NEWS FEATURES, Acoustic Americana Music Guide, October 27, 2011 edition

    
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    Here's the latest edition of The Guide's NEWS section.
    
The section with ALL THE EVENTS, the concerts, club gigs, workshops, festivals, and more – the Guide's SPOTLIGHT EVENTS section – is a click away, at
   
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/spotlight-events-acoustic-americana_28.html  
   
   
Here's the NEWS, so let's get started!
   
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                                                       October 27, 2011 edition
   
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THIS WEEK’S NEWS FEATURES   
   
  1) Irish, Celtic Music Plentiful for “SAMHAIN,” Original Halloween / Celtic New Year  
  2) “TWO SIDES OF CELTIC” Show at Caltech Saturday Night 
  3) Guerrilla Art Returns with Mayor On-Board – May The Fork Be with You 
  4) Music Got Us to the Moon – Where Might it Yet Take Us? 
    The biggest and final Mars lander touches down in November. Is there meaning for Artists? 
  5) STAGECOACH and COACHELLA Will Grow to 3 Days in 2012 
  6) Strong Mountain Roots / Bluegrass / Newgrass Double-Bill on Friday 
  7) YOU can still add your comment at the HUGE RESPONSE to our feature,
    “Artists Join 'OCCUPY WALL STREET'...”  
    
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       Here are this week's news feature stories, listed above...   
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Our # 1 Story
   
IRISH, CELTIC MUSIC PLENTIFUL FOR “SAMHAIN,” ORIGINAL HALLOWEEN / CELTIC NEW YEAR
    
From Thursday evening through Sunday, don't stay home if you love Irish / Celtic music.
    
    If you look only at all the music bookings in the Los Angeles region these few days, you'd think it was St. Patrick's Day. It's actually the most important time in the ancient Celtic calendar.
    
    A quick note about the crazy pronunciation of SAMHAIN: It's pronounced “sah-win” (rhymes with “plowin'”) because “mh” sounds rather like “w.” That's something you might use when pondering other Gaelic words. Now that you can say it, let's explore it!
    
    Samhain's concerts and events follow this brief bit o' its history.
    
    Halloween, aka Hallowe’en, or All Hallows Eve, or All Souls Eve, or All Saints Day, has a more colorful history than you may know. There’s much more to tell.
    
    It wasn’t always a day for dentists to drool, anticipating all the kid’s candy-fed cavities they’d soon be drilling.
    
    Halloween began as the Celtic “Samhain,” which actually means, "November." ADRIEN RAIN BURKE, from the Celtic Arts Center, explained it all to the Guide back in 2008, and it's so good we reprinted it here.
    
    “'Samhain' means 'November' in Gaelic, which was the first month of the year for the ancient Celts. So, October 31, which has come down to us as 'Halloween,' was the CELTIC NEW YEAR'S EVE and the beginning of the Dark Half of the year.
    
    “It was dangerous in those times, as the Celts believed in fairies and ghosts and 'things that go bump in the night' - and those bumpety things were for some reason especially prone to walk abroad during Celtic holidays - and they weren't very nice. In fact, to meet them usually ended in disaster for the hapless human. Jack O'Lanterns [carved from turnips in those pre-Columbian, pumpkin-less times – ed.] were lit and set in strategic places to scare away unwanted and unnatural visitors. Of course, one might be able to buy them off with treats.”
    
    When Christianity came to the British Isles and Ireland, The Church decided - as it often did - to keep the holiday and rename it to blend with the new faith. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So Samhain became known as All Souls Eve, All Hallows Eve, and All Saints Day.
    
    Adrian adds, “And the scary fun went on. People love ghost stories by firelight, and probably always will, and kids love putting on a costume and going door-to-door for treats.But New Year’s Eve was moved to December 31 - the Roman New Year - because you have to draw the line somewhere.”
    
    She concludes, “We at the Celtic Arts Center feel that the benefit of living in a multicultural society is the number of New Year's celebrations one can attend. So all are invited to ours.”
    
    We can't help but note that, nowadays, most of the month of October is given over to Samhain's descendant, Halloween – which is very odd, because Samhain still means November.
    
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WHEN AND WHERE TO CELEBRATE
    
    THURSDAY at 8 pm, MARLA FIBISH & JIMMY CROWLEY play the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena. Jimmy is the bard of Cork and a brilliant song-writer. Marla is known for her uniquely vibrant and driving playing on mandolin; she's a San Francisco native and a long-time feature of the Bay Area Irish music scene. Tix, $18.
    
FRIDAY – in San Diego – at 7:30 pm, “MASTERS OF THE CELTIC HARP: WILLIAM JACKSON & GRÁINNE HAMBLY” play the AMSD Concert Series in San Diego; 619-303-8176. We have a story on them (feature #2) because they play the Caltech Folk Society series in Pasadena on Saturday.
    
    SATURDAY at 8 pm, the Caltech Folk Music Society series brings WILLIAM JACKSON and GRÁINNE HAMBLY with their "TWO SIDES OF CELTIC" show – see the next news feature for all the details.
    
    SUNDAY AFTERNOON at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena, KEN O'MALLEY performs an all-acoustic matinee solo show. He brings his marvelous voice, guitar and mandolin to traditional and original (and always authentic) Irish song. If you've seen him with his band, THE TWILIGHT LORDS, you must see him solo acoustic.
    
    SUNDAY AFTERNOON and/or EVENING, at 3 & 7 pm, the Celtic Arts Center celebrates “SAMHAIN” in Irish Song, Dance & Story, with an optional traditional Samhain dinner. It's all about the story of the original Halloween and a celebration of the Celtic New Year with performances by SLUGGER O'TOOLE, BARRY LYNCH, ACS DANCERS, ADAM KIRK, CHRIS LOKEN, AEDAN MacDONNELL, STEVE PRIBYL, & LINEA SOLEDAD, sponsored by the Celtic Arts Center at the Burbank Moose Lodge, 1901 W Burbank Bl, Burbank 91506. Two shows, 3 pm or 7 pm, tix for either are $18; 5 pm dinner tix are $15; show + dinner, $30. Info & tix, www.CelticArtsCenter.com/Samhain.    
    
    SUNDAY EVENING at 7 pm, THE BATTLEFIELD BAND brings a suitably (and classically) Celtic evening performance for Samhain at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Tix, $24.50.
    
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BEYOND THE WEEKEND
    
    On Friday, November 4 at 8 pm, MARLEY'S GHOST, a wonderfully Celtic / Americana flavored outfit based in the Pacific Northwest, performs at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix, $17.50.
    
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CELTIC CULTURE BEYOND SAMHAIN...
    
    If you'd like a GOOD READ about ancient Celtic culture, the original ceremonies and festivities of Samhain, and more, we highly recommend “Hadrian's Wall” by William Dietrich (2004, available in a Harper/Torch paperback edition). It's a historical novel set in the time when Rome occupied Britain south of the famous wall and the free Celts reigned north of it. The characters are wonderful, and the intrigue of relations, back and forth, is riveting.
    
    And of course, the CELTIC ARTS CENTER has ongoing programs, including their long running every-Monday-night dance and music sessions. Check www.CelticArtsCenter.com  for info on all their events.   
    
    
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Our # 2 Story
    
“TWO SIDES OF CELTIC” SHOW AT CALTECH SATURDAY NIGHT
    
    This Saturday, October 29 at 8 pm, WILLIAM JACKSON and GRÁINNE HAMBLY bring their “TWO SIDES OF CELTIC” show just in time for Samhain (the original Celtic Halloween and New Year) to the Caltech Folk Music Society series in Beckman Institute Auditorium, on the campus in Pasadena 91106; 626-395-4652. Park in one of the two lots on Michigan Av, S off Del Mar.
    
    WILLIAM JACKSON, a founding member of the Scottish group OSSIAN, has performed “a couple of outstanding shows” at the series before. This time, he is joined by GRÁINNE HAMBLY, who is from Ireland. The promo from Nick Smith and Rex Meyreis, co-producers of Caltech Folk, is so good that we're simply reprinting it for you, below.
    
    Their recent recording together, “Music from Ireland and Scotland, is a stunningly beautiful collection of mostly traditional tunes featuring the two of them on harp, along with tin whistle, concertina, and bouzouki. Along with the late, great singer, Tony Cuffe, William was a founding member of the much missed traditional Scottish group, Ossian, who we were lucky enough to have at Caltech back in 1988. Since then, his solo harp career has taken off, and he has become world renowned with touring and with recordings, such as “The Wellpark Suite.” He is equally adept in his interpretations of traditional tunes as he is as a composer. His Land of Light won the international competition in 1999 as the new song for Scotland, announced on the eve of that Parliament convening for the first time in 300 years.
    
    As impressive as William's two solo appearances at Caltech have been, we are delighted that he will be joined for this show by Gráinne (pronounced "GRAWN-yuh") Hambly, from County Mayo, Ireland. Gráinne has 3 solo recordings and two song book collections to her credit. Finton Vallely wrote that her CD, Between the Showers, is "an altogether beautiful harp album that takes on the full gamut of traditional dance music and airs as well as three Carolan pieces that include the unusual Madge Malone and two versions of Turlough MacDonough." The interplay of these two master musicians promises a truly memorable evening of music.
    
Resources / watch / listen / learn in advance...
    
    Listen to them on Youtube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR8mXsQY-KY.     
The web page for their CD is www.harpagency.com/artist1.htm    
Their individual web sites are www.wjharp.com and www.grainne.harp.net.     
    
    Tickets are $15 for adults and $5 for Caltech students and children.
    
    
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Our # 3 Story / Event Review
   
GUERRILLA ART RETURNS WITH MAYOR ON-BOARD – MAY THE FORK BE WITH YOU
    
    We're stuck with it, and that's a good thing. The Second Coming of the iconic and world's largest “Fork In The Road” – an eighteen-foot-tall silver fork sculpture rising where a road forks in Pasadena – has happened. This time, it is risen for good. The “Fork raising” happened last Friday at 11 am, accompanied by suitable ceremonial hoopla, greasing of steel support sockets, and much altogether necessary lifting, grunting, heavy breathing and (thankfully) no reported hernias.
    
    TV news crews and print reporters covered the event and the the happy crowd. There were several live performances, with sing-alongs, of an original song written for the occasion and led by banjo and ukulele and four singers that included the Guide's editor. (Call it participatory journalism.)
    
    It's compelling, a Warner Brothers cartoon come to life or a Monty Python gag the Pythons could never afford. Yes, it's that “tine” again, and there was and is no shortage of quips, puns and clichés. If it isn't already obvious, we can't resist contributing our share.
    
    After all, wasn't it prophesied 145 years ago at Appomattox that “The Fork Will Rise Again” – or something like that? They were dealing with a divided nation. We doubt they envisioned a dividing thoroughfare and the physical double entendre of an eating utensil for Gulliver's giant.
    
    Friday's image of raising a piece of shimmering, towering, brobdignagian cutlery may not have invoked the heroic deed on Iwo Jima, but not for lack of effort by The Forkians – yes, the thing has its own cult following, as evidenced by their unique salute (hey, it's California).
    
    May the Fork be with you. That's the greeting used when exchanging the Forkian Salute, a hand raised with thumb tucked-in and four fingers splayed parallel. It's raised at the height of the greeting hand on the Voyager spacecraft plaque. (On the Voyager plaque, the figures are naked. The Forkians, having gotten into enough trouble, don't go to that extreme.)
    
    The original guerrilla art installation, two years ago, received global media attention throughout its initial six months' display. The Guide was the first to bring news of its presence, followed by newspapers all over the world – including some on the front page in distant lands. Every L.A. TV station that does news was there with their cameras within days after The Fork first appeared.
    
    A month after it first went up, The Fork was the catalyst for the largest food drive in Pasadena history. With the theme of “Stick a fork in hunger,” a three-day effort at the site collected over 4,000 pounds of edibles for a local food bank. Most contributors simply stopped when they saw a crew wearing orange shirts at The Fork to ask what was happening. Upon learning, many went to a nearby grocery store, bought a bag or whole case of canned or packaged food, and returned to donate it. With all that and more, The Fork quickly built a following – local and global – such that it could be neither banished nor forgotten. Happily, it will repeat that symbolic role in a renewed food drive this year.
    
    The Saturday before the fork raising, even Pasadena's Mayor Bill Bogaard literally got on board at the “Return of the Fork” party at the construction yard where de-lamination prevention and structural reinforcement had been accomplished. The Forkians gathered to feast and honor the object of their veneration. The sculpture was presented in a horizontal aspect, with a big western saddle so folks could, in cowboy lingo, fork the saddle, and ride The Fork. Mayor Bogaard, a good sport, contributed libations for the party and posed aboard The Fork for a photo by the Guide's editor – which quickly went viral on the web.
    
    (It's currently on the front page at www.acousticamericana.blogspot.com, and in many other places across cyberspace. There are plenty of pictures of all things Forkian, including that one, plus a detailed “show and tell” at the Fork's own website, www.theforkintheroadgang.com.)  
    
    The mayor's photo symbolizes a happy evolution from The Fork's origin, when no one knew if the artist and his crew would be arrested making the original nocturnal and clandestine installation, if caught. Friday's re-installation and official enshrinement brought the mayor's representative, several newspapers, and camera crews from KNBC Channel 4 and KTLA Channel 5.
    
