I would first like to thank my friend, saxophonist, and webmaster, Mark Craddock, for posting the preceding video from Blues Under The Bridge. It was a pleasant surprise to find it there and it serves to perpetuate the necessary illusion that this is actually a recording artist’s website. This helps in procuring gainful musical employment and maintaining the appropriate profile necessary to avoid getting a real job. Nice going, Mark.

Now I will move on from making a living in the music business to the business of living. A revelation has been laid before me. It has been brewing since childhood, steeping in years of real life experience, and has finally and dramatically burst forth as a full-blown inspiration. I know how to solve the problems of the world. I mean all of the problems. It is so glaringly obvious and simple that I am still incredulous that it has been so elusive for so long. All we need to do is to get rid of all the suits. I am not speaking metaphorically, using the word “suit” to represent a class of people. I am talking about the actual suits themselves. Permit me to explain.

Since I was a boy, I have hated suits. There were communion suits, funeral suits, wedding suits, graduation suits, going-to-church suits, and suits for every conceivable solemn and official occasion. Suits are restrictive, the ties choke, and when you come right down to it, what can you actually do in a suit? Nothing of any use. You can walk slowly, stand uncomfortably, or sit on your ass, which causes wrinkles in your trousers. Trousers – right there you know something is wrong. Put on a dress shirt, a tie, and a jacket and pants become trousers. I hate trousers, the name as well as the notion. Turn a pair of pants into trousers, and you turn a man into an asshole. Consider the evidence.

Travel to any corner of the world, any country, any region and you will find people in regular clothes. The fabrics change from place to place, the styles vary according to culture and function, but for the most part, clothing is practical. Clothing keeps certain things in, other things out, and conforms to the particular cultural norms related to what you don’t want people to see that they already know is under there. It keeps you warm or cool, it moves with the task in which you are engaged, and it can be easily washed in an Amana front-loader or beaten on a rock by the stream. Dry out your shirt and pants, just put them on again and resume doing what it was that got your clothes dirty in the first place. Perfect. But as usual, man does not live by clothing alone, so he invented the goddamned suit, which requires dry cleaning, a caustic chemical bath performed at a remote location for top dollar. Jesus Christ (who, by the way, would never have been and was not caught dead wearing a suit)!!!

Suits are badges of rank in a class system, vestiges of the royalty out-dressing the peons. A man in shirt and pants is a regular guy with a regular job, the same man in a suit is management. When one guy in a suit greets another guy in a suit, each can rest assured that he is meeting another pompous pinhead of parallel position. Behind every atrocity committed by the human species is a man in a suit, calling the shots.  When a palm oil company in Malaysia slashes and burns a rain forest to plant their cash crop, peasants in loincloths and hand-me-downs hit the woods with machetes and matches. Who directed them to do it? A son-of-a-bitch in a suit. When assholes in uniforms (unfortunate extensions of the suit hierarchy, with bars and medals replacing the silk ties as barometers of rank) torture someone in a cobblestone courtyard, you can bet your human rights that somewhere, up in an office watching from behind smoky glass is an even bigger asshole hiding behind his Armani. There is not a decision of consequence made in this world that is not the brainchild and direct order of some self-important suit-clad man-child. What about the Middle East, where such dictates emanate from men in flowing robes? Well, what do you think they have hanging by the hundreds in their royal closets? You don’t need Calvin Klein to figure that one out.

What is the garment of choice for the men who trashed our economy?  What was the evil genius who shafted the American working man by turning his government-insured pension into a market-dependent 401K sporting at the moment he hatched his ruthless plan? What does the warden wear when he attends the execution? What were Anton Scalia and Clarence Thomas hiding under their robes when they presented us with Junior as our duly non-elected president? More to the point of illustration and proof of my three-piece hypothesis: What does every, and I mean every, politician wear? The answer to all of these and all similar queries is as plain as the gravy stain on your silk cravat: a fucking suit. And even though the suit has been a traditionally male affectation, what was the first truly viable female candidate for the highest office in the land forced to clothe herself in (minus the Windsor knot) so as to make herself electable? I rest my case.

So, if we were to shred all the suits, turn Dolce & Gabbana and Bigsby & Kruthers into wanted outlaws, banish every tailor in Hong Kong to a remote Pacific island, what would be the result? I hold that we would save the planet. There would be no more opportunity for men with inflated egos to hide behind their suits and bark unthinkable orders to the hoi-polloi. A de-suited dictator could stand there naked and scream at his minions to kill, bomb, lie, cheat and steal, but his credibility would be in tatters just like his Versace. Everyone would simply point at his little penis and laugh. It would suit me just fine.

