and self-reflection by the family. Keefe explains in excruciating detail how the present-day Sacklers found opioid lawsuits and the family's reputational collapse to pariah status as unwarranted and cruel. 

The deaths from the opioid crisis was the fault of inveterate drug addicts, not the Sacklers, who neglected to warn users that taking the drug would strip away their free will, dignity, and, sometimes, their lives.

Keefe tells his readers how multiple members of the Sackler family found the demise of Pudue Pharma and the billions they were forced to pay as cruel and unusual punishment. For the Sacklers, according to Keefe, their crimes that connected them to 500,000 deaths are incidental to the financial and reputational collapse the family has suffered.

It's narcissism and familial greed run wild. 

I highly recommend the book, even if you or your family were not personally affected by the opioid crisis, although almost all Americans were and are. Keefe's narrative skills are superb, and the book and author allow the story and the Sacklers's lack of empathy to speak for itself. Keefe smartly does not allow the book's pacing to drag with preachy diatribes that, while appropriate, would wound the raw power of the narrative.

The Sacklers are a cautionary tale about how the mega-rich abrogated their sense of responsibility for others, and bathe themselves in the cloying compliments of sycophants who reassure them that they bear no blame for anything. Chief among the Sackler enablers was Rudy Giuliani, who offered the Sacklers legal protection and influence peddling. Former SEC Chair and U.S. attorney Mary Jo White also became a fierce Sackler protector when she worked for the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

What's frightening about the Sacklers clan is that their lack of accountability for the misery they've caused, and their inflammatory greed is not an isolated occurrence, but a growing trend among the one-percenters. Haven't we already witnessed it via Bezos, Musk, Trump, and Zuckerberg?

 Cardinal Rules And Other Tales Short Story Collection is now available on Amazon.

The digital revolution has numerous intended and accidental consequences. One consequence is the diminution of short fiction, primarily due to the decline of print magazines. Sure, Amazon’s Kindle Vella has attached the paddles to the fading life signs of short fiction, but short stories published in book form continue to decline in number.

So why would anyone publish a collection of short stories? Is the author satisfied if the only copies sold would be by family and friends, and many of them will claim they read the short stories and hope the author doesn’t ask for details?

The short answer is that these 11 stories offer a unique view of human nature and social interaction at work. Short stories are life in a snapshot, which is how we deal with life every day. In life, people who are incidental to our life can play as critical a role as people who are indispensable in our life.

In Cardinal Rules, you’ll meet a woman who aspires to have a romantic life that approximates that of the northern cardinals that inhabit her backyard trees.

In The Man Who Hated Google, a man who works hard his entire life struggles with retirement, loneliness, and establishing a stronger relationship with his daughter.

In What The Tin Man Learned, you’ll cross a threshold into a speculative journey about the afterlife and the simple wisdom that defines our lives.

In Driving Jim Morrison, a middle manager tries to ensure a long daily commute with an audiobook that magically brings the book's subject alive while he listens.

In The Hit List, a man loses his wife to cancer and discovers that she designed a system that evaluated him and others based on a rigid system of pluses and minuses.

In Night, Night, Baby, a couple goes on a reality TV show and is portrayed as villains, provoking grievance, hate, intolerance, and racism. Is the show the reality of their lives?

In The Ill-Fated Man, a man consumed by loneliness and consuming too much alcohol finds redemption through his 10-year-old nephew and his turtles.

In Comebacks, a man who suffered mistreatment from his father as a child learns that that same man can be a devoted grandfather.

In Book Club Confessions, four women and a man get together monthly to confess secrets and get help from each other.

In Wingspan, an injured Canadian goose re-energizes a suburban man battling aging and lack of direction.

In Unforgettable, a roadie who destroyed his personal and professional life finds atonement by helping a dementia patient who hangs by a thread through his music.

Let me end with a quote from a great contemporary short story author.

“I want my stories to be something about life…and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.” – Alice Munro -- Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
 

 
You already know it’s going to be a bad day. You can feel that black cloud hovering over your head, eager to drown any positive thoughts that may break through your haze of negativism.

Why so bleak today?

Quite simply, because you have to call your auto insurance company’s toll-free customer service number. You dial. The automated system answers and warns you ominously that they have greater than average call volume, even though you’ve called 20 seconds after the call center opened.