    The original installation embodied the old adage that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission, and the Fork's instant celebrity, smacking of civil disobedience, created that cult of Forkians.
    
    What, you ask, prompted this crazy thing in the first place? Ken Marshall is the artist, former owner of the Coffee Gallery bistro, and the guy who originally designed and built The Fork as a birthday surprise for his Coffee Gallery Backstage music venue partner, Bob Stane. The Fork mysteriously appeared on Bob’s birthday two years ago.
    
    Seems Bob had once mused to Ken as they drove through the forking junction in southwest Pasadena that a fork in the road deserved a FORK in the road to identify it.
    
    That was all it took to secretly get Ken started.
    
    There was immediate agreement that Bob deserved it. Bob Stane is a witty, much-beloved, if slightly curmudgeonly character whose many years in show biz launched careers of standup comics when he ran Pasadena's famous Ice House. For the past twelve years, Bob has helped launch many musicians since he developed the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena as a mecca for (usually) non-electrified music performances. The latter has been repeatedly named the “Best acoustic music venue in Los Angeles” in the annual round-up in FolkWorks magazine, written there by the Guide's editor.
    
    Thus, the Fork rose, and immediately, one artist's present to one show biz impresario was prominently shared with the community – especially the unknown thousands of drivers whose daily commutes were enlightened by Ken's outsized realization of Bob's casual remark.     
    
    Of course, after that first raising two years ago, The Fork did come down. Issues of public safety were invariably cited. The Fork's hefty concrete base had been clandestinely poured in the middle of the night and obviously never inspected, nor was the oversized cutlery.
    
    The City of Pasadena promised they would find a way to put it back. Not everyone was pleased. Some recalled similar promises from Los Angeles when the Angel's Flight inclined railway was dismantled “for three years,” but sat in storage for a generation; it finally returned, only to be “temporarily” taken out of service for nearly another decade before finally resuming its daily function once again, moving people up and down Bunker Hill in its rhombus-shaped funicular coaches.
    
    Happily, Pasadena officials did much better. After all, they're used to hosting the Doo Dah Parade, and that other Pasadena institution, the Rose-something-or-other. So, once refurbished to meet the engineering standards of the city, and with a new concrete footing The Fork was made legal. It stands a bit farther from the road now, so picture-takers will stay out of the street.
    
    This time, “It has the blessings of the entire city government of Pasadena, which has embraced public art with enthusiasm,” said Bob. Ever the show biz impresario, he released a statement that read, in part, “After a year’s vacation in Oz, where it was brushed and polished by Munchkins and milk maids until it gleamed,” the Fork was back.
    
    Ken celebrated, saying, “Hats off to the City Of Pasadena and its government.”
    
    The return drew internationally known artist Zofia Kostyrko, who designed a T-shirt to memorialize the event. It remembers The Fork's past with the slogan, “The American Way – Do it, Then Ask Forgiveness.” And yes, Bob and Ken autographed the shirts, as requested.
    
    Forkian guru Bob Stane was there, of course, quietly off to one side, basking once again in The Fork's towering silvery glory. Bob quipped simply, “Art, with tongue-in-cheek, lives in The Crown City.”
    
    In addition to Friday's “Fork Raising” at Fork Plaza, there was more. Musician / Actor / “Official Singing Cowboy of Burbank” Will Ryan told the Guide that he had (somehow) procured a proclamation from the League of Nations (via time machine, no doubt) declaring last Friday as “International Fork Day.” Will and his band, The Cactus County Cowboys, played their CD release show that evening at Bob's music venue, the Coffee Gallery Backstage. If you brought with you and “showed your fork,” you got a discount admission to the concert. (And you thought the spoon was the most valuable piece of silverware.)
    
    Another local musician, singer and former Denver Opera diva Christina Ortega, was there with her little dog, Grace. Christina wondered aloud if Grace would be inclined to do something that would allow her canine to become Fork Plaza's “First art critic.”
    
    By that criteria, Grace seemed pleased.
    
    Go visit the Fork's officially sanctioned home. Fork Plaza is the triangular park where St. John’s Place and Pasadena Avenue, uh, fork, and the plaza is bounded on the north by Bellefontaine. It's a few blocks west of Huntington Memorial Hospital and a mile southwest of Old Town in Pasadena. The Fork is again monumental and now central in the pleasant little park. Everything has been newly landscaped, though it needs benches to invite picnics. Photographers and those posing with The Fork (no doubt offering the Forkian Salute) now have plenty of room to visit or conduct Druidlike rituals, free of the need to risk life and limb in the street to get the best picture. Park on Bellefontaine where there's free street parking, and be mindful opening doors in the traffic.
    
    It's The Great Fork, Charlie Brown, just in time for the pumpkins – and the Thanksgiving food drive...
    
    We'll bring you info on the return of the Thanksgiving “Stick a Fork in Hunger” food drive for the needy, coming up at Fork Plaza. Already, the Forkians are vowing to set another record.
    
    The Guide sees much in the ongoing tale of the Forkians that can inspire other artists. To all the visionaries everywhere who bring art to public spaces and who use the attention their art creates to draw and propel good things in their communities, May The Fork be with you.
    
    
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Our # 4 Story
    
MUSIC GOT US TO THE MOON – WHERE MIGHT IT YET TAKE US?
    
The biggest and final Mars lander touches down in November. Is there meaning for Artists?
    
    Get ready, because we're going to challenge you. The challenge is to write the next song that fires-up the popular imagination and gets us looking upward and outward again. We'll help all we can by sharing and disclosing some compelling notions and facts and ideas and “wow” factors as we go along.
    
    Music propelled the dreams of the generation that took us to the Moon. In the time when those folks were the innovators and the movers and shakers of society, the vinyl records and airwaves were filled with “Moon songs” in all genres and heavenly musical images of romance and bliss. It helped create a mindset.
    
    Music, for good or bad, inspires culture more than it reflects it. Doubt that? Then ask why, after an era of “gangsta rap,” TV is filled with “inside the prison” shows featuring processions of thugs? And why, when modern Nashville country music is all about dysfunctional relationships, are the divorce and domestic violence rates higher in regions where that music is dominant?
    
    Where might music take us, if we write and perform songs to inspire a brighter, better future? Can our music, in our time, help us fulfill our destiny as a species? Can it help us, in the words of the poet, “Slip the surly bonds of Earth?”
    
    It's been a long time since “Fly Me to the Moon” was a '60s hit song for Frank Sinatra. And it didn't come out of nowhere. There was plenty of groundwork before the proliferation of “Moon songs.” At the end of the 19th century, “Shine on Harvest Moon” was a hit on cylindrical wax records. In the '30s, the Ink Spots had a hit with “Paper Moon,” and the song returned as the title and title track of a '70s film. That handful of lunar-related tracks hardly scratches the surface.
    
    Generations of kids grew up singing “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the Moon.”
    
    In the years immediately leading to the “space generation,” when the people who would become astronauts and those who would send them into space were all growing up, the charts were filled with homages to lunar themes: “Blue Moon,” “How High the Moon,” “Moonglow,” “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” “Moon Over Miami,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the huge hit, “Moon River,” were just some of them. Couples danced as the lyrics “Moonlight Becomes You” were sung over the band. Was music influential? Did it help create a new mind-set?
    
    Search for “Moon songs” and you'll get thousands of web hits. Most of the best-known ones are, indeed, from the era when actually going there became a credible idea – including the time when President Kennedy challenged the nation in the early '60s, “before this decade is out,” to “land a man upon the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.”
    
    Submitted for your approval: every one of those “Moon songs” prior to Apollo 11's 1969 landing – particularly those that were hits during the years just prior – made their own contribution to the popular imagination and propelled the idea of going. (Curiously, no hit song commemorated the event after it happened, though there was a rock band named Apollo 100.)
    
    Whether you are willing to accept that the collective role of “Moon songs” leading to the Apollo landings was large or small, one thing is incontestable: music ALWAYS feeds the sensibilities and perceptions of its time, and helps define its era for future generations. Popular fascination ultimately becomes desire – and in the late '40s, '50s and '60s, music fed the desire to go to the Moon.
    
    So, if music got us to the Moon, could it take us beyond? Could it get us to the planets? Can it inspire us to get past our self-absorbed misuse of unprecedented and ever-expanding technological capabilities, and inspire us to actually apply all that capability to DO something worthy of ourselves, of the legacy we have inherited, and of our true potential? Can music accelerate and fulfill our evolution?
    
    Art and song were, for centuries, a product of exploration and the spirit of adventure. But somewhere, art was embraced by the high-brow humanities and divorced from discovery and exploration, and with them, from science as an exciting vector for going forth.
    
    One result is that space exploration, for far too long, has been pitted against human needs as a budget priority.
    
    These things should never have happened. We are complicated creatures, simultaneously nurturing and argumentative and competitive and confrontational and pugilistic. But we are ones who, by our most unique and deepest nature as a species, are creators of art AND explorers, creatures driven to see what's beyond the next hill and to test the next concept and to memorialize the discovery in shared images.
    
    We are members of a species who must ask questions and who must seek and get answers. We must. It is an internal imperative. When we fail too heed it, we are unfulfilled. We are a tribe who must question the meaning and make sense of the answers we are given and those we find. We must continually inform our perceptions of all else we know with those new discoveries.
    
    Without that, we do not advance; we stagnate and our civilizations fall.
    
    We honor and romanticize idealized views of our past, even as we are driven to continually renew ourselves by supplanting yesterday's wisdom with today's questions and tomorrow's answers. And then to question all of it, all the more, always and continuously. And we must do these things not simply for ourselves but for others. We inform ourselves of who we are as we explore on behalf of others who stay behind; all are inspired by the ones who go. Let us hope the disconnection in our cynical time has not severed this forever, and that it can be restored. Like art, exploring achieves and informs the highest aspirations of the human spirit.
    
    That's why thousands of years' worth of songs were written about great voyages and epic quests and the people who made them. It's time it all got back together again. It just might end the alienation that so many people feel toward this society. It might help complete us.
    
    We should recognize that a lot was happening that enabled the fascination for going to the Moon, beyond the development of multistage rockets following their development as weapons in World War II. Indeed, the Space Race is often cited as the key contest of the Cold War.
    
    But it transcended that. The fascination for going “out there”came from the culture, where art was, and is, a more important component than science. There were endless '50s and '60s science fiction movies and comic books about aliens and space travel. Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke were writing prolifically and their novels with space themes sold big.
    
...[click the link below to finish reading this feature. Below is an excerpt from farther on...]
    
    Science has learned a lot, but needs to start dating culture again. We really only know enough to frame some big but rather basic questions, and more of us need to feel included in that. We already share one thing: we know enough to want to... experience and share with one another the most evolutionary step we could choose to take as a species.
    
Finish reading at the link below. This feature is available in full and by itself at
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/music-got-us-to-moon-where-might-it-yet.html      
    
    
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Our # 5 Story
   
“STAGECOACH” AND “COACHELLA” FESTIVALS GROW TO 3 DAYS IN 2012
    
    “STAGECOACH” bills itself as “California's Country Music Festival,” and if you've read our features in past years, you know it includes stages with some of the best roots-Americana artists, too. Sure, they book the big Nashville acts who do that red-state-trailer-park-rock Nashville version of “country,” but you can avoid all that and hear top bluegrass and other roots musicians.
    
    STAGECOACH came about because producers of the COACHELLA MUSIC FESTIVAL saw an opportunity. It's a very big to configure the sprawling grassy grounds of the Empire Polo Club in Indio into a festival site, and to secure lots of surrounding places for parking. COACHELLA is a huge rock-pop-contemporary music event. The idea was hatched that the site could stay up to host another festival the following weekend, and STAGECOACH was born.
    
    In 2012, the STAGECOACH Festival marks its sixth year, and will expand to three days of music, running Friday, April 27 through Sunday, April 29.
    
    As we always do, we list the Americana acts first and then mention the Nashville “Mane Stage” (that's how they spell it) headliners. So, we the ones who'll most tempt you to go are:
    
RALPH STANLEY & HIS CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS, STEVE MARTIN & THE STEEP CANYON RANGERS, KENNY ROGERS, THE JAYHAWKS, THE DEL McCOURY BAND, JD SOUTHER, CHRIS ISAAK, JD CROWE & THE NEW SOUTH, SARA WATKINS, SUNNY SWEENEY, DAVE ALVIN & THE GUILTY ONES, SARA EVANS, ELIZABETH COOK, OLD MAN MARKLEY, THE UNFORGIVEN, GREENSKY BLUEGRASS, JANEDEAR GIRLS, SPLIT LIP RAYFIELD, and THE MAVERICKS reunion, and maybe even by others yet to be announced. They always feature big time bluegrass stars and that's a major attraction for some of readers, so we'll keep you posted as they add acts.
    
    The big Nashville acts this time are BRAD PAISLEY, MIRANDA LAMBERT, JASON ALDEAN, & BLAKE SHELTON.
    
    More rootsy country acts are there, too, including MARTINA McBRIDE, ALABAMA, and THE BAND PERRY. And there are plenty that aren't all that Nashvillish, like JUSTIN MOORE, ELI YOUNG BAND, LUKE BRYAN, BRETT ELDREDGE, AARON LEWIS, and UNCLE MONK.
    