Many thanks to “dongoede,” who posted this video on You Tube of Ken’s gig at Blues Under the Bridge, Colorado Springs, CO, in the summer of 2008. The personnel were…

Ken Saydak – piano/vocal
Fred James – guitar
Fingers Farrell – bass
Dave Zehring – drums

My first contact with the barter system, outside of having read of its historical place, was in the stories that my brother and his wife told me of their life in the woods of British Columbia. They had retreated from the urban midwest and sought peace for a time in the islands between mainland Canada and the Island of Vancouver. They had a Portuguese neighbor down the road (whom I recall was nicknamed “The Portuguese”) who had a smokehouse. So they, who raised chickens for eggs and an occasional fricassee, would bring salmon they had caught in the salt-water bays to the neighbor, who would smoke the fish in exchange for fresh eggs. I thought that was so cool, such an obvious and compelling idea, that I recall the story to this day.

I now, also in retreat from the cities of the Great Lakes Basin, live in a small town nestled against the Spanish Peaks in southern Colorado. We are not as remotely located as Quadra Island, B.C. is, but being in a rural mountain locale, the notion of exchanging services for services is alive and well here. In the light of the fact that the fall of capitalism as we have known it may well be upon us, this system of sharing advantages seems to be growing out of both necessity and principle. I fish here, mostly for trout, and I have traded a fresh catch for produce from friends’ gardens. I have traded a few hours of recording studio tracks on the organ keyboard for equally valuable time and skill with the computer keyboard. I plan to continue the practice, as it works and has distinct advantages over exclusively exchanging green pictures of deceased U.S. presidents for very un-green Chinese consumer goods.

In the barter system, the whole idea of relative value becomes personalized. You simply trade something you have for something you need. The relationship thus established then blossoms into a trust-based partnership of mutual supply and demand. You always know what you get is worth what you give because the level on which these transactions take place is so flexible and enduring. You might get the better end of the deal this week, then the following trade yields an apparent edge to the other guy. Nobody bitches, nobody returns anything for refund, everybody wins.

In addition to the cashlessness of the trade-offs, there is yet another benefit to this system. In the whole process, you are touched by other human beings. There is no anonymous middleman simply taking a piece of the action for shelf space or delivery fees. Personal relationships are formed, friendships often follow. You find out how your vegetable supplier is feeling, what he or she is planning on for the summer, what joy or grief has entered his or her life. Additionally, even this act is reciprocated, and you are blessed with another’s interest and concern about your own life. In such an arrangement, the monetary value of “things” pales in comparison to the value of human contact and acceptance of honorable mutual dependence.

The way we have been doing things, if you haven’t been paying attention lately, is proving to be both antiquated and ineffective. This de facto caste system which we have borne and raised, with the haves holding an invincible edge over the have-nots, is about to collapse under the weight of a restless and dissatisfied world populace and the ever-increasing chokehold that this system holds on the vessel which is our planet. All of us, from the hilltop manors to the corrugated tin shacks, are about to realize, whether we like it or not, that we are in the same lifeboat together and anything that can bring us closer and devalue those things which actually have no intrinsic value needs to be considered.

The late Memphis Slim wrote a song called Mother Earth, which happens to be my favorite blues song, in  which he says,
You may own half a city, even diamonds and pearls
You may have your own airplane to fly you all around the world
I don’t care how rich you are, I don’t care what you’re worth
When it all ends up, you’ve got to go back to Mother Earth

You don’t believe that sappy socialist crap? Just ask some recently-diagnosed terminal fat cat as he empties his Gucci colostomy bag. I’ll bet he’d trade that in a heartbeat, with just about anyone for just about anything.

I will here embark on a largely emotional and broad-brushed painting of a generation – my generation. I will use the Beatles, perhaps the largest cultural influence of the Baby Boomer class, as a metaphor. I know the argument can be made that the early rock’n'rollers were the first real explosion of the post-war American culture fueled by U.S. worldwide supremacy. Remember, though, that when the rock’n'roll hurricane blew on to the scene (translation, when white America co-opted black music to sell to the restless white middle-class kids) in the aftermath of World War II, many of whom have now been termed the Boomers were small children with neither the hormones nor cash to pursue the latest cultural trend. If you doubt this, look at the difference in mindset between the Elvis crowd and the Beatles disciples. With that in mind, let’s look at what the Beatles brought to the mainstream.