Then you begin the maze of phone options. The automated system keeps attempting to tell you when your next payment is due while you are frantically pressing buttons trying to get a human, even if it’s the person who puts out the bagels in the breakroom every morning.

Once, when calling my health insurance company, whose automated voice told me that “your call was very important to us,” I waited for 20 minutes after navigating so many options and pressed so many numbers on my phone that carpal tunnel was already setting in.

Then, when I was out of numbers to push to speak to a human, I started yelling and cursing into the phone. My wife, in another room reading her book club book about someone whose life is much shittier than ours, came out of the room and challenged me.

“Are you cursing at a person or an automated system?”

“The system won’t route to a person,” I answered, full of bile and red-faced.

Since she is somehow immune to anger, she responds calmly but quizzically, “So you are actually cursing at a computer?”

You think I’d be embarrassed to answer yes, but by now, I’m so deep into demonic catharsis, I can no longer control myself.

“It will not let me speak to a person, damn it,” I respond ludicrously as I wave my hands and contort my face to look like a loser on the CBS reality show Big Brother.

She rolls her eyes at me, shoots me a “tsk,” and turns on her heels to return to her reading.

Only after she’s gone do I realize how ridiculous I am, but I’m not ready to return to normalcy. I hang up the phone and pour myself a cup of coffee – the beans of which were probably picked by the poor people my wife is reading about in her book.

I take a sip. Needs more Stevia, I decide. Then while pouring more artificial sweetener into my coffee, a flash of inspiration feeds my desire for revenge.

Regular people should have their own toll-free, automated systems just like big companies so that we can torture those companies should they ever want to contact us, as well as assorted people in our lives who just piss us off, either for legitimate reasons or because we rank high on the neuroticism scale.

I grab a notepad from my desk and begin to furiously write my script for people who might call me. While writing, I am laughing like Joaquin Phoenix in The Joker, and my wife calls out to me, “Are you okay? It sounds like you’re editing Trump’s tweets again for grammar and spelling.”

“Everything’s fine,” I answer her in my newly discovered journey into the fantasy of ultimate revenge.

I scribble on the notepad, my anger guiding my Pilot fine-point pen. I finish my coffee, and the script is done. I read it over and decide I deserve a piece of pound cake now that it's noon, and I’m in the eating window for my 18/6 intermittent fasting. As I slice pieces of pound cake, I read my script for my new “average person’s toll-free automated phone system and customer service line.”

Before I go online to apply to the U.S. Patent Office, I reread it.

If Scammers Call: “Hello, your call is not important to us. In fact, we will be blocking you after this call. If you are calling to use a social security scam, press 1 now. If you are calling to use an IRS tax refund scam, press 2. For any scams from Nigeria, press 3. For free vacation scams, press 4. To speak to me, press – oh wait, you’ll never speak to me. Goodbye, suckers.”


If Bill Collectors Call: “If you are calling about a bullshit bill you claim I owe even though I’ve tried to cancel my gym membership seven different times and the magazine subscription you claim I have was canceled during the Obama Administration, please press 1. But before you actually press 1, please note that I have moved to the deepest jungle in Bolivia and will be living there off the grid until the statute of limitations is up on my bogus bill. Have a good day.”

If Doctors, Hospitals, Dentists, Or other Health Providers Call:

“If this is an insurance company denying my claim for the recent MRI, please go screw yourself, you heartless bastards. If this is my dentist confirming my appointment next week for the 22nd time, please press 3, then wait 17.2 minutes to leave me a message. If this is a hospital about that bogus ER visit bill, please press 5 to listen to the bill collector's message about me moving to the jungles of Bolivia. Feel free to repossess my Ford Focus. The transmission hasn’t worked since I drove off the dealer’s lot.”

If Family Members I Can’t Stand To Talk To Call: “Hello, and I’m sorry I can’t take your call, but right now, I am either volunteering at a food bank, risking my life to collect change at a busy intersection for the local girls' softball team or dropping off all my pleated pants, cargo shorts and I’m with Stupid t-shirts at the nearest Goodwill consignment store. You can leave me a message by pressing 3245612357 PIN: 45212678 and using fingerprint and facial recognition to confirm your identity and ensure that you are not a robot. Because of the sheer volume of calls, I may not get back to you until Keeping up with the Kardashians finally goes off the air.”