    The Guide and all our writers who've been there have a love-hate relationship with STAGECOACH. We always celebrate the bookers' commitments to include top folk-Americana-roots music stars, and not limit it to Nashville country (most of us find the latter to be, well, cloying). But we must always rake the festival's production team over the coals for over-amplifying the Mane Stage to apocalyptic levels and blowing their hurricane of sound across the other two stages.
    
    Things have gotten better. The first year, a stage with EMMYLOU HARRIS, WILLIE NELSON, and KRIS KRISTOPHERSON was placed entirely too close to the Mane Stage. We still have an image of Emmylou's set being assaulted by BROOKS & DUNN doing a hip-hop version of “Neon Moon.” That stage is now gone entirely, and the pair of roots-Americana stages are nearly half-a-mile away; they're far enough apart to avoid crosstalk with each other, close enough together to make going back and forth easy. Each of these two stages is under its own circus big-top tent, keeping everyone out of the sun. (The massive and too-loud Mane Stage complex, with its diamond vision screens, is open-air.)
    
    Still, as recently as last year, once the Mane Stage begins (now, thankfully, not until evening) you feel a bit like Francis Scott Key experiencing the bombardment of Fort McHenry if you're trying to enjoy the fabulous talent at either of the two stages with all the good, non-Nashville music.
    
    We have taken-to-task these Indio festivals in the past for charging exorbitant prices for bottled water and having no free water available anywhere, when the temperature can reach triple digits. (We called that “criminal” in our review of the first STAGECOACH.) In recent years, free water is available, though getting it last year required a long walk from the two roots music stages. The last couple of years, you could carry a small water bottle in with you, but only one. (Hint: take your own collapsible water bag, empty and flattened with your blanket and fold-up chairs, and use your small water bottle to fill it after you get inside.)
    
    We DO recommend STAGECOACH. We've had good times the years we have attended, in spite of the drawbacks we cite. And we do credit them for improving their problems. The music, is of course, amazing, and may just be the best folk-Americana-roots music festival in California, certainly on par with “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass” in San Francisco – even if, at STAGECOACH, you may need to insert earplugs and sit close to the speaker tower at your stage, so you aren't annoyed by the Mane Stage after the sun goes down.
    
    Tickets go on sale Friday, October 28 at 10 am (Pacific) at www.Stagecoachfestival.com  
    
    Three-day weekend passes start at a bargain price of $149, and they caution that's “for a limited time.” Children age 10 and under will be admitted free. Ticket layaway options are available (10% down and equal payments until the first week of February; all pass and camping options are available on layaway). The festival also offers reserved seating, camping and RV packages. A complete description is on their website. STAGECOACH is produced by Goldenvoice and The Messina Group.
    
    Of course, we'll be bringing you more as they let us know about it.
    
    
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Our # 6 Story
   
STRONG MOUNTAIN ROOTS / BLUEGRASS / NEWGRASS DOUBLE-BILL ON FRIDAY
    
    Friday, October 28 at 8 pm, SUSIE GLAZE & THE HILONESOME BAND plus FUR DIXON & STEVE WERNER share the night at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena.
    
    Sure, each of these acts plays locally, fairly often. But this is an exceptionally strong double-bill of top Southern Cal-based talent.
    
    Folkworks Magazine named SUSIE & THE HILONESOME BAND among the “Top Ten Live Acoustic Bands in Southern California for 2008,” writing “Susie is justifiably endorsed by Appalachian music legend Jean Ritchie, and the band has a fine repertoire of beyond-bluegrass originals from its chief songwriter, Rob Carlson.”
    
    “They can take you up in the hollars, or sound like a female-fronted Asleep at the Wheel," wrote Larry Wines in Folkworks.
    
    It's fine new bluegrass and Appalachia folk-roots fusion, an experience of gorgeous eclectic blends of mountain folk and new bluegrass-inspired originals, all with the remarkable voice of Susie Glaze.
    
    Winner of the Just Plain Folks 2006 Music Awards for Best Roots Album, and Folkworks Magazine's Pick for Best Bluegrass Album of 2005 for "Blue Eyed Darlin,'" Susie's Hilonesome Band is Steve Rankin on mandolin, Rob Carlson on guitar and dobro, Fred Sanders on bass and Mark Indictor on fiddle, showcasing the songwriting of lead guitarist Rob Carlson.
    
    Their show features work from their critically-acclaimed "Green Kentucky Blues" CD produced by Laurie Lewis, award-winning "Blue Eyed Darlin'" along with mountain standards from the Jean Ritchie collection and favorites from Gillian Welch and Steve Earl.     Marvin O'Dell of Classicheartland.com writes: "Susie Glaze does something with a song that only great singers can do...she grabs hold of a song's deepest emotion and purpose and wraps it tightly around your soul" and Bluegrass Unlimited calls her "an important voice on the California Bluegrass scene."
    
    "Susie Glaze has one of the most beautiful voices in bluegrass and folk music today. She performs a song straight from her heart and soul." – Roz Larman, KPFK's FolkScene.
    
    More at www.susieglaze.com    
    
    FUR DIXON AND STEVE WERNER have been musical partners now for eight years. They have combined their own unique songwriting visions of life, travel and the American West to create a landscape that is all their own. They have three albums together, including this year’s “Songs of the Open Road,” which celebrates the writing of Mary McCaslin, Jim Ringer, Doc and Merle Watson, Woody Guthrie Blaze Foley, Dan Janisch and Randall Lamb.
    
    Fur and Steve’s original songs are catchy, fun and sometimes heartbreaking. In concert, they pay homage to well-worn old time songs. Their singing takes you on a ride down back roads under blue skies, amidst tumbleweeds and campfires.
    
    “Fur and Steve are REAL treasures of modern Americana music. They write songs that are true classics of cowboy twang and feel-good road adventure.” – Susie Glaze, the Voice of Southern California Bluegrass.
    
    “Fur and Steve make fantastic country-soaked folk songs about big highways, big heartbreak, the lure of home and the love of friends. It’s impossible not to be charmed.” – Lonesome Music, UK.
    
    “Their rootsy folk and country duets are unbeatable, honest and true.” – Rootstime, Belgium.
    
    “You’re listening to a masterful duet work with absolutely grade A material. Dixon and Werner have worked together for eight years touring and recording. All these nights on stage together show in their sense of warmth and comfort singing these songs.” – Southland Serenade.
    
    More at www.furandsteve.com  and   www.reverbnation.com/furdixonandstevewerner    
    
    The 8 pm show is at the Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N Lake Av, Altadena 92675; reservations, 626-798-6236. Tix, $20.
    
    
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Our # 7 Story
   
YOU CAN STILL ADD YOUR COMMENT AT THE HUGE RESPONSE TO OUR FEATURE, “ARTISTS JOIN 'OCCUPY WALL STREET'...”
    
    The Guide got in front of the “Occupy” movement early on, with an October 7 feature story on what it was about and how artists were taking part in New York's “Occupy Wall Street,” the then-new “Occupy Los Angeles,” and the quickly developing “Occupy” sites elsewhere. Our feature piece, “Artists Join 'OCCUPY WALL STREET' as Unemployment, Economy Worsen,” as it originally appeared, and with a GROWING NUMBER of intelligent, thoughtful comments by YOU, our readers, is available by itself (and where you can comment) at
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/artists-join-occupy-wall-street-as.html  
    
    
    
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MORE STUFF >>>>>>> Resources, etc
   
Our VENUE DIRECTORY   
  
...with OVER 500 acoustic-music-friendly venues in Southern California, is available at   
  
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/02/venue-directory-from-guide-updated.html   
  
  
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RECENT EDITIONS of The Guide's NEWS FEATURES are still available!  
  
    Just check our archive! Read the contents bar on the left side of the page at www.acousticamericana.blogspot.com and click the appropriate month.   
   
   
The MOST RECENT past editions (last 30 days) are easy to find HERE:
    
    
“Artists Join 'Occupy Wall Street'...,” The Guide's October 7 feature story and your comments to it, is available at
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/artists-join-occupy-wall-street-as.html  
    
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October 14 edition is available at
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/news-features-acoustic-americana-music_14.html   
                       and the stories are:
  
  1) Festivals & Semi-Annual “Art Night” in Pasadena this Weekend  
  2) Blues Bands Perform in International Finals, Saturday in Arcadia
  3) May the Fork Be with You – “Ride-the-Fork” Music Party Saturday, Raise “The Fork
    in the Road” next Friday, at Altadena & Pasadena Events
  4) West Valley Music Launches Concert Season Saturday with Performing Songwriters &
    Touring Artists JAMES HURLEY, LISA NEMZO, RASPIN STUWART  
  5) SONGSALIVE! Hosts Annual Music Picnic this Sunday  
  6) JUDY COLLINS and AMERICA to headline GRAMMY Museum in early November  
  7) October at GRAMMY Museum Bringing Live Music, Big Names, Substance
  8) “SQUEAKY WHEEL TOUR” Live Acoustic Show, to Help Bring Home Missing People,
    Monday, October 17 in West L.A.
  9) TIM GRIMM, musician / actor / top folk-Americana Music Award-Winner, plus
    THE SWEET POTATOES, play Wednesday, October 19 in Altadena  
10) Whoa! More on WILL RYAN & THE CACTUS COUNTY COWBOYS –
    CD release October 21 at “International Fork Day” Concert  
11) TOM RUSSELL “Mesabi Tour of the West” in L.A. for Two Shows, October 22
12) ALEX BEATON, Musician Paralyzed in Accident, Regaining Movement  
13) HUGE RESPONSE to last week's feature, “Artists Join 'OCCUPY WALL STREET'
    as Unemployment, Economy Worsen,” and how YOU can respond
    
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October 7 edition is available at
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/news-features-acoustic-americana-music.html  
                       and the stories are:
  
  1) A Festival-Crazy Weekend  
  2) “Show-of-the-Week” Concerts this Weekend  
  3) Chicago Folk Duo SMALL POTATOES Plays this Saturday In Pasadena   
  4) STEVE JOBS, iPod Inventor, Tech Guru, Has Logged-Off  
  5) Artists Join “OCCUPY WALL STREET” as Unemployment, Economy Worsen  
  6) WORKSHOP: “Country Blues with ALICE STUART & PAT TENNIS,” October 15  
  7) “Tracking Film & TV Music” with LEE HOLDRIDGE & JON BURLINGAME,” Oct 16  
  8) WILL RYAN & THE CACTUS COUNTY COWBOYS to Follow OSCARS Theatre Triumph
    with October 22 Concert  
    
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September 30 edition is available at
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/09/news-features-acoustic-americana-music_30.html   
                       and the stories are:
  
  1) World's Oldest Musician Releases New CD, with Party this Saturday  
  2) GLEN CAMPBELL is on his Farewell Tour; he Means it, and Why  
  3) SIMON LYNGE Returns to L.A. with Hits in Europe; Plays this Weekend  
  4) BUTCH HANCOCK, from THE FLATLANDERS, to Play Altadena Monday Night  
  5) Musical Revue of American History – in Song & Story, this Tuesday  
  6) WORKSHOPS are part of “WORLD FESTIVAL OF SACRED MUSIC,” October 1st-16th  
  7) INVITATION TO ARTISTS: 30th annual “Los Angeles Holiday Caroling” Festivities –   
    (or participate in YOUR city...)  
  8) GIG OPPORTUNITY: Wanna Play Southern California's Largest Harvest Festival?  
  9) “WATER IS RISING: Music & Dance Amid Climate Change,” by Pacific Island Artists,   
    will have World Premiere in L.A. and Two Local Performances  
10) “Moody Bluegrass Two...Much Love” with VINCE GILL, RICKY SKAGGS, SAM BUSH, &  
    More, Gets Critical Acclaim  
11) Highlights of the Coming Week (and Beyond): Welcome to Acoustic Rocktober!  
    
    
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Questions? Comments? Contact us through our Blogspot site or by email at   
  
                          tied to the tracks (at) Hotmail (dot) com  
  
(We're trying to cut-down spam. Please help – just remove all the spaces and type the "@" and the ".")  
  
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YES, we invite you to add YOUR comments!
    
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You can always find the LATEST EDITION of THE ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE, with separate links for:
  
1) the latest NEWS FEATURES, with feature stories / reviews / editorials / current acoustic music happenings / "heads up" notices to buy advance tickets for shows likely to sell-out / news you can't find anywhere else from and about the world of acoustic and Americana music and artists;
  
2) the latest SPOTLIGHT EVENTS section, with new and updated info on festivals / artist workshops / schedules and calendars for concerts, club gigs, live music happenings, acoustic & Americana music-related events / and more;
  
3) The Guide's VENUE DIRECTORY of over 500 acoustic music-friendly venues in Southern California – the places TO HEAR MUSIC, or CONTACT TO GET GIGS.
  
It's all available 24/7 (& frequently updated!) at ~  
  
             www.acousticmusic.net or at   
             www.acousticamericana.blogspot.com    
  
- or follow any of the links in the fifteen web sites and web groups that carry the Guide’s weekly News Features.  
    
      
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 Entire contents copyright (c) 2011, Lawrence Wines & Tied to the Tracks. All rights reserved.  
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Spotlight Events: Acoustic Americana Music Guide, October 27, 2011 edition

     
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    That way, you'll know each time the SPOTLIGHT EVENTS section gets a major update!
    
