News & Opinion

WM Smith of the Houston Press named our “Humboldt” one of the alltime marijuana anthems.

http://blogs.houstonpress.com

Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues: Eight Great Pot Songs
By William Michael Smith Sep. 21 2009

John Prine may have set the standard for pot songs in American music with his sardonic “Illegal Smile,” but that snowball picked up considerable speed as it rolled downhill. Here are eight more excellent odes to the sweetest leaf.

1. Cab Calloway, “Reefer Man”: Other than Louis Armstrong, perhaps no one in the glory days of Harlem jazz had a more musical sense of the possibilities of the sacred spliff. Calloway’s turns of phrase are a perfect example of pot-addled nonsense: “If he trades you dimes for nickels and calls watermelons pickles, then you know your talkin’ to that reefer man.”

2. Fraternity of Man, “Don’t Bogart Me”: Easy Rider was a watershed event in hippie culture. From the opening scene at LAX, when Peter Fonda extracts the smuggled cocaine from his chopper’s gas tank, to the acid trip in New Orleans to the hilarious scene in which Fonda and Dennis Hopper introduce novice hick lawyer Jack Nicholson to marijuana, the movie put drugs directly into the face of authority. Having their song included in the soundtrack would mark Fraternity of Man’s career high-water mark.

3. Neil Young, “Roll Another Number (For the Road)”: A stone classic stoner anthem from the only guy who could arm-wrestle David Crosby for the title of biggest stoner in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Neil’s version is great, but to me Country Dick Montana and the Beat Farmers immortalized this mind-altered ditty on their 1989 live album Loud and Plowed.

4. Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen, “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues”: It wasn’t long after Lonesome Onry and Mean arrived in Austin in the summer of 1973 that it seemed everyone in town could sing the words, “I saw your new man yesterday wearin’ my brand new shoes/ And I’m down to seeds and stems again too.”

Of course, this was about the time our soon to have his teat in the ringer Lt. Governor Ben Barnes made the banner of the headline of American-Statesman with his pronouncement that “Austin is the marijuana capitol of the world.” Where the fuck did he think it was, College Station?

5. New Riders of the Purple Sage, “Panama Red” and “Lonesome L.A. Cowboy”: The New Riders hit it big with these two decidedly different efforts. Peter Rowan’s “Cowboy” seemed like a script for Gram Parsons’ life when LOM first heard it. And “Panama Red” was such a fun, gentle, screw-you ode to the budding pot culture. Dig that tie-dyed backdrop!6. Brewer & Shipley, “One Toke Over the Line”: A huge hit as FM “underground” radio was taking off and the Sixties were exploding into protest and violence, “Toke” brought serious heat down on these guys. But perhaps funnier (or scarier?) than Spiro Agnew’s castigation and inclusion on Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list,” the tune was covered by cheesemeister Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers. Go figure.

7. I See Hawks In L.A., “Humboldt”: The Hawks come in a direct line from the Byrds, Burritos, New Riders et.al. and these Los Angeles roots favorites have always traveled their musical trail surrounded by the odor of the burning bush, and they nail the whole Northern Californian pot grower vibe with “Humboldt.” Best pot dealer line ever? “I’d be glad to plant corn in the ground but corn don’t go for three thousand a pound.” And, yes, that’s Paul Marshall, formerly of Strawberry Alarm Clock (“Incense & Peppermints”), on bass.

Pacifica News Service

LOS ANGELES – 9/11 conspiracy theorists are calling it a real stunner: a key breakthrough in solving the crime of the new century has come from, of all places, a country rock band based out of Southern California.

In an exclusive interview taped in January, Sally Goodman (Amy Goodman’s younger sister) of radio station KPFK talks with Paul Lacques and Rob Waller, guitarist and lead singer respectively, of veteran “alt country” band I See Hawks In L.A.

Sally Goodman: Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to be with you today.

Rob Waller: Likewise, Amy, er, Sally. Is it too late for me to use a pseudonym? I guess so.

Paul Lacques: Sally, you’re a dead ringer for your sister.

