To anyone who may be wondering why I am not on BS as much as I used to be or why I am not writing as much:

I do not have a catchy video or song for this explanation but just a laundry list of courtesy to all of those who read my blogs, are friends, or simply just curious.

I am on a diet and doing well on it, but it is trying and tiring and requires me to move around a bit more than a four hour a day blogging habit may allow.  I would like to get down to about 200 (knowing that I will probably put on about 15-20 lbs. after it is over and a wieght of 215 or so would be good on my 6' frame with my muscle mass). Wish me luck!

Last Sunday I was informed that my landlords will be selling the condo that Lady and I have been renting for the last two years and now there is alot of work to be down. We are paying 1200 a month which is a very low rent for this area which is local to both of our jobs. The cheapest we can find right now for something comparable, but in an apartment complex, would be in the 14's. Most are between 1550 and 1800. Most of these figures are impossible with our budget. I have asked for a raise (yet again, since I was promised one 9 months ago when I started - all I was supposed to have to do is prove myself, which I have ten times over). It looks like I won't get it. Needless to say, a huge conundrum is on our doorstep, complete with all of the stress.

Also, I am getting my license back and have bought an old beat up Nissan pick-up. Trying to make sure I ahve jumped through all the right hoops, aquired all of the proper paperwork, and raised the correct amount of funds for my big 'Trip To The DMV' next Wednesday has also eaten up much of my time. Insurance, a breathalizer/ignition lock device to be installed, smog check, transfer of ownership, new title as the old one was lost, proof of class enrollment, fees for reintatement of license and fees for the restrictions have all had to be checked, re-checked, and checked again in order to ensure a less complicated trip to the DMV than would could be if I did it all nonchalantly. It seems as though I shall be on the road next week which should relieve alot of the 'driving Richard around' stress we have had over the past two years. YAY!

I shall be around a bit.

I am just filled to the gills with a plate of glass shards.

I guess it is time to get out the soldering gun and make some stained glass windows!

Be good and smile.

Godspeed ...

Sometimes dancing is all we have.

Sometimes it is just as simple as the skinniest woman in the world.

Sometimes it is a easy as saying ‘Gomer’ in many different variations.

Sometimes William McKinley matters more to us than he did while he was President.

For now, it is just as cool as Greg Benson making us laugh, yet again:

Goodnight and Godspeed …

So this appears to be growing into a four part series that mellows and grows vicious at the same time …

I mentioned the Beastie Boys in the previous post to Adam and here is somewhere I will mention them again. They broke the mold of black/white rap with their album ‘License To Ill’ produced by NYU college monkey Rick Rubin. Their initially less received follow up album ‘Paul’s Boutique’ began the sampling lawsuit craze/legislation that was phenomenal, but their real rap prowess shot out with the third album ‘Check Your Head’ (which also featured some of their original venue of expression, 'punk').

Here is a sample:

Yet another that I loved-enjoyed-marveled at. I am still convinced that this was filmed in the Steele Derrick quarries near Rockport Mass. I knew a man who went to school with MCA and Ad-Rock’s Dad ran the Gloucester playhouse and many a friend of mine have played scrabble with Mike D, who hates to loose and never does. I lived on Cape Ann for awhile and knew the boys and this song rocked me through High School before they were a glimmer of my reality:

See, rap comes in phases like any other music and there was jazzy, political, hard core, gangsta, funk, soul, rip off, pop and so forth and so on …

Here is some of the run on of what was before. A bit of Ice Cube doing what he does best and changing my mind with his album ‘Predator’. Distinct descriptions of an L.A. day. And yes, I was there:

And here is his NWA counter part recruiting new talent and rocking it through his own day that is not very different, as George Clinton is responsible for both:

A bit of different that changed my life forever but was still L.A. while L.A. was still L.A. This is where we find the Hill (Cypress Hill), and the most realistic Hispanic rap group to ever take hold for two albums before they sold out entirely. This is what turned me hot and white like magnesium for them:

Around again to the pop of it and we find the soul sisters of booty shake coming back sexier than ever trying to get it all wrapped around it. There was plenty to like beyond cutting edge and gangsta emerging. There was pop and these ladies knew how to do it with smiles and class:

And then there was politics and there were no better than ‘The Goats’ out of Philly. They crucified the first Bush and did so while promoting the use of Acid and Grass and Beer - something no one had done before. Politics (not just revolving around racism, but politics in general) and LSD were not rap talking points. This video is of bad quality but the music is great. Universal holds video rights, thus this version of someone video taping their T.V. (The Goats were a huge band that used a full ensemble when playing: bass, guitar, drums, records, everything):

And then onto jazz mixed into two flavors. There was that of the universal new-wave found in ‘A Tribe Called Quest’. Q-Tip went onto guest on albums by the B-Boys, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, and so on - plus he has had his own solo albums. This song was always one that echoed through my head as I flew into LAX (sorry it is only a snippet as the full length version is record company owned):

This was of a different jazz variety. It featured amazing switch up and an ensemble cast of rappers getting their points out and rocking it hard and mighty with profound snippets of ‘hell yeah!’. Digable Planets rocked as hard as the fast burning candle could:

And then there was the popped out ‘Cantoloop” that echoed through our heads and permeated our car speakers where ever we went while awaiting pending commercial background noise. However, this song shows where it all went and could of gone and shouldn’t have, all in one melody - it was pleasing due to Herbie Hancock and the creative lyrics - beyond that, it would have been a no-mention:

I guess there are now two more parts and I suppose they will be looked at or not; listened to or not; dealt with or not; recognized or not.

