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Friday, February 24, 2017






Dave opened a record store on Main Street in a small New England town, during most unlikely times. The three pictures above are from Dan who visited Dave there. These show when Dave was re-arranging the shop to have more live music in the store, something many record stores do now.


The others are a few pix from Dave's files. We lost Dave Pellecchia on President's Day 2017 around 5:45 a.m. Torrential rains had pummeled San Antonio staring at 11 p.m. or so, and by around 2 a.m., 4 tornados came through within minutes wreaking havoc a few miles from where Dave was under 24 hour nursing care.
Dave is survived by his daughter Angela, her mother Myra,  Dave's three brothers Dan, Mike and Mitch, several nephews, his aunt Carmella, and many cousins.
Schooled in New Britain and Southington, Dave went on to live in Vermont, Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts (Martha's Vineyard, Buzzards Bay, Eastham), Connecticut and New Hampshire. He loved being near the mountains or ocean. In the picture above, he's standing in front of our parents' car with his friend and next door neighbor Ralphie.

His found his professional home in service industries, from food preparation to youth hostel and motel management, to being one of the pioneers in online sales of collectible vinyl records. He was also a private chef, chauffeur, advocate for the homeless, blogger, expert in all forms of popular music, and developed his own style of singing with baritone ukelele, and other ukes, with a resonant baritone voice that had heard a lot of Taj, Ry, Mose, et al and be all!


 The picture to the right is a property Dave managed in the Wellfleet area of Cape Cod. As an American Youth Hostel it attracted many European travelers. Dave bonded with many international travelers over their fondness for American jazz music.





Dave is to the far right in this picture. He managed the youth hostel here in the shadow of the White Mountains, and this group of Alpine travelers came through more than once, a tribute to Dave's flair for old fashioned hospitality.
Here's Angela who still looks the same a few years older :-)







this above postcard is the municipal swimming hole where we grew up.

Also, I wrote this song and made this video for Dave today:


Sunday, July 6, 2014

Hi folks,
I hope to see you here some time this summer. I'm playing behind some great singers who sing everything from Ray Charles to Dean Martin to Norah Jones to Billie Holiday to Cher. And a Sunday menu where if I don't have the eggs benedict, there goes the rest of the week.
Summer's great and at our barn at moneyblows books and music we have thousands and thousands of books and records, constantly replenishing, for your atmospheric browsing in the old stalls, at the price of three for five dollars.
Almost everything.
*Lurking treasure might be more

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Practice Makes Worse

In being a sideman with bands, I've noticed that practices are the biggest waste of time next to transporting to the gig and setting up and taking down.

Practice sessions involve the same time commitment for everyone in the band, but the preparations for that practice are vastly different. Everybody brings a different understanding.

Some people in the band may have played the same three or four chords their whole life, and that covers most of what the band does. For them, a lot of practice can be eliminated by using the Nashville Number system. Whoever knows the song communicates it to the rest of the band and very little rehearsal would be necessary.

Some people in the band might listen to the originals of cover tunes as preparation to practice.  You can learn a lot by listening, but it often leads to unnecessary discussion, when different members hear a song a different way, or want to emphasize one aspect over the other. The band that wants to develop their own interpretation needs a leader who is also an arranger or has the financial resources to put the desired arrangement into a form acceptable to the musicians. Otherwise this is what most of the practice time will be devoted to. The net result might be a good level of precision, but one that could be just as easily achieved in less time with arrangements.

In the case of blues, r&b, rock or other dance music, some of the best players need little or no practice. They really only need to rehearse the beginnings, endings, and stop times or other aural tricks in the song.

It might surprise someone to hear that a fun practice is a bad practice. Doing it for fun is the reason most musicians play, especially since live music gigs have gotten scarce. I submit that practice makes worse.
One typical situation is playing a song all the way through. Most of the time, a singer wants to do this. Hey, who wouldn't? You're singing, and you've got a live band behind you. It may not be as good as karaoke, but that band is also your built-in audience.

