The real deal. Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Uptown funk you up, Uptown funk you up, Torn Slatterns and Nugget Ranchers




In France, a beach was closed because a dolphin was trying to mate with the swimmers. 

"Leave me alone, I can stay in the water as long as I want," said Khloe Kardashian.

When asked about the accusation, the dolphin said he did not do it on porpoise.




San Diego Rep., Duncan Hunter, now blames his wife for the Chargers moving to Los Angeles.






For the first time since his horrible sexual misconduct charges, Louis CK performed stand up in New York. Ironically, the show had a happy ending.






"SNL" member Pete Davidson said he thinks Ariana Grande will dump him. "So do we," said every known factor in the universe.




A study claims Viagra can cause an early death. So some men won't know if they're coming or going.

It can also make it harder to close the coffin lid.







Donald Trump is in a feud with Google. He gets mad because every time he Googles Trump Administration it shows a picture of a dumpster fire.

Of course Trump hates Google, when you type something into the search it gives you the truth.





Western Illinois sent out a memo telling men that masturbating in the dorm showers is a violation of their health rules. In a related story, applications to go to Western Illinois are down 57%. 

This was a surprising memo coming from a college whose mascot is the Spanking Monkeys.

(Bill Snake) 






In France, a beach was closed because a dolphin was trying to mate with the swimmers. One victim, a  middle-aged woman, was particularly upset. "He lives in the ocean. How am I supposed to get in touch with him?"




Since you asked:


Watched  “The Big Chill” again after many, many years. Wow, that movie did not age all that well. Sort of  like mayonnaise in the sun. What a bunch of whining narcissists. Jeff Goldblum’s character is patient Zero for terminal douche-isim. 

Good music, though.

Great story from that movie. The opening scene looks to be a guy getting dressed. They brush his brown hair, wipe a smudge off his polished black shoe. Turns out it is a corpse getting prepared for a funeral.

The corpse was played by Kevin Costner. It was his first big movie. The director and writer, Lawrence Kasdan, decided to cut his part out. The first scene was Costner as Alex with his girlfriend, played by Meg Tilly. Kasdan decided, like “Jaws,” it would work better if you did not see the character Alex in the opening scene and used your imagination.


But Kasdan dreaded breaking the news to the starving actor, Kevin Costner. Kasdan said it was the toughest thing he ever had to do in movies. Kasdan braced himself for an emotional young actor-like meltdown. Actors have been known to throw tantrums because one scene of theirs was clipped. Costner’s entire role was out, so even though his behavior on set was excellent, he had every right to throw a tantrum. 

Costner could not have been more professional. He thanked Kasdan for the money and the big break and said, while sad, he understood being cut. He added he hoped to work with Kasdan again sometime.   

Lawrence Kasdan, like Judd Apataw,  is nothing if not loyal to his movie family. He has about ten family members in “The Big Chill” and the ensemble cast loved each other. Kasdan was so touched by Costner’s reaction, he vowed to find a movie for Kevin Costner to star in.

Thus became the movie “Silverado.” 

Kevin Costner, thanks to Lawrence Kasden, now has a 70 acre beachfront home South of Santa Barbara in Carpentaria. But when he needs to relax, he goes to his ranch in Aspen. 

If he had thrown a tantrum, he would have none of that. Loyalty and class always pays off. 


Also saw Showtimes documentary on Lynyrd Skynyrd called "If I Leave Here Tomorrow."

   Myths are the logs that stoke rock and roll's fires

Lord knows how I love both rock documentaries and I love Lynyrd Skynyrd. 

But this movie focused too much on the plane crash. We needed more about stories from the road and how songs were made.   

One of the things that hit me right away is that I thought, while lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, was the real deal, I figured the rest of them were sensitive musician types and they were just playing the role of a bar-fighting Southern redneck band.

That was only true of California kid, guitarist Ed King.

Oh, my, oh no. These other guys were from West Jacksonville. West Jacksonville is a dump's idea of a dump. These guys were dirt-poor, gritty fishermen, hunters, farmers and fist-fighters. 