    We are grateful to our many website and webgroup partners who bring you The Guide's weekly News Features. But these are sometimes subject to delay (up to several days, it seems) for moderators of some of sites / groups to get to them and re-publish for their readers. So why not GO DIRECT!? (Yep, it's still free, and we don't share your email address with anybody.)
     
     
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               SPOTLIGHT EVENTS
     
                         from THE ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE
     
                                                                                          October 27, 2011 edition
     
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THIS is our roundup of concerts, club gigs, workshops, and acoustic music-related events, in a dedicated weekly section of The Guide, and it's called SPOTLIGHT EVENTS.
    
Note – we'll be adding MORE to THIS edition at THIS url on Friday and later, since November is nearly upon us.
     
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The Guide's NEWS FEATURES, October 27 edition, is available in its own section, at    
    
http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2011/10/news-features-acoustic-americana-music_28.html    
    
    
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                        Acoustic Americana Music Guide's
    
                                        SPOTLIGHT EVENTS
    
                                                  October 27, 2011 edition       
    
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 FIRST, a few ongoing things END this weekend...
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Daily, through Oct 31, FESTIVAL:
10 am-midnight “HALLOWEEN HARVEST FESTIVAL” has live music (they've been serious about keeping it booked) and lots more, at the Pierce College Farm Center, corner of Victory and Desoto in Woodland Hills. Organizers proclaim the event as “the largest Harvest Festival in all of Southern California,” and they've expanded this year to include a larger festival grounds and an expanded six-acre corn maze.
    The festival opens at 10 am and runs daily and every evening. Sundays-Thursdays, it closes at 10 pm, Fridays & Saturdays, 'til midnight.
    This is a big-deal event, and they've been doing it for years, so they're good at it. In addition to the live music and that giant Corn Maze, activities include a Hay Ride, Giant Slide, Jumpers, Petting Zoo, a Train Ride, Carousel, Pony Rides, Bumper Boats, daytime Haunted House, Cow Train, Bungee, Rock Wall Climb, Gemstone Mining, and there's an “Afterdark FrightFair Screampark” with nighttime Factory of Nightmares Haunted House, Creatures of the Corn Haunted Trail, nighttime Corn Maze, and something they're calling the “Insane Reaction.”
    They offer all kinds of “activity ticket” combinations, but basic admission, which includes entry, the Corn Maze, the Hay Ride, and a couple of activity tickets, is only $5. Anyone who rides the Metro Orange Line gets in free, and the station is just across the street (must show a paper Metro ticket with that day's date).
    There's more info at www.halloweenharvestfestival.com – www.FrightFair.com – www.PierceFarmCenter.com – or call them at 818-999-6300.
     
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Daily, through Oct 31, in Ventura County, FESTIVAL:
“UNDERWOOD FAMILY FARMS HARVEST FESTIVAL” runs weekends with music, weekdays without, and closes with an unannounced CAJUN & BLUEGRASS WEEKEND Oct 29 & 30, plus a big corn maze, lots of activities for kids, food, and more, all at Underwood Family Farms, in the countryside near Moorpark. More at www.underwoodfamilyfarms.com, or call them at 805-529-3690.
    See the Guide's separate listing for Oct 29 for schedules and lineups for the weekend.
    Admission, any day, is $12 general, and children under age 2 are free.
     
     
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Thursday, October 27
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Thu, Oct 27:
8 pm MARLA FIBISH & JIMMY CROWLEY bring Celtic music in time for Samhain to the Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N Lake Av, Altadena 92675; reservations, 626-798-6236.
play the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena. Jimmy is the bard of Cork and a brilliant song-writer. Marla is known for her uniquely vibrant and driving playing on mandolin; she's a San Francisco native and a long-time feature of the Bay Area Irish music scene. Tix, $18.
     
     
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Friday, October 28
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Fri, Oct 28, in San Diego:
7:30 pm “MASTERS OF THE CELTIC HARP: WILLIAM JACKSON & GRÁINNE HAMBLY” play the AMSD Concert Series, 4650 Mansfield St, San Diego 92116; 619-303-8176.
    Caltech Folk co-producers Nick Smith and Rex Meyreis wrote good promo for these musicians, That's included in our Oct 29 listing for the concert in Pasadena.
     
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Fri, Oct 28:
SOLD OUT 8 pm JENNIFER WARNES at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497.
     
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Fri, Oct 28:
8 pm SUSIE GLAZE & THE HILONESOME BAND plus FUR DIXON & STEVE WERNER at the Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N Lake Av, Altadena 92675; reservations, 626-798-6236.
    This is an exceptionally strong double-bill of top Southern cal-based talent.
    Folkworks Magazine voted SUSIE & THE HILONESOME BAND # 3 in "Folkworks' Top Ten Live Acoustic Bands in Southern California for 2008," writing "Susie is justifiably endorsed by Appalachian music legend Jean Ritchie, and the band has a fine repertoire of beyond-bluegrass originals from its chief songwriter, Rob Carlson.
    “They can take you up in the hollars, or sound like a female-fronted Asleep at the Wheel," wrote Larry Wines in Folkworks.
    It's fine new bluegrass and Appalachia folk-roots fusion, an experience of gorgeous eclectic blends of mountain folk and new bluegrass-inspired originals, all with the remarkable voice of Susie Glaze.
    Winner of the Just Plain Folks 2006 Music Awards for Best Roots Album, and Folkworks Magazine's Pick for Best Bluegrass Album of 2005 for "Blue Eyed Darlin,'" Susie's Hilonesome Band is Steve Rankin on mandolin, Rob Carlson on guitar and dobro, Fred Sanders on bass and Mark Indictor on fiddle, showcasing the songwriting of lead guitarist Rob Carlson.
    Their show features work from their critically-acclaimed "Green Kentucky Blues" CD produced by Laurie Lewis, award-winning "Blue Eyed Darlin'" along with mountain standards from the Jean Ritchie collection and favorites from Gillian Welch and Steve Earl.     Marvin O'Dell of Classicheartland.com writes: "Susie Glaze does something with a song that only great singers can do...she grabs hold of a song's deepest emotion and purpose and wraps it tightly around your soul" and Bluegrass Unlimited calls her "an important voice on the California Bluegrass scene."
    "Susie Glaze has one of the most beautiful voices in bluegrass and folk music today. She performs a song straight from her heart and soul." – Roz Larman, KPFK's FolkScene.
    More at www.susieglaze.com    
    
    FUR DIXON AND STEVE WERNER have been musical partners now for eight years. They have combined their own unique songwriting visions of life, travel and the American West to create a landscape that is all their own. They have three albums together, including this year’s “Songs of the Open Road,” which celebrates the writing of Mary McCaslin, Jim Ringer, Doc and Merle Watson, Woody Guthrie Blaze Foley, Dan Janisch and Randall Lamb.
    Fur and Steve’s original songs are catchy, fun and sometimes heartbreaking. In concert, they pay homage to well-worn old time songs. Their singing takes you on a ride down back roads under blue skies, amidst tumbleweeds and campfires.
    “Fur and Steve are REAL treasures of modern Americana music. They write songs that are true classics of cowboy twang and feel-good road adventure.” – Susie Glaze, the Voice of Southern California Bluegrass.
    “Fur and Steve make fantastic country-soaked folk songs about big highways, big heartbreak, the lure of home and the love of friends. It’s impossible not to be charmed.” – Lonesome Music, UK.
    “Their rootsy folk and country duets are unbeatable, honest and true.” – Rootstime, Belgium.
    “You’re listening to a masterful duet work with absolutely grade A material. Dixon and Werner have worked together for eight years touring and recording. All these nights on stage together show in their sense of warmth and comfort singing these songs.” – Southland Serenade.
    More at www.furandsteve.com  and   www.reverbnation.com/furdixonandstevewerner    
    Tix, $20.
     
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Fri, Oct 28:
8 pm NATHAN McEUEN & MATT CARTSONIS at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. This'll be a fine show. Tix on sale Oct 14; $15.
     
     
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Saturday, October 29
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Sat & Sun, Oct 29 & 30, in Ventura County, FESTIVAL:
CAJUN & BLUEGRASS WEEKEND closes this year's month-long “UNDERWOOD FAMILY FARMS HARVEST FESTIVAL,” which runs weekends with music, weekdays without, including this fine musical closer, plus a big corn maze, lots of activities for kids, food, and more, all at Underwood Family Farms, in the countryside near Moorpark. More at www.underwoodfamilyfarms.com, or call them at 805-529-3690.
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SCHEDULE: Oct 22 & 23 unannounced CAJUN & BLUEGRASS WEEKEND:
    Sat & Sun, Oct 29 & 30 (both days) there's good music. Sat, ACADIANA plays Cajun-zydeco from 10:30 am-2:30 pm, followed by the CATTERWAILERS with bluegrass from 3:30-5:30 pm. Sun, the CATTERWAILERS play 10:30 am-2:30 pm, and ROCKY NECK BLUEGRASS plays 3:30-5:30, to close-out this year's month-long festival.
    Admission, any day, is $12 general, and children under age 2 are free.
     
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Sat, Oct 29:
3 pm “NOW THAT SHE'S GONE” is “a play of life and insight,” at the Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N Lake Av, Altadena 92675; reservations, 626-798-6236. ELLEN SNORTLAND is a playwright just returned from Scotland where she presented her play at The Edinborough Festival. She is bringing the full version, not the shorter version used in Europe, to The Coffee Gallery Backstage for two shows, Sat, Oct 29 at 3 pm (matinee) and Sun, Oct 30 at 7 pm. Her website has great visuals at http://tinyurl.com/coffeegallery The play is said to be “Funny, touching, insightful and all about Ellen and her mother.” Bob Stane says, “See why they took it to Scotland.” Very reasonable tickets are $10 (matinee) & $12 (evening).
     
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Sat, Oct 29:
8 pm DAN NAVARRO & LAWRENCE LEBO at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. This'll be a fine show, with LOWEN & NAVARRO vet Dan Navarro and Bluesy-Americana-Classic Jazzwoman Lawrence “Don't Call Her Larry” Lebo. Tix on sale Oct 15; $15.
     
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Sat, Oct 29:
“THE WHITE HOUSE CONCERT WITH STEVE ERDODY & FRIENDS,” at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N Mentor Av, Pasadena 91106; tix and info, including discount and bonus packages, are available at www.bostoncourt.com or 626-683-6883. This is an interesting concept that relives a musical moment that was, by all accounts, magical. On November 24, 1961, President Kennedy revolutionized arts performances at the White House by presenting the famous but reclusive 84-year-old cellist PABLO CASALS in a recital for 150 of the world’s most famous and influential classical composers, conductors and musicians. To commemorate the anniversary of the historic occasion, Music at the Court is presenting local cello virtuoso STEPHEN ERDODY with an all star ensemble of chamber musicians in a recital replicating the original program from 50 years ago.
     
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Sat, Oct 29:
8 pm WILLIAM JACKSON and GRÁINNE HAMBLY bring their "TWO SIDES OF CELTIC" show just in time for Samhain (the original Celtic Halloween) at the Caltech Folk Music Society series in Beckman Institute Auditorium, on the campus in Pasadena 91106; 626-395-4652. Park in one of the two lots on Michigan Av, S off Del Mar.
    WILLIAM JACKSON, a founding member of the Scottish group OSSIAN, has performed “a couple of outstanding shows” at the series before. This time, he is joined by GRÁINNE HAMBLY, who is from Ireland. The promo from Nick Smith and Rex Meyreis, co-producers of Caltech Folk, is so good that we're simply reprinting it for you, below.
    Their recent recording together, “Music from Ireland and Scotland, is a stunningly beautiful collection of mostly traditional tunes featuring the two of them on harp, along with tin whistle, concertina, and bouzouki. Along with the late, great singer, Tony Cuffe, William was a founding member of the much missed traditional Scottish group, Ossian, who we were lucky enough to have at Caltech back in 1988. Since then, his solo harp career has taken off, and he has become world renowned with touring and with recordings, such as “The Wellpark Suite.” He is equally adept in his interpretations of traditional tunes as he is as a composer. His Land of Light won the international competition in 1999 as the new song for Scotland, announced on the eve of that Parliament convening for the first time in 300 years.
    As impressive as William's two solo appearances at Caltech have been, we are delighted that he will be joined for this show by Gráinne (pronounced "GRAWN-yuh") Hambly, from County Mayo, Ireland. Gráinne has 3 solo recordings and two song book collections to her credit. Finton Vallely wrote that her CD, Between the Showers, is "an altogether beautiful harp album that takes on the full gamut of traditional dance music and airs as well as three Carolan pieces that include the unusual Madge Malone and two versions of Turlough MacDonough." The interplay of these two master musicians promises a truly memorable evening of music.
    Listen to them on Youtube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR8mXsQY-KY.     
    The web page for their CD is www.harpagency.com/artist1.htm    
    Their individual web sites are www.wjharp.com and www.grainne.harp.net.     
    Tickets for this show are $15 for adults and $5 for Caltech students and children, and they can be ordered by calling the Ticket Office at 626-395-4652, visiting the Ticket Office, or purchased for cash at the door (if it doesn't sell-out). The Ticket Office is open noon to 5 pm Monday through Friday.
     
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Sat, Oct 29:
SOLD OUT 8 pm JENNIFER WARNES at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497.
     
