3 Chords & the Truth

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, we're going to be thumbing our way down that folk highway, and then take a side trip down a country road.

Either way you go, you'll find some of the greatest music America -- and the world -- ever has produced.

FOR ME, country music wasn't an instant-gratification kind of thing. Growing up in the Deep South in the 1960s and '70s, it was, to a large extent, the background music of my young life, but it wasn't my background music of choice. That would have been The Who, the Beatles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Billy Preston, the Meters, Irma Thomas and Al Green.

And even the Carpenters . . . and (ahem) the Partridge Family.

Country music was the background music of my life in the sense that I couldn't avoid it. It was the music the Old Man listened to on the radio -- and you moved the AM dial away from WYNK, WSLG or WLBI at substantial risk to life and limb.

Same deal with the Porter Wagoner Show on television every Saturday afternoon.

I yearned for "that g**damn hippie music," as the Old Man referred to my generation's soundtrack. But I also ended up knowing the likes of Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones and "pretty Miss Norma Jean." One of my favorites -- albeit something of an ambivalent favorite -- was "Country" Charley Pride.

And if you don't know that it's C-H-A-R-L-E-Y instead of C-H-A-R-L-I-E, you're a damn pretender, son.

BACK THEN, however, there were two sides to life: yours . . . and your parents'. The existential question of one's young existence -- Which side are you on? -- required exactly no thought.

Whatsoever.

It's a funny thing. Though the question was simple, all kinds of stuff got mixed up in it that really had no business there. The Beatles vs. Porter Wagoner is not a fundamental question of good and evil.

"It's a big world out there," we young'uns constantly told ourselves. Our actions and our prejudices, however, betrayed our lack of believe in our own party line.

In fact, while "Which side are you on?" was -- and is -- the central question in any of our lives, we stupidly applied it to all the wrong areas. And not at all to the Right Area.

Then again, neither did our parents, by and large.

It is possible, and even quite healthy, to like both the Sex Pistols and Ernest Tubb. It's likewise possible to associate with, and even like, both Democrats and Republicans. Squares and hippies both have their virtues . . . and their vices.

The world is big. It's our hearts and minds that tend to be small.

Too small, as a matter of fact, to apprehend exactly how cosmically huge a question is "Which side are you on?"

THAT, IN A NUTSHELL, is what the Big Show happens to be about this week. 3 Chords & the Truth: It's the show where we ask the big questions and where, this week, we're playing ALL FOUR kinds of music.

Rock . . . and roll. Not to mention country . . . and western.

Be there. Aloha.

Beat.

The beat. The beat . . . hey . . . the beat . . . hey . . .the beat . . . hey . . . the beat. The beat beat beat.

WE GOT THE BEAT. It's in the air. It's in your hair. It will tear. If you bear . . . the beat. Hey. The beat. Hey. The beat.

What's the beat? I repeat. I repeat the beat.

Hey. The beat. Hey. The beat.

It started before time, it took off with jive, it's the heartbeat of life, and it'll cut like a knife.

Man.

IT'S THE BEAT. Hey. The beat. Hey. The beat.

3 Chords & the Truth got the beat. 3 Chords & the Truth is the beat. 3 Chords & the Truth wants your dancin' feet.

Dancin'. Dancin' to the beat. Hey. The beat. Hey. The beat.

Man.

The beat. 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

Didn't manage to get The Moody Blues on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth, but it strikes me that the spoken-word ending to Nights in White Satin sums up well the vibe that permeates much of the show.

PARTICULARLY this week's "theme" set . . . all about dreams.

Here's the lyric:

Breathe deep the gathering gloom.
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day's useless energy spent.

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one.
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son.
Senior citizens wish they were young.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night;
Removes the colors from our sight;
Red is gray and yellow white
But we decide which is right...
And which is an illusion.

THE SHOW IS 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

The Devil is in the kudzu, and Satan has surfaced in the swamp this week on the Big Show.

Ashley, meanwhile, contentedly slips his mint julep on the front porch. Swinging back and forth as the breeze comes up off the river, he admires the moonlight and magnolias.

"Repent, sinners! Jesus is calling!" Brother Cletus is working up a full head of steam at the revival tent at the edge of town.

Cries of "Hallelujah!" emerge from the Amen Corner, as the church ladies out back prepare to serve up temptation once the Holy Ghost has put in a good night's work. Not Demon Rum but, instead, the shameless hussy Blackberry Cobbler.

