Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 58° overcast cool breeze, 66° back at home.
First Podcast today WTF? with Marc Maron Podcast Episode 1549 - Geezer Butler, Possibly my first hero band from when I was in 10th grade in 1970. If you're a Black Sabbath fan, this is the podcast episode.
RIP Donald Sutherland
My first day walking the next day after a walk. I’ve been doing 5 miles every two days as a standard. But I couldn’t do more than 3 miles yesterday because it was warming up so much. Which is sad because once I could’ve just walked in the heat and sweat it out and it would’ve been great, but now, getting older, you've gotta be more careful. So I’ll try 3 miles today. It’s 8:33 AM and the sun's out, almost a slight cool breeze, no clouds, beautiful day, sun feels great. So I’ll try to do 3 today and 3 miles tomorrow and 3 miles every day rather than five every other day.
Two new episodes are available on BritBox for "Blue Lights". Yay! I’m still watching Shetland on BritBox. Really like that show and I’ve learned so much about what the hell Shetland is. I had no idea about that place. Northeast in the Arctic Circle up above Scotland. Interesting and fun series.
Last night, I watched the newest episode of Dark Matter on Apple+. I also really like that show. It’s getting pretty messed up. Fun seeing someone take physics and twist it around to show you what could happen.
What the hell is going on with Republicans anymore? We’ve got a domestic threat with Trump and his MAGA. We've got an international existential threat, certainly a potential one, with Putin‘s bullshit. Now he’s flying around to North Korea and Vietnam to make alliances. Russia needs to be destabilized and that laid at his feet, made obvious to his citizens that he's not good for them. So they'll yank his criminal ass out of office. And how is it he’s flying around the world and no one’s killed him yet? When is humanity going to get to a point of having had it with these people?
Maron’s complaining about how so many awesome bands were already done by the time he became aware of them in high school. I guess I lucked out there, that's one thing about being my age. I got to experience a lot of stuff in real-time back in the 60s and 70s. It does remind me of after I graduated from university and returned to Tacoma to work at Tower.
They had just opened Tower Video. My friend Mark managed it. I'd worked under him at Records when he supervised the cassettes section. While at Video, I would discover a new band and tell our assistant manager, Liz, who got to be a very good friend of mine, She's gone now for some years, sadly. Once a model, I had previously worked with her at Tower Records next door, back when she was married to a coworker, now a friend, who has long lived in London. Tower people, we were like family, certainly in the years after working together.
I would "discover" a band and be excited about it and tell Liz, who would say, "Broke up years ago." This was funnier because we had worked at records together. Now I was discovering bands because of MTV and on the music videos we'd play on the monitors in the video store. Then I'd find another "amazing" band and tell her and she'd say again, "Broke up! Almost TEN years ago!" It became a running joke that I found at times, depressing. Still, I learned of a lot of new (to me) bands.
I remember the first Beatles song that hit the radio waves in America in the early 60s. I remember it as 1962, but apparently it was March 1963.
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I had this small, red rocket radio that didn't require batteries which I found amazing. I guess they came out in the 1950s. You pulled the antenna out of the tip, then clipped a wire onto something metal for energy. I used to use our front yard wire fence. An amazing device in 1962 when I was in 2nd grade, and was so fascinated by it.
When Black Sabbath came out with their "Master of Reality" album (a name from the master tapes they recorded on and the lyrics were about reality, according to Geezer), with "Sweet Leaf" on it (about a special kind of normal cigarette, not cannabis, as we'd all assumed and played it in celebration of that).
I got the album the week it came out and listened to it to death over that week. Couldn’t have had a better experience than that album as my first Black Sabbath album, aside from what I'd heard on the radio. But replaying that album all week, while reading the book "Dune", which I'd just received from my science fiction book club, while being sick and out of school for that week, and high on codeine cough syrup for my bronchitis.
When you’re sick like that it sucks, because every time you cough your chest hurts really bad. Stepdad, when he was at home that week, would yell at me from in the living room downstairs, reading his newspaper and telling me to"stop making that damn noise!" While I would complain back to him that if there was any way I could avoid that cough, I would, because it hurt really, really bad.