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Sat, Oct 29:
8 pm CLIFF WAGNER & THE OLD #7 bring bluegrass to the Folk Music Center & Museum, 220 Yale Av, Claremont 91711; 909-624-2928; www.folkmusiccenter.com.  Tix, $10.   
     
     
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Sunday, October 30
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Sun, Oct 30, FESTIVALS:
See yesterday's listings for a pair of festivals this weekend, and check-out “SAMHAIN” below...
     
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Sun, Oct 30:
3 & 7 pm “SAMHAIN” Irish Song, Dance & Story, with optional traditional Samhain dinner, brings the story of the original Halloween and a celebration of the Celtic New Year, with SLUGGER O'TOOLE, BARRY LYNCH, ACS DANCERS, ADAM KIRK, CHRIS LOKEN, AEDAN MacDONNELL, STEVE PRIBYL, & LINEA SOLEDAD, sponsored by the Celtic Arts Center at the Burbank Moose Lodge, 1901 W Burbank Bl, Burbank 91506. Two shows, 3 pm or 7 pm, tix for either are $18; 5 pm dinner tix are $15; show + dinner, $30. Tix will sell-out early; info & advance tix, www.CelticArtsCenter.com/Samhain.    
    HALLOWEEN, aka HALLOWE’EN, or ALL HALLOWS EVE, or ALL SOULS EVE, or ALL SAINTS DAY has a more colorful history than you may know. So there’s much more to tell.
    It wasn’t always a day for dentists to drool, anticipating all the kid’s candy-fed cavities they’d soon be drilling.
    Halloween began as the Celtic “Samhain,” which actually means, "November." ADRIEN RAIN BURKE, from the Celtic Arts Center, explained it all to the Guide back in 2008, and it's so good we reprinted here.
    “'Samhain' (pronounced to rhyme with 'plowin') means 'November' in Gaelic, which was the first month of the year for the ancient Celts. So, October 31, which has come down to us as 'Halloween,' was the CELTIC NEW YEAR'S EVE and the beginning of the Dark Half of the year.
    “It was dangerous in those times, as the Celts believed in fairies and ghosts and 'things that go bump in the night' - and those bumpety things were for some reason especially prone to walk abroad during Celtic holidays - and they weren't very nice. In fact, to meet them usually ended in disaster for the hapless human. Jack O'Lanterns [carved from turnips in those pre-Columbian, pumpkin-less times – ed.] were lit and set in strategic places to scare away unwanted and unnatural visitors. Of course, one might be able to buy them off with treats.”
    When Christianity came to the British Isles and Ireland, The Church decided - as it often did - to keep the holiday and rename it to blend with the new faith. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So Samhain became known as All Souls Eve, All Hallows Eve, and All Saints Day.
    Adrian adds, “And the scary fun went on. People love ghost stories by firelight, and probably always will, and kids love putting on a costume and going door-to-door for treats.But New Year’s Eve was moved to December 31 - the Roman New Year - because you have to draw the line somewhere.”
She concludes, “We at the Celtic Arts Center feel that the benefit of living in a multicultural society is the number of New Year's celebrations one can attend. So all are invited to ours.”
    We can't help but note that, nowadays, most of the month of October is given over to Samhain's descendant, Halloween – which is very odd, because Samhain still means November.
     
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Sun, Oct 30:
7 pm THE BATTLEFIELD BAND brings a suitably (and classically) Celtic evening performance for Samhain at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Tix, $24.50.
     
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Sun, Oct 30:
3 pm “NOW THAT SHE'S GONE” is “a play of life and insight,” at the Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N Lake Av, Altadena 92675; reservations, 626-798-6236. ELLEN SNORTLAND is a playwright just returned from Scotland where she presented her play at The Edinborough Festival. She is bringing the full version, not the shorter version used in Europe, to The Coffee Gallery Backstage for two shows, Sat, Oct 29 at 3 pm (matinee) and Sun, Oct 30 at 7 pm. Her website has great visuals at http://tinyurl.com/coffeegallery The play is said to be “Funny, touching, insightful and all about Ellen and her mother.” Bob Stane says, “See why they took it to Scotland.” Very reasonable tickets are $10 (matinee) & $12 (evening).
     
     
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NOVEMBER 2011 (a first look)...
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Fri, Nov 4:
8 pm MARLEY'S GHOST, a wonderfully Celtic / Americana flavored outfit, performs at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Oct 21; $17.50.
     
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Fri, Nov 4:
8 pm WILLY PORTER at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Tix, $22.50.
     
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Fri, Nov 4:
“OH COSMONAUT!” presented by the Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N Mentor Av, Pasadena 91106; tix and info, including discount and bonus packages, are available at www.bostoncourt.com or 626-683-6883.
     
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Sat, Nov 5:
6 pm DIRK HAMILTON plus CINDY KALMENSON & THE LUCKY DUCKS play the “FOUR FRIENDS ACOUSTIC MUSIC SERIES” dinner-and-a-show at Four Friends Gallery, 1408 E Thousand Oaks Bl, Thousand Oaks 91362; info@fourfriendsgallery.com; 805-497-4022. 
    Dinner at 6, concert starts at 7 pm.
    Singer-songwriter DAVE MORRISON is performing host. There is a Song Circle at the end, so you are invited to bring your guitar, and a there's a piano for you to play.
    Full bar available. Dinner is included with $15 admission.
     
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Sat, Nov 5:
8 pm DREAM STREET at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Oct 22; $17.50.
     
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Sat, Nov 5:
VOX FEMINA presents “AND JUSTICE FOR ALL,” at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N Mentor Av, Pasadena 91106; tix and info, including discount and bonus packages, are available at www.bostoncourt.com or 626-683-6883. Expect an inspiring evening about love and equality, as the mighty voices of Vox Femina explore the issues of equality and immigration, and their passion for fairness, proving that all men and women are created equal. The highlight of the concert will be Mark Koval’s work “We the People,” the story of the fight for marriage equality in narration and song.
     
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Sat, Nov 5:
8 & 10 pm GRAHAM PARKER at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. 8 pm is sold out. Tix, $24.50.
     
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Sun, Nov 6:
10:30 am JUSTIN ROBERTS & THE NOT READY FOR NAPTIME PLAYERS play the Kids Concert at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Tix, $17.
     
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Sun, Nov 6
7 pm JOHN WESLEY HARDING & The KING CHARLES TRIO plus THE MINUS FIVE at McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Tix, $22.50.
     
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Fri, Nov 11:
8 pm AL STEWART plays McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Still famous for his fine songs, “Time Passages” and “Year of the Cat,” he's here for two nights, the 11th and 12th. Tix, $24.50
     
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Fri, Nov 11:
ILIANA ROSE BAND: “HOT NIGHTS IN HAVANA!” at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N Mentor Av, Pasadena 91106; tix and info, including discount and bonus packages, are available at www.bostoncourt.com or 626-683-6883. Romantic melodies, voluptuous poetry, and pulsing rhythms of Cuban Salsa abound. Hailed as a spirited and vibrant presence on and off stage, Iliana's voice is pure, warm, sensual and beautiful, captivating audiences in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
     
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Sat, Nov 12:
8 pm THREE MUSCKETEERS (Three mUSCketeers) at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Oct 29; $15.
     
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Sat, Nov 12:
RICHARD PEARSON THOMAS: “SONGS FROM NEW YORK,” at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N Mentor Av, Pasadena 91106; tix and info, including discount and bonus packages, are available at www.bostoncourt.com or 626-683-6883. With “the heart and soul of the quintessential New York musician,” Thomas has received praise from the likes of Audra McDonald, Sanford Sylvan, Lauren Flanagan and Kurt Ollmann. Richard will perform an eclectic selection of his music with his brilliant TRILLIUM ENSEMBLE collaborators, California based soprano PATRICIA PRUNTY and New York based baritone BRUCE RAMEKER.
     
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Sat, Nov 12:
8 pm AL STEWART plays McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Bl, Santa Monica 90405; 310-828-4497. Still famous for his fine songs, “Time Passages” and “Year of the Cat,” he's here for two nights, the 11th and 12th. Tix, $24.50
     
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Fri, Nov 18:
8 pm CALAVERAS plus CLAUDIA RUSSELL & THE FOLK UNLIMITED ORCHESTRA play a double-bill at the “CAMARILLO CAFÉ CONCERT SERIES,” at Camarillo Community Center, 1605 E Burnley St (NE corner, Carmen & Burnley), Camarillo.
    Artist info, www.CalaverasSongs.com and www.ClaudiaRussell.com   
    Open mic precedes the featured acts (signups start at 7:30). Info, 805-523-2682; email, WhatsHappening@CamarilloCafe.com; website, www.CamarilloCafe.com. Sponsored by Pleasant Valley Recreation & Parks District and produced by Gary & Kathy Lynch, this is always a good time, and tonight, it brings two acts well worth a drive from L.A.
     
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Fri, Nov 18:
8 pm “A FAMOUS BRITISH TRIBUTE BAND” at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Even the venue won't tell you who yet, citing their “Don't strum, don't tell” policy.” Big reveal is Oct 22. Tix on sale Nov 4; $17.50.
     
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Sat, Nov 19:
“ORPHEUS AND EURIDICE” at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N Mentor Av, Pasadena 91106; tix and info, including discount and bonus packages, are available at www.bostoncourt.com or 626-683-6883. This artful production explores what happens when Orpheus gives up his mythic lyre for a clarinet. Find out in an innovative staging of award-winning American composer RICKY IAN GORDON’s reimagining of the classic love story. Graceful and dramatic is the beloved Euridice as created by up-and-coming soprano superstar ALEXANDRA LOUTSION. World renowned pianist ALAN SMITH provides the vibrant keyboard landscape that supports the longing voice of masterful clarinetist JAMES SULLIVAN’s poignant Orpheus.
    
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Sun, Nov 20:
8 pm monthly “VARIETY NIGHT” with featured artists CALI ROSE & CRAIG BRANDAU and the sign-up-in-advance OPEN MIC, at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. Open Mic signups limited to the first eight, and are taken beginning Nov 6 at 1 pm at the venue. Tix, $4.
    
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Nov 26, in Ojai:
“CELTIC WOODS CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION” with local superstars CELTIC SPRING promises to be a “delightful and festive” edition of the Ojai Concert Series. Tix & info, www.ojaiconcertseries.com or call Shane Butler at 805-665-8852.
     
     
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DECEMBER 2011 (a bit of what's coming...)
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Fri, Dec 2:
8 pm ROB ICKES & JIM HURST at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Nov 18; $17.50.
    
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Sat, Dec 3:
8 pm LOAFER'S GLORY at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Nov 19; $20.
    
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Sat, Dec 10:
8 pm JANET KLEIN & HER PARLOR BOYS at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Nov 26; $17.50.
    
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Sat, Dec 17:
8 pm THE WITCHER BROTHERS bring dynamite bluegrass to Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. More details in the near future. Tix on sale Dec 4; $15.
    
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Sun, Dec 18:
7 pm Annual “FREE HOLIDAY SHOW” at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Bl, Culver City 90230; 310-398-2583. An established tradition here, with entertainment provided by the teachers (recording stars / session players all) at the venue / music store. Cookies and baked confections are always anticipated at this event, too. More details in the near future. Free.
    
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Dec 31, in Ojai:
3rd Annual Celtic “NEW YEARS CELEBRATION” with “the international sensation” MOLLY’S REVENGE at the Ojai Concert Series. Tix & info, www.ojaiconcertseries.com or call Shane Butler at 805-665-8852.
    
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MUCH MORE COMING SOON!
     
     
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Music Got Us to the Moon – Where Might it Yet Take Us?

    
A GUIDE special feature...
    
    
[If you began reading this in the Acoustic Americana Music Guide's news feature edition of October 27, 2011, then scroll down to pick up where you left off. It's clearly marked.]
    
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MUSIC GOT US TO THE MOON – WHERE MIGHT IT YET TAKE US?
    
The biggest and final Mars lander touches down in November. Is there meaning for Artists?
    
    
    Get ready, because we're going to challenge you. The challenge is to write the next song that fires-up the popular imagination and gets us looking upward and outward again. We'll help all we can by sharing and disclosing some compelling notions and facts and ideas and “wow” factors as we go along.
    
    Music propelled the dreams of the generation that took us to the Moon. In the time when those folks were the innovators and the movers and shakers of society, the vinyl records and airwaves were filled with “Moon songs” in all genres and heavenly musical images of romance and bliss. It helped create a mindset.
    
    Music, for good or bad, inspires culture more than it reflects it. Doubt that? Then ask why, after an era of “gangsta rap,” TV is filled with “inside the prison” shows featuring processions of thugs? And why, when modern Nashville country music is all about dysfunctional relationships, are the divorce and domestic violence rates higher in regions where that music is dominant?
    
    Where might music take us, if we write and perform songs to inspire a brighter, better future? Can our music, in our time, help us fulfill our destiny as a species? Can it help us, in the words of the poet, “Slip the surly bonds of Earth?”
    
    It's been a long time since “Fly Me to the Moon” was a '60s hit song for Frank Sinatra. And it didn't come out of nowhere. There was plenty of groundwork before the proliferation of “Moon songs.” At the end of the 19th century, “Shine on Harvest Moon” was a hit on cylindrical wax records. In the '30s, the Ink Spots had a hit with “Paper Moon,” and the song returned as the title and title track of a '70s film. That handful of lunar-related tracks hardly scratches the surface.
    