If Friends Who Want To Gossip Incessantly About Other Friends Call: Hi, friend. To report another mutual friend’s sexual perversions, press 1. To report a mutual friend for serving milk that is not organic at a recent brunch, press 2. To report a mutual friend for claiming their dog is dying as an excuse to get out of that AirBnB we all rented in Myrtle Beach, press 17. For random sightings of casual acquaintances acting like douches, please press 6 and speak slowly.

If Any Big Company With Its Own Automated Phone System Calls: “Your call is important to us, and to illustrate how important, I will make you wait at least 40 minutes before you can even speak to me. In the meantime, while you wait, I will assault you with a blistering number of phone options to press that will take you nowhere, and I may even hang up on you a few times so that you go to the back of the queue. Have a nice day.”


If you want to discuss this brilliant idea in more detail, please call 1-800-call-frank and press 4. If you hate his idea, please call the IRS and confess that you have under-reported taxable income for the last five years.

If I have offended anyone during this essay, please go to your smartphone, then go to SETTINGS, then CELLULAR, and hit disconnect from the CELLULAR NETWORK.

Then attempt to call me. Have a nice day. Your non-call is important to me.

Photo by Anni Roenkae

 

 “Poverty, by America, is a searing moral indictment of how and why the United States tolerates such high levels of poverty and of inequality. . . [and] a hands-on call to action.”—The Nation

It's rare that a book review begins with a call-out from a media outlet about the book. Here, however, The Nation has neatly encapsulated the persistence of high levels of poverty in the United States. In his book, Poverty, by America, author Matthew Desmond makes a compelling case that smashes headlong into the mindset of too many Americans.

People live in poverty because it's their own fault.

 Desmond knows that many middle and upper middle class Americans swear by the fiction that they've experienced some degree of monetary success by dint of their own efforts. Nobody -- least of all, the government -- helped them.

Look at what just happened. Republicans in Congress insisted that a more stringent work rule to quality for SNAP benefits be approved before they would allow the debt ceiling to be raised. Numerous studies show that nearly 90 percent of Americans receiving food stamps work, yet somehow the twisted logic that they are "takers" persists.

In the book's beginning, Desmond says. "The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?"

In the book, sociologist Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
 
Early in the book, Desmond tells his readers, "I learned that a fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. To understand why, consider welfare."

Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents. Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance. Of the $31.6 billion in welfare funding, just $7.1 billion was realized as dollars-in-hand relief to the poor.[

Between 1999 and 2016, Oklahoma spent more than $70 million in TANF funds on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, providing counseling services and organizing workshops open to everyone in the state, poor or not. Arizona used welfare dollars to pay for abstinence-only sex training.

Then Desmond exposes Mississippi by explaining that a 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave.

Desmond enjoys exploding myths perpetrated by so-called family values advocates. In 1959, about 70 percent of poor families were composed of a married couple. Today, roughly one in three families headed by a single mother is poor, compared to just one in seventeen married families. This disparity has led some to conclude that single parenthood is a major cause of poverty in America. But then, why isn’t it a major cause in Ireland or Italy or Sweden, where single mothers are plentiful, Desmond asks. A study of eighteen rich democracies found that single mothers outside the United States were not poorer than the general population.

Then Desmond explains that the U.S. economy is much less productive than it was 50 years ago.

He says: "Astonishingly, the real wages for many Americans today are roughly what they were forty years ago. Ninety percent of Americans who entered college or the job market in the late 1960s would go on to earn more than their parents did, but this was the case for only 50 percent of Americans by the late 1990s. Upward mobility is no longer the overriding feature of the American experience. For far too many young people today, the future is fraught."

 Desmond then goes on to knock down another straw man of conservatives, especially the artificially outraged commentators on Fox News. Complaints about the poor using food stamps to buy lobster and other expensive food items panders to their largely white and older audience.

Desmond refutes this by detailing how The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has meticulously tracked the spending patterns of families receiving means-tested government assistance. 