They practiced in a red shed in the swamp. That was where all of their first songs were written exactly like they were on the first album, including "Gimme Three Steps", "Tuesday's Gone" "Simple Man" and "Freebird." There is not one bad song on that entire album and those aforementioned songs are legends. 

They would improvise a guitar solo while creating the song. But once they had a solo like they liked it, they were Eagles-like in playing it identically live. 

Because word got out that their gear was stored in this red shack they they called Hell House, due to the insane heat and humidity, thieves broke in and stole crap. So each night, one band member had to hang out in there battling the sweltering heat, swarming mosquito's and water moccasins and occasional alligator to guard it with a gun.

They had a demo fully recorded of their first album and shopped it around to nine record companies. Nine. All nine turned them down flat. And that is with "Freebird." 

Nine record companies turned down Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album.

And you want to become a musician?

The name is of the band is even a better story than I thought. Like everyone, I heard they were getting back at a mean gym teacher who hated hippies. Yes and no.

There was a popular funny song in the late Sixties I remember called "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah." It is a kid writing home from camp. It contained these lyrics:

"You remember Leonard Skinner

He got Ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner"

So Leonard Skinner became the joke name of anyone the band did not know. Who's on the phone? Leonard Skinner. Who is that guy standing there, Leonard Skinner.

Then, out of the blue, guitarist Gary Rossington is complaining his a-hole gym teacher wants his hair cut. They ask him the guy's name and he says Leonard Skinner. They thought he was joking. No. The guy's name was really Leonard Skinner.

Ronnie Van Zant considered that a sign from god and they never went back. Besides, their first name, One Percent, sucked. 

As tough, talented, motivated, hard-working as they were, like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they needed luck. And they found it in the person of a certified musical genius, Al Kooper. (Not Alice) 

And with that luck of finding their music savior and guru, having already been playing for nothing for three years, they still had another four years of playing honky tonks, piled into one truck and slept four to cheap motel rooms. 

It is hard to imagine how much hard working, blue collar bands, like Lynyrd Skynyrd, love music because most of us do not even know anyone who loves something that much. It slides over into the crazy side. When they start out, they have nothing else. Food included. 

For comparison, take something that someone has to deeply love to keep doing: playing minor league baseball. Hot sweaty bus rides, two to a room in cheap hotels, bad food. That is luxury compared to a beginning rock band.

No bus, everyone piled in a van, four to six to a room, if they have a room at all and no food instead of bad food. 

If these guys had not been so damn tough and so young and so uniformed of their statistical chances of making it and so talented and so driven, there is no way they would have made it. No way. 

Someone put it really well in the documentary when guitarist Ed King quit in 1975 when they were at their peak. They said as hard as it is to make it in the music business, it is even harder to stay in it. The music business, especially in 1975's cocaine era, flew in the face of having a family, a wife, friends, and good health.

For seven years, they lived in gritty, bloody squalor just to play music in dive bars, drink, fight and do it again. You know how sleazy roadhouses have chicken wire to protect the band from the patrons? Lynyrd Skynyrd was the first band to need chickenwire to protect the patrons from the band.

While an unbelievably charismatic singer, lyricist, performer and leader, Ronnie Van Zant was a legit psychotically mean drunk. He was short, but strong and tenacious, he had trained as a boxer. Ronnie had been a damn good baseball player. They all were baseball players, that is how most of them met.


Apparently being a hippy in Jacksonville in the Seventies was like being a member of the Taliban at a Seal reunion. Hated does not come close. 

One night, Van Zant goes after his childhood friend and one of three great lead guitarists, Gary Rossington, the guy who gave them the rift on "Sweet Home Alabama." Van Zant breaks a whisky bottle and yells, "You'll never play guitar again." And proceeds to cut both of Rossington's hands badly with the broken bottle. 

Playing the next night with bandages on his hands leaking blood all over his guitar, the critics thought it was a cool special effect. 

Many of them were missing many teeth.   

Lynyrd Skynyrd seemed like overnight success to all of us because they were young when they made it, 24, but that was because they started at 16 and 17. 

Their motivation at 17 was to make it out of Jacksonville. So what did they do when they made it big? They all stayed in Jacksonville. Ronnie Von Zant had a one-story brick house by a river so he could fish. He added another third to it when they hit it big.