    Generations of kids grew up singing “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the Moon.”
    
    In the years immediately leading to the “space generation,” when the people who would become astronauts and those who would send them into space were all growing up, the charts were filled with homages to lunar themes: “Blue Moon,” “How High the Moon,” “Moonglow,” “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” “Moon Over Miami,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the huge hit, “Moon River,” were just some of them. Couples danced as the lyrics “Moonlight Becomes You” were sung over the band. Was music influential? Did it help create a new mind-set?
    
    Search for “Moon songs” and you'll get thousands of web hits. Most of the best-known ones are, indeed, from the era when actually going there became a credible idea – including the time when President Kennedy challenged the nation in the early '60s, “before this decade is out,” to “land a man upon the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.”
    
    Submitted for your approval: every one of those “Moon songs” prior to Apollo 11's 1969 landing – particularly those that were hits during the years just prior – made their own contribution to the popular imagination and propelled the idea of going. (Curiously, no hit song commemorated the event after it happened, though there was a rock band named Apollo 100.)
    
    Whether you are willing to accept that the collective role of “Moon songs” leading to the Apollo landings was large or small, one thing is incontestable: music ALWAYS feeds the sensibilities and perceptions of its time, and helps define its era for future generations. Popular fascination ultimately becomes desire – and in the late '40s, '50s and '60s, music fed the desire to go to the Moon.
    
    So, if music got us to the Moon, could it take us beyond? Could it get us to the planets? Can it inspire us to get past our self-absorbed misuse of unprecedented and ever-expanding technological capabilities, and inspire us to actually apply all that capability to DO something worthy of ourselves, of the legacy we have inherited, and of our true potential? Can music accelerate and fulfill our evolution?
    
    Art and song were, for centuries, a product of exploration and the spirit of adventure. But somewhere, art was embraced by the high-brow humanities and divorced from discovery and exploration, and with them, from science as an exciting vector for going forth.
    
    One result is that space exploration, for far too long, has been pitted against human needs as a budget priority.
    
    These things should never have happened. We are complicated creatures, simultaneously nurturing and argumentative and competitive and confrontational and pugilistic. But we are ones who, by our most unique and deepest nature as a species, are creators of art AND explorers, creatures driven to see what's beyond the next hill and to test the next concept and to memorialize the discovery in shared images.
    
    We are members of a species who must ask questions and who must seek and get answers. We must. It is an internal imperative. When we fail too heed it, we are unfulfilled. We are a tribe who must question the meaning and make sense of the answers we are given and those we find. We must continually inform our perceptions of all else we know with those new discoveries.
    
    Without that, we do not advance; we stagnate and our civilizations fall.
    
    We honor and romanticize idealized views of our past, even as we are driven to continually renew ourselves by supplanting yesterday's wisdom with today's questions and tomorrow's answers. And then to question all of it, all the more, always and continuously. And we must do these things not simply for ourselves but for others. We inform ourselves of who we are as we explore on behalf of others who stay behind; all are inspired by the ones who go. Let us hope the disconnection in our cynical time has not severed this forever, and that it can be restored. Like art, exploring achieves and informs the highest aspirations of the human spirit.
    
    That's why thousands of years' worth of songs were written about great voyages and epic quests and the people who made them. It's time it all got back together again. It just might end the alienation that so many people feel toward this society. It might help complete us.
    
    We should recognize that a lot was happening that enabled the fascination for going to the Moon, beyond the development of multistage rockets following their development as weapons in World War II. Indeed, the Space Race is often cited as the key contest of the Cold War.
    
    But it transcended that. The fascination for going “out there”came from the culture, where art was, and is, a more important component than science. There were endless '50s and '60s science fiction movies and comic books about aliens and space travel. Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke were writing prolifically and their novels with space themes sold big.
    
    
[If you started reading in the October 27 edition of The Guide's News Features,
    
IT PICKS UP HERE...]
    
    
    In our arena, recorded music was booming in the late '50s. Singles on 45s were cheap and plentiful. There were hi-fi 33 1/3 rpm records that could hold complete symphonic pieces, unlike the earlier 78s. The classical world brought Holst's “The Planets” to a large audience, even as Elvis shook, rattled and rolled. It all went into the cultural stew pot. For the first time, everybody was building a music library at home. New songs and anything on an LP suddenly joined the pantheon of orchestral numbers and pop songs – and a disproportionate number of those songs were about the cultural and romantic value of the light of the silvery Moon, and even the heavens beyond.
    
    All this became a subject of exploration for us when we realized there are some significant anniversaries this time of year.
    
Sputnik 1, the Earth's first artificial satellite, was launched October 4, 1957, scaring America into a space race. Astronomer Edmund Halley, for whom Halley's Comet is named, was born October 29 (in 1656). Explorer / adventurer Thor Heyerdahl was born on October 6 (in 1914). Polar explorer Richard Byrd was born October 25 (in 1888). “Discoverers” of America Leif Ericson and Christoforo Columbo (or Colon, aka Christopher Columbus) have their annual days on October 9 and October 12, respectively. The president who started the U.S. Space program, Dwight Eisenhower, was born October 14 (in 1890), and the same date (in 1947) was when Chuck Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier while piloting the Bell X-1 rocket plane. And on Halloween in 1939, actor Orson Wells broadcast his infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast.
    
    October 22nd is likewise an important, if obscure, anniversary. On that day in 1975, the Soviet's Venera 10 probe landed on Venus and became the first spacecraft ever to send photographs back from the surface of another planet.
    
    The '50s hit song, “Venus,” and all the references to the planet, deriving from its role in the ancient pantheon as the Goddess of Love, could never be the same. Just as with the Moon songs, art and life interact and music changes reality by changing our perceptions and understanding.
    
    The U.S. Space program followed our culture's obsession and focused on the Moon and Mars. Cultural obsession? In addition to all our American Moon songs, American culture was still very much under the influence of Orson Wells' 1939 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, based on English novelist H.G. Welles' 1899 book.
    
    That radio play caused millions to panic in the belief an invasion was underway – from Mars.
    
    After that, the Red Planet began to resonate even more with Americans. Every school kid for decades knew that American astronomer Percival Lowell had seen and mapped a system of canals on its surface. Plenty of other astronomers saw them, too, through different telescopes, as far back as Galileo's description of “canali” – Italian for “channels.” They are simply explained away now as “optical distortions” or “atmospheric phenomenon.” Others cite it as the power of suggestion, even among scientists. (Valles Marineris, the hemisphere-spanning Grand Canyon of Mars, really is there, but none of those telescopes should have been able to reveal it.)
    
    “And the story was told of a river that flowed make me sad to think it was dead.” - Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell, aka the band America.
    
    After “Tarzan” creator Edgar Rice Burroughs' series of “Jon Carter of Mars” books, and then Wells' terrifying adaptation of Welles, Americans were obsessed with Martians.
    
    The Russians, meanwhile, did not share the same cultural icons. They chose to concentrate on Venus. Having lost the Moon race, Venera 10 was important as their first success – and boast – since putting the first man in space and making the first spacewalk.
    
    Previous Venera-series landers had disappeared on the way down through the planet's mysterious atmosphere. When Venera 10 landed, it survived long enough to transmit a few black-and-white images of the surrounding terrain. Sadly, instead of finding a steamy, tropical twin of Earth, as had long been dreamed, the Soviet lander revealed a literal hell of 870-degree (F) temperatures and crushing atmospheric pressure, 90 times that of Earth.
    
    Talk about conflicting images. Hell, vs. the Goddess of Love? That just might have marked the end of romantic songs about space. While the Rolling Stones could sing that “Love Stinks,” it was a tough sell to equate love with a hellish place. Reality is always a romance killer, eh?
    
    It may have been where art and science began to disconnect. Certainly, the absence of art – specifically, the absence of songs – to inform the popular imagination about space meant the beginning of the end of inspirations based on starry heavens and exploring them.
    
    It's a shame, because Venera 10 brought us a stunning message with the biggest overtones we've ever faced as Earth-dwellers. It showed us that a good planet can go wrong. Though moonless, Venus had long been regarded as Earth's twin. The reality, with an atmosphere comprised mostly of carbon dioxide, offers the most extreme warning imaginable of a runaway greenhouse effect. As on our own planet, CO2 allows the sunlight in, but doesn't allow the heat back out. Atmospheric scientists find great relevance for studying Venus as an analog for likely scenarios of Earth's atmospheric changes. Beyond our society's addiction to burning fossil fuels that release CO2 by the millions of tons, nearly all scientists agree that Venus is what the Earth will eventually become, whether or not man accelerates it by millions of years. But nobody has helped inform us about any of that with a song.
    
    “The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the [solar] wind...”
    
    Was Venus ever Earth-like? Maybe. There was once an ocean's worth of water there, and even today, the hydrogen and oxygen that once comprised Venus's water are still being literally blown-away into space. The planet has no magnetic field to shield it from the solar “wind” that strips-away most atmospheric gases and allows lethal radiation to reach the surface, in spite of the thick CO2. As if it wasn't hellish enough, volcanoes add sulfur dioxide, as they do on Earth, except it doesn't dissipate on Venus.
    
    “...and it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire, the ring of fire.”
    
    Whatever conditions may have been in the distant past, today, Venus's sulfuric acid will dissolve you; if the CO2-trapped heat doesn't charbroil you; or the atmosphere's surface pressure, 90-times that of Earth, doesn't crush you first; or the 230-mph equatorial winds or pair of seasonal polar hurricanes don't tear you apart. The planet's high mountains top it off with a diabolically satanic aspect, topped with a white (at least a bright) snow-like coating that's actually formed from molten metal.
    
    Not surprising that nobody wanted to write a song about THAT being the true nature of the Goddess of Love.
    
    Yet, believe it or not, some scientists speculate that life may have developed on Venus. And it may still be there, in the form of heat-tolerant acid-eating microbes that live in the upper atmosphere or beneath the surface where they could eat rocks, as some exotic cave-dwelling microbes do here.
    
    “I was strolling through the park one day, in the merry, merry month of December” - “No – May!” - radio broadcast of Apollo astronauts singing, while romping across the surface of the Moon.
    
    While we can never walk on Venus, we can learn things there, and we can learn far more by visiting other planets and moons. It's possible that, early on, there was a common origin for life on Venus, Mars and Earth. All were being struck by a lot of stray objects that knocked pieces of each into space, and some of that likely fell onto one of the other “nearby” planets.
    
    Remember the Martian meteorite found in Antarctica, the one that created the buzz because it might contain fossils of Martian life? Many scientists look beyond that and cite far more profound possibilities: WE may be the surviving Martians. The first life on Earth may have been delivered from someplace else.
    
    Those are questions we can explore. We won't know until we go and seek and find and learn.
    
    Given our technology, we could have gone already; we could have seriously been looking for life “out there.” NASA's original Apollo-era time line called for a manned landing on Mars in 1987, and it was a reasonable expectation. Instead, for two generations, we've been told we cannot afford it. Our priorities to fight in Vietnam ended the manned space program beyond Earth orbit. It's a recurring theme. FAR more expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became our 21st century national priorities, though their ongoing two-billion-dollar-per-week costs were kept off the books for most of one president's two terms. When the bill for the first few years of those wars was finally presented, it nearly bankrupted us.
    
    Peaceful planetary exploration would have been much, much cheaper and expanded our technological base far more than developing exotic drones or other weapons. Yet we're still here and only here, earthbound and armed to the teeth. A small part of what we continue to spend on those wars – despite the supposed “end” of our presence in Iraq by the end of this year – could be diverted to enable a real and vigorous space program.
    
    We could simply spend a fraction of what the military gets. A fraction, to explore the planets of our solar system and the most promising of their moons. Yes, it should be aimed at sending astronauts – excited, inquisitive, scientifically proficient, articulate, artistically literate men and women.
    
    But that hasn't happened and it seems worse than unlikely. There's a bought-and-paid-for majority in Congress to support the defense industry, and insufficient public pressure on politicians to divert a small part of the money to an ambitious, adequately funded space program. We could have gone long before now. We still could.
    
    That Wall Street bailout money could have sent humans to Mars and back, while exponentially increasing our understanding of – literally – life, the universe and everything, AND improving education, AND providing health care for those without it. Instead, our money preserved “too-big-to-fail” banks that invest only in offshore operations of multinationals and won't provide mortgage relief to Americans losing their homes to foreclosure. So the fat cats collect their obscene bonuses, ship our jobs overseas and keep ripping us off, all in a never-ending myriad of ways. And let's not forget that a lot of our money has gone to a few favored multinational corporations in no-bid contracts, even as our blood and treasure drained into the rocks and sands of Southwest Asia.
    
    For decades, dreams of planetary exploration focused on the “Goldilocks Zone,” the idea that anything too close to the sun would be too hot for life and anything too far away would be too cold. Now we have learned just enough to know better and to want to expand our search.
    
    “Life finds a way.” – Jeff Goldbloom's character in “Jurassic Park.”
    