Typically, that leads to playing the song again, usually because the guitar player has been adjusting their volume during the first time through, and one more time, they might think they can get it right.
At this point, there might be a group effort to get the sound right, maybe by playing the song again, or moving onto another song. What might enter in, is the sound reinforcement aspect. Amplified music has made things so complicated that most hobby players will waste more time and money on gear than will ever be compensated by improved performance.

Alongside the issue of what amounts to wasting time on a "gig scrimmage" is, the players may be friends and actually have no objection to coming up with a new take on an old chestnut. Music does bring people together; there's no arguing that. Like anything else though, compromise is inevitable. Meshing various skill levels works only for the people on the low end of skills. Like many musicians, I've always treasured being the worst player in the group, it actually means you're going somewhere, getting to play with a higher level of musician than oneself. By the same token, being one of the better players in the group often aggravates bad behavior, either by those who can't cut it, or by the good player themselves who becomes morose or passive aggressive.

Hopefully I've laid out a few simple considerations to show that "practice makes worse." It sounds counter intuitive because people think when they invest time, things get better. Let's say you mow your lawn and all you have to show for it is a bunch of cut grass. Well, you spent the time on it so you think it looks better, right? Just like a haircut, the answer is no. It won't look right for a couple of days. One of the reasons smart bands only rehearse when a gig is a couple days out.

Another consideration I haven't mentioned has evolved in the last 20 years or so. It is the ubiquity of song lyrics easily printable from the internet. This has led to an explosion of people who see these lyric sheets as something to read during a performance, rather than something to memorize. It's easy to understand why superstars do this, they are paid well to not forget lyrics, especially their hits. During the first few rehearsals of a song, any kind of chart (as mentioned above) can ease the need for practice time. When the lyric sheet doesn't go away after a certain amount of practices and/or gigs, the rest of the musicians can sense the singer's lack of commitment. Everyone might react differently. I'm a bass player, and I'm no saint, so I start listening to just myself, and perhaps the drummer if I like what they are doing. The singer's gonna keep on reading their sheet and the guitar or keyboard player's gonna keep on adjusting their volume. That's when it's time to stop practicing and let the gigs be the practice.
Here's a couple of good links:

That's a quote from Jill Jaxx at her site http://learntosingbetterfast.com/
She also has a video on youtube.

This is a good link describing the need and tactics for memorization: http://www.singingwood.com/NewFiles/CarnegiePractice.html


Monday, February 11, 2013

The little record that could....and did...prove Elvis' appeal


On Sept. 9, 1954, a young rockabilly singer played at the grand opening of a shopping center; he was paid $10 to perform on a flat-bed truck parked in front of the Katz Drug Store. The next day he began a long session of recording at a local studio. He worked for hours on several song covers which were never released.

Finally things fell into place while he and the studio group were covering the 1948 r&b hit "Good Rockin' Tonight." Later that day, or maybe the next day, he recorded a pop tune he had heard in a movie, "I don't care if the sun don't shine."
These two sides became Sun 210, released on Sept. 25, 1954.
That night, Elvis appeared at the Eagle's Nest Club with the Tiny Dixon Band. The single record release, Elvis' second, would not hit big. But artistically, this Sun single represents one of the best performances of Elvis' career.