DOWN THE ROAD, some good ol' boys get loaded on Demon Bud. Up the creek, somebody's out running a trot line. In the city, a banker has supper at the Club.

In the 'hood, a murder will end up as a local brief in the newspaper.

At the family restaurant out on the highway, a black server greets an old white lady as "Honey" and they embrace in a big hug. On an Internet sports board, an SEC fan complains about how the "n*****s" got Confederate flags banned from the local stadium. The Civil War wasn't about slavery, he types. Facts is facts.

On campus, the conservative college kids rail against the liberal college kids. The progressives berate the reactionaries. None of them understand their parents. And parents don't understand their kids, whose private-school educations didn't come cheap.

MEANWHILE, the angels keep watch over the neighborhood, as Miss Betty stops to chat with Miss Bertha, and Mr. Joe has a fist full of quarters for Junior to play video games while he chews the fat with Senior at the Quick Shop.

And old times there are not forgotten. Way down South in Dixie. On 3 Chords & the Truth.

Be there. Aloha . . . y'all.

1968. What a year.

An amazing year, a despairing year. A deadly year.

IT -- 1968 WAS -- the year we lost Martin and Bobby, who died 40 years ago today . . . murdered by yet another crazy-mad guy with a gun. Sixty-eight . . . the year of the police riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

The year of the Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong lost the battle but won the war.

1968. A year of wonder. Apollo 8 and William Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman reading from Genesis as their tiny command module orbited the moon.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

AS THE ASTRONAUTS read words more than half as old as civilization itself -- read from sacred scripture on Christmas Eve -- we saw the Earth rise over the horizon of the moon's surface.

I guess whether you remember 1968 as a year of strife and horror come to our living rooms every night on the evening news or, alternatively, as a year of possibility and wonder depends on whether you were a kid or not. I was a kid and, though the horror was there -- somewhere fuzzy in the background -- what stuck with me was the wonder.

The Wonder Years . . . somebody ought to make a TV show. . . .

I THINK THAT, now, as middle-aged man, is the time I really appreciate the horror on the periphery of my 7-year-old's existence during that fateful year. The gut-wrenching agony of the murdered Martin Luther King Jr. The mind- and soul-numbing senselessness and incalculable loss of another Kennedy gunned down.

I still see, in my mind's eye, the live TV coverage of the funeral train.

All the "what ifs" surrounding all the "never will bes." Possibilities thwarted. Hope denied.

Is four decades later too late to grieve?

1968. A hell of a damn year, that's for certain.

Well, at least the music was first rate. And we'll be hearing a lot of it on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

Be there. Aloha.

Home

Years I had been from home,
And now, before the door
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business, - just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.

Emily Dickinson

WE'RE THINKING about home this week on 3 Chords & the Truth, the music half of the Revolution 21 media empire.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

This week on Four Songs: five songs. It was necessary, one of the songs is by John Denver, and a "make good" was in order.

IN MY DEFENSE, I didn't pick the music. That was done according to what was hot with the record-buying public . . . in April 1975. Unfortunately, John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" was big back then.

Unsurprisingly, I would have picked differently. But they don't let 14-year-old kids program Top-40 radio stations, and that's how old I was when this episode of Four Songs was done. Live. Through the facilities of the Big 91, WLCS radio in Baton Rouge, La.

In all its amplitude-modulated glory.

And glorious it was. So glorious that I was sitting at the kitchen table, early the morning of April 17, 1975, with my portable reel-to-reel tape recorder patched into the earphone jack of my clock radio to preserve a piece of WLCS forever.

It was a Thursday. Gary King was the morning man.

WLCS was one of Baton Rouge's two Top-40 blowtorches. Radio 13 -- WIBR -- was the other. 'IBR had some great jocks, and a friend of mine even was a part-timer there when I was in high school . . . but I was an 'LCS man.

No offense to WIBR.

Of course, by 1976, I was firmly in the camp of Loose Radio (WFMF during its album-oriented rock salad days). But I'll always love Double-U ELLLLLLL CEE Ess . . . even though it died in 1983, a few months after I married a KOIL woman from Omaha.

And if you're under, say, 30, you're not getting this conversation at all, are you?

LET ME EXPLAIN. Once upon a time, there was this thing called radio -- AM radio -- and we listened to it on "transistors," which were like iPods, only affordable. And better.