    Couldn't we learn more by exploring the rocks and sands of Mars and Mercury and the atmosphere of Venus? Couldn't we learn more by exploring the giant oceans beneath the icy surfaces of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn? Do those alien oceans harbor critters the size of plankton, small to conserve heat, or the size of whales, big to absorb heat from available sources? We could find out. If we did, it could change everything more profoundly than anything ever has.
    
    “Aye, Calypso, the places you've been to, the things that you've shown us, the stories you tell, and aye, Calypso, I sing to your spirit, the men who have served you so long and so well.” - John Denver's song “Calypso.” (Written about Jacques Cousteau's exploration ship before it was sunk by the French government to keep it from learning French nuclear waste disposal secrets and causing an international scandal. Is that a metaphor for much that is and isn't happening today?)
    
    Can you imagine the sea chanteys from oceans on other worlds that are within our grasp?
    
    And what of the methane snowflakes that fall and the liquid methane rivers that flow on Titan? It's Saturn's largest moon, the one that has an atmosphere with clouds that move lazily across its sky, and a crazy-cold analog of our weather. What analogs of Christmas Carols or winter hearth songs or “Suwanee River” would come from experiencing that?
    
    The little Huygens' probe from Cassini LANDED on Titan and sent back pictures. Cassini discovered lakes on Titan, one the size of Lake Ontario. The lake is fed by those flowing rivers and rain and snowfall. And all of it is liquid methane. Freaky. How much more exciting does it need to get?
    
    Liquid methane lakes on Titan are -290 degrees. Fed by rain from the clouds, rivers carve valleys there en-route to lakes, just as rivers do on Earth. And there is evaporation from those lakes that keeps the whole process going, just like the hydrologic cycle on Earth. Major wow factor.
    
    In “2001: A Space Odyssey” (the Arthur C. Clarke book and the landmark movie) humans had already built permanent Moon bases and sent a manned expedition to Jupiter. Before the year 2001. All the technology and hardware required for those things was reasonable to envision when the film was made in the late 1960s, before the Nixon Administration canceled the last three Apollo missions (the most science-oriented of the program) and pulled the plug on NASA's plans for humans in space beyond Earth orbit. Shades of Conan O'Brien's “In the Year 2000” sketches. They stole our future to pay for the wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, just as they're stealing it now to pay for wars in Southwest Asia and oil depletion allowances and greed-driven fat cats who are too big to fail.
    
    Still, that early '70s end of manned space exploration didn't stop everything. Not altogether. We've had some remarkable robots – and the returns we've gotten from any one of them should have been enough to lure us back into space with urgent enthusiasm.
    
    In 1976, two Viking landers sent back color images from the surface of Mars while their orbiting counterparts mapped a surface of impossibly high mountains and impossibly deep and lengthy canyons caused by huge volumes of running water. We even thought we'd found life just beneath the surface. We're still not sure.
    
    In 1979, thanks to the two Voyager spacecraft, we got our first close-up look at Jupiter and its moons, and what we saw was far more intriguing than we had ever imagined. Nowadays, that knowledge is simply part of the background noise of what everyone sort-of knows but doesn't really understand.
    
    Along the way, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo allowed the ancient treasures of King Tutankhamun to tour the world. That was a big deal, but what captured everyone's imagination was Steve Martin's “King Tut Boogie.” It dominated radio with its wacky lines: “Born in Arizona, raised in Babylonia, King Tut.” But it captured the imagination. In the midst of all ythe robotic probes, that was what space exploration needed then, and needs now. - a human touch.
    
    The '90s brought us the era of Mars rovers. There was hatbox-sized Sojurner that made elementary school kids gleeful because it was small and cute and they were the first computer generation of kids. The double-aughts brought us the busted-but-still-running Spirit and Opportunity and color and stereoscopic images of their far-flung travels across Mars. A final robotic rover, called Curiosity, lands this November and it's the size of a VW Beetle. It should be the best yet. But it's the final one. There's no more money.
    
    It's maddening. We're just learning enough to know what to look for. In May, 2008, the Phoenix lander found water ice beneath the surface of Mars, and we began to see the planet, as one scientist expresses, as “an ice cube covered with a layer of dirt.” That's huge, because the Dry Valleys of Antarctica are the closest thing here to Mars, with their surface of rock instead of glacial ice; and just beneath their surface, they have water ice – and life.
    
    Methane gas is seasonally released from specific regions on Mars. Is it volcanic, or did something fart? That new Mars rover, Curiosity, the LAST one, the one that lands in November, is both robot geologist and astrobiologist, designed to search for specific organic compounds that are the product of living things.
    
    Of course, finding life on Mars would be historic and problematic. If anything IS alive there, can we ethically keep visiting, or might we interfere with it? (Yes, it's the ol' Star Trek “Prime Directive.”) Best of all would be finding abundant fossils and nothing alive now on Mars, or nothing alive that doesn't already live on Earth. That way we could colonize Mars. But could we if we find life?
    
    But the questions are moot. We aren't spending any more to go to Mars, even as our knowledge has taught us enough to send people with an effective set of tasks and questions. Instead, we gave all our money to the Wall Street pirates to bail them out of their incompetence-caused / motivated-by-greed failures – because they were too big to fail – and they've spent it lavishly on themselves.
    
    In 2005, the Japanese probe Hayabusa (“Falcon” in Japanese) landed on an asteroid, collected a sample of dust, and spent the next five years bringing it back to Earth.
    
    We've successfully sent Galileo to Jupiter and Cassini to Saturn; both were big, capable robot orbiters equipped with smaller probes. They performed brilliantly. Our knowledge grew exponentially. It took the big robotic Cassini seven years to reach Saturn. But they were robots and the popular imagination was not inspired by them.
    
    The absence of humans from all but the mundane “around and around and around” of low Earth orbit aboard a spindly space station with an unexciting mission is the realization of NASA's original fear: “No Buck Rogers, no bucks.”
    
    The end of the Space Shuttle program earlier this year may have exacerbated that, but in 30 years of missions, the thing never did much that captured the public's imagination, anyway.
    
    Outside the scientific community, even the Shuttle-deployed, space-based, Hubble Telescope has only a cult following. And while the space station and its predecessors, Mir and Skylab, have been testbeds for technology needed for manned interplanetary space flight, there's still nothing planned, so there's been no chance to create excitement.
    
    Concurrent with the robotic probe era were the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” franchises and their iconic musical anthems. Perhaps 1979's Voyager photos just couldn't compete with 1977's Darth Vader theme and John Williams' other Star Wars' compositions. All those films were, at essence, techo-dazzle updates of Buster Crabbe's 1930s Buck Rogers, complete with lots of loud explosions, dramatic music, and assorted space noises that can't really exist in the silent vacuum of space.
    
    Those screen epics and, moreover, their instantly recognizable soundtracks, are as close as we've come, post-Apollo, to channeling popular imagination into the final frontier. It's the instrumental music of Star Trek and Star Wars that endures.
    
    Reality lacked background music. No composers, no songwriters went along for the robotic ride. We know nearly all of what we know about Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and their moons because of our robotic extensions of ourselves. They could carry our scientific instruments, but not our culture.
    
    Except... The most recognizable aspect of the Voyager probes, what people remember most, are the gold phonograph records of “Earth's Greatest Hits.” The two Voyagers took along music from the blues to Beethoven, voiced greetings in many languages, bird songs and whale songs and more. Since both Voyagers have left the solar system and are racing outward, they may be humankind's only permanent cultural presence in space. And we remember them best and smile because they are taking our music with them.
    
    “Let's light this candle!” - Alan Shepard, to encourage an end to launchpad dithering, just before he became the first American astronaut launched into space.
    
    Science has learned a lot, but needs to start dating culture again. We really only know enough to frame some big but rather basic questions, and more of us need to feel included in that. We already share one thing: we know enough to want to build spacecraft and pick landing sites and go – ourselves – to ask the most profound questions in our history, to make the deepest inquiries of all – and to experience and share with one another the most evolutionary step we could choose to take as a species.
    
    Except we can't even get our people to or from that spindly space station without hitching a ride with the Russians. It's not simply unexciting and a regression from the days of Apollo. It's an embarrassment and a disgrace.
    
    Exploring Jupiter's moon Europa should have become a priority for the nation and the human race as far back as our first good look in 1979.
    
    Way back in the '60s, that “2001” movie had guessed at Jupiter and its constellation of moons as the best planetary target, and given us a soundtrack with music that's still iconic. “The Blue Danube” is no longer a waltz for people in powdered wigs, but the default selection in our mental jukebox for anything that slowly tumbles through space. “Also Sprach Zatathustra” is the ultimate anthem for supreme dramatic excitement on the scale of monumental experience, driven by the horns and kettle drums you hear in your head at the mere mention of it. Its three-note intro is more recognizable than the four-note motif of Beethoven's Fifth. Perhaps only the five-note intro to Led Zep's “Stairway to Heaven” is more recognizable – and we can't help but note the theme and title of THAT one. It could e that post-Apollo commemoration we were looking for, in an artistically obtuse way.
    
    There could have and should have been – and can yet be – more of the soundtrack for the human experience of the star-spangled skies, based on actually going to explore them and being inspired by the doing of it.
    
    Human inspiration is a two-way street. Inspired as artists, inspired to go, inspired by going.
    
    We dream of doing. We anticipate going, and cannot contain our excitement about going, and then we go because its an imperative within us, and we feel and discover and are flooded with impressions no one has ever had before, and while we focus on central aspects, we notice that even what is peripheral is completely new, and we are thrilled and infinitely surprised and must seek meaning from all of it, and because we are artists we are driven to interpret and share what we learn and we are flooded with the rush of feeling all the new things as we process and seek to assess the totality and how each aspect informs, effects and changes us. That is one of the ultimate inspirations we, as a species, could experience.
    
    In addition to the obvious choice of going to Mars, let's go to Europa. That moon, it turns out, is locked in an orbital tug-of-war with the massive pull of its giant host planet and two of Jupiter's other moons, Io (pronounced EYE-oh, with its school-bus yellow surface and many active volcanoes) and Ganymede (with its own wildly purple palate of colors and peculiar enigmas).
    
    The New Horizons probe flew past Io and revealed the scope of its spectacularly continuous volcanism, first discovered by Voyager. Io is stretched by more than 330 feet, then returned to its usual shape, each time it completes one of its egg-shaped elliptical orbits of Jupiter. One scientist says the gravitational tug-of-war inside Io is like the heat you get when you keep bending a paper clip. (Try it, it's amazing.)
    
    Discovering, in the Voyager images, that Io was being flexed is what first gave us the idea that Europa could not be a frozen-solid ice ball, or even a snow cone.
    
    Beneath Europa's icy surface, the heat of all those competing gravitational forces keeps things warm enough to maintain a planet-size SALT WATER OCEAN, 500 million miles from our own oceans. Europa's ocean could be as much as 60 miles deep, and contain MORE water than ALL the Earth's oceans, COMBINED. How can we ignore THAT?
    
    “The ocean is a desert with its life underground and the perfect disguise above. Under the sea, under the hard-baked ground...” - Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell, aka America.
    
    Galileo passed by Europa twelve times. It's slightly smaller than our own moon, with a surface temperature of -260 degrees F. But that surface is a crazy quilt of broken, upthrust ice sheets and cracks, resembling ice floes on the Arctic Ocean.
    
    Saturn has a moon like that, too, called Enceladus. It's only 300 miles across, yet it has giant deep “tiger strip” gouges that fire dozens of jets of water-ice hundreds of miles into space – at 1200 miles an hour – like Yellowstone's geysers on steroids. Planetary scientist Chris McKay says, “It's like a flashing sign that says 'Free Samples!' We don't need to land, we don't need to drill, we just need to fly through the plumes and collect some of what's being ejected into space.”
    
    Most of it falls back onto Enceladus as fluffy white snow. It could contain frozen remains of whatever may live in the sea beneath the ice. Except we aren't going to find out. No money.
    
    Not long ago, we thought water was the rarest and most precious commodity in space. Fortunately, it turns out that's not true in the solar Mister Roger's Neighborhood. Since water is the common denominator for all the life we know, sampling frozen aqueous plumes and oceans beneath ice crusts offers the most intriguing and realistic places to look for alien life. And it's important for another reason entirely, since a fuel cell can separate water's hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel that lets us keep going or return home with samples that could change everything we think we know.
    
    Near the top of Europa's and Enceladus' oceans, light or other radiation may, in places, penetrate their skins of ice. That could enable life based on diffused sunlight or some other wave length emanating from the sun or from Jupiter. Mostly, the ice is probably quite thick. But wait. At the bottom of Europa's ocean, Jovian planetary physics would create a seafloor that releases heat, and lots of it. Life there isn't just possible, but likely, since it could be based on the same formula as the “Black Smoker” ecosystems at the bottom of Earth's deep, dark, Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and in the depths of the Pacific – and at the bottom of the cold Arctic Ocean. All these places have crushing water depth pressures, where isolated communities of life must be based not on sunlight, but on eating heat-formed waterborne minerals and compounds based on sulfur and hydrogen and methane. Microbes here that depend on those chemicals for life are themselves the basis for extensive food chains in deep, cold, dark isolated places. It works on Earth, where exotic tubeworms flourish in unique, lavish ecosystems, so why not? We can go see, if we're willing to spend the money.
    
    Okay, so Europa's surface receives radiation so lethal that five minutes there would kill you. But get beneath the ice, descend through the water, and things change rapidly.
    