So on Monday that week, Mom went to the fairly new Tacoma Mall and got me what I had asked for. That new Black Sabbath album I had just heard about on the radio. Whenever we got sick, she would get us some kind of gift to raise our spirits.
So on Monday that week, Mom went to the fairly new Tacoma Mall and got me what I had asked for. That new Black Sabbath album I had just heard about on the radio. Whenever we got sick, she would get us some kind of gift to raise our spirits.
So I put the album on, lying in my bed, because she wouldn’t let me out of bed. "If you're too sick to go to school, you're too sick to be walking around the house." Which I never understood. Why can’t I go downstairs and watch TV? I mean, I did have a 13-inch TV in my room. But you get a little stir-crazy after a while. So I dug into my new Black Sabbath album and replayed it over and over, all day every day that week while reading "Dune" and high on codeine. Perfect mental state for both Dune and Black Sabbath.
Let me tell you, that was an amazing weeklong experience. Far more enjoyable than it should’ve been. Thank you, Frank Herbert. Thank you, Black Sabbath. Thank you, Ozzy Osbourne. Thank you family doctor for the cough syrup which tasted incredibly bad but made you feel very good and helped you to not cough.
I graduated high school in 1973, and kicked around for three years until I joined the USAF. I graduated from Tacoma's Lincoln High School, which used to be the “rail splitters" (referencing Abe Lincoln), when my mother would have gone there. Actually, she only got to the ninth grade. So it was where she would’ve gone. She did get to see Elvis play there in the "Lincoln Bowl" where we had football games and track meets. By the time I got to Lincoln (or my sister before me...our brother attended Mt. Tahoma HS as he grew up living separated from us with this dad), we were known as the Lincoln "Abes", which I always thought was stupid. "Rail Splitters" for me seemed much cooler.
Let me tell you, that was an amazing weeklong experience. Far more enjoyable than it should’ve been. Thank you, Frank Herbert. Thank you, Black Sabbath. Thank you, Ozzy Osbourne. Thank you family doctor for the cough syrup which tasted incredibly bad but made you feel very good and helped you to not cough.
I graduated high school in 1973, and kicked around for three years until I joined the USAF. I graduated from Tacoma's Lincoln High School, which used to be the “rail splitters" (referencing Abe Lincoln), when my mother would have gone there. Actually, she only got to the ninth grade. So it was where she would’ve gone. She did get to see Elvis play there in the "Lincoln Bowl" where we had football games and track meets. By the time I got to Lincoln (or my sister before me...our brother attended Mt. Tahoma HS as he grew up living separated from us with this dad), we were known as the Lincoln "Abes", which I always thought was stupid. "Rail Splitters" for me seemed much cooler.
"Lincoln High School in Tacoma, Washington, has had a few nicknames over the years, including the Lynx and the Railsplitters. The name change to “Abes,” which stands for “Absolutely Better Every Day,” reflects a modern, multicultural urban high school identity that emphasizes continuous improvement and excellence.1The nickname “Railsplitters” was historically associated with Abraham Lincoln, who was known as a rail-splitter in his youth, symbolizing honesty and hard work. However, the school’s current nickname, “Abes,” aligns with their commitment to fostering an environment where students strive to be better every day.1" I don't remember "Abes" being an acronym, but maybe so.
Lincoln was Tacoma's high school with inner city kids from downtown and the "Hilltop" kids (due to race riots, as kids we were forbidden to ever go near Hilltop), which was a mostly black community. There was Stadium HS but mostly "rich" kids there from the north end. Our school was populated by about a third with the Black kids. Which when I got there 1970 Black people were still pretty angry at that time in their self-actualization. And good for them. But for who I was as a short white kid starting 10th grade at the high high school in being terrified of going to high school to begin with, and only knew one black kid in junior high in that entire school...it was pretty damn intimidating. After about two weeks though, it wasn't so scary. Then again going from elementary school to junior high was perhaps even more intimidating.
It was initially called Lincoln Park High School, as it adjoined city park property that was turned over to the school board without charge. We loved hitting the park for lunch on nice days.
