Kansas (band) | The Electron Pencil

Times Change

And often for the better. Dig this remastered blast from the past. Rare Earth was the first all -white group to have a hit on the Motown label. This album cut goes on for nearly 22 minutes, as did many anthemic and iconic tunes did back in 1969 and ’70.

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These are blue-eyed soul brothers if there ever were any, to borrow a phrase from the late, great Don Cornelius. You can cite this tune as proof if you care to make the argument that music was better three, four, five, or six decades ago. Which seems a fool’s errand as far as I’m concerned.

This track has a drum solo that goes on for — get this — more than three minutes. Hell, plenty of rock ‘n roll era songs lasted just three minutes in toto.

Here’s a confession: I detested drum solos. In fact, when I stopped going to big, arena-rock concerts sometime around 1975, one of my main reasons was the fear that I’d climb the rafters and jump off to my certain death if I was subjected to yet another drum solo.

Neil Peart Bangs Away

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I ask you, my loyal readers who are old enough to remember big shows at the International Amphitheater or the Chicago Stadium or Market Square Arena in Indy or Freedom Hall in Louisville, what was the purpose of the drum solo? Did you enjoy hearing them? Why?

Honestly, I want to know. Because I always felt they drained the life out of any concert. I recall always starting to look around the arena in a state of sheer boredom when the drummer got going. I could never understand why the people around me went apeshit at some point during the drum solo.

Anyway, I assume there aren’t drum solos anymore, which seems a huge mark in favor of today’s concert-goers.

I await your comments.

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History

My last arena-rock concert was Paul McCartney & Wings at the Stadium in 1975. McCartney was my least favorite Beatle and by the mid-70s his music was unlistenable. By the ’80s, when he pushed treacle like “The Girl Is Mine” and “Say Say Say” with Michael Jackson and “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder, he should have been brought before the World Court for crimes against humanity’s ears.

Still, a guy I knew was scalping tix to see McCartney and I felt compelled to buy them for the then-princely sum of $25 the pair because of the history of the thing. Within a year and a half I’d made the full transition to punk music and more intimate venues like the Aragon Ballroom and Tut’s.

The Aragon

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In fact, somewhere in my box of keepsakes I still have the tickets for the Sex Pistols New Year’s Eve show at the Ivanhoe Theater, one of four stops they had to cancel because they couldn’t get visas in time. They only played seven dates on their American tour, the highlights of which being Sid Vicious carving the words “Gimme a fix” in his chest and Johnny Rotten coughing up blood due to the flu.

I get the feeling that some arena-rock aficionados and drum solo lovers might call me out on this one but I’m not claiming the Sex Pistols were anything more than a sensational middle finger directed at the pretentious prog rock of the day. As long as they helped bury Kansas, the Pistols’ll be okay by me. Suffice it to say I’ve seldom, if ever, listened to them on iTunes.

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Court & Spark

Right now my money’s teetering between conviction on a much lesser charge and a complete acquittal for King Doofus George Zimmerman in Florida.

Book it: He ain’t gonna fry for a 2nd degree rap. He was getting the bejesus kicked out of him by Trayvon Martin (not that I blame the kid) and any reasonable jury has to nix the murder call.

I don’t think the jury really wants to let the pudgy Guardian of the Neighborhood walk but they may have to. And if they do, what’s the reaction on the streets going to be? Are we in for a reprise of LA 1992?

The Thick Blue Line

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Back twenty years ago after the Rodney King verdict came down South Central LA residents tore up the town, leading to 53 deaths and a billion dollars-worth of damage. But that was well before the election of Barack Obama and the resultant sense among the lower primate orders of the American electorate that “outsiders” and “aliens” (read the N-word here) were taking over their holy land. If dark-skinned folks take to the streets after a potential Zimmerman pass, are the armed-to-the-teeth Ted Nugent wannabes of America going to wade into the fray?

Role Model

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It could happen.

Then the Prez might be pressured to send in federal troops and once that happens, the militias and tinfoil-hat gangs will really take the gloves off.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole thing.

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THE QUOTE

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity — and I’m not sure about the former.” — Albert Einstein

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A HEAVENLY PIONEER

Bloomington’s own Camilla Williams, international opera star and professor emeritus at IU, died Sunday. She was 92.

Williams

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Williams was thought to be the first black woman to appear with a major US opera company, the New York City Opera in 1946. Her late husband, Charles Beavers, was an attorney for Malcolm X.

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MASTER OF MINIMALISM

Philip Glass is 75 today. He is also still very, very cool.

Glass

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Do yourself a favor and download the documentary, “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.” It is a gloriously beautiful and ugly examination of life on late 20th Century Earth. It has no narrator; no human’s voice is heard throughout. The only sound you’ll hear is Glass’s musical score.

Glass presaged trance music by decades. And the composer certainly influenced Brian Eno, whose ambient forms beginning in the mid-1970s helped save the world from the navel-gazing pap of the likes of Kansas and other uber-pretentious prog rockers.

Eno

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Glass may well be the composer music students in the year 2512 revere as they do Bach or Wagner today.

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INDIANA: THE SQUARED STATE

Now that the great state o’Indiana is considering teaching the myth of Intelligent Design in our public schools, it’s worth keeping in mind that our fair fiftieth of this holy land once before attempted to throw a caveman’s club into the gears of intellectual progress.

Mental Floss points out that in the 1890s, an Indiana chucklehead by the name of Edward J. Goodwin fantasized that he’d discovered a method to “square the circle,” a long disproved mathematical exercise. Goodwin was convinced that by equating the circle with a square, one could easily find its area.

Part of Goodwin’s fever dream was to jigger with the value of pi, the constant that allows the sane among us to calculate a circle’s area. It was the equivalent of NASA navigators saying, “Aw, what the hell, let’s just call the distance to the moon 240,000 miles — what’s a couple thousand miles one way or another?”

Given that attitude, the mummified corpses of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might today be floating several billion miles outside our Solar System.

Just Point That Thing Toward The Moon, Boys

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Goodwin — from the town of Solitude, appropriately enough — told the world in the 1890s that he’d found the secret to squaring the circle. In the grand tradition of many another snake oil salesman, Goodwin was more than willing to let mathematicians and educators use his secret formula — for a price.

But he had a soft spot for Indiana and offered to let Hoosier State schools teach his method for free as long as the state legislature would enact a statute declaring his crackpot idea the real thing.

And guess what — several Indiana House committees studied his equations, including his insistence that pi should be 3.2 (as opposed to the accurate constant 3.141592653589793….) The committees approved Goodwin’s methods and wrote up a bill declaring pi to be 3.2 and the circle, legally, squared.

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And then the full House approved the bill unanimously! By the time the nation’s newspapers got hold of this news and began to bray with laughter at Indiana, the state Senate defeated the bill. Even that vote was iffy after a Senate committee passed it onto the floor.

Science and Indiana — I wonder if this is the first time the two words have ever appeared together in print.

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GIRL OF MY DREAMS

Another chestnut from my college radio years, by Bram Tchiakovsky.

Pure power pop poetry:

Judy was an American girl/

She came in the morning/

With the US Mail.

Enjoy the soaring melody, goosebump harmony, and bell-ringing rhythm chord progressions.

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The Electron Pencil

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