Aguardiente, Carrie Underwood and American Idol–A Mass Transit Fantasy

Posted on by abassford

Introduction: A few years ago, my friends at work bought me a Carrie Underwood CD for my birthday. I like old school country music but hadn’t listened to much coming out of Nashville for a few years. They asked me what I thought of her, and this story sort of poured out. Carrie, if your lawyers are reading this, let me state for the record that what follows is obviously complete fiction. It is simply an artist’s conception of what might happen in an alternate universe when somebody wins American Idol.

I’m on the subway, listening to the Carrie Underwood CD. If you’re not familiar with the name, Carrie is the newest winner of the American Idol contest.

It’s not as good as the CD I was just listening to by Diomedes, the great Colombian vallanato artist, but it’s still pretty good. Lacks something, though. I can’t pin down exactly what it is. Maybe she needs to record under the influence of aguardiente (the indigenous Colombian liquor made from anise and favorite tipple of vallanatos)!

I will go to Jersey City and buy some for her. Then I will stand backstage to meet her and spike her herbal tea…It will do her good. Put a little spunk in her country funk. And what would happen next?

First, she will add a couple of Colombians in big white hats with accordions to her band…no one will notice them at first, but as the tour goes forward and the road crew discovers the joys of aguardiente, the accordions gradually creep forward in the mix…

Then Carrie starts looking at old Selena videos for fashion cues…then she records in phonetic Spanish, becomes a big star, transfers her contract to Sony Latin America, moves to the mountains of Colombia, starts smoking the local flora, takes dance lessons from Shakira.

Her management is perplexed as she becomes the first gringa crossover star and tours Latin America incessantly, denouncing the US as imperialist and advocating the nationalization of oil…all because we slipped aguardiente into her Celestial Seasons Sleepy Time…

Then she does a sexy video, clad only in a torn Che Guevara t-shirt, of her new song, “Immigration Sí,” the hit single off her new album “Por Los Illegales.” The video is shot in red lighting, and climaxes in her passionate embrace with the hottest, most disreputable looking Vallanato star…what else have I left out? Oh yes, her next album “A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Cumbia!” Recorded in Cartagena with imported Nashville pedal steel, fiddle, and banjo players along with the cream of the vallanato guys, the album becomes a smash hit, not only in Latin America, but Europe as well.

In the meantime, to follow up her Cumbia album, she does an album of narcocorrido collaborations, “Los Tres Animales.” The cover shot features her in a barely legal bikini in the colors of the Colombian flag, her arms around a sweaty hunky guy in army fatigues in the middle of a pile of ganja-filled burlap sacks.

The National Enquirer does a feature article with the minister of the church she grew up in. “I just don’t understand what’s happened to Carrie. She was such a good girl before she went native.” Teary photos of her parents appear in the Star. OK! does an interview with the American Idol judges discussing her current antics.

Randy Jackson: “Dog, I was worried about her. She was a little too much like the girl next door to really be believable. I knew she must have had a dark side somewhere. But at least she isn’t pitchy anymore.”

Paula Abdul: “I’m still a big fan of Carrie’s. I know this period must be baffling to the American Idol audience, but an artist must be allowed to change and grow.”

Simon Cowell: “We have seen Carrie mature into a real artist. Unfortunately the artist she is now most likely to become is the kind that applies home-made tattoos in prison. I hope her management realizes that she may be destroying all that they have worked for by her titillating behavior. What’s her cell phone number again?”

Finally Carrie goes too far. She moves to Brazil and gets into favela funk, performing live at favela dances to boost her street cred. She learns Portuguese as well as the favela dialect. She dabbles in drugs and drinking, but her real vice is young street boys. The favela people embrace her, as the Spanish-speaking countries have before them. But her career is derailed by a massive lawsuit when a remix that includes a sample of her singing “You Light Up My Life” over favela beats, recorded without permission from the company that owns the original master, becomes a worldwide smash in dance clubs.