The name was later changed to Lincoln High School shortly after the school opened.
The school’s architecture was designed in a classical Collegiate Gothic style by Frederick Heath, a prolific Tacoma school architect, to reflect a sense of timelessness and inspiration. Over the years, the school has become a model of the modern, multicultural urban high school, reflecting the diversity and dynamism of its student body. The name “Lincoln” serves as a reminder of the values of democracy, freedom, and equality that President Lincoln stood for and that the school aims to embody in its educational mission.
We also had the largest group of inner-city Black students and lower-income families. Though we also had some very well-off families. I thought we may have had one of the best over the spread of demographics in town. I remember people around Tacoma looking down on us in various ways. Though I didn't think we deserved a lot of that.
All the Black kids I actually got to meet or talk to were pretty cool and we got along. But if you didn’t know them. or when they were in a small group, they could be pretty intimidating, and purposely so. Though I’ve heard they were probably as scared as I was. I noticed they would group up a lot. While white kids just didn’t.
I was kind of small as a kid and got bullied from time to time by bigger kids. Which is why I have such a severe dislike of bullies. And why in part I find Donald Trump so disgusting as the bully HE is. Though by the end of 10th grade, I was suddenly 6 feet tall and had lost some weight and fewer people would screw with me. Girls suddenly noticed me. Life was just different.
Marc‘s now naming a bunch of bands from the 70s he was introduced to by friends. How lucky I was that my brother is seven years older and let me keep his albums while he toured the country on his Triumph motorcycle, in the late 60s. So I was introduced to the blues and a lot of stuff that my friends were not, who only listened to pop or rock music as they could find it on local radio stations.
Back in the summer of '85, Mikey and I, who worked at Tower records where I had previously worked with him (when I was working at Video after graduating college, working at the new store in Tacoma), we went to record conventions and I sold my four apple crates full of albums. What a great lot of fun we had and then went home with some cash.
Reminds me of my two kids when they were young. I was working on the computer at home in my bedroom. They came running in saying they saw a blue orb that passed through the youngest's room, into the hallway by the front door, into the living room, and then into the mirror above the fireplace.
At a lack of what to say, they drug me into the living room. My youngest never told lies and was always very accurate about things. Pathologically so. It was weird. My wife and I finally told her to stop telling on herself, it's just unnecessary. IF you do something wrong, recognize it, feel you should tattle on yourself, instead, just don't do it again and let it go. In fact, regarding our child's accuracy, my wife and I got used to being in the car and if our child had been with us previously, and then we got lost, our child could guide us to our destination, kind of like an organic navigator.
At first, I wanted to tell the kids they were just imagining things. Blue orbs of light? But they both said they saw it. They were adamant. And my youngest absolutely believed it, which kind of tipped the balance. So rather than shut them down like a lot of parents would or just explain it off, I said, "OK, let’s work this out."
I spent about 15 or 20 minutes talking to them about it, trying to work out what could’ve created that orb. Car headlights driving by? Nope. We never figured it out. But I also didn’t discount them. I tried to treat them like adults. It’s just how I raised my kids.
Well, damn. I just went back to the podcast and Geezer is saying “I was laying in bed and I looked up above my head and there was this orb… “ He said it was like a crystal ball and he could see himself in it wearing silver boots on stage. He said, well that's never going to happen. But this was before glam rockers and all that and one day, years later, he realized he actually was on stage and wearing silver boots.
Geezer is saying he knew he wanted to be a musician the first time he heard the Beatles on the radio. It’s well known the BBC played old people's music on the radio. And so pirate radio appeared. Famous was the one on a ship outside the waters of Britain where a lot of people got their pop music. But he said he got his from Radio Luxembourg. I’ve not heard that before. He said he was 11 at the time. He got his first guitar from a kid at school who had a guitar with two strings that he sold to him for $.75. He learned all the Beatles songs on those two strings.
Well, that’s my 3 miles for the day. My knee is feeling better, but I think I’ll ice it.
I like walking the 5 miles but not when it’s hot because it does unpleasant things to me nowadays. I think back to my teens and 20s, when I went backpacking up in the Cascade Mountains and the Olympic Mountains, and in the Superstition Wilderness in Arizona. I’m glad I have those memories.