SG: I get that a lot. This is an interesting café, is this new?
PL: It’s pretty new. Intelligentsia, in the heart of Silverlake, Really good coffee.
RW: Precious coffee, you might say.
SG: Explain.
PL: Oh, you know . . . it’s . . . special.
RW: Thinks it’s special. They brew their coffee a cup at a time.
SG: Seriously?
RW: And call me paranoid, but if you aren’t right for the vibe here, they’ll screw up the heart pattern on your latte. They’re particular about who’s festooning their outdoor tables.
PL: Dude, you’re paranoid. Check out this swan in my soy cappuccino.
RW: Was the barista friendly?
PL: No.
RW Case closed.
PL: Not for me. My inquiry will continue.
SG Speaking of cases, let’s get to the heart of your 9/11 discovery.
PL: Well first off, this is all conceptual stuff, armchair theorizing, so let’s not make a bigger deal of this than it is. It’s just connecting the dots. The ground work has been done by thousands of researchers, mostly bloggers.
RW: None of whom get a pay check from a major newspaper or TV.
PL: Real journalism is being done for free by guys with greasy hair sitting at cafes with their laptops.
RW: Like that guy at the counter.
PL: Intelligensia must love it when he parks himself. Serious vibe killer.
RW: My point exactly.
SG: Anyway—
RW: I mean, when’s the last time the New York Times or CBS broke a big story?
They missed the Kennedy assassination plot, they hand walked us straight into
Vietnam, gave Bush a free ride on Iraq.
PL: Until 2004. Then they found their missing testicles. They’ll never get it right.
It’s not their purpose.
RW: And now they love Obama. As long as he channels the money into Wall Street.
Remember Muhammad Ali’s Rope A Dope? Well this is Hope A Dope.
PL: Nice!
SG: To get back to 9/11 . . .
RW: Right. Okay—well, first, a little background. I mean, there are just too many
strange little events, coincidences, improbabilities, impossibilities in the official
9/11 story. It’s your first clue that something’s very wrong.
PL: Just like the Kennedy assassination. And with a cherry picked panel to investigate,
and a big thick book that ignores inconvenient facts.
RW: Yeah, the personnel on the 9/11 official investigation team is a whole story
unto itself. Talk about foxes investigating the tragedy in the chicken coop.
That’s a four hour conversation just to look under that rock.
PL: That’s the thing. This is so huge. So many elements. So many bewildering
elements.
SG: Well—give us a few. The ones that relate to your theory.
RW: Yeah, the theory. It needs setting up. The theory’s
really simple.
SG: Well . . . (inaudible)
PL: Okay, okay, let’s just list some things here, maybe a bit randomly, just to paint the
picture, the background field. For example: Osama Bin Laden was named instigator
of 9/11 on the same day as the attacks.
RW: Just like Oswald was named the assassin within an hour of Kennedy’s shooting.
PL: And Osama Bin Laden was a CIA asset.
RW: As was Lee Harvey Oswald, as was George Bush, senior, who says he can’t remember where he was the day Kennedy was assassinated. Think about it. A few years later, Bush is Director of the CIA. But denies ever having been an operative.
SG: I’ve heard this before, can we stick to 9/11?
PL: Yes. More strange 9/11 stuff: Mohammad Atta’s passport was found after the
9/11 attack in rubble a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Impossible.
RW: A middle east diplomat says he was ordered to give U.S. visas to many of the hijackers, years before 9/11. They had no official business to conduct in the U.S., but were given special status, with no explanation. Five of the 9/11 hijackers listed a military base as their place of residence on their driver’s licenses.
PL: And there’s lots of anecdotal evidence of the FBI and CIA ignoring private citizens’
suspicions of the hijackers’ behavior while they were in the U.S. For years.
RW: The FBI doesn’t list the 9/11 attacks as one of Bin Laden’s crimes, because they say there’s no hard evidence linking him to 9/11. Bin Laden didn’t claim responsibility for 9/11 for quite some time, at which point an imposter Bin Laden may have been put into place.
PL: Yeah, and then no more Bin Laden video messages, just audio. And we failed to catch Osama–the most powerful military on earth, with drone planes and thousands of Navy Seal and Special Ops guys who can survive on lizards and pond scum, and the dictator of Pakistan in our back pocket. And we couldn’t catch Bin Laden.
RW: The buildings. That’s an encyclopedia’s worth of discussion.
SG: Can you summarize?
RW: Building Seven is the crux of 9/11 conspiracy, the biggest piece of unexplainable evidence. It wasn’t hit by an airplane, it had one or two small fires burning in it.
PL: And it collapses! Just like the Twin towers, except there was no reason for it to collapse.
RW: You can see it on YouTube, millions saw it live, you’ve got the police on the ground waving the crowd back, saying they’re going to blow the building.
