mother macrees uptown jug champions...

Jerry Garcia' Almost Acoustic album is a marvelous artefact from way back then.
It has hours of fun learning the licks and the bar counts and getting the songs down.
forget playstation.
this is the real deal!
In fact all of Jerry Garcias solo output is outstanding in terms of song choice, sidemen, arrangements and superior musicianship.
Before Jerry became the wunderkind of the Grateful Dead he began his apprenticeship in music playing bluegrass banjo and all his solo albums contain at least one tune from the Stanley Brothers or other traditional material.
All round this is the pinnacle of American music and individual virtuosity.


At the moment I am working on the changes from “I've Been All Around This World”.
On Almost Acoustic it is in the key of C but on the Dead album it is in D.
the C version is best with a nifty intro and Jerry putting all his skill into the instrumental passages.
Tonight I will put it on the slow VLC player and count off the bars. I'm sure that they are not the same length in every chorus so there ya go.
To find out requires 'headwork'.


Right now it is high summer. The temperature is in the high 20's and the grass is crisp.The telly is boring and I have watched quite a bit of al Jazeera.
They have their own view of the world and that is fair enough but the anti Americanism is striking and is never very far from the surface.
From a western point of view it is quite off putting when one listens to some ostensibly sane and rational person predict the end of the American Empire.
In New Zealand the dweebs say we are more English than the English and American comedies are not funny but they all have a Hardly Davison or a fibreglass Ford or Chevy Hotrod if they can afford one.
As Aristotle said it is impossible to win an argument against someone who will not listen and is determined to ignore any reason that opposes their own view.
 Is there such a thing as infantile schizophrenia?
Anyway it is tempting to think that the anti Americanism on al Jazeera is all about envy. Consumer goods and unlimited water supplies guaranteeing bountiful  harvests and there is that element but the real determinant is resentment.
Many cultures tell their children that they are the chosen because of their history, their culture, their religion but eventually reality always intrudes and suddenly they become aware that the heaviest hitter is the USA.
What they resent is the coercive power.
That is what they want more than anything else.
The history of world since time immemorial has been the history of putative empires.
Hammurabi, Sargon, The Hittites, The Assyrians, Xerxes, Alexander, Rome, the Huns, Vandals, Genghis, Tamerlane, The Ottomans, Hitler.
They all had a go.
Now in the 21st c, the strongest power is the United States Of America who filled the gap after Germany was defeated twice and England lost most of her empire and influence due to the cost of the war.
Like it not there is nowhere else to go and America is in the box seat.
The American system whatever its faults and they are many pays allegiance to the rule of law and the separation of powers.
There is no one person or institution with supreme power to fix parking tickets or order executions of miscreants or political opponents and dispense justice on a personal whim.
Democracy can be traced from Athens in the 4^th century bc, to its remanifestation in England in the 17^th century and its republican creation in the New World.
When I hear people seething with resentment about the US then I hear the echoes of oriental despotism and nepotistic absolutism.
Whingeing never accomplished anything.