Interesting that Geezer got proficient on a two-string guitar and eventually became a bass player in one of the most famous bands in history. He said his brother used to bring his friends over to hear how good he could play Beatles songs on a two-string guitar. Then his other brother gave him money to get a real guitar.
"Hello, and congratulations!
You are a Quarter Finalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Suspense Competition!"
For 'The Teenage Bodyguard' by JZ Murdock"
On those special notes, I’ll bid you adieu…
All the Black kids I actually got to meet or talk to were pretty cool and we got along. But if you didn’t know them. or when they were in a small group, they could be pretty intimidating, and purposely so. Though I’ve heard they were probably as scared as I was. I noticed they would group up a lot. While white kids just didn’t.
So when a black and a white kid got into a fight, a bunch of black kids would jump in and help their friend. While any white kids standing around on the periphery never seemed to do a damn thing. You just couldn't count of them. I guess that’s an example of privilege. White kids unused to being ganged up on, while Black kids were more used to being oppressed or had more often had to face being harrassed. Or maybe inner-city kids were more used to getting in fights, or being around gangs while the white suburban kids were just, not.
I spent three years on the Rifle Team and got my sports "letter", my "L" because of it. Here is a photo of the 1972-73 team in my final senior year. In the photo is me and one of my friends who is a character (half of one anyway) in my true crime drama screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard".
I was kind of small as a kid and got bullied from time to time by bigger kids. Which is why I have such a severe dislike of bullies. And why in part I find Donald Trump so disgusting as the bully HE is. Though by the end of 10th grade, I was suddenly 6 feet tall and had lost some weight and fewer people would screw with me. Girls suddenly noticed me. Life was just different.
Marc‘s now naming a bunch of bands from the 70s he was introduced to by friends. How lucky I was that my brother is seven years older and let me keep his albums while he toured the country on his Triumph motorcycle, in the late 60s. So I was introduced to the blues and a lot of stuff that my friends were not, who only listened to pop or rock music as they could find it on local radio stations.
KTAC was a new format Tacoma station back then, based at the Tacoma Mall office building. I won some albums from them once. My cousin and I locked up their phone number by calling on two phones together (we had two numbers at that time at our home), disallowing other outside people to access them until they answered on the whatever, the 9th call maybe, and we'd win.
KJR was in Seattle and played some of the best rock on the Radio at the time and was around before KTAC.
KJR was in Seattle and played some of the best rock on the Radio at the time and was around before KTAC.
FM. I remember late one night at home I turned on the radio to FM. Somebody had told me about the FM stations which were new. Very new and not on all the time. I tuned into one with a DJ talking low, slow, and intimate (pretty conducive to stoners listening), who played some of the coolest music that you would never hear on AM radio. 2AM listening music that I found fascinating. I came to love FM. Greater fidelity. I really hated AM radio. The AM car radio fidelity sucked. And if you went into a tunnel, you lost the signal. It tended to be scratchy and mono and FM was usually stereo until FM stations became more popular and you could get them in your car.
But then one day FM stations spread in use until one day they qualitatively turned into AM stations with all the commercials, the too loud DJs, and utter ridiculousness. And that was the end of the cool FM era. But the AM style FM did have better general listening and higher quality radio from then on. I just missed the specialness of the original FM stations.
Starting my 2nd mile...
Apparently, Marc Maren graduated Highland High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1981.
Marc is doing a rundown on the podcast about some of the other bands that came out around the time he was in high school and the shows he saw. This is probably a good place for me to add a link to my concerts/bands webpage I have on my website. There you go. I realized I was gonna forget some of the concerts I had seen when I was younger, or over my lifetime, so I made a page that, over the years, I would enhance and fill in as I found info or remembered things. Like the playlist for the night I saw a certain band play.
I was looking at my website analytics page the other day and it seems that my band page is one of my most highly accessed pages. Well, that IS kind of cool.It used to be my old Martial Arts page on my old website which won a couple of awards in the early 2000s.