"Not surprisingly, those receiving assistance spend a larger share of their income on necessities (housing, food) and a smaller share on entertainment, alcohol, and tobacco than other American families. The BLS also found that families with incomes in the top 20 percent of the distribution dedicate twice as much of their budget to alcohol as families with incomes in the bottom 20 percent. It’s been this way for generations. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote about rich people’s taste for “intoxicating beverages and narcotics” and the poor’s “enforced continence,” on account of the cost of booze and other drugs."

Further, Desmond explodes the fiction that upper-middle-class Americans bootstrapped their success. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low-income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent).

The cost to the federal government for employer-sponsored health insurance exempted from taxable incomes is $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $600 billion. 

Another myth Desmond explodes is that the poor don't pay taxes. Desmond tells us that, on average, poor and middle-class Americans dedicate approximately 25 percent of their income to taxes, while rich families are taxed at an effective rate of 28 percent, just slightly higher. The four hundred richest Americans are taxed at 23 percent, the lowest rate of all.

Desmond goes on: "The average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363. Every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in government subsidies than the poorest American families."

Desmond continues: "In 2020, the mortgage interest deduction allowed more than 13 million Americans to keep $24.7 billion. Homeowners with annual family incomes below $20,000 enjoyed $4 million in savings, and those with annual incomes above $200,000 enjoyed $15.5 billion. Also in 2020, more than 11 million taxpayers deducted interest on their student loans, saving low-income borrowers $12 million and those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 $432 million."

Desmond also enjoys attacking the conservative view that government spending continues to expand. The numbers, he concludes, show an opposite trend.

"In 1955, government spending accounted for roughly 22 percent of the economy, and it stayed that way for years. But during the last quarter of the twentieth century, public investments began to decline. By 2021, government spending on all public goods—including national defense, transportation, health expenditures, and programs to ease the pain of poverty—made up just 17.6 percent of GDP."

Desmond also offers his readers a history lesson in "voodoo economics" as candidate George H.W. Bush once characterized Reagan's tax cut plans. When the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, was proposed by Congressman Jack Kemp and signed into law by President Reagan, it reduced federal tax revenues by more than 13 percent over four years. The act included across-the-board cuts to income taxes, including a 20 percentage point reduction in the top marginal tax rate, and slashed estate taxes as well. In the immediate aftermath of this legislation, the deficit began to expand, interest rates climbed, and markets flagged. Reagan was forced to right the ship, somewhat, by raising taxes on businesses the following year. But it was the public sector that paid the biggest price for the president’s budgetary reprioritization. Reagan reduced funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, not by 20 or 40 percent, but by almost 70 percent. 

Question: Who suffered the most from that catastrophic budget cut? Could it be the poor?

Desmond also destroys the myth that white rural residents are neglected and forgotten. Consider the 502 Direct Loan Program, which has moved over two million families into their own homes. These loans, fully guaranteed and serviced by the USDA, come with low-interest rates and, for very poor families, cover the entire cost of the mortgage, nullifying the need for a down payment. Families can also apply for low-interest loans or grants to help with repairs. In 2021, the average 502 Direct Loan was for $187,181 but cost the government only $10,370 in total, chump change for such a durable intervention.

Desmond then ponders: "Expanding this program into urban communities would provide even more low- and moderate-income families with homes of their own."

In public education, Desmond also argues a contrarian view. Pouring money into "high-poverty" schools and then complaining when improvements are nonexistent is a prescription for failure, he states.

He explains: "The results were striking. Students from poor families who attended low-poverty schools significantly outperformed those who attended high-poverty schools with “state-of-the-art educational interventions.” Even when we expand the budgets of poor schools beyond those of rich ones, it does not make those schools anything close to equal."

Desmond wraps up the book with an investigation of the ever-growing segregation of the races. He again attacks conventional wisdom of the Fox News crowd with an example: "In the years since New Jersey began economically integrating its communities more aggressively than any other state, its property values have remained among the highest in the nation, and it ranks first in public education."

I highly recommend this book because it presents a strong case that the poor in America face an economy, culture, and society that's rigged against them. To make things worse, people above them economically in the middle and upper middle class not only scorn them but also are blind to the "leg up" the government provides them in numerous ways.

