politicalsurfer.com

I’m sure it’s still a great place to eat but when I remember the Loveless on rt. 100 just outside of Nashville I can almost smell the smells of Nashville’s best kitchen and hear the guitars from a half a dozen old rickety, but clean, hotel rooms. One time, long ago,I was sitting on one of the hotel beds smoking a joint and playing my guitar when Billy Joe Shaffer came in and asked for a hit and then he said,” That’s good”,  he gagged and asked if he could play my guitar, after ten minutes or so he told me that my Gibson was the sweetest Gibson guitar he had ever played. I told him that Johnny Cash tried to buy it from Joe Lefcowitz in Tucson when I had it in for repairs in the late sixty’s… or something along those lines ; he asked me who I was and I told him ,”Tucson Bob” , he told me his name and when he realized I was clueless and did not recognize his name he said,” You mean to say you don’t know who I am, well hell I wrote “There ain’t no God in Mexico” and then he started playing “There ain’t no God in Mexico’. I think I said “No shit”. He told me that Elvis Presley had just given his buddy a Lincoln Continental and that his friend had booked a room at the Loveless and would be arriving at any minute in his new car. You know, I saw a guy pull up in a beautiful black Lincoln Continental with a tire kit on the back, Billy Joe got up, I said,”That’s alright you keep it”, and I knew I was blessed as witness to a very special part of  Rock’n'Roll-Country Music- History because I saw legend occur and that never would have happened without the “Loveless”.  Professional sports rule Nashville now, Sony, R.C.A. have left, Music Row is almost Music-less, all of the action is downtown.It would have been nice if the city of Nashville could have remembered it’s ‘Country Music’ culture and supported it… you know… it’s too bad about the ‘Loveless’.

The last time I was in Nashville was in the eighties’, I could not believe how boring and corporate the music was then [ Pam Tillis and barbie dolls ]. Nashville needed a wake up call, now it looks like the music culture of the place has been replaced by a right wing sport’s culture thing! During that time I met two people who were stand outs, very talented and very nice. Monique Moman and Danny Tate were the only two people that I could relate to outside of my work, which is still making underground music. Danny Tate helped me by being too tall, too mean to quit, too soon to tell, really funny, a gentleman, honest; he was a young man with the world at his feet. Monique Moman was a lady and an individual who inspired me and gave me a hope that one day Nashville would get back to producing great main stream music again. The reason I am directing my attention to long ago experiences in Nashville with great people is because I have just read the article written by Brantley Hargrove, Jan.21-27/vol.23/no.50, that appeared in the Nashville Scene about Danny Tate. The one aspect of Danny Tate’s personality that jumps off the page in this article is Danny Tate’s honesty about himself and that he has accumulated a type of sage wisdom that serves him well. The last time I saw Danny was in Nashville in the nineteen eighties’ and my worries for him then were about the corporate pretenders like Steve Davis and the other jerks that were pushing and pulling at him would contaminate his music. It hasn’t, Danny is a man of music, a man of legend and I believe that Danny Tate will continue on his musical journey, become a music icon for Nashville and above all maintain! If you ever met Danny you love the guy, hey the last time we talked he called me a ” washed up R and B guitar player ” alright, I did do twenty days on the stage at the Apollo Theater in N.Y.C. and I still sleep on the couch or the floor or in my car when I do my music in a studio. The brutal truth is what saves and Danny Tate still says it! My bets, my support and my prayer are all in support for Danny Tate: a true Nash/Villian : nobody said rock’n'roll was for angels and when a rocker applies his pain and the experiences of a hard life, it gives to his music, WATCH OUT because there is a train ‘a comin’  and that train is called American Music! GOD BLESS YOU DANNY TATE !

It is the study of words over the study of nature that has led our Supreme Court into the realm of the RIDICULOUS. I’m a surfer who plays the guitar and sings the songs that I write and if you want to think that corporations are people then that is O.K. with me. Corporate surfers and assholes who surf in surfing contests have hyped and sold my sport of surfing to death, clueless assholes, you know, just like the politically motivated asshole supreme court justices whose decision works for their corporate cronies, you know, just like the asshole congress that is too scared of the pentagon to govern or maybe citizens who allow themselves to be forced to piss into a jar by corporations in order to qualify for work. The drug warriors have all the money, all of the grants, all of the power but they have no common sense; they arrest and criminalize their own children for handling marijuana. As stoned as I have been in my life, I never hallucinated a corporation into a person. Those drug warriors are really something, they can make words do anything : turning corporations into citizens like you and like me. WOW! That’s really something!

The congress got it wrong when it incorporated it’s wrong minded view on corporations in the fourteenth amendment during the eighteen hundreds and now the supreme court has openly betrayed the spirit of our American democracy by allowing corporations to make unlimited political contributions. The law needs to change regarding the civil rights of corporations over people. We can work with and control the corporations and help direct them toward an aim of producing good for our American communities as well as profit. The American Supreme Court has done good work for it’s corporate cronies but the hope is that local communities can work together to defeat the corporatism that has destroyed community after community. Remember … all politics is local.