This is the original Sun 210 single. There's something special about owning it.
As life neatly arranges itself into archives with the help of computers, this unmistakable artifact reminds us of the mechanical and agricultural age when popular music started to rock and roll, as if creating a vulgar secular church.
Condition of the grooves in this Sun rarity is very good, and both sides play through nicely, with all the excitement of early Elvis on wax.
The label has some ring wear but no markings. There's a slight smudge on the author credit of "Good Rockin' Tonight"-- the word "Brown" can be read but not the word "Roy." (Both Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris had previous hits with this song). The artist credit is Elvis Presley Scotty and Bill.
From the earliest days of "big hole" 45 rpms-- innovated by RCA Victor as a game changer in the competition against Columbia (which invented the LP album)-- there were two "flip" sides. More often than not, the record would have a fast song on one side and a slower song on the other. It was also assumed that only one of the songs could be promoted enough to get wide radio airplay.
The term "rhythm and blues" is said to have been concocted because a 45 rpm might have a "rhythm" tune on one side and a "blues" on the other. Often these records contained music that would not be heard on radio. There would have to be strong encouragement to play a song on the radio if the artist was perhaps not caucasian. A few pioneering DJs were up to the task, especially if they had black listeners. The rest of the radio community needed an umbrella concept that was as lily-white as their baby boomer audiences. The concept became known as "rock 'n roll." The packaging of this idea coincided with television stagings such as "American Bandstand" and record promotions such as the ones pioneered by Alan Freed and other DJs. Almost as soon as the term "rock 'n roll" (originally a black coinage) was applied to the music, "rhythm and blues" became "oldies but goodies" or just "oldies." Many rhythm and blues records were exported to England to help create the "British Invasion" sound of the 1960s. British youth did not see the racial baggage in the music that the parents of their American counterparts saw. When Paul McCartney was making girls swoon by imitating LittleRichard, no American artist could pull off the same thing. White American kids needed their black music safe.... Motown and Berry Gordy accommodated this need.
Elvis Presley was not only a caucasian, he was an equal opportunity offender. He appropriated music from the rural country and from race "rhythm and blues" artists and became one of the top pop artists of all time. He was one of the "white boys" who could carry "rhythm and blues" into the white community under the moniker of "rock 'n roll." His touring throughout the South in the mid-1950s also helped pioneer the development of rockabilly music, which reached popularity later with artists such as Buddy Holly.
The example of Sun 210 is historically perfect in showing the "flip side" numerology of the 2 sided 45 rpm. The songs on this record are one side "rhythm (and blues)" and the other side "pop country." Elvis Presley could do genuine versions of each, adding his own touches. The 45 rpm was the perfect medium for him. This was his 2nd 45 rpm record with Sam Phillips for the Sun label.
The round punch marks on the label, for juke boxes, are present in this Sun 210, distinguishing it as an original. Trail-off numbers in the deadwax are U-130-45-72. The record is in a plain white sleeve. It is worth well over a thousand dollars. It plays well and is in VG condition.
It's February 11 and we're in the middle of back-to-back snowstorms with more coming this weekend.The USPS was closed on Saturday due to the snowstorm "Nemo" so there was much to ship today.

Just a coincidence, but the Hank Ballard single is called "The Switch-A-Roo"---- the Rock-A-Teens single is called "Woo-Hoo"---- and the sheet music sale for today is "Hi-Diddle-Diddle." It's a real day for baby talk!

The vintage Mentor Paperback is called "Man Makes Himself." That little box with the triangle window is a replacement needle for a record player.

This Louis Armstrong album came out while he was still alive but his popularity was dwindling and few people knew he practically created the art of jazz improvisation. Bessie Smith did not live to see her music revived in this Columbia Records box set of 78 rpms from the 1940s.

It was a light day for "print." Life was a weekly magazine and Horizon was a monthly history journal. Hardcover and paperbacks were also among today's sales.

Just a few of the LP albums that shipped today. The four Jimmie Davis LPs you see were from Gov. Davis's own personal collection. He was a teacher and a professional musician and a politician and a songwriter and performer among other things.

The alto tone I dig, the haircut, not so much

I never used to play alto sax much, always trying out mouthpieces and still never getting a decent sound. Then one time I was in Texas, Daddio spotted me his red Runyon plastic alto mouthpiece, in trade for some tenor mouthpiece he had his eye on. Up in Newington NH, my favorite drummer Bat Kaddy gave me this Yamaha student alto he had in his attic. I messed around with it and actually liked it better than my artist model Yanagisawa (my favorite tenor and soprano are also Yanagisawa). Then I got a chance to used it on this gig with Ray DeMarco in Portsmouth, NH. Ken Ormes had been working on singing "I'm Old Fashioned" and I honestly didn't know the tune but had brought a chord chart with me. Well, so it all worked out and I like the alto tone here, if you ever see me not getting tone this good, please let me know.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Back to the Garden

