Ask Me Anything - V1

So earlier this week I asked for questions….any questions. I got some good ones, so let’s get to it, shall we?

Who is your favorite game show host? -JB

Bob Barker is the obvious GOAT here, even if the only time any of us actually saw “The Price is Right” is when we were home sick from school, sipping chicken noodle soup with crushed saltines on top, paired with warm ginger ale. Richard Dawson was certainly the most randy of the bunch, lip smacking every female contestant on “Family Feud” with disturbing relish. If you want to see how society has changed over the last 40+ years, consider the fact that female contestants on that show were actually tested for Herpes after being mouth-groped by Dawson, but nobody could really be arsed to do anything about it because it was the 1970s. The 1970s featured a movie starring the kid from “Welcome Back Cotter”, who along with his leisure suit wearing Brooklyn friends, routinely raped women in the back seat of a car, to the soundtrack of the Bee Gees. In retrospect Dawson was about as creepy as Jared from Subway, while Bob Barker became a cultural icon for kicking the shit out of Adam Sandler. As I got older the daytime games shows were replaced by the back to back Wheel Of Fortune and Jeopardy hour. Pat Sajak turned out to be as MAGA as Chuck Woolery, the Dating Game guy whose twitter feed read like he was the adult Chachi. Alex Trebek had one of the all-time great mustaches, but it’s hard not to come across as a bit of a dick when you know the answers in advance. Barker, on the other hand, seemed genuinely surprised and pleased when it turned out that some schlub with a mullet knew how much a washer-dryer set cost, even if the guy did get the answer from somebody screaming it out from the crowd. The Price is Right was positively unhinged in retrospect, but Bob remained unflappable throughout. And he never fondled anybody. The GOAT.

What is your favorite part of writing? What is your least favorite? -SB

I’m temped to say that my favorite part is when I’m done, and my least favorite part is when I’m starting. But the truth is I adore the struggle, refusing to move on from the wrong word until I find the right one. Mark Twain called the right vs the wrong word the difference between “lightning and the lightning bug”.

That being said, writers spend a lot of the time they call “writing” staring at a screen, or a piece of paper, or a piece of lint on the floor. We pace holes in the carpet, or google for synonyms. Author Shelby Foote took 20 years to write his great 3 volume Civil War Narrative, which each book thicker than the bible, but only wrote 500 words a day, which means if he was at it 8 hours at a stretch, he probably only put pen to paper a few hundred seconds each day. This is surely a curious way to make a living. Writing requires patience for people all too often writing because they have hellhounds on their trail. Which is why we don’t get invited to many parties.

So, in short, my favorite part is knowing that I did my best, and my least favorite part is re-reading my best and knowing that I can make it better.

Does being left-handed hamper your right-handed guitar playing? -LC

To this day I still play air-guitar left handed. Us lefties were forever being fucked with, starting with scissors…..along with those desks in school designed for righties that forced us to cross over and write with our elbows hanging in the air as if they were in invisible slings. My first set of golf clubs came from the lady next door, and for the first year or so I gripped the clubs cross-handed because they were a righty set and my hands just fell that way. After being laughed at one too many times, I became a right-handed golfer, but always putted lefty because her putter was a double bladed model. I became a fairly decent player in my teens, but stopped playing for a time, assuming it was just like riding a bike and I could just pick up where I left off. It isn’t, and suddenly I went from routinely breaking 80 to not being able to break 100. Various comeback attempts were quickly aborted after endless shanks, along with discovering how much golf actually costs now.

My clubs are currently in the garage, covered with mold. A few of them are in 2 pieces. This is as it should be.

My first guitar was my brother’s guitar, a right handed model. I couldn’t be arsed to re-string it upside-down ala Paul McCartney, so have spent the last 45 years playing guitar with my weak hand, which may or may not be the reason I am still a fairly rudimentary player. I often wonder what kind of guitarist (or golfer) I could have been if those who lived with (or next door to) me had the good sense to be left-handed.

What’s the difference between a person who writes about history and a person who makes it? -BA

The people who make history we hang on our walls. The ones we learn it from we bury on our shelves.

Do we have free will? -CS

I’d prefer to ponder things such as “what Stones album is best….Let it Bleed or Sticky Fingers? My answer to that question would depend on what day you asked me, and how long it had been since I last heard “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking", which is the greatest Stones song ever, unless I just heard “Gimme Shelter” on the radio, in which case CYHMK becomes the second greatest Stones song ever.

I like to think I exercise free will, but then again if you believe in the concept of an all-knowing God, everything that happens is already pre-ordained, so all I’m doing in picking my favorite Stones album is reciting lines from the script that’s already been written by an all-knowing deity with his (or her) own thoughts on Keith Richards.

This is the problem with religion. It takes all the fun out of things.

It’s also been argued that free will is a crock of shit….as we’re all simply a wild, random conglomeration of atoms and molecules, and that far from picking one Stones song or album over another, my brain simply gives the illusion of choice by selecting one or another for me. In other words, the choice is already made for me by this wild, random conglomeration of atoms and molecules.

This is the problem with science. It takes all the fun out of things.

In 1974 my band got paid $500 for our FIRST gig. Fifty years later we make $150 plus tips. Are we ever gonna get paid? -SW

No. The streaming services have devalued music to the point where people expect it to be free. It’s become something like graffiti on a passing boxcar. A bar owner isn’t going to give you $500 any more than the people at the bar are gonna drop cash at your merch table for your latest CD, which you probably haven’t even bothered to manufacture because nobody owns CD players anymore. Like it or not, you are the equivalent of muzak in the elevator. Granted, it might be loud and even exciting muzak, but it’s still muzak. You can easily be replaced by Trivia Night. Your only chance to make more money is to have a devoted fanbase who drink like Shane MacGowan and follow you from gig to gig, thus forcing bars to hire extra bartenders for the night. Do this and you don’t even have to bother tuning your guitars. But if your fans are hovering around a table nursing a single pitcher of Miller Lite all night long, you’d make more cash as an Uber driver.

As the great James McMurtry once said….”I used to think I was an artist. Turns out I’m a beer salesman…”

In a bit…

—tf

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