I guess my first concert was my brother and sister’s band back in the 60s. My first big concert was the Beatles at the Seattle Coliseum, the second time they came through Seattle. Apparently, my older brother got tickets but said he knew it was gonna be miserable because of all the screaming girls, so you couldn't hear the music. Which was true. In 1966, my sister was a young teenager in 9th grade (I was in 6th grade, about 9). I remember how mad she was at the girls screaming all around us and telling me "We could actually hear the music if they would stop screaming!" The entire Colosseum was screaming. We weren’t that far away from the Beatles on stage but you could barely hear their music. Just make it out enough that you’d recognize the song from having listened to it so many times on the radio.
I remember them not having very big amps on stage. Not for that size of a concert venue. I found photos of them playing. At the Colosseum. Overall, pretty cool for a first real concert. Many years later I came to own an awesome Vox Beatle SuperReverb amp.
But then one day FM stations spread in use until one day they qualitatively turned into AM stations with all the commercials, the too loud DJs, and utter ridiculousness. And that was the end of the cool FM era. But the AM style FM did have better general listening and higher quality radio from then on. I just missed the specialness of the original FM stations.
Starting my 2nd mile...
Apparently, Marc Maren graduated Highland High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1981.
Marc is doing a rundown on the podcast about some of the other bands that came out around the time he was in high school and the shows he saw. This is probably a good place for me to add a link to my concerts/bands webpage I have on my website. There you go. I realized I was gonna forget some of the concerts I had seen when I was younger, or over my lifetime, so I made a page that, over the years, I would enhance and fill in as I found info or remembered things. Like the playlist for the night I saw a certain band play.
I was looking at my website analytics page the other day and it seems that my band page is one of my most highly accessed pages. Well, that IS kind of cool.It used to be my old Martial Arts page on my old website which won a couple of awards in the early 2000s.
I guess my first concert was my brother and sister’s band back in the 60s. My first big concert was the Beatles at the Seattle Coliseum, the second time they came through Seattle. Apparently, my older brother got tickets but said he knew it was gonna be miserable because of all the screaming girls, so you couldn't hear the music. Which was true. In 1966, my sister was a young teenager in 9th grade (I was in 6th grade, about 9). I remember how mad she was at the girls screaming all around us and telling me "We could actually hear the music if they would stop screaming!" The entire Colosseum was screaming. We weren’t that far away from the Beatles on stage but you could barely hear their music. Just make it out enough that you’d recognize the song from having listened to it so many times on the radio.
I remember them not having very big amps on stage. Not for that size of a concert venue. I found photos of them playing. At the Colosseum. Overall, pretty cool for a first real concert. Many years later I came to own an awesome Vox Beatle SuperReverb amp.
The image above is from the Beatles' first concert in Seattle in 1964. We were at their second visit in 1966. Another time, my sister and brother went to see Donovan at the Colosseum. I was dying to go. But nope, I was too young. I remember my brother wearing a Nehru jacket with a long gold chain and a cool gold ball. He was so proud of that outfit.
Marc‘s talking about the Rolling Stones Hot Rocks album he had. A double album with a castle on the cover.
I had their original "Sticky Fingers" album with the actual real pants zipper on the cover which you couldn’t put with your other albums.
I also had the original Jethro Tull "Thick as a Brick" fold-out with the newspaper inside and over the years I got rid of both of them. I highly regret that. However, about a year ago, Jethro Tull released their Thick as a Brick remaster with the newspaper inside. Because they dropped that after a while. So I now have that album again, anyway.
Back in the summer of '85, Mikey and I, who worked at Tower records where I had previously worked with him (when I was working at Video after graduating college, working at the new store in Tacoma), we went to record conventions and I sold my four apple crates full of albums. What a great lot of fun we had and then went home with some cash.
The break up with my girlfriend, who I had been with before, during, and briefly after college, really messed me up. I spent about 18 months trying to party myself to death, until I nearly succeeded until I realized one day, actually, I want to live! But that depression was multifaceted.
