Billy Bragg, "Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards."

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline
Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying
Over luxury's disappointment
So he walks over and he's trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
That the Third World is just around the corner
In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded
By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded
That Dr Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell
At the first hurdle
In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear
Is the sound of someone stacking chairs
And mopping up spilt beer
And someone asking questions and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer
Mixing Pop and Politics he asks me what the use is
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses
While looking down the corridor
Out to where the van is waiting
I'm looking for the Great Leap Forwards
Jumble sales are organised and pamphlets have been posted
Even after closing time there's still parties to be hosted
You can be active with the activists
Or sleep in with the sleepers
While you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards
One leap forward, two leaps back
Will politics get me the sack?
here comes the future and you can't run from it
If you've got a blacklist I want to be on it
It's a mighty long way down rock 'n roll
From Top of the Pops to drawing the dole
If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman
In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune
But this is reality so give me some room
So join the struggle while you may
The Revolution is just a T-shirt away
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Jose Feliciano, "Feliz Navidad."

Two weeks before Christmas a couple years ago, my daughter and I walked into a diner in Palo Alto, California. Two Chinese women were behind the counter, giddily running their own business. We got our sandwiches and sat down to munch.

The place was half-full, a Sunday morning. I was in a good mood -- our first semester at the adult playground that is Stanford University was over, and now there was a lull in the action as we got ready to go home for Christmas -- so I went about doing what I do best when I'm in a good mood: embarrass my daughter.

"Feliz Navidad" came on over the speakers and I started shimmying in my seat, munching potato chips, and snapping my fingers like Minnie the Mooch. My daughter rolled her eyes and told me to stop.

I was about to, but then I felt a tap on the shoulder of my jean jacket. I turned to find a senior citizen babe with white hair and a powder-blue sweater holding her hand out to me. "May I have this dance?," she said.

I'd noticed her when we'd walked in. She was alone at a table with an address book, stamps, Christmas cards, and envelopes strewn out before her.

I took her up on her offer. Twirled her. Dipped her. Sang the song. The Chinese women clapped and laughed. My daughter was mortified but extremely entertained. When the song finished, we politely thanked each other for the dance. I finished my lunch, she went back to her Christmas cards, and we said goodbye.

Patty Loveless, "What's A Broken Heart?"

Great question. For the answer, we go to my heart-doc sister, who writes:

A thrombus forms in the proximal most portion of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Once the artery is completely occluded, blood flow to the distal vessel is compromised. In minutes the adjacent myocardium is rendered first ischemic, then necrotic. If blood flow is not quickly restored, the ischemic myocardial cells become electrically unstable often resulting in the lethal arrhythmia, ventricular fibrillation.

Mary Norine Walsh, MD
Director, CHF and Nuclear Cardiology
The Care Group, LLC
St Vincent Hospital
Indianapolis

ABBA, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!"

A few years ago I visited a hermitage in the mountains overlooking Big Sur, California. More serious pilgrims than I milled about, bussing dishes from their cabins and then, with nary a glance towards the outsiders, returned to their silence retreat, away from the rest of humanity and its gray noise.

I went into the bookstore, browsed, and grabbed a couple titles that looked interesting, including David Steindel-Rast and Sharon Lebell's Music Of Silence, a paean to the grounding that meditation and solitude bring. In the introduction, Kathleen Norris writes:

"I once met a woman who said she didn't like the island of Kauai, surely one of the most spectacular islands on the face of the earth, because, as she put it, 'there weren't enough places to shop.' Music Of Silence challenges us to recognize the poverty of our affluence in the face of God's overflowing generosity and accept that so much of what we take for granted, even the ordinary rhythm of day and night, has something to say to us. It has nothing to do with shopping. It speaks to silence, not noise. Its power is revealed not in money or consumption, but in the unseen, steady growth of seeds into grasses, plants, trees. It is the voice of nature. God's creation, which remains when the electric power has failed and it is too dark to read."

I brought my books to the check-out counter, where a young monk stood. The place was almost perfectly still; only a few other quiet souls loitered, with only their thoughts to keep them company. The young monk greeted me warmly, looked at my books, then touched his finger his to lips as he moved to the cash register. He was so thoughtful and peaceful that it almost startled me when he said, "Will you please hold on for one moment?"

