Category: Recollections

This is where I keep posts of the off the cuff writings or thoughts

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Kate Bush

“It’s in the trees”

“I just know something good is going to happen, just saying it might even make it happen”

It all started when I got an email from the web-version of the Cleveland Plain Dealer alerting me to local news updates. I hadn’t lived in Cleveland in fifty years, but through the hard work of the DARPA gang and subsequent innovators, I could keep up with the my hometown through a series of settings and keystrokes.

I was looking for new updates from either the Saint Edwards football team or the Cleveland Browns. But then I saw a plug for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, also located in Cleveland and their 2023 inductees. Somewhere in the scribbling, my eyes caught the name “Kate Bush.” Finally! I thought surprisingly; Kate Bush was going to get into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I clicked on the link looking for more information, thinking maybe she had appeared live at the induction ceremony. Back in my 1980’s her music was of the palette of my musical life, but I had not heard anything about her in 20 years or more and was naturally wondering how she was getting on. I read on.

Evidently, Big Boi from Outcast inducted her into the hall – they didn’t give the connection. I scanned the scribbling about what he said, hoping to catch the words  ‘performed live’ or  ‘appeared.’ But it was not to be. According to the article, Kate Bush merely sent a letter thanking the Hall of Fame for the recognition. It was a nice letter. But no Kate live. I remained curious: what has Kate Bush been up to the last 35 years? Such a monster artistic talent had to be busy doing something.

Starting in 1978, the then nineteen year old artist was a unique presence in the pop music horizons till the early nineties. Her first album, The Kick Inside, contained her first hit record, “Wuthering Heights. The song about Heathcliffe and Kathy on the moors. Hardly pop music fodder. For me the 1984 album Lionheart, while not the most popular, it contained the infectious song “Wow”. No matter the song relates to the stage and screen, for me it will always conjure up the desert

I remember being at the Botanical Gardens in Tempe AZ with Colleen O’Shaughnessy and we had taken some mushrooms and were wandering the desert; but staying within listening distance of the stereo system. It was playing the ethereal , “Wow”. As the sun set, we were tripping out and fabulous. It was majestic, it was natural, it was… wow. Though the song lyrics told of stage and fame, all it told me was the melting colors of the saguaros and mesquite.

Most people know Kate as the guest vocalist on the Peter Gabriel song, “Don’t Give Up.” The song was top ten hit in the US in 1986. The song cast a man’s voice in desperation because his life faces hard times, inspired by the Depression Era photo’s of Dorthea Lange. Kate enters as the counterpoint, he voice on of encouragement.

Three albums later, Kate Bush released Hounds of Love and caught the zeitgeist. Three songs form this album charted, “Cloudbusting. ”, ”Hounds of Love” and the recently re-popularized “Running up that Hill.”

But, as the Rock Hall, it seemed Kate Bush was gonna sit this one out. Well played, Kate Bush.

So I did what I always do when information is scarce. I went to YouTube. There I found out that Kate last performed live in 2014 and had a residency of some sort. I clicked on this, but it was just a still image with some music behind it, then I clicked on Kate Bush Cloudbusting Before The Dawn live at Hammersmith Apollo. Bingo! live Kate. The video began with a clip from Kate probably circa 1984 then transitioned to Kate: 2014. Her voice sounded just the same ethereal coo and Cloudbusting revisited brought on a new sensation that I never had when the clot when next song was current Cloudbusting is a great song but so is most her catalog which is why the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame was honoring her in the first place.

I see the post has gotten 267,000 views since it was posted on YouTube. Now that she’s in the rock that’ll get to over 1 million maybe 10 million as the world would be a more hopeful place if more people knew Kate’s music. That many more hearts to be grateful.

“I just know something good is going to happen, just saying it might even make it happen”

Oh, yeah and St Ed’s won the state championship. Go Eagles!

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The Catch that Wasn’t

Every life is filled with paramount moments that pass in a flash and only come into perspective with time. This is just one of mine..

Number 28 in your program, Number One in your hearts, from Cleveland Hights, Ohio and Cathederal Latin School, Ed Reilly

It was the season opener of the 1975 campaign against the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga Moccasins at venerable Dudley Field on campus. If it wasn’t for the attached photo courtesy of the Vanderbilt Hustler photographer who took it and gave it to me sometime later that year, this play may have been lost in the mist. Perhaps remembered only by me and my ever-loyal roommate, Reed Trickett. But it’s not and over the years through all the moves and changes of my life, this picture periodicallly surfaced and has survived preserved personal myth.

I believe the pass was from Fred Fisher, our all-conference quarterback my sophomore year. But as I found out at some point over the last fifty years, Fred got hurt in that game and it might have been David Culley that threw the ball. We may never know. I believe it was the first half of a tightly contested game. The thing I absolutely do remember about the play is when I broke my post over the middle and knew that I had beaten the safety, I got a rare kind of excited: something good was about to happen.

But alas t’was not to be. The ball was overthrown or underrun by about a yard. Just another incompletion. That we won the game 17-7 wont be recalled by anyone, and an incomplete pass in the first half even less. But it was a good start for a season that would end up taking us to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee and the 17-14 victory over the hated Vols. That we remember: Go ‘Dores.

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The End of the Great Society?

Since the end of World War II and the Depression’s perceived threats to democratic societies, America has been consumed with how to do democracy better. This generally came in the picture of the FDR’s America, where the government exists to support the people and spread goodwill as opposed to the laisse-fair governments of the post Civil War United States. At least that’s how it is when viewed from the proverbial helicopter, ignoring for the moment the bad things that occur in any big country and seen as necessary to survival in the moment.

This wave of democracy reached began with FDR and its peak in the late 1960s in the form of LBJ‘s social programs of the Great Society and the passage of the Voting Rights Acts. These programs are best evidenced by FDR’s Social Security and LBJ’s Medicare, Medicaid and Food stamps program. In the last 10 years, this Federal philosophy has come into greater question as Americans live their life and ponder what kind of government or society they want. For most citizens this is not an overwhelming occupation but we listen to our friends and family who are more concerned with change than others and it has more and more been a topic often heated of the mainstream America. These changes up until very recently have all settled around What are the limits of government in a free society and how do we take care of more people better.

I feel this examination of the 80 years of liberal policy government all came to a crescendo in 2008 in Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. When Barack Obama walked on stage to address the crowd after being elected President of the United States. As the nation shared in this triumph of Hope, a small segment of the electorate was not happy, and maybe it was in heat, but it was a concern: “What was to happen to our status quo?” Underneath this sense of positive change in America was the dark tendrils of fear.

I believe ever since then there has been a growing counter influence on the American people. First a contrarian whisper, then a cry to to a reflexive form of nationalism as an answer to the perceived erosion of American values as understood by those who limply cheered for Barack Obama’s election, but secretly wondered “what will happen?”

Over the past 18 years in America has been a struggle for direction as witnessed by the inconsistent elections and trying nature of our politics. Much of this it must be said is business as usual, in our free society, which allows everybody an avenue of appeal no matter how ridiculous their notions but this time their rhetoric did not fade and was it and be drawn out by saying her constituents, but this time became the QAnon nation.

A  consisten stream of violent far right or far left activism is reshaping the country from the Great Society envisioned in the late sixties.

  • Ruby Ridge,
  • Waco,
  • Oklahoma City
  • Election of Donald trump
  • Black Lives Matter 
  • The polarization of technology wealth
  • Impending explosion of AI
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The Gardens at Cherry Creek

From 2019 thru June 2021 I lived in the Cherry Creek area of Denver. It was time of equal parts excitment and misery as the pandemic hit after year one and upended our plans in ways that would play out only over time