The song’s video features a naked Carrie and three favela boys frolicking in a large pot of feijoada while she warbles “You Light Up My Life ” into various parts of their anatomy. MTV bans the video, which some of her technologically minded favela fans bootleg anyway and put up on the internet. It becomes the most downloaded clip at YouTube, crashing the server daily.

However, there is a problem. The original version of the song came out on Curb Records, which is owned by Seventies music mogul Mike Curb, a right-wing fundraiser and devout Christian. Grossly offended by the whole idea, he sues everybody within moaning distance of Carrie and threatens to shut down Brazil in the bargain.

Increasingly addicted to “Los Tres Animales,” Carrie is booked on a worldwide stadium tour, but becomes very ill from the stress and drug abuse and is unable to finish the tour. The medical expenses and the resulting lawsuits from Curb and the tour’s promoters bankrupt her.

To add to her problems, she hasn’t paid any income tax for years and the IRS serves papers on her when she comes back to the states for her younger sister’s wedding. Carrie goes into seclusion in a tiny cabin near where she grew up, attempting to connect with her roots.

During the agonies of withdrawal, she sits down with her acoustic guitar and writes a double CD’s worth of songs about all she has been through. Unable to afford studio time and on the run from various process servers, she records the songs directly into a friend’s computer, then goes back into her cabin. She fasts and prays, removed from all contact with the outside world.

The friend puts up one of Carrie’s songs on her MySpace site. The track, “Life Is A Favela” becomes the most downloaded song on the internet and another smash hit.

Carrie is hot again, but has no idea. Her cabin has no phone or internet access, and her cell phone battery is run down. Carrie’s sister, back from her honeymoon, calls the IRS on her behalf and negotiates a payment plan. Her pastor fields the phone calls that come into her family’s little house, all from major recording and management companies offering to handle her legal issues if she will sign with them.

Carrie emerges from seclusion with renewed purpose and a redefined agenda. From now on, she will only perform with her acoustic guitar, wearing white. She becomes a vegan and maintains a monastic lifestyle. Her sister and pastor negotiate a new record deal with Polygram.

“Life Is A Favela,” the album of songs recorded into her friend’s computer, is released and becomes one of the top ten albums of all time. The songs are in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, appealing to worldwide markets. With the money pouring in, Carrie pays everyone—the IRS, Mike Curb, the promoters, and her lawyers—back in full. She continues to live in the tiny cabin, coming down from the hills to visit her sister, her parents, and her new niece.

Carrie tours selectively. Most of her performances are for charity. She is particularly interested in literacy and health ventures for the poor in the slums of South America, and drug rehab programs. Though once again a devout Christian, Carrie downplays her faith in interviews, claiming it is a private matter and she is no role model for anyone. She rejects all attempts by the right-wing Christian community to adopt her as a spokesperson. To the contrary, she supports a number of initiatives that help illegal aliens in America, though doing so privately.

Carrie’s next album consists of just her voice with a chorus of Latin singers and an array of percussionists playing the traditional rhythms of Colombia and Brazil. The album, though it doesn’t match the sales of “Life Is A Favela,” still sells millions worldwide, and some of the tracks live on for years in dance clubs because they are easy to drop into DJ mixes.

After several years of chastity, Carrie begins to rediscover her sexuality, having first a brief affair with one of her tour managers, then a longer relationship with a man who knew her in high school, before all of the drama started. Unfortunately, her past indulgences have resulted in extensive damage to her health, and they are unable to have children.

Carrie goes into a period of depression again and the relationship dissolves. However, her devotion to her religion, along with the help of a skilled therapist, helps her through this difficult period and she eventually rebounds. But she develops writer’s block after her recovery.

The record company is nagging her for a new album, since it has been two years for the last one. Suffering from hopeless writer’s block, a desperate Carrie reaches out to the gospel community and puts together an all-star Christmas album. Her share of the proceeds will go to Christian charities worldwide. Shirley Caesar, Fred Hammond, Rance Allen, and the Winans sign on, along with Amy Grant and many other white gospel artists.