I wasn't making much after getting a university degree. I was tired of lugging around all that vinyl and thought I could use the money. I had gotten stuck years before with 8-track tapes when cassettes came out. I didn’t want that to happen again when CDs came out. I thought this is just gonna waste vinyl, and I’m gonna get stuck again. I didn’t know about the discrete packing of the digital storage and loss of fidelity even though it sounded good to me. Lossless digital format years later did much toward fixing that.
I do not now understand young people's desire for audio cassettes. I thought they were the worst medium. Easy to use, small (not 8-tracks) but your machine could eat them and there’s always that damn hiss. Even with metal tapes, which were much better, and Dolby sound, etc., etc..
I still have three cassette cases with about 60 tapes in each case. But they’re not vinyl. So a while back I started collecting vinyl again. When I was working on my World War I documentary, I bought the 1930 Polydor's first public recording with Ravel conducting his orchestra. I also bought a record player that you can digitally rip the music into a digital SD card.
And then there is the remastered Led Zeppelin II my youngest gave me for Christmas a few years ago, signed by Jimmy Page when he had visited the record store she worked on at Capitol Hill. He was there on his second day with his bodyguard and his girlfriend and my kid was assigned to help him. They had wanted to talk to him on the first day, but couldn’t get near him, but had this idea of getting me a signed album. Which happened on the second day. One of my greatest Christmas gifts ever, obviously.
I was just thinking of my weekly mileage of walking. Normally I would get in 20 or 25 miles walking per week. Depending on how the days fell. So one week 20 the next week 25 the next week 20 again, etc. Walking every day at 3 miles gives me 21 miles a week consistently.
So Geezer Butler is on Maron's podcast because he wrote his book, Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath―And Beyond, which sounds like a hell of a read.
I do have a story about the first and only time I saw Black Sabbath. Let me correct that. I went to a Black Sabbath concert in Spokane, Washington. The story is on my website bads/concert page. To be brief, my (1st) wife and two friends from our shop on base in USAF went. I gave my wife a quarter ounce of Colombian dirt weed that wasn’t worthy of smoking. She put it in some brownies but didn’t stir it well enough. We each got a brownie and everybody loved them. Except me. Mine was like chewing 4 ounces of Colombian dirt weed.
I do not now understand young people's desire for audio cassettes. I thought they were the worst medium. Easy to use, small (not 8-tracks) but your machine could eat them and there’s always that damn hiss. Even with metal tapes, which were much better, and Dolby sound, etc., etc..
I still have three cassette cases with about 60 tapes in each case. But they’re not vinyl. So a while back I started collecting vinyl again. When I was working on my World War I documentary, I bought the 1930 Polydor's first public recording with Ravel conducting his orchestra. I also bought a record player that you can digitally rip the music into a digital SD card.
And then there is the remastered Led Zeppelin II my youngest gave me for Christmas a few years ago, signed by Jimmy Page when he had visited the record store she worked on at Capitol Hill. He was there on his second day with his bodyguard and his girlfriend and my kid was assigned to help him. They had wanted to talk to him on the first day, but couldn’t get near him, but had this idea of getting me a signed album. Which happened on the second day. One of my greatest Christmas gifts ever, obviously.
I was just thinking of my weekly mileage of walking. Normally I would get in 20 or 25 miles walking per week. Depending on how the days fell. So one week 20 the next week 25 the next week 20 again, etc. Walking every day at 3 miles gives me 21 miles a week consistently.
So Geezer Butler is on Maron's podcast because he wrote his book, Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath―And Beyond, which sounds like a hell of a read.
I do have a story about the first and only time I saw Black Sabbath. Let me correct that. I went to a Black Sabbath concert in Spokane, Washington. The story is on my website bads/concert page. To be brief, my (1st) wife and two friends from our shop on base in USAF went. I gave my wife a quarter ounce of Colombian dirt weed that wasn’t worthy of smoking. She put it in some brownies but didn’t stir it well enough. We each got a brownie and everybody loved them. Except me. Mine was like chewing 4 ounces of Colombian dirt weed.
So we got to the concert and they made me take a pipe hit (I refused but they said you have to take at least one at a concert), which put me over the edge. Reminds me of an evening decades later with my last wife and her friend who was pushing me to take one shot (after I'd drunk a 6 pack and drank 2 botles of wine with them). It didn't go well the rest of that night eight.