I'll finish with a story. My partner Linda and I were out to dinner with another couple, and one of their friends stopped over at our table. The man -- a talkative, oversharing type -- told us that he had just sold his business for five million dollars. He said he needed to get out of his business because his minimum-wage employees were lazy, unreliable, and always demanding more. He insisted people didn't want to work hard anymore. They just wanted a government handout. After asking a few questions, we discovered that it was an interest-free government small business loan that enabled him to start his business 25 years ago. The man collects a monthly disability from the military for minor damage incurred to his right shoulder when serving, and is working a no-show job for his buddy, who will conveniently lay him off after 20 weeks so he can collect unemployment.

Before he left the table, he proudly exclaimed, "Unlike so many losers today, I never took anything from the government. I'm my own man."

 Heroes come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders. In TV and the movies, these heroes most often have a weapon --usually a lightsaber, phaser, magical sword, a gun, or some superhero skill. 

The hero I am discussing in this article doesn't pack a weapon, or have superhero skills like Spider Man, but she still brings the heat.

Heat, as in a passion for helping others. 

Courtney Johns is a Training Manager and Human Resources Coordinator for a Fort Myers-based upscale hotel. It's a hospitality business with success and profitability contingent on having highly skilled employees who understand customers, their needs, and anticipate their requests.

The first person these day-one employees see and hear is Courtney Johns as she takes them through a rigorous training class that is one part masterclass on service, one part stand-up comedy routine, and one part motivational session.

"I don't just teach class for new employees and never see them again," says Courtney. "These employees can always rely on me to help them adjust to their new position, answer any questions, and mentor them."

Courtney continues: "After all, training is a process, not an event. I'm there for them as long as they work here."

 Courtney believes that you train people well enough, so they can leave, and treat them well enough so that they don't want to.

A hotel relies on its customer service as well as its amenities. The employees, who feel cared for, will care for their customers. 

In late September 2022, Hurricane Ian was a powerful Category 5 Atlantic hurricane which was the third-costliest weather disaster on record, and the deadliest hurricane to strike the state of Florida since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. Ian caused widespread damage across western Cuba and catastrophic damage in Florida; it also caused damage in the Carolinas.

Large swaths of the Fort Myers area were devastated. Homes were destroyed. Too many lost everything, and too few in the area escaped damage.

After the wind diminished and the rain stopped, Courtney and others at her job leaped into action. Courtney began contacting all the company's employees to ensure they were safe and to assess their need for assistance. 

As employees relayed stories of horrible loss to her, Courtney was an integral part of her company's effort to provide assistance to the entire Fort Myers area and to its employees specifically. Since homelessness was an immediate and all-too-common situation, Courtney set up employees with housing at her company's Fort Myers property.

As rescue efforts ramped up from federal, state, county and local governments, Courtney joined a massive effort to host a downtown rally in Fort Myers. At that rally, Courtney helped to coordinate the distribution of tarps, food kits, hot meals, clothing, and organized sessions with FEMA. 

Even though Fort Myers has returned to some sense of normalcy, there are still thousands of people trying to rebuild their homes and their lives.

 To be fair, there were -- and are -- thousands who stepped forward to assist with the rescue effort in Fort Myers after the hurricane. 

Courtney Johns recalls a quote about giving back that summarizes how she, and many others, feel: "If you want to touch the past, touch a rock.  If you want to touch the present, touch a flower.  If you want to touch the future, touch a life."

Courtney will shake her head and insist she is not a hero. But Courtney Johns touches lives every day in her training classes, helping people be successful at their jobs. And when her community and fellow employees needed her, Courtney picked up the only weapons she knows how to use -- the ability to empathize and the power to help others.

Training Manager Courtney Johns

 

 

 

 

 

Today, we have an entire class of people who believe that college is designed solely to help a student get a job after graduation. The tradition of higher education offering young people a respect for learning, a curiosity for things they don't know, and a measured perspective for things they do, appears to have been swamped by the proto-realism of those who see all colleges as a vocational training area for four years. 

That's a shame and damaging to our society and culture. Academic disciplines, such as music and history, may seem to be irrelevant intellectual hobbies, but both steer the currents by which society travels.

Look how history -- and sharper view it offers -- can radically alter cultural beliefs. Elvis Presley was first thought to be anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-American. Today, Elvis embodies Americana for millions. The long hair of The Beatles in 1964 sent millions of parents, preachers, and prudes into conniptions, and they forecast cultural collapse. Today, history views the Fab Four as cultural and musical touchstones.