The great Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy plays on the record and produces, collaborating on rhythm tracks with hip hop visionary Dr. Dre, several vallenato accordionists, and a veritable army of favela percussionists. The all-star group’s ten-minute version of “Silent Night” becomes yet another tremendous hit, Keaggy’s incendiary rock guitar solo and Dre’s dirty street grooves getting it airplay on stations that have never played a Carrie Underwood record before.

Unfortunately, on the way back from Christmas dinner with her family, Carrie’s car slips off the road on the way back to her cabin and she dies tragically, never hearing the success of her final project.

Within the month, Fox TV produces a four-hour documentary on her life and times, featuring Simon Cowell’s voice as narrator, and Carrie is elected into the Rock and Roll and Country Music Halls of Fame simultaneously on the first ballot. Her pastor, drug dealer, and high school boyfriend write tell-all books. Carrie’s sister and her beloved niece inherit the estate and use the proceeds to build an international college of the highest academic quality in her home town, where brilliant students with no money from all over the world come to study music, languages, and international relations.

My train stops at 34th Street. Reality intrudes.

A Greenhouse Lotus

Posted on by abassford

Introduction: Apart from the odd (sometimes very odd) attempt at lyric writing, I have never dabbled much in poetry. However, I recently participated in a WebEx presentation and realized that I was listening to a wondrous, spontaneous commentary on the modern world. Since I didn’t think the content of the presentation was nearly as interesting as the way it was expressed, I immediately started writing down as much of it as I could catch in real time. I then cut and pasted the words of the anonymous presenter, and then formatting them as a poet might. I am no expert, but it seems to me at least as good as Leonard Nimoy’s poems, possibly better.

(Each line in this poem is transcribed verbatim, in sequence from the WebEx presentation. I wish I could remember the name of the person who actually came out with these bon mots, but I can’t. My poetic contribution is limited to formatting what he said with line breaks, capitalization, and punctuation.)

A Greenhouse Lotus

Cloud based offering
Granular level access-based control.
Compatible with other players,
Full integration is exposed—

I’m the person hanging on to the lock.

Integration across the tools
Where multiple technologies are at play
This is the out of the box experience
I believe this is the link that I want—
There is a minimal amount of learning.

Ribbon exploitation, mirror mode,
Set of extensibility options—
I can work the way I want.

The mappings to portlet,
The best way to create that new user experience.
Maintain the metadata—
The same direction is being leveraged.

Living on top of Domino—

Modularized.

On Tour With Culture

Posted on by abassford

Culture at the Ritz

After celebrating Christmas 1980 with my family in Hartford, I called my friend Elihu Rubin, who lived in Bayside, Queens. Elihu and I had met one evening during my freshman year in college. We’d stayed up all night talking and arguing, and we’ve been talking and arguing ever since. He was my guru of hipness, as he was from the big town and fully absorbed by its history and limitless cultural options and possibilities.

Elihu had gone into songwriting full time after dropping out of Trinity and had had a disco hit, “Love Insurance” by Front Page, a studio group of ex-Harlettes put together by his co-writer Steven Plotnicki. After their partnership splintered, Steven went on to co-found Profile Records, sign Run-DMC, and retire early. Elihu decided that he didn’t enjoy the pressure of creating for hire or the claustrophobic world of the songwriting business. So at this time he was living at home and spending his days at the library researching the candy business, which he had decided would be his next venture. Elihu had always urged me to get out of Hartford if I was serious about music, and I had finally taken him up on it by going to Jamaica.

From the first time he had seen me play at a party our freshman year, Elihu had followed my musical adventures keenly, avidly rooted for my success, and was never short of advice. When he saw me wearing a polyester shirt one day, his comment was, “Andy, all those guys you see that came from small towns and got somewhere in the business? They all have something in common. They moved to New York and started wearing natural fibers.”

Now I couldn’t wait to check in with him and share some of my adventures, as well as get out of Hartford, which now looked smaller than ever after six months of Kingston street life.