PL: And then Building 7 blows up, collapses, an orderly pancaking just like the Twin towers! And in 2002 you’ve got Larry Silverstein, the owner of the World Trade Center, this was on PBS, it’s on YouTube too, telling an interviewer that he was told by NYFD that they’d have to pull the building.
RW: Not knowing that it takes days or weeks for a demolition crew to wire a building to explode.
PL: Same with the Twin Towers. They’ve been hit, they’re burning, but these are holes in just a few stories of giant buildings. And then suddenly they both collapse, within an hour of each other, in identical style, straight down, top to bottom.
RW: No tilting, no partial collapse. Total annihilation, and totally orderly.
PL: Like only a controlled demolition can do. There are building engineers who have pointed this out, but try getting them on The View. There are investigators who found traces of thermite used exclusively for controlled building demolition in the 9/11 wreckage. But you won’t ever hear this in mainstream media. Not yet.
RW: Because it’s unthinkable. To think that your own government, or officials high up in the government, would kill your own president, or 3,000 innocents.
PL: Unthinkable, unless you travel to other countries. Iraq and Vietnam know very well what we’re capable of. Cambodia. Panama.
RW: Oh, we’ll do it here. We met someone whose cousin ran errands at a big architecture firm that we can’t name. They designed embassy buildings and had a full time CIA officer with his own office in their headquarters. Why? Because it’s standard practice to wire our embassy buildings in other countries to blow up–but now it’s happening here. Building 7’s tenants were the IRS, CIA, Secret Service, FBI, DOD, the SEC. And who was on the board of Securacom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securacom — the company that ran security for the World Trade Center? George Bush’s brother Marvin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_P._Bush
These buildings were doomed!
SG: Okay, but I’d like to get to the heart of your theory. I’ve got a plane to catch at 4 p.m.
PL: Where are you headed?
SG: To Obama’s inauguration.
RW: Cool. Say hi to Zbigniew Brzezinski for us.
SG: Jimmy Carter’s security advisor?
PL: And mentor to Barack Obama. Maybe Z will show you the photo of him with
his pal Osama bin Laden.
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1246&bih=956&q=zbigniew+brzezinski+bin+laden&gbv=2&aq=1&aqi=g2&aql=&oq=Zbigniew+Brzezinski&gs_rfai=
RW: That could be the title of his autobiography: Ziggy B: from Osama to Obama.
PL: This shit is deep. Many layers over many decades. The CIA worked with Bin Laden for years, because he was fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And there’s so much other 9/11 bafflement—no fighter jets intercept the hijacked planes, 3 perfect hits by people who’d never flown any kind of jet, flight 93’s strange crash pattern. There’s no clear surveillance camera footage of the Pentagon crash, in the most heavily watched piece of real estate on earth? The huge short selling of American Airlines stock just before the attack. The Bin Ladens flown out of the country on a special plane on 9/12, while the whole U.S. air space is grounded. The long friendship between the Bush and Bin Laden families. On and on. It’s so blatant.
RW: Secrets in plain sight.
SG: So what you’re saying—
RW: Okay, here it is: Elements of the U.S. government, quite possibly either rogue or mainstream elements of the CIA and DOD, conspired with the 19 hijackers and other long time CIA assets or operatives to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To create the new Pearl Harbor that neocons had been citing for years as necessary to justify a ramped up presence in the Middle East.
PL: Nothing new there. But here’s a big problem for conspiracy nuts like ourselves: how do U.S. officials interact with suicide bombers? There’s a cultural disconnect. Anyone willing to die in a fiery crash into the Pentagon is a religious fanatic beyond our comprehension. They’re not going to take meetings with the CIA or Defense Department.
RW: So here’s our little contribution to 9/11 conspiracy theory: the 19 hijackers weren’t suicide bombers. They were long time CIA operatives, and they thought they were on a completely different mission.
SG: Which was?
RW: Who knows? Their field officer tells them they’re going to hijack the planes and force the pilot to land in Yemen.
PL: Or Caracas. Was Chavez in power in 2001?
SG: So—
PL: So the hijackers do their job, they storm the cockpit, order the pilot to fly to wherever—
RW: Because the hijackers aren’t going to fly the planes themselves—
PL: No way. They can’t. They’ve never flown a passenger jet. It’s impossible. So they
order the pilots to fly to wherever, but the pilots can’t. The passenger jets have been taken over by CIA or DOD installed JPALS guidance systems. At the same moment that the transponders shut off.
RW: Do a Google search for Raytheon company and JPALS. It’s a guidance system for missiles and
aircraft. It’s been around for years. It says right on the Raytheon website that the system is designed to take over the flight of an airplane.