That's why The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music is more than an engrossing musical history book. Author Tom Breihan links musical trends, tastes, twists, and turns into a brilliant synthesis of what the history of #1s has meant to music and our culture.

Author Tom Breihan launched his Stereogum column in early 2018, “The Number Ones,” which is a space in which he has been writing about every #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, in chronological order. In the column, he’d post capsule-size reviews for each song. 

In the book, Breihan writes about his 20 songs in chronological order. Along the way from one to twenty, Breihan is not averse to social commentary and broadside attacks on cultural myths and mythmakers.  

In the first song, The Twist by Chubby Checker, Breihan notes that Dick Clark was given undeserved songwriting credit for songs by publishing composers desperate to get their songs on American Bandstand. Clark even owned a record label and promoted his own records on his show. 

Breihan also describes how The Twist version by Hank Ballard and Midnighters was a hit, but Clark deemed that version "too black" and Philly resident Earnest Evans (AKA Chubby Checker) was deemed acceptable to record Ballard's hit song. Breihan relates that The Twist was the first dance-craze record to hit the Top 100 on Billboard.

Breihan has a lot of practice writing about hit records, and his entries bristle with energetic and revelatory pop criticism. In the chapter on Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds, Breihan discusses the brilliance of the banking band, the Wrecking Crew, who, much like the Motown house band, The Funk Brothers, backed hundreds of hit records in the 60s and 70s. The Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine, for example, played on 40 number-one singles. 

When discussing Billie Jean, the 1983 number one hit by Michael Jackson, Breihan observes, "In Billie Jean, you can hear the lockstep groove of disco, the icy textures of synthpop, and the rich melodic layers of pure pop music."

That entry exemplifies the strength of Breihan's music criticism. It's the unique ability to link musical genres and trace them from their musical ancestors to their current iterations. Uber fans of one music genre often assume -- wrongly, of course -- that their favorite genre is in no way affected, morphed, and transformed by other musical species. 

When Breihan writes of Michael Jackson, he again asserts that music and the dominant artists of the time initiate seismic changes in our society. In writing about Billie Jean and then Thriller, Breihan opines that "He moved things away from segregated radio formats and toward a pan-racial, pan-genre music video future."

After discussing Where Doves Cry by Prince and highlighting how Prince bucked funk music tradition and omitted a bass line to the song, Breihan asserts that Prince's omission made the sound stand out.

Breihan does not omit the tools of the modern pop musician, noting the contributions of the Moog synthesizer, the musical vocoder, and Andy Hillebrand's Auto-Tune. In September 1997, Auto-Tune hit the market with fading pop star Cher singing the number one hit, Believe, "a woozy and futuristic track that would become an unlikely comeback smash."

When discussing K-Pop group, BTS, and its smash hit, Dynamite, Breihan discovers a South Korean hit-making machine that is more militaristic than purely artistic. 

 "In South Korea, young pop idols are trained with military precision. These kids...must go through years of lessons in singing, dancing, speaking foreign languages, and interacting with the media."

At the end of the book, Breihan notes that "The Hot 100 is no longer a historical record of the music that dominates pop culture at any particular moment."

There is a distinct sense of regret and loss in his words. Somehow, Breihan senses, as I do, that streaming music is much more accessible to the music-loving population, but that very attribute has diluted the value of hit songs.

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music will make riveting reading for music fans. The book can be related to popular music podcasts in this way. The book is part Slate's Hit Parade podcast because of its billboard chart connection. It's part Song Exploder podcast because Breihan performs such excellent autopsies on how the song was constructed, performed, and recorded. 

Finally, it's part Switched On Pop podcast because Breihan diagnoses the musical structure underlying the songs and the instrumental arrangement that defines the songs.

 The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music is a breezy musical journey that hits all the right notes. If you're a music fan, a music history student, or a chart history geek, the book offers 20 short narratives of music greatness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Author: Pekka Hämäläinen

 Rating: Four out of Four -- you know you're on to something when you've angered people with opposite worldviews.

Ease Of Reading: 594 pages.

When To read: After watching the 1956 film The Searchers with John Wayne. 