We stood up when Van Halen came on as the curtains opened, and Eddie jumped out by himself in the middle of the stage, hit a cord, and my eyes rolled up in my head (so I was told, it looked to me like the ceiling was rushing down into my face) and I passed out (my friends caught me from falling). The next thing I know, I’m talking to a cop in the side hallway, then I'm on a gurney, then I'm in an ambulance. I would have been just fine. I just got too high. But I missed the rest of the concert. They wouldn’t let me back in. Had I just not passed out, it would have been an amazing concert.
My friends almost didn’t get back in themselves, but they talked their way back in. They said that band Van Halen blew away Black Sabbath who seemed tired and as I understand it they had pretty much had it with Ozzie by that time.
So my wife and I ended up having sex on the waterbed the rest of that night. So not a wasted night.
Marc is finally now talking to Geezer and I’m starting my 3rd and last mile for the day...
It seems Geezer was a vegetarian all his life. So touring with Black Sabbath was a nightmare, especially in the beginning. He said now it’s much easier but in the 60s and 70s it was hard to find decent vegetarian food. Obviously. Now he says he gets a once a month, B12 shot and takes occasional vitamins. Marc said he’s probably the healthiest of the crew. And Geezer just laughed.
About this walk at 3 miles a day, now… After 3 miles I noticed my hands swelling and my sister had said that’s normal as you age. Just put them up above your head for a bit. But it occurred to me that this is probably somehow less stress on my body walking fewer miles. When I think of physical stress on my body, I think of a good workout. But at almost 69 you have to factor that age thing in. Wonderful.
This is interesting, Geezer says his family's from Dublin but they grew up near Birmingham. He and the other band members grew up around there and if you were Catholic you went to the Catholic school but if you were Protestant you went to the Protestant school. It was an area of immigrants and real workers. Nobody had a car.
Oh good, I just stepped down on my left foot and my knee seemed to bark a bit of pain at me and now I’m limping. Good grief.
This aging thing is bullshit. I do believe it’s a disease we could cure. I mean, even if we only lived to 150 but were functionally in our 30s until we drop dead? I’d be good with that. If you get old, you need to exercise for reasons you didn’t have to when you were younger. But when exercising becomes a problem, and as I went through with long Covid… you need to exercise to squash down the disease, but you have to feel good enough with the disease to be able to exercise, so it’s just a maddening cycle
Geezer is talking about how his dad would save up and every other year they would vacation at the family home of the grandparents in Dublin. One time his sister and he heard a noise and went down to see a shadow moving along the stairs.
My friends almost didn’t get back in themselves, but they talked their way back in. They said that band Van Halen blew away Black Sabbath who seemed tired and as I understand it they had pretty much had it with Ozzie by that time.
So my wife and I ended up having sex on the waterbed the rest of that night. So not a wasted night.
Marc is finally now talking to Geezer and I’m starting my 3rd and last mile for the day...
It seems Geezer was a vegetarian all his life. So touring with Black Sabbath was a nightmare, especially in the beginning. He said now it’s much easier but in the 60s and 70s it was hard to find decent vegetarian food. Obviously. Now he says he gets a once a month, B12 shot and takes occasional vitamins. Marc said he’s probably the healthiest of the crew. And Geezer just laughed.
About this walk at 3 miles a day, now… After 3 miles I noticed my hands swelling and my sister had said that’s normal as you age. Just put them up above your head for a bit. But it occurred to me that this is probably somehow less stress on my body walking fewer miles. When I think of physical stress on my body, I think of a good workout. But at almost 69 you have to factor that age thing in. Wonderful.
This is interesting, Geezer says his family's from Dublin but they grew up near Birmingham. He and the other band members grew up around there and if you were Catholic you went to the Catholic school but if you were Protestant you went to the Protestant school. It was an area of immigrants and real workers. Nobody had a car.
Oh good, I just stepped down on my left foot and my knee seemed to bark a bit of pain at me and now I’m limping. Good grief.