“Can I come to visit? I’d love to see you before I go back to Jamaica.”

“ Sure, when were you thinking of coming by?”

“I should stay with my family another day or so. I’m going back in January. I’m going to be playing with Lloyd Parks and We The People. They’re great. I hope you get to hear them someday.”

“Cool. Hey, you know this group Culture, right? They’re playing the Ritz on Sunday night. Weren’t you going to be touring with them?”

“Yeah, I was supposed to. We had a meeting at their house and everything but the promoter never sent tickets for the band, just them.”

“Well, you remember Joy Rosen from college, right? She’s in town with her friend Susie Kepnes. I was looking for something to do with her, but she doesn’t want to strand Susie. Do you want to go see your friends and double date with Joy and me?”

Joy and Susie were two beautiful young Jewish women in our class who had been best friends at college. I had been in a few large classes with them and admired them from afar, but did not know them well. Joy was stylish and well-dressed, Susie favored corduroy jeans and embroidered peasant tops. I’d always wanted to know Susie better. I hadn’t realized that Elihu felt the same about Joy, or that he’d been in touch.

“Hell, yeah. I always thought Susie was really cool, but I thought she might not be into me because she’s Jewish, so I never asked her out. That sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it. I’ll come down on the bus Saturday.”

“I’ll call Joy and set it up. Call me when you know what bus you’re taking.”

“Great! See you then.”

Two days later we were in line with Joy and Susie at the Ritz, the coolest venue in Manhattan, buying tickets for Culture. I had never been to the Ritz, but I had read about it in both the Village Voice and the New Yorker, my conduits to the big world outside of Connecticut. Combined with the excitement of seeing Susie again, who was even more attractive than I remembered, I was ready for a great evening of music, watching my favorite reggae vocal trio. Any disappointment I felt about not doing the gig was minimized by the potential of the evening ahead.

We got there later than we had planned, and by the time we got inside, the floor was jammed. My personal preference for watching shows was to be as close as possible to center stage so I could watch the musicians, particularly the guitarists. But Elihu, wiser in the ways of the world, had other plans. “Let’s go upstairs and get a table.” The prospect terrified me. A table meant a waitress, and a waitress meant tipping. I might be an up-and-coming reggae guitarist, but that didn’t mean I had come to New York with very much money. And would Susie expect me to buy her drinks? I didn’t mind, but Susie was a bit of a feminist and I wasn’t sure about the proper etiquette.

“Shit, there aren’t any tables open.” Elihu was annoyed, I was thrilled. Maybe we could just stand up and watch the show. “Andy, you know these guys. Go backstage and ask them to get us a table.” The ladies looked at me with polite surprise. “I think the dressing room door is right in front of us.”

I thought I would vaporize from surprise and mortification. It never would have occurred to me to use the fact that I knew somebody to get a table at a show. That wasn’t done in my family. One waited patiently in line. What if they said no? I was pretty sure that Elihu’s opinion of my stature, however flattering, was grossly exaggerated. If I was that important to Culture, I’d be on the tour, not in the audience.

Even worse, what if they said yes and the Ritz staff officiously took a table from someone else who was already there in order to seat us? I would feel dreadful either way. But, as so often happens in human history, hormones trumped embarrassment. The double vision of Susie Kepnes and Joy Rosen looking at me with polite skepticism propelled me forward. I knocked on the dressing room door. It opened, to my horror.

“I’m sorry, you can’t come in now. The band is just about ready to go on.” My way was blocked by a polite but very solid-looking red-headed American who obviously meant business. There would be no table for our crew. I could see a number of unfamiliar musicians getting ready over his shoulder. Then Joseph Hill, Culture’s dynamic leader, suddenly appeared, blotting out the view. He recognized me and he broke into a huge smile.