 It's only fitting that the author of a book about North American history not be an American. Distance -- both geographical, cultural, and psychological -- offers perspective. Right now in America, there are far too many who wish to smooth over the rough edges of American history so that present citizens are in no way made uncomfortable and feel regret about the actions of their ancestors.

Apparently, nationalistic exceptionalism does not allow for any imperfection.  Perfection equals patriotism. Or is it vice versa?

The author, Pekka Hämäläinen was born in Helsinki, Finland. He has been the Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford since 2012, and was formerly in the history department at University of California, Santa Barbara. 

The subtitle of the book -- The Epic Conquest for North America -- telegraphs one of the primary themes of the book -- Europeans arrived in North America and instantly and without much effort dominated the land and the indigenous people who had lived there for centuries.

That white ethnocentrism is expressed perfectly by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who, in remarks to a conservative group, the Young America's Foundation, in April 2021, argued that the culture of the United States is largely unchanged since it was birthed by "Judeo-Christian" values.

 "We came here and created a blank slate," Santorum said. "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture."

Santorum is not an outlier. Many Americans have learned that sanitized version of American history.

 One example: Native Americans did not simply sell Manhattan for trinkets, and then peacefully migrate far away to other lands.

In effect, this book hopes to recast the history of the conquest of North America, in which Native Americans are assumed to be destined to be conquered by the encroachment of European civilization. In the book, the author emphasizes the considerable political and military power of various indigenous empires, such as the Great Sioux Nation and the Comanche empire. 

 There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. 

"The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing New World as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction."

Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counter narrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. 

Hämäläinen describes a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. 

"From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle." Hämäläinen asserts.

Faced with a growing white population and their land grabs, Indigenous peoples still flourished, due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures.

By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial bragging for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn.

It's a little-known fact that Oklahoma took so long for statehood approval (1907) because up until then it was essentially two states -- Oklahoma and the indigenous state of Sequoya. In 1905, the U.S. Congress denied the petition to create two states, even though it had passed a statewide referendum.

The book is exhaustively researched and is a Herculean labor because Hämäläinen is painstakingly relating almost four hundred years of North American history.

Hämäläinen begins by refuting the notion that before European whites showed up, the continent was bereft of any sophisticated or successful cultures. The author details the success and sophistication of these cultures -- from the Mayans to the Aztecs -- and also makes the point these European invaders triumphed not because of superior military weapons or tactics but because indigenous people had no immunity to diseases like smallpox that, in some cases, killed 80 percent of an area's population. 

The author refutes the commonly held belief that once Europeans got a foothold in America, it was inevitable and relatively easy to conquer the indigenous populations. 

He writes: "Time and time again, and across centuries, Indians blocked and destroyed colonial projects, forcing Euro-Americans to accept Native ways, Native sovereignty, and native dominance."

The author notes at the book's end that, "The four-hundred-year struggle to keep the continent indigenous had stretched colonists from the European powers, and then the United States, to the breaking point again and again."

While current Americans rely on pop culture like Westerns that readily depict Indians slaughtering innocent white settlers, consider these facts.

What is lost to most history books are massacres like in 1851 where miners killed 300 Wintu Indians or in 1853 a posse of settlers attacked and burned a Tolowa Indian settlement, killing 450 while they held a prayer ceremony. From 1856 to 1859 white settlers killed over a thousand Yuki Indians in Round Valley, California over the course of three years in an uncountable number of separate massacres.

Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of “colonial America” is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.

 Critical reception of the book has been mixed, which is not all surprising considering the breadth of the book and the scope of the subject.

To be clear, Indigenous Continent is not a retelling of North American history. Instead, it is a faithful and accurate narrative of North American history.

No historical event better exemplifies the viciousness of settlers and colonials than the Seminole Wars in Florida.

In the early 1800s, black slaves from Georgia escaped to Spanish-controlled Florida and set up settlements there. The Seminole Wars, which intermittently flared up from 1818-1858, began when Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish-held Florida and destroyed Seminole and black towns. While black slaves were returned to Georgia, the Seminoles were forced deeper into the Everglades, fighting two more wars with American soldiers in the late 1830s and finally in 1855-1858.

Today, an Indigenous group hunted to near extinction by a future president and other military and vigilante armies over 40 years has its name enshrined at its state university -- Florida State Seminoles.