It is what it is.

Adam knows.

I am leaving out too many to name.

Many do not have the videos or are protected due to record company anti-embed bull-crap.

Cest la vie.

Rock on.

Two more to go Adam, two more to go.

Be good.

Godspeed …

First off, I would like to apologize to everyone for my delayed responses lately as I have been very busy, stressed, and playing video games so I did not have to focus on any extraneous drama, as I have enough of my own.

That being said, I have wanted to post this for a long while but there were some editing issues with the clip and when they were resolved I was not really online so much.

Greg Benson is a local comic hero of mine and is the man responsible for the series of video clips called, “Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show’. One of his newer video escapades really made me belly laugh and I wanted to share it with you all.

Unfortunately, at one point in the video he had used the term ‘midget’ which is way 'not cool' to some people (even though it didn’t bother me, Greg, or the midget that was in the video). Some people want to ‘PC’ the world to all hell.

Greg changed it to ‘little people’ and all was good.

Without further adieu … 'The MXT Tour":

Be well and smile.

Godspeed …

When I was eleven, going on twelve, my mother moved my two sisters and I to California on an Amtrak train. We packed all we could into boxes and duffels and went their with no destination or anything other than hope. I spent part of that summer living in a tent with my two sisters, my mother, and her very masculine first ‘wife’ Nancy who was only about 23, at the Disney Land campground. I was able to swim in a pool everyday and watch the fireworks at night. It was the summer of ‘87.

That following fall I escaped the rigors of Orange County life and living in Anaheim (I was going to Brookhurst Junior High, which is where Gwen Stephanie went a few years before me). We went to Boston for an Aunt’s wedding and I stayed with my Dad. This is about the time that I met Lady for the first time. I was a husky and sweaty 12 year old who liked fantasy and math and the only attraction to me was that I was the ‘new’ kid from California. I was attending the Higgins Junior High School which used to be Peabody high and had such alumni as certain members of Aerosmith.

This began a series of numerous years traveling from L.A. to Boston and vice versa via plane in order to visit parents. On one of these adventures I met a college kid on a non-stop TWA flight between the two cities. I had a newly marketed gadget called a Sony Discman. I was playing CD’s that mostly consisted of Iron Maiden and Metallica (when they were good not that mainstream crap that you all lapped up).

This college kid asked this twelve year old tyke of a man-to-be if he had ever listened to Rap. I said no. He had CD’s too (my grandfather always joked by asking me what the return on ‘my’ CDs was). In a revolution/movie moment he said, “Well, you gotta listen to this!”. He handed me a CD to put in and showed me a cover that had a half naked woman holding a gun book ended by two black men holding weapons. The year was 1988, it was winter. The album was ‘Power’ by a man we all know as Ice-T. There is a song on there called “Girls Lets Get Buck Naked And F***”. Do I need to say anymore? I was HOOKED!

I started buying up CD’s as much as I could. I knew a bit about rap as the first tape I ever bought with my own money was the Beastie Boys tape ‘Licensed To Ill’ which had come out the previous year. I played that the whole campground summer in Orange County. But the stuff I was buying in ‘88 was so different. Big Daddy Kane, Erik B. and Rakim, Public Enemy, 3rd Bass, De La Soul, N.W.A., Biz Markie. I was listening to a whole new world. It was my ‘Brave New World’ and with it I was waking up and mixing it with ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ and ‘Number of the Beast’. Iron Maiden and Easy-E were alternating through my Monday morning school wake up and only the Beatles could shut them both up!

This is for Adam Warlock of ‘What Would You Do?’ and his numerous other blogs. I know what it is like to be the honky digging the beats. I had the boom box that Radio Raheem had in ‘Do The Right Thing’. I was the dumb fat white kid in a beret and some fingerless gloves holding that 25 lb. monstrosity on my shoulder playing the soundtrack to the movie ‘Colors’. I even tried break dancing while it was big but my gut was big too so it didn’t work out too well.

There will be a part two of this post that shows the flip side of all that hip hop grooming and how I dissolved a love affair with Frank Zappa in order to get back to rap, but for now I would like to share these videos with you all, and especially Adam:

Disclaimer: A bunch of the videos that I had cherry picked were not available upon me returning to put this together so I guess I need to act a little faster when it comes to posting things that I research and I guess if people put up videos on YouTube and are really sharing them then they should keep them up! A bunch were also not findable like some M.C. Lyte videos, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Kool Moe Dee, Roxanne Shante, and the Ice-T stuff that I found that vanished. I also had to use a live version of 'Paid In Full' because Universal Records has the wraps on the real video footage and no one has pirated it yet like they did the 3rd Bass footage.

I hope you all enjoyed and could get it.

Most of all, Adam - you got one more post coming your way, brother.

Godspeed ...