An iPod only can bring you the few hundred songs you load into it after illegally downloading them off the Internet or legally buying them on iTunes. But a transistor radio, that could bring you the world, baby.

All for free. And without the threat of a lawsuit by the music cops.

The world first came to my bedroom on a transistor radio tuned to WLCS. I also could tune in the whole wide world on WIBR, or maybe WTIX in New Orleans -- and sometimes KAAY through the ether from Little Rock at night -- but I mostly dug those rhythm and blues . . . and rock 'n' roll . . . and countrypolitan . . . and a bit of ring-a-ding-ding, too, on the Big 91.

What it was, was the breadth of American popular culture at my fingertips. And British Invasion, too.

Never was education so fun. I turned on the radio just to listen to some tunes, and I found myself under the spell of a thousand different tutors -- friendly voices from morning to overnight -- playing for me the breadth of musical expression . . . or at least the musical expression that charted well. It is because of 'LCS, 'IBR, 'TIX (and later, 'FMF) that this Catholic Boy has catholic tastes.

Your iPod is cool and all, but it can't do that.

SEE, THE DEAL IS that I can't repay the debt I owe to WLCS, for one. I can't repay the debt I owe to Gary King, that friendly morning voice on this episode of Four Songs.

For a spell there, King's was the voice I woke up to, got ready for school to and ate breakfast to. He played the hits and told me what the weather was outside, and Gene Perry gave the news at the top and bottom of the hour.

Back in the day, radio was a well-rounded affair.

King's also was the friendly voice that answered the studio line when an awkward teen-ager in junior-high hell would call to request a song. And his was the friendly voice that would take time to chat for a bit when that kid -- or his mother -- sometimes thought he had nothing better to do . . . like put on a morning show.

I didn't know it then, and Gary King (real name: Gary Cox) probably didn't know it, either, but what he was doing was being Christ, in a sense, to a lonely kid and his -- come to think of it -- lonely mother. I shudder to think what one of today's "morning zoo" shows would do with rich material like me and Mama.

That is, if they answered the studio line at all.

Via the AM airwaves, I made a human connection with WLCS and Gary King. I needed that. We all need that. And you can't get that from your iPod, though some of us will try to give it, because you have to work with what you have.

BEFORE APRIL 1975 was done, Gary King was gone. He originally was from Kentucky, and one day the call came from WAKY, the Top-40 powerhouse in Louisville that Gary grew up listening to.

On his last show, Gary's ending bit was "convincing" Gene Perry that he could catch a bullet in his teeth if the newsman would just help him out on the gun end. It didn't work as planned . . . which means it worked perfectly in radio's "theater of the mind."

I think I shed a tear or two.

And a couple of years later, I was learning the ropes at WBRH, Baton Rouge High's student-run FM station. And 33 years later -- after various pit stops on the air and hot off the press -- here we are at Revolution 21, trying to figure out what "radio" will be in this new millennium . . . right here on the Internet.

Thanks, Gary. I can't repay you in full, but maybe this will make a nice down payment.

Here's another special audio presentation: A bit of nostalgia recorded off the TV in the early '70s in Baton Rouge.

I remembered this recording when I heard of the death of Jules d'Hemecourt, a journalism professor when I was in school at LSU . . . and the man behind "The Cajun 12 Days of Christmas" when he was news director at Channel 33 in Baton Rouge.

This must have been recorded by me, off the air, sometime around Christmas 1973. Maybe '74. D'Hemecourt, who also was the Channel 33 news anchor at the time, introduces the recording on a holiday newscast.

Back in the day.

Enjoy.

Here's a special audio presentation -- don't worry, the podcast will post as usual Friday -- from Revolution 21. I thought you just might want to hear this . . . a ghost in the machine, as it were.

What it is, is a recording of legendary Alabama radio host Joe Rumore from Oct. 28, 1949 on WVOK, Birmingham. And it's an extraordinary look back 58 years across the tidal wave of change and cultural revolution that radically transformed America.

It's a look at who we used to be, and at a kinder, more gentle and humane era of broadcasting that -- to today's ears -- sounds like a just-received transmission across many light-years of interstellar space from a star system far, far away.

You can read more about it on "Revolution 21's Blog for the People" at http://revolution-21.blogspot.com/2007/03/way-we-were-1949.html.

Enjoy.