When the Children of God took over the Texas Soul Clinic in 1970, they begat an era of peace, love and disillusionment.
written March 1990
By MICHAEL PELLECCHIA
In February 1970, as the curtain rose on a one-act religious drama of uncommon passion, Nancy and I were students at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Eighty miles to the west via Interstate 20, the Children of God were settling into their commune near the town of Thurber.
Nancy was a Kappa Delta living in their house and I was in an anti-fraternity dorm. I'm almost sure that we met in some activist get-together, urging Safeway customers to boycott grapes and lettuce or passing out Vietnam protest literature.
Our idealism was both physical and defiant. We started going barefoot to classes and skinny-dipping at Benbrook Lake. We went to the Cellar in downtown Fort Worth -- it was open till 4 a.m. -- and to Hollywood-radical movies like Easy Rider and Putney Swope.
Nancy was blond, pretty and troubled. Her father had died when she was 11, leaving a void I never knew much about. She had thought about becoming a missionary while growing up in Dallas. In high school she had tried drugs. Now she wanted to try everything. So did I. It was my first time living away from home, a small New England town. I had lived a little -- seen Hair on Broadway, been to music festivals. I had even been in on one of the original Moratorium organizational meetings, in Litchfield, Conn., with playwright Arthur Miller and activist Sam Brown.
Together, Nancy and I discovered that long hair conferred no particular character virtues or guarantee of enlightenment. As a couple I suppose we were about as right for each other as Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona. Nancy really needed love and I needed a keeper. But we never could figure out the essence of our mismatch: that I was not a warm person and she was not a responsible one.
That fall she dropped out of school, only days after registration. She seemed to need a lot of attention and I wasn't helping much. I needed to study to keep up my scholarship. Still, I was hurt when Nancy took off for California. A guy I met in the dorm had bought a bunch of old mail trucks at a government auction. He sold them as hippie vans, and drove one himself. He proposed heading out to Thurber for adventure one warm, orange evening.
Dust kicked up from the wheels and in through the van's open sliding doors as Jack drove onto a winding dirt road off the interstate. We passed grazing Herefords, through live oak, mesquite and yucca, and across a dry creek bed, arriving as the sun was beginning to set on the 150-member Children of God colony.
You can take the same approach today, driving right up to the Art Deco pillars that mark the road into the old property of the Rev. Fred Jordan. The shed atop the rise is still there, too; it was an observation post from which threatening visitors could be spotted a mile away. The Children of God needed security against officials and parents who accused them of kidnapping their children and stealing their possessions.
When we had piled out of the van that night for a closer look, they took us to the dining hall, where a Jesus rock band was playing. Each time the leader yelled "Revolution!' everybody yelled back in rhythm, "For Jesus!'
Later, each of us was paired with a commune member and subjected to a high-powered pitch. Their object was a surrender to Jesus and to the Children of God. What they told us, in essence, was that we had to see that the system was too corrupt to save us. That we had to get out of the system; the devil was fixing to take it over, and the devil looked like a Russian bear. That we should bring everything we own and ourselves into the commune. Their world scenario mirrored that of the bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. He predicted that Russia and an alliance of Arab states would invade Israel, setting off an Armageddon that only the second coming of Christ could prevent.
That night a beautiful hippie girl (with divinely unshaven legs) sat me down with the Bible and fixed me with her eyes. Eye contact, especially of such intensity, was new then. At least to me. But although I fell for Jesus, I stopped short of agreeing to drop out of school and move in. The girl -- everyone had a Biblical name and hers was Keturah -- turned me over to an elder of the commune, who made it clear that my salvation was up in the air if I didn't join the group.
But I had just seen Nancy drop out of school. She was a year ahead of me at TCU -- maybe she knew better what she was leaving behind. But I was the first person in my family ever to go to college, so I thought my life was pretty radical already.
My friend Tom, however, got the message. He was swayed, and no one could change his mind; he was going to leave it all behind. He came back to campus a few days later with a commune member to pick up his clothes and his bass guitar.