http://www.dcmilitary.com/stories/103008/tester_28188.shtmlhttp://www.systron.com/pro_QRS11.asp
PL: So as the hijackers and passengers and pilots all watched helplessly, their planes turned around on their own and headed for New York and Washington.
RW: Probably guided by some tweaked out 30 year old guy in a bunker
near Langley, or Palmdale. Same guy who guided the smart bombs into Baghdad two years later.

PL: And is now firing Predator drone missiles at Afghan houses.

RW: He’s probably playing Donkey Kong as we speak.
PL: Or they knocked him off. Like Oswald.
SG: What about the boxcutters, the murder of passengers, the murder of the pilots, the cell phone recordings?
RW: Anything could have happened. Maybe Todd Beamer did say “let’s roll.” I’ll bet all kinds of people up there acted heroically. But they didn’t have a chance. JPALS was guiding them to doom.
SG: Why couldn’t these hijackers have been real suicide bombers who got lucky?
RW: These guys weren’t poor kids from the heart of a war zone whose brothers had been killed by U.S. weaponry. These are older men, middle class, with educations. They have wild parties, get thrown out of bars. They shatter the psychological model of a suicide bomber. You should read some of the articles explaining this anomaly. Hilarious. Like that old movie.
PL: The Manchurian Candidate. Really cornball.
RW: So our scenario ends with three remote guided passenger planes hitting their targets with absolute precision. And a fourth disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
PL: It must have been so eerie on board. Passengers, pilots, crew, hijackers, and no one knows what’s going on. And they approach Manhattan. Someone should write a play.
RW: Dude, I think you’re reckless enough to pull it off.
PL: Thanks.
RW: And then the script continues. Within hours we know who did it, why, who masterminded it. Awfully efficient for a government that let this all happen.
PL: And the Bush administration plays the grief and hysteria like Yo Yo Ma. Bush and friends are brilliant. This guy is no buffoon, much as Buzzflash and Huffington Post and all the other lame-o’s enjoy that stereotype. And they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the 9/11 plot. But they knew how to react. It’s a radical consensus with the reins of power.
RW: And 28 days after 9/11 we’re bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Huh? And there are so few protests to this infantile destruction. To this day. Obama got elected promising to ramp up the war in Afghanistan. It’s our holy war.
PL: Hope A Dope.
RW: I claim authorship on that, you’re a witness, Sally.
SG: Do you also claim authorship for your interesting theory?
RW & PL: Naahhh . . . (laugh)
RW: Search the web. I’ll bet lots of people have proposed this exact theory. We’ve plagiarized someone. That’s the glory and the sloppiness of the internet. But we’re in a country rock band. It’s a nice angle for your story.
PL: Should we mention our upcoming shows?
RW: Let’s pretend we have some class.
SG: Gentlemen, it’s been fascinating. I’ve got a plane to catch.
PL: Ooh, nice final sentence!
RW: Till you added on.
PL: Good point.

The time has come for a rare granting of the I See Hawks in L.A. Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is given, well, not necessarily every year but only when the honoree has given so much to the cultural life of the city of Los Angeles that the award is merited. We have chosen this year to honor the legendary Vin Scully. Such an artist is a rare and wonderful thing to behold. Really, deeply, does Los Angeles even deserve such a talent? Have we really earned in? I hope so. I do.

