Hoofing it With Harry

A close friend says I ought to receive parental combat pay for occasionally escorting my 13-year-old son Nick to rock concerts, some of which are concluded at an unreasonable hour. Truth is, despite the many detriments of such adventures-standing up for four hours straight in unheated clubs, for example-they're usually pretty interesting and, if the band playing isn't up to snuff, it's a decent opportunity to stand under a flickering light and catch up on back-logged reading material.

(On this particular night, I also clapped my hands several times, relishing the news that the Red Sox had acquired Coco Crisp to replace Johnny Damon in center field. The Daily News' Mike Lupica, probably the only New York sportswriter who doesn't even resemble the obsequious Michael Kay, said last Sunday, "You have to say that the Red Sox don't lose much offense replacing Johnny Damon with Coco Crisp and pick up younger legs in the process.")

Last weekend we went to see Deerhoof, a noisy quartet that features an otherworldly Asian lead singer (Satomi Matsuzaki) and over-exuberant drummer (frontman Greg Saunier), at a tiny venue called the Ottobar in North Baltimore. It didn't bother me when the bouncer, checking identification cards for most patrons, waved me off with a jovial "You passed the physical, Gramps" or when a college-age kid asked me to guard the one ounce remaining in his pint of beer while he went to the john, but man, the opening acts that an "indie" band includes on the bill are often so crummy that you simply have to admire their bravado for ambling on stage before paying customers.

It immediately reminded me of yet another disgraceful New York Times editorial ("Family Values on Fox," Jan. 22), which masked a gratuitous shot at Rupert Murdoch as a lesson on morality. One of Gail Collins' writers was out of sorts about Fox's "American Idol," protesting that the popular show takes advantage of "naïve" and "deluded" contestants. As if anyone was forcing them to appear.

The Times scold concluded: "No one wants to censor Fox's money machine [at least no one wants to admit that in public; bad form, democracy and all that rot], but it does seem peculiar that a nation so torn apart over what message gay marriage or prayer in school will send to impressionable youth is so unified in giving a pass to a program that teaches young people that it's extremely cool to be mean."

While it's doubtful that even five percent of the Times staff was ever considered "cool," I fail to see the connection between gay marriage and Americans chasing a dream, no matter how remote. Most accomplished artists are ridiculed at one point in their formative experiences, so it stands to reason that in the future someone now considered "hapless" by the Times will hit it big.

On this night, before Deerhoof started its set-playing by New York rules, the band didn't appear until two hours after its scheduled 10 p.m. kickoff-there was a more robust than usual roster of amateurs to suffer through. Worst of all was Le Ton Mite, sort of an adult Raffi, a one-man attraction with a guitar, nails-on-chalkboard voice and annoying cardboard visuals to illustrate his songs. Nick thought my opinion was unduly harsh, but I think the fact that Le Ton was hawking his own "merch" at the table before and chatting up people had a bigger influence on my son than the guy's tedious 45 minutes in the spotlight.

There were also a slew of experimental short films between the live entertainers, mostly groan-inducing, and an insufferable modern dance presentation, and it was at these times that I retreated to the bar and re-read parts of Merle Miller's '74 hagiography of Harry Truman, Plain Speaking. I'm cherry-picking here, for most of what Truman tells Miller (the interviews were conducted in the early 1960s, a decade before the former president's death) would provide sustenance to those today who believe George W. Bush is subverting the Constitution-his blistering assessments of Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower-but he did get in some fairly wicked punches that wouldn't be popular with the liberal big thinkers who pollute the current media.

I liked this passage: "Newspapermen, they're all a bunch of lazy cusses, once one of them writes something, the others rewrite it and rewrite it, and they keep on doing it without ever stopping to find out if the first fellow was telling the truth or not." It makes you wonder how many Jayson Blair-like scandals would've been uncovered in the mid-20th century had the Internet been available to sleuths of all partisan convictions. Would, for example, the Times' Arthur Krock been exposed as a valet of Joseph Kennedy and forced to resign his powerful post at the newspaper? And the fate of Walter Duranty? Another mystery.

Truman, who favored LBJ in the '60 presidential race, didn't care much for any of the Kennedys. "Old Joe Kennedy is as big a crook as we've got anywhere in this country, and I don't like it that he bought his son the nomination for the Presidency." And HST really had it in for Bobby Kennedy. Mind you, Miller's interviews took place when JFK and his brother were mere mortals and not yet martyred icons. Still, Truman said, "I just don't like that boy, and I never will. He worked for [McCarthy] and when old Joe was tearing up the Constitution and the country, the boy couldn't say enough for him? Now they say young Bobby has changed for the better. They never say anybody's changed for the worse? [M]aybe he has, but what I can never understand and never will if I live to be a hundred is why it takes so long these days for somebody to learn the difference between right and wrong. A man who hasn't learned that by the time he's thirty is never going to learn."

-January 30

Just for kicks, I brought along George Melloan's acute Jan. 24 Wall Street Journal critique of Democrats who rant about the country's current energy difficulties by blaming corporations who don't see the wisdom in more regulatory legislation. Not only did Melloan elicit a chuckle when he bracketed the words global warming with quotation marks, but he penned this biting thought: "Anyone still buying the line should ask himself why the 'giant oil companies,' with all their market power, somehow couldn't prevent crude oil from collapsing to $10 a barrel a few years ago."

It doesn't please me to dump on Michael Barone two weeks in a row, but his Jan. 30 syndicated column, mostly about Democrats who haven't yet emerged from the 70s, contained a sentence that wasn't worthy of his byline. "The 1970s, that slum of a decade, [gave] us the worst popular music, the ugliest hairstyles and clothes, and the most disastrous public policies of the 20th century."

I can't argue the last point, and never did care much for bellbottoms or leisure suits, but the widely accepted notion that pop music sucked in the '70s is silly. Yes, Billy Joel and Bread sold a lot of records, but what about David Bowie, Roxy Music, Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan, Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, Al Green, the O'Jays, John Prine and the Clash, just to name a baker's dozen from that era?