They did a ton of drugs, drank whisky, passed groupies around like joints and crashed cars. But the cars they crashed were used T-Birds. Not Ferrari's. They built homes on the edge of the swamp by the river. 

Hell, the reason their plane crashed was because it was an old piece of crap twin prop. (The one in "Almost Famous" is exactly like it) They could have, and should have, afforded a Lear Jet. 

But, let's face it, like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis, their myth would not have grown if they had lived. 

And myths are the logs that stoke rock and roll's fires. 

(Oh, snap, Lex, buddy. Get over your damn self on that one. Kiss myself, so pretty) 

One of the most consistent themes I have learned reading all of my rock biographies is that rock and roll is not nearly as glamorous as we want it to be. The performance is slick, but nothing else is. Especially the groupies. It is not being too harsh to insert the word skanks. Or the words nasty skanks. 

When I saw Lynyrd Skynyrd at Comiskey Park in 1976, it was brutally hot, dusty and crowded with idiot drunks. And, it turns out, we were living like the royal family compared to the band members.

No, if it is possible, Lynyrd Skynyrd was even more than their image. Other bands, like the Stones and the Eagles and even Led Zeppelin, worked hard at creating an image of a wild rock band. 

But the truth is most of them were wimpy and skinny effete musicians.

Lynyrd Skynyrd had to play their real image down a notch or ten or they would have scared their audience to death.


These are few of my favorite smells:

Suntan lotion

Peanut butter

Ivory soap

Shrimp

Mount Gay Rum

The ocean

Thanksgiving turkey cooking

A Christmas tree

The mystical combination of eucalyptus trees, fog, ocean and tar that is the smell of Santa Barbara.

Grilling red meat.

Oak wood smoke

Wet dog (Yes, the smell isn't great, but it means you have a happy dog) 

Pool water with a tad of chlorine

Coffee

Bread baking

A baseball mitt

New track shoes

Rice cooking

Bar room

Air conditioned air

The burning sugar cane in the sugar factory in Maui on the way from Kihei to go windsurfing at Kanaha. 

Fresh cut grass

Rain

Wet paint

Pine wood

Ski wax and surf board wax

Just about any and all women's perfume

Sauteed garlic, onions, peppers, shallots




Dearest Hollywood:


As I have mentioned before, you are missing some seriously easy slam-dunk movies. First, remake the awful “Semi-Tough” Burt Reynolds-ruined football movie and make it exactly like the great Dan Jenkins great novel, “Semi Tough.” 

Now make a bio-pic of Ronnie Van Zant. Name it "Kid Free Bird." This guy is a slam dunk. After watching the Lynyrd Skynyrd documentary, “If I Leave Here Tomorrow” and already being a huge fan, I had no idea how wild this guy and his life actually was. 

Dirt poor. Street fighter. Talented baseball player. Red neck with liberal views. Man of his convictions. True to his word. Unfailing gentlemen to women even with groupies at his feet. Devoted dad and husband as much as he could be. Did not give a flying hump about money or fame.

Oh, and he could write lyric or three. And sing.

It would have everything that is pertinent today. He was for gun control and civil rights living in the middle of a town that hated both. And yet part of their symbol was the Confederate flag. (They used the flag to identify they were from the South, not because of a reminder of the war) 

Apparently being a hippy in Jacksonville in the Seventies was like being a member of the Taliban at a Seal reunion. Hated does not come close. 

Then there is drugs, sex, rock and roll, loyalty, fighting, the insanity of the music business all wrapped up in a charismatic and funny guy who everybody loved. Even though he may have been the ugliest drunk in history. 

"Kid Free Bird." Coming to a theater near you.




See? Two thousand words. I write, on average, one thousand words a day. Usually most of it is 20 jokes. Today, two thousand, but less jokes and a lot of that was drivel about “The Big Chill” and “Lynyrd Skynyrd.” 

Total word output including emails, Twitter posts and two Facebook posts, 3,000 words.

It is two little things I like to call productivity and creativity. 

Uh, you're welcome. 

"Fat guy in a little cooooooooaaaaaaat"