End of an Era - guest post by Michael Dolan

Well, maybe not an era. More of an interlude, or, since the topic is music, a passage.

What happened was, my band lost its rehearsal space.

You ain't miss your water `til your well run dry, and you don't appreciate free rehearsal space, well-lit and secure and situated downtown in the center of a block on the first floor of a thick brick structure in which a 10-piece outfit with five horns can whomp up a mess of noise that would get its members arrested anyplace but in a bar until your patrons politely suggest that since they've finally found a tenant after three years you, um, ought to remove your drum set and your Korg Triton and your mismatched herd of amps and your scarred Anvil box of wonders and your guitar rack and your snake's nest of Whirlwinds and your stacks of axes and your mic stands and your printouts of tablature and lyrics and your hundred-foot extension cords coiled like rappelling lines except for the ends wriggling to distant outlets and the plugs to the Ampeg BA115 and the Crate Club 30.

The horn players got off pretty light. The heaviest thing any of them tote is a trombone. So did Ian the drummer, since I own the drum set -- a relic of my son's brief dalliance with riddim, and in no small part the genesis of the band, since without that no name trap set Ian would have had nothing to jam on in my shed, which was where we started out two and half years ago. He didn't even take his sticks, just stuck `em in the random bag where random stuff goes.

Ian and Josh and I were working at the company that owns the building where we wound up rehearsing when I bought a wine-red Jazz four-string from one of the interns. The day we did the deal, Ian said, "Hey, I play drums, but I sold my set while I was in grad school." And Josh said, "Hey, I play guitar, but my guitar is in Pittsburgh."

As it happened I had the drums and a couple of guitars, as well as the newly completed shed in my backyard, and the first time the three of us jammed -- Ian on skins, Josh playing my ES335 through my Club 30 and me playing the Fender through a borrowed bass amp, it was like fingers interlacing. When Josh went home to Squirrel Hill the next weekend he not only brought back his Guild and his Crate, but he brought a little cube Crate bass amp that his brother no longer used.

Through the spring and summer we spent Sunday afternoons in the shed, sometimes as a trio, sometimes with more co-conspirators. One glorious June day there were six of us crammed in there jamming, from the 16-year-old keyboard ace to me thumping hammerhandedly at age 56. That afternoon there was nothing we couldn't play, from "Sugar Magnolia" to "Don't Let Me Down" to "Pink Cadillac."

Josh had to haul his Guild and his Crate. Tim took the Epiphone ES335 he'd been leaving rather than lug his Les Paul to and from the Hill. Rich has packing his congas down to a science

How Sweet It Is

I had a joyful experience in DC a week ago. I drove from Baltimore with my daughter to see a play, A Flea in Her Ear, at The Source Theater at 14th and T Street. A friend of my daughter was a member of the cast. The play was great but the post play experience was the beautiful part.

I was born in Washington and grew up there, went to high school in the city and graduated in 1968, the year my mother says “the wheels came off the cart,” with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. During the riots after the King assassination the 14th Street corridor was hard hit. It remained blighted for decades afterward. I had not been in that neighborhood for forty years before last Sunday.

After the show a group of us walked a few blocks north to Busboys and Poets for dinner. It was a revelation to me, a world unimaginable forty years ago. There was a thriving nightlife scene, people everywhere on the street and in the restaurants. It was as diverse, global and eclectic a mix of people you could imagine mingling peacefully and happily.

For me it was like seeing the resurrection of my hometown. It was joy to behold and experience. I rejoice in having lived to see the day.

Taras Bulba?

I think Vladimir Putin has been watching too many Yul Brynner movies.

Things Come Back To Haunt You

No humor in this post, but I am pohlaxed.



The Baltimore City Paper, 6/26/09, has posted an article about the state's plan to close the only public inpatient psych treatment facility in Baltimore City.



Here is what came to my mind when I read the article.



This is right on the mark: "Not only is that detrimental to the patient, says John Burleigh, who was also a civil rights activist and friend of Walter P. Carter’s, it’s detrimental to the community. The Carter Center, he says, was created to address the unmet needs of minorities and low-income individuals in the city during a time when “many were being released from institutions, during the movement of deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill.” Many of those patients, he recalls, had few resources and ended up out on the streets. Because of their mental illnesses, these untreated patients would do things that were “socially unacceptable” and would end up incarcerated."



I was a Baltimore police officer at the time when deinstitutionalization was taking place as a result of court decisions, which said mentally ill people could not be held unless they were a danger to themselves or others. That usually translated to trying or succeeding in killing themselves or others, which usually falls under Mr. Burleigh's euphemism of "socially unacceptable" things.



The theory was that treatment would be provided at "community mental health centers.” In Irvington, where I worked, that meant a house off Frederick Road, where the patients could come and meds would be dispensed and I presume, the patients counseled. As you might guess, one of the problems with the mentally ill is that they don't like or want to take their meds. I never saw anyone go in or out of the community health office. I did arrest a number of former Spring Grove patients who did "socially unacceptable" things. My friend, Timothy Ridenour, was murdered in October 1975 by one such patient he was attempting to arrest.



That time was the beginning of the visible and intractable problem of homelessness in Baltimore.