His new leader, David Berg, had been a traveling preacher. In 1968 David's mother, Virginia, a radio evangelist, had asked him to teach at the Teen Challenge coffee house in Huntington Beach, Calif. Under his charismatic leadership, the first "Jesus people" commune, Teens for Christ, was born. From there, he and his extended family began to crisscross the continent preaching separation from the establishment, gradually evolving into confrontational "Revolutionaries for Christ." A newspaper reporter in New Jersey began to call his followers Children of God and eventually that was the name that stuck.
The Rev. Jordan's mission had once employed Mr. Berg in its broadcast ministry. He offered the group his Texas Soul Clinic property, a former missionary training camp, as headquarters. In return, a contingent of Mr. Berg's followers provided a youthful look as regulars on the Rev. Jordan's California-based Sunday morning television show, Church in the Home. The presence of hippie-looking Christian radicals helped the minister raise enough money to support not only the Texas Soul Clinic but his Towne Street Mission on Los Angeles' skid row -- with enough left over to purchase a communal ranch for the Children of God near Coachella, Calif.
The Texas Soul Clinic, with Mr. Berg and family in residence, became a magnet for idealistic youth uncomfortable with conventional authority. Like a 19th century utopian group, it tried to be self-sufficient.
Back in Fort Worth, I decided to finish reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road before beginning my own Bible studies in earnest.
Letters from Nancy were depressing. She was not finding herself, as she'd hoped, by sleeping around and getting high. She shacked up for a while with a psychology professor in Southern California. I wrote back, and with superior airs told her about Jesus, and where I'd found Him.
Suddenly, the theology that had always been used to support the status quo appeared to be arguing against it. Society and pop culture were questioning everything. College kids, Vietnam veterans, hippies and runaways were dropping out, tuning in and turning on to Jesus.
While I crusaded for Christ on campus, Nancy had become one of the hippies on the pier in Huntington Beach. She got my letter and checked out David Berg. The whole bit about the Children of God, the revolution for Jesus, the commune, the fundamentalism, must have hit a nerve with Nancy. She wrote to tell me she was a Teen for Christ, a Revolutionary for Christ, a Child of God.
In Fort Worth, I was shopping churches, going to different Sunday services, comparing preachers and hymns. Having grown up Catholic, the whole Protestant experience was new to me, especially the Pentecostals. I moved off campus into a rent house with some other Jesus freaks.
Summer came and I went on the road as a back-up musician with a gospel choir. When we got to Los Angeles, I went by the Towne Street Mission, where the Children of God were ensconced, and asked for Nancy. The elders kept me waiting for hours in the common area of the mission. I knew she was there; she had written me from there. But I was just part of the parade of acquaintances who had stopped by to look her up. Some of them, she told me later, got "saved.' But they wouldn't let me see her.
Then they shipped her to Canada, part of a movement-wide scattering of the flock that was the inevitable result of the equally inevitable culture clash between television evangelist Jordan and the Berg revolutionaries. David Berg was part of the falling out. He had changed his name to Moses David and departed a bit from the biblical script. He took a mistress and began to encourage "flirty fishing," the sexual recruiting of new members.
He still had what the Rev. Jordan wanted -- Vietnam veterans, former drug users, dealers and campus radicals endorsing his ministry. But as his charisma increased so did his demands, like: If your parents don't send money to the Children of God, don't write to them.
Parents responded by forming a pressure group called FREECOG (Free the Children of God). Some of them contracted with a former community relations specialist in Gov. Ronald Reagan's office, Ted Patrick, who came up with the idea of deprogramming. Essentially, Mr. Patrick would retrieve minors from the commune, sometimes forcibly, lock them in a motel room and subject them to a non-stop barrage of questions about the break they had made with society. When successful, Mr. Patrick was paid handsomely.
Confrontations increased. One of the Rev. Jordan's employees, Charles Johnson, accused the Children of God of breaking up families. He was denied entrance when he tried to evict the group from the Texas Soul Clinic in October 1971. "You turned my son against me after one year," he charged. "Since he has been with the group, he talks against his father. You taught him that."