For my colleagues in the Hawks, three California natives, Scully is embedded in their earliest childhood memories, along with being weaned and learning to talk. He predates television for one of them.

How can Vin Scully, a man in his 80s, still be so on top of the game? The lineups of these teams are constantly changing yet Vin seems to know a least one or two stories about each player’s life and careers. And he is able to do this seeming without scripting. He just knows this stuff, he knows the game of baseball as well as anyone of any age. It’s like if Kobe Bryant were scoring 30 points a game every night well into his 40s. That seems a reasonable comparison to what Vin is able to do.

It is all delivered with such class, such a genuine sympathy is his voice. A sympathy for the human condition. He makes life bearable. At least he makes Los Angeles bearable. When Vin goes, I may likely go too. That might just be it for me and Los Angeles.

On Monday night the Hawks played a city gig in Central Park in Whittier. Whittier, my friends. The birthplace of Richard Nixon and, ironically perhaps, the center of Quaker activity on the west coast. Whittier. It was a great night, the weather was cooler than expected and the community was out for the gig. It was classic American living. A park in the middle of the city, kids on play gear, a gazebo, and the American flag. The show began with the Pledge of Allegiance. Even PL took off his hat, although he muttered “for some” at the end of the Pledge. It was that kind of gig.

It was the Big Hawks Experience. In addition to the four usual Hawks we were joined by Victoria Jacobs on tambourine and lead vocals, Rick Shea on steel, and the original man himself, Brantley Kearns on fiddle. It was great to have them all with us and the aggressive (nay, competent!) sound man made the band sound huge for the Whittier residents and their guests.

We did two sets with a raffle in between. Fresh baked pies were the prize. They were testing blood sugar in a trailer next to the pie raffle. Two for one? The songs were sounding good in the summer evening air. After a respectfully gentle and patriotic first set, we stretched out in the second, sensing the crowd wanted to rock, inverting the set list and opening with Humboldt. Victoria came up and sang lead on her song Open Door. A little later we did Papa Stopped the Wagon reggae-style at Brantley’s request. Bats circled the gazebo along with big jets in the LAX flight path. It was a grand affair!Here’s a little nugget from the past. It’s not reggae but man it’s got a vibe–an MP3 of Papa Stopped the Wagon recorded in the basement of Cole’s back in April of 2005. Enjoy!
Papa Stopped the Wagon MP3 Download file

Dear Deedee,

Thank you for allowing us to apply to the 2009 Annual Americana Music Festival. We made over 800 submissions to festivals around the world for approximately 80 performance dates for which we are available. The listening sessions and decision making process of I See Hawks In L.A. have taken months to complete.I wish we had time for all the fine festivals out there, and although I regret that we are not able to offer Americana Music Festival our showcase presence, we want you to know how much we appreciate your interest in the I See Hawks In L.A. and our participating in the festival.

If you or your fellow Americana Music Festival staff had been thinking of attending an I See Hawks In L.A. performance, I would like to personally offer each of you our original early-bird $250 registration rate, which is no longer available to the general public or even our members. You get access to all I See Hawks In L.A. shows, a ticket to the 8th Annual I See Hawks In L.A. salvia divinorum death march, admission to our trade show, invitations to all sanctioned parties and events, admission to all showcase performances, recycled Trader Joe plastic bag, and much more.If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, which is good until August 31, 2009, please email or contact us at the website below anytime, as this is an unpublished rate.

Thank you again for your interest in I See Hawks In L.A., and we look forward to continuing our association with you.Kindest regards,

Paul LacquesDirector of Operations
I See Hawks In L.A.

www.kissmyass.org

We’re rolling through somber deep redwoods and deciduous dense growth on the narrow winding highway outside of very hip and mellow Sebastopol, woods yielding to cow pastures and taking back again, to the hamlet of Occidental and radio station KOWS, for a taping. Nice, nice, nice.

