Willie Nelson & Family at Madison's Overture Hall, April 14

     Willie Nelson and Family appeared last night before a packed house in Madison's Overture Center Hall which seats 2251.  The concert,  billed as Willie Nelson and Family, didn't really include family members other than Daughter Amy from Nelson's third marriage, and she  made but  a brief appearance during the last five minutes of the show,  but even then her voice was not audible. Occasional two of Willie's sons from the fourth marriage, Luke and Micha, appear as part of the family but not at the Overture.  Apparently the billing is designed to cover any and all contingencies.  

     The music was vintage Nelson; however, the overall quality  was not quite what you'd expect from a Willie Nelson band.   Unlike many performers, Willie doesn't use a head mike and at times the sound volume varied depending on his proximity to the mike. His electrified acoustic guitar over shadowed the sound of the baby grand piano which was not miked. The Nelson  band consisted of a pianist, an amplified harmonica player, a drummer, a drummer of sorts who alternated between two small hand drums and castanets, and finally Willie himself dominating the ensemble playing “Trigger,” his performance ravaged guitar, compete with a rather large pick worn hole in the sound board, an uncountable numbers of dings and scratches, along with the names of performer friends scratched into the instruments back, sides and top. Surprisingly there were no other guitars  in evidence with the exception of a tune late in the concert during which one of the drummers picked up and strummed a rhythm guitar.

     Whatever shortcomings might have attended “Willie Nelson & Family's” concert on this night, one thing was abundantly clear, Madison loved him. In the many years that I've been attending concerts of one kind or another, I've never attended one that could quite compare with this one. The age range of those in attendance covered the compete range from young to very old. Several older gents even came with their guitars in hand; I counted between six and eight. One old fella looked and dressed like a Willie Nelson clone, complete with head band, braids, and beard.   I haven't seen so many cowboy boots and cheap western hats since my boyhood days in Montana. This was not a night noted for the upper class sartorial splendor common at Overture Hall concerts.

     As we entered the auditorium, the docent taking tickets said excitedly, “I hope you enjoy the concert, it's sold out.”

     “Really,” I replied not really caring one way or anther.

     “Oh yes,” she said, “Even the docents had to pull seniority to get this event. Everybody wanted to be here.”

     So when the concert began at 7:30 p.m., I was a little surprised to see many empty seats.  Surprise gave way to disbelief as people continued arriving during the 40 min opening acts performance.    These late arrivals were totally oblivious to the disruption they caused for those already seated or for the performers on stage.  By the time of the intermission separating the opening act from the main event,  the  seats had all   filled to capacity.  The lights dimmed and Willie walked to center stage moving slowly in the manner of the 80 year man he is. Seated on the orchestra floor near the rear of the hall, I look out across the audience now shrouded in darkness and was amaze at the dozens of lighted cell phones screens in evidence. Several of the people in the rows immediately to my rear started shooting flash photos about every four minutes, and in fact people in the auditorium generally took cell phone flash photos throughout the concert. To be sure there were no announcements at anytime prohibiting the use of recording devices or cell phones during the performance. As noted earlier, I've never attended a concert quite like this one.

     I did enjoy the concert but probably more because Willie's an icon, who won't be around much longer. He celebrates his 80 this month.

     In addition to appearing in more than 30 movies, written five or six books, published poetry, founded a successful bio-diesel company, and written scores of hits songs for some of the luminaries of country music ( The Family Bible-Claude Gray; Hello Walls-Faron Young; Night Life-Ray Price; Funny How Time Slips Away-Billy Walker; Pretty Paper-Roy Orbison; Crazy-Patsy Cline)  Willie himself has recorded and charted many hits.  

Nelson has also been a champion of those in need, ranging from farmers on hard times, to the Japanese homeless recovering from tsunami devastation, to the recent fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, his  social activism, has had an altruistic bent. In one way or another, Willie Nelson has been a presence in our cultural/political lives for 80 years, and I think it's fair to say that he has a poets heart and soul. I admire and respect him as a man and like his music.

19 April 2013 Update

The following AP story highlights the sort of humanitarian impulses Willie Nelson responses to:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Willie Nelson said Thursday that he will turn an upcoming Texas concert into a benefit for victims of the explosion at a fertilizer plant not far from where he grew up.

The country music icon still has a home in Abbott, Texas, about five miles north of West, which was rocked by the explosion Wednesday night that left an unknown number of people dead and more than 160 hurt. He remembers riding his bike the short distance between the towns and still has many friends and family there.

"Our hearts and prayers go out to the people of West," Nelson said in an interview before taping a CMT Crossroads special in Nashville. "There are a lot of our friends and loved ones and neighbors down there. We talked to some of them and some of the made it out OK, and some of them didn't. But they're strong and they'll be back. It's one of those things you don't get over. But you will get through it."

The concert is scheduled for April 28 in Austin.