This aging thing is bullshit. I do believe it’s a disease we could cure. I mean, even if we only lived to 150 but were functionally in our 30s until we drop dead? I’d be good with that. If you get old, you need to exercise for reasons you didn’t have to when you were younger. But when exercising becomes a problem, and as I went through with long Covid… you need to exercise to squash down the disease, but you have to feel good enough with the disease to be able to exercise, so it’s just a maddening cycle
Geezer is talking about how his dad would save up and every other year they would vacation at the family home of the grandparents in Dublin. One time his sister and he heard a noise and went down to see a shadow moving along the stairs.
He had another dream years later about him and Tony Iommi being on tour and in an elevator. As they’re going down it stops and then it plummets, but stops just before they crash. Which is normally a built-in safety mechanism. So they’re he tells Tony about it and at some point while on tour, they get in an elevator. While they’re going down the elevator stops. They both look at each other like, "oh shit!" But then it started up again
Reminds me of my two kids when they were young. I was working on the computer at home in my bedroom. They came running in saying they saw a blue orb that passed through the youngest's room, into the hallway by the front door, into the living room, and then into the mirror above the fireplace.
At a lack of what to say, they drug me into the living room. My youngest never told lies and was always very accurate about things. Pathologically so. It was weird. My wife and I finally told her to stop telling on herself, it's just unnecessary. IF you do something wrong, recognize it, feel you should tattle on yourself, instead, just don't do it again and let it go. In fact, regarding our child's accuracy, my wife and I got used to being in the car and if our child had been with us previously, and then we got lost, our child could guide us to our destination, kind of like an organic navigator.
At first, I wanted to tell the kids they were just imagining things. Blue orbs of light? But they both said they saw it. They were adamant. And my youngest absolutely believed it, which kind of tipped the balance. So rather than shut them down like a lot of parents would or just explain it off, I said, "OK, let’s work this out."
I spent about 15 or 20 minutes talking to them about it, trying to work out what could’ve created that orb. Car headlights driving by? Nope. We never figured it out. But I also didn’t discount them. I tried to treat them like adults. It’s just how I raised my kids.
Well, damn. I just went back to the podcast and Geezer is saying “I was laying in bed and I looked up above my head and there was this orb… “ He said it was like a crystal ball and he could see himself in it wearing silver boots on stage. He said, well that's never going to happen. But this was before glam rockers and all that and one day, years later, he realized he actually was on stage and wearing silver boots.
Geezer is saying he knew he wanted to be a musician the first time he heard the Beatles on the radio. It’s well known the BBC played old people's music on the radio. And so pirate radio appeared. Famous was the one on a ship outside the waters of Britain where a lot of people got their pop music. But he said he got his from Radio Luxembourg. I’ve not heard that before. He said he was 11 at the time. He got his first guitar from a kid at school who had a guitar with two strings that he sold to him for $.75. He learned all the Beatles songs on those two strings.
Well, that’s my 3 miles for the day. My knee is feeling better, but I think I’ll ice it.
I like walking the 5 miles but not when it’s hot because it does unpleasant things to me nowadays. I think back to my teens and 20s, when I went backpacking up in the Cascade Mountains and the Olympic Mountains, and in the Superstition Wilderness in Arizona. I’m glad I have those memories.
Interesting that Geezer got proficient on a two-string guitar and eventually became a bass player in one of the most famous bands in history. He said his brother used to bring his friends over to hear how good he could play Beatles songs on a two-string guitar. Then his other brother gave him money to get a real guitar.
Hey, just got home and saw that I made quarter-finalist for my screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard":
"Hello, and congratulations!
You are a Quarter Finalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Suspense Competition!"
For 'The Teenage Bodyguard' by JZ Murdock"
Awesome!
Then I saw this...Donald Sutherland, Star of ‘MASH,’ ‘Klute’ and ‘Hunger Games,’ Dies at 88 - Variety That makes me sad. I've loved his acting all my life. I think first noticing him in Kelly's Heroes.
On those special notes, I’ll bid you adieu…
And I’ll leave you with that. And it’s noon and time for lunch.
Cheers! Sláinte!
Cheers! Sláinte!
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