Now that I'm old enough to be a parent, I can almost feel his rage. What can be worse than having your child turn against you? Only one thing: the possibility that the child is right on some level. Perhaps that was why some parents supported their children's decision to remain with the group. For a time, Nancy's mother became their spokeswoman.
The Children of God soon reached the attention of law enforcement agencies wherever its "houses" were located. In 1974, the Charity Frauds Bureau of the New York state attorney general's office put the heat on David Berg. Increasingly isolated by his evermore extravagant claims and behavior, he moved his followers out of the United States, to Canada, Europe and the Caribbean, settling at one point in Africa. By this time the Children of God were being accused of bizarre sexual practices. David Berg was portrayed as an alcoholic. In our fragmented lives he would eventually be replaced by Sun Myung Moon, Werner Erhardt, the Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. There's always someone trying to corner the market in revelation.
Today the old commune near Thurber speaks with a small voice. What remains are crumbling shacks and shards of plumbing and the occasional decomposed rag that was once a granny dress. The dusty West Texas wind blows eerily through the broken window panes and peeling door jambs of the dining hall.
But between February 1970 and October 1971, the population doubled from 150 to more than 300, phenomenal growth considering the living conditions. When the Jordan-Berg rift brought the Children's eviction by their TV evangelist landlord, they donned sackcloth and ashes and left under protest. Even though I never joined, a part of me went with them. What did we hope for? That we had latched onto something of importance. What did we dream of? Nothing less than peace and love for everyone. Then came the gradual disillusionment.
I married (and later divorced) the daughter of a Baptist minister. I became assistant manager of a religious bookstore. I witnessed exorcisms in California and got baptized in the Atlantic Ocean at Hollywood, Fla. In Memphis I met up with a former biker named Bobby Cash who had found Jesus. He had gone to Nashville and introduced himself to Johnny Cash, and Johnny gave him a set of all-black duds so he could be Memphis' "man in black' named Cash. I helped him operate the House of Psalms, a rambling old house where vagrants and hippies could come eat and sleep in exchange for learning about Jesus.
Bobby and I went to schools and talked against drugs, although we weren't allowed to talk about Jesus. Then Pentecostals from places like West Memphis, Ark., and Southaven, Miss., started dropping by unannounced with their congregations -- on field trips to the House of Psalms. All hours of the day and night they were around, praying, shaking tambourines, speaking in tongues and abandoning crutches. The whole Jesus thing had about run its course with this believer. I drifted into advertising as a copywriter, working up scripture to order, preaching the gospel of filling your leisure hours with consumables.
On the red-eye once from Los Angeles to New York I glanced at one of the weekly newsmagazines and there was a picture of Moses David with his so-called concubines on some Caribbean island. The Children of God was a sex cult, according to the accompanying article. I stared at the faces in the picture and there was Nancy, her expression just as innocent and her posture as loose as I remembered.
Shock must have registered on my face, for the serene, somewhat aloof person sitting next to me struck up a conversation. It was one of those old-fashioned airplane conversations about things important, things you would never talk about with a stranger elsewhere. About relationships between men and women, parents and children, past, present and future. My fellow traveler was actress Susan Anspach, still quite famous then for playing a waitress opposite Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. She talked about raising her children, studying the work of Henri Piaget, and about turning down the part of Paul Simon's wife in One Trick Pony because the character was, in her words, a stereotype.
Moments that pass too quickly, moments that linger for years -- they're all similar. Places pass, too. Historical preservationists don't get this. Real preservation is the existence of places in the mind, places of no consequence to people we know now. For me the old Jordan property is one of those places. The sky over Thurber still twinkles animatedly at night, away from the city lights.
David Berg would be hard to find today. Fred Jordan died in 1988. The Fred Jordan Ministry still helps homeless people on Towne Street in Los Angeles. For Mother's Day last year, it offered free cosmetic makeovers to homeless women.
And from England, Nancy answered a letter of mine last year with a plea to come to Jesus.