    Submarine-spacecraft are probably the wildest and most exciting Star-Trekian machines anybody can imagine. We built spacecraft to hold pressure in. We built submarines to keep pressure out. Kids love those goofy cartoon Transformers. How cool would the real thing be?
    
    On Earth, a cubic foot of water weighs 62 pounds. So, there's 620 pounds of water pushing down on every square foot at the bottom of a ten-foot-deep swimming pool. At the bottom of Earth's deepest ocean, the pressure is equal to 50 Boeing 747 jetliners pressing down on you. We know because we've been there, we've done that. Europa is smaller with less gravity, but our oceans are a fraction as deep as Europa's ocean. Whatever we build must survive the trip through space to get there. It's daunting, but if we do it, our technology would expand in ways we can't begin to imagine. And we could meet ET. Wow.
    
    It's a mind-boggling idea. Yet today's scientists are already envisioning robotic deep-water aquatic spacecraft and the drilling devices to get them down through the ice. All they need is the money to apply our vaunted technology to do something more worthwhile than playing Angry Birds or Grand Theft Auto – something truly worthy of our technological prowess, and even of its development – to build and launch amazing submersible interplanetary spacecraft.
    
    Want kids to study math and science? Give them a reason. It wouldn't need to be hyped to be “made exciting.” It IS exciting. Even Steve Squyres, guru of robotic Mars probes, says, “I build robots because it's the only way I can go. Would I go myself, instead? Hell, yes!”
    
    There's a space geek cliché that the first human to walk on Mars has already been born. Right now, that simply isn't credible. But we could change our priorities and make it true. Someone old enough to be reading this could go.
    
    We owe it to our kids. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the future every bit as much as we owe it to our forebears, those who left us gifts they paid for, the legacy that enabled us to enjoy the advances we take for granted.
    
    We can credibly return education to prominence, through a partnership of techno-innovation, adventure, scientific exploration, and the knowledge needed to go do it. We owe it to ourselves – if we want a place in history as something other than (a) the ones who used-up all the cheap oil while letting the fat cats become Robber Barons again, (b) developing sophisticated electronics that we wasted on goofy games and self-indulgent foolishness, and (c) irreversibly bringing greenhouse gas-induced climate change that we couldn't control.
    
    We need to patch things up with the kids. Ever since astronomers demoted Pluto from its role as the farthest planet from the sun (three billion miles away) kids everywhere have been disillusioned. Mickey Mouse's dog is near comatose with depression. And they're not alone. We're supposed to accept Pluto as just one of a bunch of “Kuiper Belt Objects,” and not a planet? That just feels soooo wrong. Pluto has a moon called Charon, doesn't it? If you're round (spherical) and you have a round moon orbiting you, aren't you a planet? Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and neither of them is even close to round. Isn't Pluto more of a planet? Shouldn't it get its own zip code? But then, astronomers haven't had a decent PR guy since Carl Sagan died.
    
    Okay, we “get” the rest of the Kuiper Belt and its distant solid objects – planetos or planettes or planetoids or chunky granola masses or whatever you want to call them – solid stuff that's up to four billion or so miles away, ever-so-slowly orbiting the sun. And we “get” the Oort Cloud of comets, in a sort-of shell around us, up to 34 billion miles away – leftovers from where the solar system's water probably originated. A single comet can contain over a 100 million tons of water, so if there ever was a profusion of them closer to the sun, it explains our own blue planet, along with the origin of the lost water on Mars and Venus, the ice in perpetually dark polar craters on broiling Mercury and our own Moon, and those whizbang amazing ice-skinned ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
    
    Intellectually we get all that. But we could sure use one, good Jovian sea chantey.
    
    Some of us are not content that “somebody,” “someday,” will be scuba diving beneath the ice of distant moons, frolicking with whatever else is swimming there and writing songs about it to inform the people (or whomever) of THEIR time. Perhaps we would learn and sing indigenous songs with the local inhabitants? However you approach it, it's mind-boggling. We could stop dithering, and go.
    
    Why should we accept that swimming in alien oceans – or walking on Mars, peering over the rim of a canyon 100 times the size of the Grand Canyon – should be postponed for our unknown heirs (if we last long enough to beget them before rising sea levels drown us)?
    
    Why shouldn't WE be the ones to go, instead of leaving the thrill for some nebulous future time (if there is one, before a giant asteroid impact destroys our civilization)? The money exists now (it exists to fight wars and for Wall Street to steal, so it must exist) and the technological and industrial and manufacturing bases still exist (just barely) within our country to build the manned and remotely operated and autonomous robotic spacecraft and the rovers and the samplers and the habitats and the hydroponic gardens and the fuel cells and the submarine-spacecraft.
    
    There's an argument that we must keep building sophisticated military hardware to preserve our vanishing industrial manufacturing capability.
    
    Why not develop and build a fleet of sophisticated spacecraft, instead? It's a strong argument, especially since technology spins-off freely (by law) from space exploration, but is always classified and inaccessible to innovation when it's for weapons and the military?
    
    Want economic stimulus? Well, hellloooo, space gadget spinoffs!
    
    We CAN change the equation. We CAN decide that the fat cats must take less from us and we CAN invest the difference in things that benefit all of us – economically, physically, emotionally, spiritually, as quality of life issues, AND things that fulfill our most noble visions of ourselves and our destiny as a species.
    
    “Come Josephine in my flying machine going up she goes, up she goes...”
    
    If, after the Wright Brothers, the development of atmospheric flight had been as regressive as manned space flight after Apollo, we would not be traveling aboard transatlantic jumbo jets. We would just now be congratulating Lindberg.
    
    The difference is, there was immediate money to be made from commercial aviation. There is no immediate profit for investors in interplanetary space exploration – unless government commissions the programs so that private companies can bid to take part. Philosophically, the biggest rewards should not be treasure troves of profit for a few – though stock in aerospace would soar in value if they were building spacecraft and employing advanced-degree engineers and tech-competent worker bees to do it. Going “out there” creates infinite spinoffs, yes, as proven by Apollo. But more than that, it brings priceless returns for all of humanity.
    
    The aerospace companies, large and small, will otherwise be building weapons. We wouldn't lose them as employers, but what a fine conversion – or reconversion, since once upon a time, they all built space hardware. Plus, the space program being public and open, there's less opportunity for Wall Street's Robber Barons to hijack things for their own self aggrandizement and personal greed, like KBR/Halliburton did with embellished and abused and unfulfilled military contracts. That alone makes it smarter than what we've been doing.
    
    If vigorous manned planetary space exploration were only about seeking and learning and understanding more, about going “where no one has gone before,” about knowledge for its own sake, that would be enough. But it's not limited to all that. It's about the ULTIMATE “more.”
    
    Human exploration of the cosmos drives us to continually reexamine and redefine ourselves and to continually challenge ourselves in new ways. And that drives the imagination of society, feeding and drawing from the need for art and artists to help us understand what we, as a species, are doing, and to interpret and reveal, to all, what it means. In the songs – those that come from doing it or from advocating that we should do it – each of us experiences and shares and reinterprets and becomes a co-discoverer.
    
    “Oh for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage, to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea, tracing one more line through a land so wild and savage, and take the Northwest Passage to the sea.” – Stan Rogers' song, “Northwest Passage.”
    
    Dreaming becomes doing. Doing feeds the dream. It's a natural human process when we reach for high aspirations. Going “out there” drives us and feeds us and provides immeasurable returns to us with every discovery we make about life, the universe, and everything – and ultimately, about ourselves.
    
    This is about – quite literally – everything. Everything, if we choose to do it.
    
    Or it's about nothing if we choose instead to stick with endlessly costly distractions – or, alternatively, with some obsession with reducing costs by settling for a nation based on less of everything. Do we accept some crazy idea that we all should be John Wayne the man's man, and kill our own deer, so we can take the hide and tan it ourselves, and make boots from it ourselves, so we can pull ourselves up with our own bootstraps? And do it all outdoors, with no shelter in an urban society, because we got upside-down on our mortgages and lost our jobs when our employers shipped them to China, and we were foreclosed-on while we were unemployed, and had no other assets because they were made worthless by manipulators of the stock market for their own insider-knowledge-enabled gains. But we probably died from tetanus when we cut ourselves skinning the deer and didn't have any access to health care because we were unemployed.
    
    “The Eastern world, it is explodin', fires ragin', bullets loadin', and even the Jordan River has bodies floatin', and you tell me over, and over, and over again my friend, oh you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction?” - “Eve of Destruction,” the hit song banned by the FCC from U.S. radio airplay when Barry McGuire's recording was released in the '60s.
    
    Sure, there are problems right here on Earth and many require costly solutions. But do we choose to address those issues myopically, or will we choose to expand our vision? Even as we seek remedies to a nearly extinct American manufacturing base (exported for corporate profits), to an education system that's on life support, to a health care system where only the rich can afford life support, and to a quagmire of unemployment with diminishing prospects for many of our people ever going back to work?
    
    If we choose cutbacks – and the shrinking economy that every historical example shows would follow, we will always be too broke to go anywhere; we will forsake our future; we will turn our backs on our legacy as a species; we will fail to inspire anybody or make a place in human history for ourselves, as the ones who took humankind upward and outward and into the next phase of our evolution.
    
    Do we keep postponing the choice to some unknown time when some unknown others replace us and perhaps finally decide to bless themselves and their posterity by accepting a challenge worthy of THEM selves and THEIR time? Or will WE be the ones who enable all who follow us?
    
    At any time, it could become a practical question instead of just a philosophical one. Whether we can dodge the next asteroid impact (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) may well be a function of whether we chose to be aware and observant of all that's out there. (Google Chixulub Impact, and Tungeska Impact, and Meteor Crater Arizona – these things happen more often than you may think.)
    
    Are we a spacefaring civilization that recognizes it is time to learn what, and maybe who, is next door (perhaps before it collides with us) and that our neighborhood is a part of a vast natural environment that reaches infinitely beyond the Earth?
    
    Or do we choose to stay boarded-up in our cabin in the woods, afraid of the bears and the wolves and the forest demons, afraid of the brown people who live over the hill, playing our claustrophobic games of distraction, manipulation, power and control, constantly trying to get more on our own plate at the expense of everyone else at the table, striving to always eat the choice cuts, paying others to be the ones to go cut our firewood and hunt our food and dig our well and our outhouse for us, and telling others to face all the risks and eat less so that we have more?
    
    It's much easier to be driven by greed and fixated by arguing over the things that go bump in the night, without ever going to see what those things are. But is that worthy of us as a species? Is that a worthy use of the technology we have developed and, so far, applied to mostly silly ends? Will we leave anything behind as useful as the things our grandparents and their parents left us? Is our legacy that we, and our culture, and our time, were all about greed and narcissism that ultimately sabotaged our own future and our own self-preservation?
    
    Artists invariably play a role in society's choices. Artists, at their best, always hold a mirror to everything around them and bring the reflection to society. Simultaneously, artists are among those planting seeds of new motivations and desires, and at critical times, new outlooks and new paradigms. Artists must not forget who we are. It's been a long time since “Fly Me to the Moon” was a hit.
    
    “Mercury Blues” was about a car – is it time for a song about the planet? After all, in March of this year, NASA's Messenger became first probe to orbit Mercury. A robot. No Buck Rogers...
    
    If you're wondering, we know about “Filk Music” (that's how it's spelled). It's the underground genre of science-fiction folk songs, where “Green, Green Grass of Home” becomes “Red, Red Sands of Mars.” There are songs about Spock's ears and Luke Skywalker's land speeder. Please, that's not where we're going here.
    
    We're talking about something with much broader popular appeal and far more meaning. A song – or better, a trend in music – that reorients popular thought to embrace a return to space exploration as part of the fulfillment of human potential and the human spirit; a return to the discovery, the adventure, the science, and the thrill of pursuing a higher purpose and creating a legacy for our time, one that enables a destiny for our species that will make our descendants remember us as the ones who decided to “Boldly go.”
    
    So we're throwing-down the dusty old gauntlet of an Apollo lunar pressure suit. It's one that would have gone to the Moon, until the program was cut. Pick it up. Take the challenge. Feel the slumbering spirit inherent in it. Write a song that turns society's attention upward and outward to the shimmering lights in the night sky.
    
    Write a song that looks beyond the equivocating and obstructionist politicians, one that rejects their perpetual fixation with campaign donations and their failure to do anything except for their mega-donors, even as they steal our future. Write a song that shows a better way.
    
    Write a song that reaches the highest aspirations of the human spirit, a song that motivates us and helps us see ourselves and our destinies as a species of spacefarers whose limits are as boundless as the light of the distant stars.
    
    Songs can help us decide to go meet our fellow inhabitants of the solar system, whoever or whatever they are. Music helped motivate a generation, not so long ago, to find and spend the money to go to the Moon. Songs can play the same role again to get us to explore Mars and our sun's other planets and their wildly exotic moons, some with liquid salt water oceans more vast and voluminous than our own.
    
    You might be the one who writes the song that motivates the rest of us to stop wasting time, quit screwing around with our future, and go. And who knows? You may someday hear your song sung from the surface of the distant world that it's about. (When that happens, remember who inspired you.)
    
    Let's light this candle.
    
    
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The LATEST EDITION of THE ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE, with separate links for:
  
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