Post KOWS interview. Our gentle and enlightened Songs In The Round DJ host Scott guided us through an acoustic performance and interview that went in our favorite direction–a consideration of the fauna and flora of our surroundings and of Los Angeles. It’s good to be with people who think about the land, about the mall and its consequences. We bought a strawberry tart with a long German name and delicious nettle/mint aqua fresca from a sweet 60’s mama at the farmer’s market that had burgeoned in the parking lot below the radio station, which is housed in an old wood frame mercantile building. The tea’s green goodness is suffusing our sytem and souls, and we are so digging the vibe on Bohemian Highway.Thin shadowed twisting highway. We dip into deep forest, passing thin young trees making kinescope of the green mysteries behind. An old wood cabin with only a dirt road for access through forest. An abandoned pickup truck with its brains blown out. Roadside gardens bursting with vaginal fertility. We stop at a roadside organic bakery, and inside are tables overflowing with the most beautiful earthy seedy fruit chunk bearing loaves and scones we’ve ever seen. The scone tastes as good as it looks, and the espresso is perfect. Are we dreaming these green fields, these flowing skirts, these goddesses, this nuclear free zone, into existence? Are we in a matriarchy? Heal us.

[continue reading…]

After an active and reflective day out on the Bay, we are well grounded in the history and earth of Marin for our show tonight at the Sleeping Lady in Fairfax. The pub is run by a wise and generous Irish couple who have taken the model of an Irish pub from the green rolling hills of Ireland to the yellow rolling hills of Marin. The beer is cold, the taps are clean, and the food is hearty and nourishing. You can even bring your kids. The Sleeping Lady (named after the local nickname of Mount Tamalpais) is a welcome new venue for the Hawks. Lots of friends and relatives of the band live nearby and they populate the tables as we launch in to our evening acoustic set. The sound is a little tricky at first, the crowd wants more guitar and we figure out how to give it to them after a while. Learning a new room and a new sound system is always a little tough but we’ll be ready for it next time. Sleeping Lady, we want to sleep with you again.

Thursday morning comes early at our undisclosed location in a city in Marin county whose name means shark in Spanish (oops, almost gave it away!). The young Waller children are traveling with the Hawks on this journey and PM and PL are generously waking early and hanging with the lively Waller youth. Even Richie adds his experienced hand to entertain and care for the children at the early hour of waking. RW is a lucky man to play with such talented and child-friendly musicians.

After hearty cups of strong milkless coffee that galvanize our spirits to nearly a state of ambition, we make our way down the hill and board a ferry to Angel Island. The weather is cool and partly cloudy, a lovely day to hike on the historic island. In recent history the Island served as the “Ellis Island of the West.” But that name is a bit misleading. This western immigration station was really more of a holding pen than a gateway to America. Asian immigrants, particularly the Chinese, were quarantined here for years and often sent back. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 laid the legal framework for these policies. According to Karen Polster of UC Riverside, in 1876, the Marin Journal published charges against the Chinese presence in California on behalf of the white working men of the state and their families:”That he is a slave . . . no fit competitor for an American freeman . . . That American men, women and children cannot be what free people should be, and compete with such degraded creatures in the labor market . . . the health, wealth and prosperity and happiness of our State demand their expulsion from our shores.”

We wandered among the surprisingly graceful block detention buildings nestled in the cliffs of a cove. Poems are etched into the walls that tell of the aspiring-immigrants fate. Here are a few examples:
I am distressed that we Chinese are detained in this wooden building.
It is actually racial barriers which cause difficulties on Yingtai Island
Instead of remaining a citizen of China, I willingly became an ox.
I intended to come to America to earn a living.
Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, I came to America . . .
[to attain] my ambition and become successful.
Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving here?
If there comes a day when I will have attained my ambition and become successful,
I will certainly behead the barbarians and spare not a single blade of grass.

Long before Chinese immigrants came to America, indeed long before there was an America at all, the Miwok Indians made their way out to the island in boats made of reeds which could hold as many as ten people. Like the brotherhood of ISHILA, the Miwoks had an animistic philosophy. They trod lightly on the island, apologizing to spirits of the animals and nature whenever they disturbed them, they also used local plants to create trances. It’s a beautiful island and the Hawks are nourished by their visit walking and hanging with the ghosts of history.