He disappeared into the back room and was gone for a long time. I was excited. He obviously had seen something in my books or me that inspired special attention; a particularly revelatory author or collection, perhaps, that would unlock the secrets of the universe for me: We've been waiting for you, brother.

When he returned, there was an old monk accompanying him. The old monk smiled and nodded at me. Then he moved to the cash register and said to the young monk, "First you press the 'cash' button, and then hit the 'return,' like this."

I thought about that story yesterday, while waiting for my wife's aunt to visit. She's a nun from Iowa, and she and her longtime nun companion had spent the day shopping. When they got to our house, the shopping nun-aunt couldn't wait to show us what she'd bought.

Turns out she's a lot like my eight-year-old daughter, for whom I bought a dress earlier in the day. She flipped over it, but 20 minutes later she was asking for something else that cost money -- I can't remember exactly what at the moment, because they all blur together -- and I lectured about being in the moment, being thankful for what you have, and not always wanting for the next big thing, because it creates an emptiness in you that you can never fill.

Basically, I told her to knock it off with the gimmes or else.

She was quiet for 15 minutes. Finally, she came up to me. Sheepishly.

"Dad?"

Yeah?

"I was born with the gimmes."

I laughed and picked her up and kissed her all over her face until she laughed and I thought about all the great songs that begin or end with "I want" or "Give me" or "Gimme" and said to her, "Aren't we all, baby?"

Aren't we all.

Bruce Springsteen, "Secret Garden."
The best white blues singer of them all singing the worst colorblind blues of them all: the "there's-no-figuring-out-women-who-won't-let-you-in-and-it's-no-fun-trying-anymore" blues.

Yes, yes, yes.

Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, etc., "Trouble In Mind."

Pop culture as horse race and game of musical chairs. One day you're up, the next day you're down the stretch they come. One day you're a hottie, the next a not-so-muchie. One day you're snorting coke off a stripper's tit, the next you're trying to remember what her tattoo said. One day you're the main Heather, the next you're on the outside looking in at rock 'n' roll high school. One day you're...

You get the idea. Talkin' the blues, and not the genre. I have heard the blues played by oud players, garage bands, bagpipe corps., funk lovers, folk bleeders, technorats, ambient angels, jazz messengers, and Play Stations. The blues is ageless, timeless: You know it when you hear it. Someone somewhere is always playing the blues, and there is great solace in that, for to acknowledge the inherent sorrow in living is to spit in the face of the wagging tails and happy faces that surround us, and to truly live out what the Buddhists talk about -- that sorrow is the main event in this thing called life, and that any joy we happen to happen upon is pure guava.

Moreover, the promise of the blues "lifting" is what keeps us going, and listening: I've got 20 different versions of "Trouble In Mind" on my iPod -- instrumentals, slide-guitar-fueled monsters, harp-shaped hymns, stripped-down toss-offs, big-band epics, B-3 Hammond organ-painted masterpieces, and almost any else you can imagine. No two are alike, and not one of the mind-troubled singers -- Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, or John Langford --sings it the same way. But every time I hear the line, "But I won't be blue always/I know the sun is gonna shine in my back door one day," I get a little faith; a little internal sunshine of the spotted mind.

To that end, the blues is god's bitch-slap that lets everyone concerned know, unconditionally, that, as the Flaming Lips so sunnily put it, "everyone you know will die." One way or another, they all fade away. Friends, lovers, relatives, pets, dreams. Each loss chips away at your heart and makes it hurt and heal and hurt all over again, all of which makes it stronger and more tender and fuller, and that, baby brother, is the blues.

The good news is that while people and relationships do not survive, places do, and no matter how many Hard Rocks or Gameworks or Hooters blot the landscape, there are hallowed grounds to be had in America -- the Haight-Ashburys and Asbury Parks and Uptowns and the West Bank of Minneapolis, which brings us here today, and which I rarely type out without affixing the word "storied" to it: The storied West Bank of Minneapolis.

"The blues is emotional, raw music that gets you in the gut. Primal rhythms. It shakes you up, it can make you get out of your head and get you into a more physical space," says Cyn Collins, author of the newly published West Bank Boogie: Forty Years of Music, Mayhem and Memories (Triangle Park Creative). "It can be sorrowful music, but it can make you feel uplifted, or one with a bunch of people. There's community in the sharing of sorrow and joy together."

