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WIB Listening Party #32: Break The Chain

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Doug MacLeod, Break The Chain

🍺 Lowlander Cool Earth Lager

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Riffing on the environment, drinking the environmentally-friendly Cool Earth Lager, revisiting Doug MacLeod’s 2018 gem Break The Chain. Welcome to Listening Party #32.

This morning I was watching CNN’s ongoing coverage of COP26. If you’re reading this in the year 2050, it means this particular summit meeting – “The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties” is the official title – wasn’t all for naught and that Planet Earth is still inhabitable. Hooray for that!

But I’m doubtful. Even as they put on a good show and say all the right things, I question our leaders’ willingness to put the long-term good of the natural environment ahead of economics and their own addiction to power and personal gain. 

Today’s news included promises to reduce methane emissions and a deal by 100 heads of state to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Well, OK.

Then CNN brought in a representative of an anti-poverty organisation who put a damper on things. He pointed out how Britain was actually doubling down on fossil fuels while doing the climate change dance at the COP26 conference. Greta Thunberg also chimed in, calling out politicians for their hypocrisy and shouting about how we cannot entrust the fate of the planet to corporations and governments. In true revolutionary spirit, she said climate change would have to come from “the people.”

Next came an almost too-painful-to-watch report from Afghanistan showing impoverished parents in the act of selling their daughters in order to survive. Selling their daughters.

My main takeaway: humanity sucks. The systems we’ve created are unjust. Given that situations like this exist – circumstances so desperate that mothers and fathers would make the soul-killing decision to sell their children – is there really any hope that we can pull together as a race and reverse the seemingly irreversible downward climatic spiral?

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WIB Listening Party #9: Ocean Of Tears

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ The Paul deLay Band, Ocean Of Tears

🍺 Lowlander I.P.A.

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

A cool, rainy week in the middle of March and one of my go-to blues albums. Ocean Of Tears. Seriously, this 1995 recording by The Paul deLay Band contains some of the most hopelessly heartbreaking tunes I know of. In a genre like the blues, that’s saying a lot.

Is Paul deLay’s story a tragic one? I suppose it is in many ways. On the strength of his extraordinarily creative harp playing and exceptional skill as a songwriter, the big man from Portland had built an equally heavyweight reputation as one of the brightest blues lights in the Pacific Northwest. That is until a drug bust interrupted his career in the early 1990s. Stories of addiction are so commonplace in musical circles as to be ho hum, but deLay used his 41 months of incarceration wisely, getting clean and sober while simultaneously penning and refining the wealth of material that would fill the albums that followed his release, including Ocean Of Tears.

“It’s odd to look at it this way now,” deLay tells interviewer Mark Spangler in the disc’s liner notes, “but (…) it was a luxury to have that kind of time to devote to it, to make sure there were no weak spots.” 

Then physical problems took over. When I interviewed deLay in 2002 – unfortunately I never met him or saw him perform live – he spoke in detail about the health issues he’d been battling the previous several years. But he was feeling better now, he said, thanks to the wise advice of his endocrinologist. He had just put out a killer album, Heavy Rotation, and was looking forward to getting back to regular touring, maybe even returning to Europe. But none of that ever materialized. In 2007, deLay succumbed to Leukemia, just 55 years of age.

Is it a tragic story? I honestly have a hard time calling it that. DeLay left so much good blues behind. And as any fan knows, a good blues song is a thing of joy.

So let’s salute Paul deLay today, raising a glass of Lowlander I.P.A. as we listen to a few timeless gems off Ocean Of Tears, my personal favorite from his catalogue.

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