As author Robert Heinlein once said, "A generation that ignores history has no past -- and no future."

 

 

 Author: Rachel Abrams & James Stewart

 Rating: Four out of Four ghostly apparitions

Ease Of Reading: 416 pages. This book constantly shocks you as you have a front row seat to the depths of human depravity.

When To read: After being harangued by your brother-in-law about how corporations are so much more efficient than the government.

 First, I do not want to bury the lead. Unscripted --The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy -- is exhaustively researched, painstakingly presented, and always in danger of swerving off the narrative path as the Redstone saga branches off into the CBS Chief Les Moonves's self-inflicted meltdown. However, co-authors Rachel Abrams and James B. Stewart are expert co-captains and manage to avoid the rocky shoals of the multifaceted tendrils of this unwieldy tale.

While the story is ostensibly about billionaire media tycoon Sumner Redstone and his immediate family, we are treated to villains who pulsate with greed, ambition, and lust. Redstone caretakers Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer make Thanos, the world destroyer from The Avengers, appear timid compared to their power and money grab, and their mistreatment of an old and feeble billionaire who spent a lifetime abusing others.

As the Hollywood Reporter quipped when reviewing the book --  “Addicted to Succession? Well, here's the real thing.”

Unscripted attempts to unwind the various narrative surrounding Sumner Redstone, owner of Paramount, Viacom, and CBS. That primary narrative of a dysfunctional family makes the Kardashians look normal. And that's hard to do.

In the preface of the book, readers learn that authors Abrams and Stewart were initially working separately on different parts of the Redstone family conflagration. It was only after CBS President Les Moonves set himself ablaze with numerous of sexual abuse that they joined forces. He once masturbated in front of his diabetes doctor when she resisted his unwanted physical advances.

James B. Stewart is the author of Deep State, Tangled Webs, Heart of a Soldier, Blind Eye, Blood Sport, and the blockbuster Den of Thieves. He is currently a columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia Journalism School. In 1988, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading.

Rachel Abrams was a media reporter for The New York Times and is now a senior producer and reporter for the television series The New York Times Presents. In 2018, she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting that exposed sexual harassment and misconduct. Cleverly, the authors structure the book by SEASON and the chapters as EPISODES, paralleling the format of a TV series. Some of the content about Redstone's and others sexual exploits could make the owners of Pornhub blush.  Except for Redstone's daughter Shari, who does escape the moral turpitude of the other cast of characters, the book is awash in people who make the Royals in Netflix's The Crown seem almost human.  For shareholders of any company owned by a billionaire, Unscripted should be a wake-up call that these entitled tycoons blur the line between their personal money and the resources of the corporation, which is owned by the shareholders. In the book, Sumner Redstone spent hundreds of millions of the corporation's money on personal purchases, vengeance money used to settle personal vendettas, and demands that Redstone female companions receive jobs they didn't deserve and perks that would drain corporation coffers.
There are a few delectable ironies here. First, Sumner Redstone spent an adult lifetime using people and then discarding them. Then at an advanced age and in poor health, he is used and abused by his two ersatz caretakers, Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer. Then CBS chief Les Moonves goes to war with Shari Redstone for control of the company at stake, apparently unaware or morally blind to his multiple past sexual advances.
The authors explain this blind spot with a quote from veteran producer and CBS board member Arnold Kopelson who was baffled by concerns over Moonves's alleged advances in the workplace and said dismissively: "We all did that." Again, no heroes here.
 The book is as intricate as any Ludlum spy novel, and offers as many twists and turns as an Agatha Christie novel. It's enjoyable to read, and the authors toil diligently so that readers can keep track of the cast of evil and malicious characters. It's hard to keep the names straight when almost every character has long ago sold their soul to the devil...or worse, Sumner Redstone.

Reading this book is like getting on a roller coaster that you absolutely know will return to this spot, but you have no idea at all how it will do that or the track it will follow.
In the preface, the authors make a prophetic statement about the state of American culture and economy.
"The drama may have unfolded may have occurred at Viacom and CBS, but the recent drumbeat of greed, backstabbing, plotting, and betrayal at the upper levels of American business and society has hardly been confined to one or two companies or one wealthy family and its hangers-on." If anyone thinks that Sumner Redstone, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos could possibly make this world a better place, please read this book.