West Bank Boogie is the first-ever document of the amorphous music scene that has thrived in places like Palmer's, the (currently shuttered) Viking Bar, and the 400 Bar while other Minnesota music scenes got almost famous. It's a wonderful read, with testimonials from suck folk and blues royalty as Willie Murphy, Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray, Tony Glover, Pop Wagner, Mary DuShane, John Beach, and Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson.

Plenty of other musics have infused the West Bank, including reggae and other red stripes of world rhythms, and rock 'n' roll, which has historically been about seizing the day, being all that you can be, living each moment like it was your last. But the blues is something else. The blues is kicking back and giving up to some extent.

In her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously defined the five stages of grief as 1) Denial and Isolation; 2) Anger; 3) Bargaining with God to take the hurt of the loss away; 4) Depression; and 5) Acceptance. The blues is straight up number five, which is at the heart of West Bank Boogie, and at the heart of the comfort that comes from the sound of another human being slogging through similar travails.

A human being like Dave Ray, who died a few years ago when I was out of town. I wanted to hear his voice the night of his funeral, but I didn't have any of his records with me, so I called his cell phone, which hadn't been disconnected yet. His voice came on the line. He was so alive. He told me to leave a message, so I did.

Publication party for West Bank Boogie takes place Wednesday, Nov. 22, at the 331 Club in Minneapolis. Storytelling session with local music historian Red Nelson begins at 7 p.m.; music starts at 8 p.m. with Bill Hinkley & Judy Larson, followed by Koerner & Glover and Willie Murphy.

John Swardson, "Who's Your Baby Now?"

I only heard this once, live, and I'm not even sure this is the title, but it's with me a week later. Swardson is the son of the great writer/thinker/crank Roger Swardson, who died three Thanksgiving mornings ago. That loss, all loss, is in John's voice on this one, a song-question to an ex, posed in a way only song-questions can be.

That's because song-questions are wholly illogical and ill-advised, posed as they are to phantoms-demons of the mind and heart. Rosanne Cash asked her invisible ex-would-be-suitor, "Who does your past belong to tonight?" Karen Casey simply blurted to the universe, "Where are you tonight, I wonder?" Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg gave it up to their ghosts, "Do you ever think of me my darling, as you sail that ocean blue?" Liz Phair cried, "Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?" Peter Perrett pined, "Sometimes I think of you, out there in the night/Roaming the empty streets, looking for your life."

With a low growl that suggests cigarettes not pillow mints; curiousity not jealousy, Swardson imagines the unimaginable and asks the unanswerable, though it's clear he wants anything but the whole truth. Do you call someone else "baby?" Do you do what we did? Do you use the same lines on him you did on me? Do you rest your head on his chest? Who does your past belong to tonight?

In every menage-a-trois, no matter how much love and understanding there is going in...

... someone always get hurt.

Photos of the Mad Ripple, the Hamm's Bear, and Alicia Corbett from The River Of Hope fundraiser (Grumpy's NE, 11/14/06) by Tony Zaccardi.

The New York Dolls, "We're All In Love."

Get this. David Johansen made like Jonathan Livingston Seagull on stage in Minneapolis a couple hours ago, spreading his wings over his flock, urging everyone to sing along, "We're all in looooove."

Meaning what, exactly? Winter Of Love '06? Why not? It could happen: There are good hippie bands springing up everywhere like wild dandelions -- here, it's Wookiefoot and God Johnson and Mad Love -- except that they're not hippies; their hybrids, funk and soul and reggae and house as much as jam-band jive. There's good punk bands sprouting up, too -- The Falls, The Hard Left, and Elephine, whose singer/guitarist, Mayda Miller (of the late, great Sugar Divas), is as exciting a new talent as I've seen on the Entry stage in ages -- except they're hybrids, too.

The thing is, punk and hippie was like America and Iraq at one point. Or like mods and rockers, or hip-hoppers against the world. Now they all listen to, and play, a lot of the same music. I'm just saying that it's noteworthy when the oldest living punk is singing "We're all in love," and the youngest earth-and-ocean optimists are singing, "mad love," all of which suggests boundaries melting away before our ears.

How's the song go?

"There was music in the cafes at night, and revolution in the air."

Yeah. Something like that.