ItsOnlyBob

I'm pretty sure my ability to write music comes from my dad. I have no other musical blood ancestors to blame.   Dad couldn't read a note of music or play an instrument (he washed out on the trumpet in elementary school), but he had a good ear and he could carry a tune.  Best of all? He could whistle like nobody's business. His technique was astonishing, as nimble as a chimpanzee. And he could improvise for hours. He would putter around the house, spinning endlessly inventive, wildly acrobatic variations on the simplest of tunes. One of Dad's favorite songs from his own childhood was "Dunderbeck's Machine." It used a familiar folk melody to tell the story of an evil butcher whose sausage production flowed in suspicious concord with the disappearances of animals from the nearby pound:  Dunderbeck, oh, Dunderbeck! How could you be so mean? I'll bet that you are sorry You invented that machine. Now dogs and cats and long-tailed rats No lon...

Like anyone else who makes stuff up for a living, music arrangers occasionally suffer from creative constipation – sometimes to the point that we are so unsure of our ability to put a new spin on a tune and write it to our impossibly high standards that we back out of doing it. Then we hear the arrangement that’s used in its place, and we realize we could have farted out a better one after a dinner of corned beef, cabbage, egg salad and Old Milwaukee. So my advice to the creatively blocked – no matter what your art may be – is always: Go have that dinner. Then write. Write whatever is in your head at the moment, even just the melody and chord symbols. Bland is better than nothing, for now. It can be merely the least inspired thing you've ever written … or you can make it intentionally bad . Ask yourself what Mr. Trololo would do. Let it be shabby and cheesy and gauche. Or maybe just a little over-caffeinated . Write it as a jaunty march in 6/8 time, or as...

I love reading other peoples' inciteful commentary referencing the unproper usage of language expecially if it centers around some of the things which also tend to bother myself when I am reading things which are written or things spoken by voice in a poor fashion. There are many writers and speakers, who only tend to utilize the weakest sentances and words; irregardless of the fact that they are just watering down the affect that there words have on the people that are reading that which they have written or hearing that which they say. A long time and well reknown critic of carless writing and talking, this has and always will bother me. I often wonder if the English language will ever survive in tack. The thing is, is that oftentimes these are educated individuals, they are someone who definately should not have any excuse of incriminating the mother tongue like they do and, yet there intercourse is literally sprinkled with the following, to name a few; bad punctua...

Today's inaugural festivities are the first since 1993 that I've watched on TV at home. In the past four inaugurations—Clinton's second in 1997, Bush's in 2001 and '05, and Obama's in '09—I marched with the U.S. Air Force Band. This time around, I was a standby in case a primary percussionist couldn't make it.  I have mixed feelings about not marching. On the one hand, Inauguration Day is genuinely historic, and being an official part of it, however peripherally, is something to tell the grandkids about. Then again, it is The Mother of All Parades: a marathon of rehearsals (including a full-scale predawn dry run the week before) for an event that dominates the national consciousness for weeks and completely wigs out the detail-fixated and the security-obsessed.  I wrote this after President George W. Bush’s first inauguration in 2001. It's probably safe to say my colleagues' day today was pretty much like this one,  only with better w...

Christmas Day and Mother's Day go hand-in-hand for me ... or maybe more like hand-in-stocking. Since my childhood, Christmas has always begun the same way: We tear into stockings Mom knitted just for us, each one made in time for our own first Christmas. My brother and sisters have stockings just like mine. So do our spouses, kids and grandkids ,  plus a few ex- and almost-spouses and various others.  Mom copied the pattern from the stocking of a family friend, counting stitch-by-stitch and recording it on graph paper to make her first stocking in 1955 , for my sister Becky. She used that same pattern to make her 30th stocking in 2010,  for my granddaughter Ava — Mom's second great-grandchild. My favorite Christmas memory is of waking before dawn with my siblings and plundering our stockings, knowing they held enough treasure to tide us over until breaking light made it safe to nag our parents out of bed to open presents. We rummaged through a king's ra...

Every Election Day, I mourn a friendship killed by political “discourse.” I met this friend in college. He was brilliant and intense, with a finely tuned sense of humor steeped in Monty Python and Firesign Theater. He was also kind and thoughtful. When I came to Washington, DC, in 1993 for a job interview, my friend—by then a bureaucrat living in Northern Virginia—offered me a futon to sleep on. One evening, our conversation veered into politics. I mostly just listened as he talked—and talk he did, with breathtaking ferocity. At one point, his phone rang: “Hello? … Oh, hi, Mom. Hey, can I call you back? I’m in the middle of a tirade.” He hung up and jumped right back in. I’d never given my own political opinions much critical thought before then—like many people, I just followed my parents’ lead. My discomfort at that moment had less to do with the fact that I found myself disagreeing with my friend's views, and more to do with my feeling suddenly trapped in a conversation I wasn...

Researchers recently uncovered previously unknown correspondence among the Founding Fathers that sheds new light on the process of dissolving political bands, declaring independence, pledging sacred honor and so forth. Who knew? (Click on the picture to make it bigger.)