When not on the road touring, Nelson has lived in Austin since 1971. The concert was scheduled as an 80th birthday celebration, but now will serve a dual purpose.

Lady Thatcher, The Iron Lady Has Passed from The Scene

Lady Thatcher, the goddess of money redistribution to the wealthy has died. Though some still revere her, the fact is that during her third term in office her own party shit canned her. Though the Soviets gave her the sobriquet that she embraced with delight, the Iron Lady, it did in fact suggest something important about her character. . .she didn't have an ounce of compassion for the poor and dispossessed.

It's much too soon for an assessment of Lady Thatcher in an historical sense, but my guess is that she will be noted by future historians as a short sighted, narrow mined ideologue who exacerbated problems that would have been more easily ameliorated by a leader with a broader less partisan, extremist world view. May she rest in peace! 

Social Security, Welfare Queens, Deficits and Walmart

Though most Americans depend on Social Security payments for their very livelihood, most of those recipients know very little about the actual working of the program; and are, therefore, highly subject to the disinformation campaigns waged by politicians like Congressman Paul Ryan. The fact is Social Security, contrary to the Ryan Republican PR campaign, is not the engine driving the budget crisis, and benefit cuts should not be used to erase our national debt.

Let's  be realistic about our national budget deficit and what's causing it's growth. For starters, Social Security is self funded and does not add one penny to the debt. Indeed, our Social Security trust fund monies have been dumped into general revenue funds and have helped pay the Nations bills every year since at least 1973. Those funds were invested in US Treasury notes and carry with them the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Coincidentally, those are the same notes regularly purchased by the foreign governments whose monies have helped to keep our government afloat. Just today (4/o1/2013) the Treasury reported that the Chinese continue to buy US Treasury notes at  a rapid rate.

A new report out today indicates that the real "Welfare Queen," to use a fictional label created by Ronald Reagan, is not the mother with three or four kids collecting food stamps and driving a Corvet; it's not the retirees collecting their hard earned Social Security checks, NO! IT'S WALL MART!!!!!! Yes, Walmart!

Walmart, our nations largest private sector employer, pays their "sales associates" on average just over 15,000 dollars per year--for a family of four that's pretty close to $6,000.00 to 8,000.00 a year below the Federal Poverty Level. The Walmart poor apply for and receive Federally funded food stamps just to get by. In 2011, Wallmart workers received $2.66 billion in food stamps and Medicaid. Those numbers have gone up in each year since. While the working poor at Walmart were forced on to public welfare, Walmart in 2011, declared profits of $15.4 billion dollars.

Obviously Walmart has the means to take better care of the people upon whose backs they make their money. Indeed, “The combined worth of the 6 Walmart heirs and heiresses is greater than that of the bottom 41% of American families (48.8 million households)".

To be sure corporate welfare is alive and well.  Walmart is not alone in collecting Federal largess. The last time I checked, GE, another of our nations largest corporations, didn't pay any federal taxes last year but rather were the recipients of federal moneys though one legal scam or another. American corporations are fond of stating that US corporate tax rates are the highest in the world, and that may be true. But, the facts give the lie to the actual rates being paid by these corporate giants. Many large US corporations keep their wealth off shore and don't pay any taxes.

In sum, it's important to keep in mind that though our nations deficits have become the constant preoccupation of the extremists that have become the Republican Party, none of their deficit reduction programs even remotely touch the problems that created those deficits. During the Romney/Ryan Presidential campaign, Congressman Ryan repeatedly talked about closing tax loop holes etc. but in fact neither he nor Gov. Romney would ever even  mention a specific loop hole they would willingly close; and that remains the posture of those Republicans in Congress to this very day. Yet, they do continue to talk incessantly about cutting “entitlement programs” into which they dump programs like Social Security.

Let's not forget that the Republican deficit hawks voted for the unfunded Bush wars. . .didn't offer any criticism of Bush Administration budgets that did not include one penny for war funding. This is the same group that pushed though a huge prescription drug bill that lined the pockets of big pharma but did not include one penny to fund the program.   And let us not overlook the biggest contributor to our Nation's deficit. . .the one and a half trillion dollar Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.   To be sure, the Bush budget deficits didn't emerge from a vacuum; they came from the voodoo economic behavior that ribbed eight years of Bush economic profligacy.   As Vice President stated during the vice presidential debates, "“They talk about this Great Recession as if it fell out of the sky, like, 'Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?' It came from this man (pointing at Congressman Ryan) voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted against them.”

Have we forgotten that during the last months of the Bush Administration that the economy was in desperate straights; that Obama and McCain were called back to Washington to participate in emergency talks to keep the ship of state from going over the economic cliff.

How a few short years of Right-Wing economic nonsense changed the equation Bush inherited from the outgoing Clinton administration. Back then the dominate talk in economic circles had to do with what we were going to do as a nation with all the budget surpluses the Clinton Administration had accumulated. Those were the days.