Here is the latest news from David Gans, producer and host of the Grateful Dead Hour.
TV everywhere
Dead to the World 3/22/06
Guest host: Tim Lynch
Jack Straw
Althea
Mama Tried >
Mexicali Blues
Friend Of The Devil
New Minglewood Blues
Deal
Music Never Stopped >
Franklin’s Tower – Grateful Dead 3/13/85 Berkeley Community Theater
True Religion – The Duhks
Treat Me Right – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Nothing But The Water
Chain of Fools – Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, Generation Nation
Trouble on the Levee – Digney Fignus, Trouble on the Levee
Ruby >
Robots! >
Ruby! – Yonder Mountain String Band, Mt. Tracks, v. 4
Weir interview in Fairfield County Weekly
Really nice interview with Bobby, by Brita Belli, in the Fairfield County Weekly. An excerpt:
Fairfield Weekly: In [the film] Festival Express you come across as the innocent, naïve 22-year-old. Was that train trip a turning point for you?
BW: Well, it was a great ride, I’ll tell you. It was the ride of a lifetime. As far as a turning point, not really. It was a great party.
FW: Alcohol seemed like the only unknown element.
BW: For a lot of us, that was the case. Actually, it was something of a discovery. We all got looped.
FW: What kind of influence did the other musicians have on the Grateful Dead and your music?
BW: I guess that train trip was kind of influential in that we all got together and traded licks… There were a few songwriters that I became aware of like Kris Kristofferson; he had just written “Me & Bobby McGee” and that tune was making the rounds during that train trip. I think I learned of Jackson Browne on that trip… Aside from that, I knew about country music, I knew about jazz music, I knew about blues and rock ‘ n’ roll, and I’d been sort of pursuing all those. Most of us had been. I was acutely aware of what Miles Davis was up to at that point.
Family values
Jon Carroll, in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, offers a very angry and personal take on the latest front in the culture wars: “gay adoption.”
According to the Catholic News Service, “Catholic Charities of the Boston Archdiocese announced March 10 that it will stop providing adoption services rather than continue to comply with a state law requiring no discrimination against gay and lesbian couples who seek to adopt…. Prompted by a similar issue arising at Catholic Charities of San Francisco, a top Vatican official has said Catholic agencies should not be involved in adoptions by same-sex couples.”
To which Jon Carroll responded:
Last year the Ford Motor Co. started to buy ads in several publications aimed at gay readers…. Then the company got assaulted by the American Family Association, a creation of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a clever right-wing agitator with a hate-based agenda. So Ford announced that it would stop advertising in gay publications.
But then, whoops, Ford reversed its reversal and said, never mind, it was going to advertise in gay publications after all. So then a representative of the AFA announced that it was reinstating its boycott. “We cannot, and will not, sit by as Ford supports a social agenda aimed at the destruction of the family.”
What a vile sentence. What a vile sentiment. What overbusy, underbrained worms these people must be. I am not yelling.
My older daughter is a lesbian. She is also the single mother of an adopted child, working to make and sustain a family with jaw-dropping tenacity. I am a member of that family, but she is the head of it. The idea that any part of her social agenda involves the destruction of the family is insulting and stupid. She adopted a child, which means that a child who would not have had a home now has one. It means that a child who would not have rested safely in a mother’s arms now does so. These are real family values, not the poison spouted by these thoughtless, gossip-mongering abominations.
All over this nation there are gay and lesbian families working hard to make a life for themselves and their children. I know a few of them. They could have done it the easy way, stayed in the closet and decided not to endure the hassles of having children, but they didn’t. They wanted a family. They wanted a lover and companion to share their lives with, and they wanted children to love. And for this they get insulted by cretins….
The people who hate America are the members of American Family Association and its ideological fellow travelers. They’re the ones who do not believe that all people are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. They’re the ones who believe that this country was founded on hate and fear; they’re the ones who want the hate and fear to continue.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s out picketing a funeral of a gay veteran.”
“Will he be home in time for the flute recital?”
“Your father is very busy, dear.”
I mean, render unto me a break. If your family feels so threatened by my family that you think you have to organize a boycott of a car company, then your family has problems my family can do nothing to solve.
In other news of religious evil, a man is on trial in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity. He faces the death penalty if he doesn’t reconsider.
Trial judge Ansarullah Mawlazezadah told the BBC that Mr Rahman, 41, would be asked to reconsider his conversion, which he made while working for a Christian aid group in Pakistan. “We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him,” the judge told the BBC on Monday. But if he refused to reconvert, then his mental state would be considered first before he was dealt with under Sharia law, the judge added.