When the British Invasion hit the New World shores in roughly 1963, those born in the early 1950s were ripe for the resultant commercial exploitation. We were entering or in the midst of puberty, our sexual awareness blossoming as the Fab Four urged us to hold somebody’s hand. The mop-tops were cute, catchy, hip, and innocent enough on the surface to be allowed into Middle America’s living rooms via The Ed Sullivan Show, the standard bearer of our parents’ post-vaudeville entertainment format. Each of the singing group was marketed as a personality; the cute one, the dumb one, the rebel, the quiet one, with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Perfect. Something for everyone. There were lunchboxes, posters, decals, wigs, and hundreds of other products to accompany the 45s and LPs which were the mainstays of the sales pitch. The resultant commercial bonanza brought smiles to the faces of both the kids and also the cigar chompers who ran the show and counted the coin.

As time passed, the individual Beatles grew up and began to pursue their passions without consideration as to how it affected the overall marketing plan. Their egos bolstered by their own success, they began to thumb their collective noses at the machine that had carried them to the fore. There was no more touring, they dabbled in experimental recording techniques, and they assumed their own studio production, minus George Martin, the genius guru who had guided their recording career. John Lennon, perhaps prodded by his miserably lonely childhood, pushed into angry politics and assumed the mantle of the Beatles’ social conscience. He railed against the pompous excesses of the First and Second Worlds’ shameless exploitation of the Third World’s resources and impotence, pointing an accusing finger at the sustained and costly effort to maintain the consumer mania which made nouveau rich out of shrewd marketeers (ironic, I suppose, as it was the workings of this machine which afforded him his podium). Eventually martyred, first by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and later by a lovelorn nut case with a handgun, he was lost at a time when he was most needed. George Harrison, perhaps the most spiritually enlightened of the group, grew into his introverted role as the seeker, quietly pursuing more personal answers to the madness which characterized the growth of the Western military/economic beast. Ringo, the true mystery man of the group, lived in his octopus’ garden with a genuine smile that beckoned us to just have a good time and quaff an ale with him (too bad he couldn’t have run against George W in 2000, he’s more fun, more accessible, and undoubtedly smarter). And then there was Paul. I save him for last because his persona embodies the failure of our enlightened generation to seize the opportunity to perhaps save the world.

Paul, the Cute One, was the “musical” Beatle. An indisputably glib fountain of melody and cleverness, he wrote the songs that were added to the pop music lexicon. Yesterday, I Will, My Love and countless others have graced both weddings and elevators ever since. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed Paul’s music for years and have great respect for his talent and output. But at a time when the Beatles had begun to open the eyes of the generation which had embraced them as tour guides of the new consciousness, Paul’s life echoed the Boomers’ complacency which later allowed us to drop our indignation in favor of the pursuit of portfolios and summer homes.

When the Vietnam War and the draft ended, the outraged youth of America began to hit the streets not in righteous indignation but in search of a parking place for their newly acquired BMWs. As the Boomers left their anger and political commitment behind, Paul retreated to Scotland to live a rustic life with his love and family, his right, to be sure. As the once enlightened and determined hordes of now forty-and-fifty-somethings feathered their nests and traded up into 5000-square-foot manors, Paul married a model (got his clock cleaned as a result), surgically tightened his jowls, and dyed his hair the jet black of his Hamburg youth. In other words, When I’m Sixty-Four going on twenty-nine. If you didn’t see his performance at the recent Grammys, where he pulled out I Saw her Standing There (“She was just seventeen….”, Paul, puh-lease!), then you missed the enduring snapshot of the narcissistic fantasy to which our disappointing generation remains deeply devoted. The performance was something, yeah, yeah, yeah, he can still hit the high “wooohs”, and the chance to reminisce was tempting, but I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of embarrassment as the moment captured the self-obsession of a failed generation.

Never has a group, namely the Baby Boomers, been given such a canvas on which to paint: post-war supremacy, leisure time, disposable cash, educational opportunity, access to literature and information, the chance for spiritual awareness. What have we done with this? We have produced a painting worthy of a shopping mall art sale, replete with the kids with the big eyes. We had momentum and challenge, we had a chance to avoid the world we now face, and instead we have welcomed and tolerated the Bushes, the Bible Thumpers, anti-intellectualism, and war without end. But we do own some cool stuff. Thanks, Paul and all of the rest of us. We suck and we’re sleeping in the bed we’ve made of our own self-satisfied sloth. F#%k the Baby Boomers. Long live rock’n'roll.