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Thursday, April 24, 2003

Fascinators It is an intriguing word that bubbled around in my mind on my recent trip to northwestern Ohio. First there was my mini-obsession, The Quest For Dave, which reached a mini-fulfillment when I went to Durdel’s Music and spoke with Fred Shuman, the current owner. I learned that one of my top 10 favorite guitarists was alive and still playing sometimes.  After he and the rest of the Hurricanes split with Johnny in 1961, they formed a group called The Fascinators who played the Peppermint Club in Toledo. They did mainly covers, but we didn’t call them covers then; we would say “they sound just like the record!” When the record is Sam Cooke singing You Send Me that’s nothing to sneeze at.   When I arrived home this week, and had >12kbps Web access, I checked a little more and found Les McDonald’s incredible web photos of a recent (last November) Toledo band nostalgia concert which reunited Dave Yorko and Lionel “Butch” Mattice (the bass player) onstage. Man, would I ever have loved being there, had I known.   Being a dumbass farm kid, it never occurred to me to wonder what a fascinator was. The band must have taken the name fascinators because they fascinated listeners, which they did, especially when Bill “Little Bo” Savich did a 15-minute drum solo on Caravan. Later on, by the mid-60s, Caravan drum solos became a cliché, as bad as Louie, Louie, but Little Bo made those drums sing. His eyes would light up like he was a possessed man and he played rhythms you never heard in church. The rest of the band did the obligatory walk from the stage and mingled with the crowd. By 1964, when the Caravan routine became mandatory, the egotistical drummer in one of my ill-fated bands insisted that we not waste rehearsal time learning the bridge, just hack our way through one A-section and then get our butts off the stage. But The Fascinators did it uptight, clear through, quickly assembling on stage and nailing the major key B-section on a precision downbeat after only two bars of lead-in from Little Bo. It was on Stormsville, late last year, that I learned that Little Bo passed away January 2002.     On my trip back home, I took along Black Swamp Farm by Howard E. Good, a prescient move because of the prolonged return trip. It is about early farm life in the area southwest of Toledo where I grew up. When I reached these paragraphs, waiting in the American Eagle terminal at LaGuardia, I suddenly realized that fascinators were something else before they became a band:   One winter, "Way" mufflers appeared in all the clothing stores. They caught the fancy of men and boys and not a few girls. The best were made of fine knitted wool with a thick, warm fold to encircle the neck over the regular collar and fasten at the back with snap buttons. A wide "bib" in front tucked inside coat or vest. All were designed to make it appear from the front that the wearer had on a turtleneck sweater inside his coat. Few were interested in this make-believe quality; the muffler's popularity was due mainly to the warm comfort it afforded and to the convenience of putting it on or taking it off.   At that time women and girls were wearing "fascinators," which had been in use long before Way mufflers appeared, and continued in favor long after the latter were forgotten. The fascinator was usually made of loosely crocheted wool yarn, in the form of an isosceles triangle with a broad base. It was worn, folded a time or two, over the head, the ends wrapped about the neck.   Forty years too late, my curiosity finally surfaced. I did a Google on “fascinator” this afternoon and found some incredible examples on the website linked in the title to this piece, though they are not of the neck variety in the book. I remember Mrs. Overmeyer used to wear one of those things, fastened to the side of her head. When I was very small, I thought it was part of her head. They probably were called fascinators because they were fastened to the hair, unlike a hat - which stays there of its own accord. I remember those things and I remember hats. There was always something silly about headgear, de rigueur in that time and place. They went out of fashion because everyone got serious, but not so jaded as to deny the magic that can be found in a single word. 6:11:36 PM    comment []

Iraq weapons 'will not be planted'   Jack Straw has dismissed suggestions that coalition forces would "plant" weapons of mass destruction to justify the war in Iraq.   Well, this pretty much negates the old Texas expression “All hat and no cattle.” With this much bullshit, the cattle must be nearby. 4:38:22 PM    comment []

Golden Oldies What now my love, now that you've left me, how can I live through another day. Watching my dreams turn to ashes, and my hopes turn to bits of clay. Once I could see, once I could feel, now I am numb, I've become unreal. I walk the night, without a goal, stripped of my heart and my soul. What now my love, now that it's over, I feel the world falling all around me. Here come the stars, tumbling around me, there's the sky, where that sea should be. What now my love, now that you're gone, I'd be a fool to go on and on. No one would care, no one would cry, if I should live, if I should live or die. What now my love, now there is nothing, only my last, my last good-bye. 2:16:25 AM    comment []

Now that things have quit going BOOM in Iraq and the attention spans of Fox fans shift to gun shows and NASCAR, let us examine new developments in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates. Oh my! Those ungrateful Shiites are demanding we leave their country so they can form a constitutional democracy. Worse, they want to model it after Iran, which would guarantee membership in the power trio Accent On Evil for as long as they remain the majority. No problem...we've got another Reva Pahlavi waiting in the wings for Iran, let Iraq model that! - or a secular democracy like Turkey, meaning the Kurds get screwed again. No problem, they'll soon forget and let bygones be bygones, no one ever carries a grudge in the Middle East. Meanwhile Fox plays Hearts with the Deck Of Death and, with a forlorn eye on Nielson,  makes nary a mention of their engineer nabbed for smuggling precious Iraqi artworks. I guess he's innocent until proven guilty - a reassuring return to old-fashioned constitutional values at Fox. And that's the latest from Iraq, where all the women wear hijab, all the men carry rifles, and all the children wear strange-looking vests. 1:00:03 AM    comment []