“Andy! Whaa?? Yuh deh! Come nuh, mon! We have a next guitar for you! Show fe start!” Before I could react, he had pulled me past the startled road manager and into the dressing room. I didn’t even have time to look back. Kenneth and Albert, the other members of Culture, also recognized me and smiled. But the band regarded me with a variety of expressions ranging from outright hatred to open astonishment. Who was this white guy, and what was Joseph doing?

“Andy, this is Ras Ipa, our guitarist. Ipa, lend Andy your spare guitar. Him a go play tonight.” Ipa, a handsome Rasta in a tam, was fortunately one of the astonished rather than the resentful. He looked at Joseph for a couple of seconds. Then he opened a guitar case containing a black Les Paul copy and graciously nodded to me. I picked it up and fingered a couple of chords. It was in good shape. I tuned it quickly by ear to Ipa’s open strings.

“Come, mon, time fe go!” We hurried down the stairs to the stage, where fortunately there were two guitar amps waiting. As the crowd caught sight of me, I could see people pointing at me and talking to each other. As with the band, their facial expressions ranged from outright hatred to astonishment. I hadn’t had time to think about what kind of reception I might get. I had other, more immediate problems.

I plugged in and said to Ipa, “What are we playing?”

“International Herb, in Bb. Do you know it?”

“Well, I have the album.”

Ipa shrugged. There was no turning back for either of us. I He couldn’t have been happy, but he hid it well. “I’ll hold the rhythm. You play lead.”

As I looked at the crowd again, the totality of my situation finally hit me. I was onstage at the Ritz in front of a sold-out crowd with a band I had never played with or even seen before, backing one of my favorite groups without a sound check or even a set list. Was this how it worked? The whole thing was surreal. I had a fleeting thought of Elihu, Susie, and Joy upstairs wondering what had happened to me. Then the drummer counted off the first tune and it was survival time.

I had learned enough about the music in the past four months of hustling sessions to know that I needed to think mostly about doubling the bass line. I had no idea if Joseph wanted anything more than that. So I concentrated on picking up the bass lines, just as if I was on a session, and trying to remember what the lead players on the albums had done. If I remembered that a tune had guitar fills, I threw some in.

Joseph gave a fantastic, commanding performance. The band, which I learned from our introduction was called Zion Initation, was nowhere near as good as the Roots Radics or the other session players I had been working with, but they were well rehearsed and held their own. For the most part they avoided looking at me, except for Ipa, who told me what was coming next and in what key. After a ninety-minute set and the encore of “Two Sevens Clash,” one of my all time favorites then and now, we went back to the dressing room. I returned the guitar to Ipa with thanks, after wiping it down, and he said, “Irie.” I figured that was as good as I would get. The others said little or nothing. Dilly, the trumpet player, glared at me.

As the dressing room filled with fans, I saw Joseph deep in conversation with a dark-haired, bearded man in a green Army jacket. He gestured for me to come over.

“Andy, meet Mike Cacia. Him is de promoter for de tour.”

We shook hands. Mike said, “Joseph wants you to come along with us for the rest of the tour. There are only four more shows, and we don’t have room for you in the van. But if you can get yourself to the shows, we’ll cover your expenses.”

“What does the gig pay?”

“Well, we didn’t budget for you when we set up the tour. But I can give you $30 a show.”
I thought about it for all of ten seconds. Hanging out at my parents’ house in Hartford or going to play gigs with Culture. Thirty dollars a night was what I had been making in the bars a few years earlier, and obviously not enough money. But, not for the last time, I made a decision based on art rather than commerce.

“OK, I’ll do it. Where is the next show?”

“We have two shows at Jonathan Swift’s in Boston tomorrow night. Then we have a show at My Father’s Place, and then the Mudd Club afterwards. Can you find places to stay? We don’t have a hotel room for you.”

“I’ll manage.” My friend Howard Kruger was in pharmacy school in Boston and I had a standing invitation at Elihu’s house, as Mrs. Rubin was quite fond of me.
He gave me a copy of the itinerary. “We’ll see you at soundcheck at Swift’s at five.”