THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

Another Song on the Radio

And the hits just keep on coming.

The Muster Point Project’s latest single “I Love That Song” is not to be confused with “That Song” by Big Wreck or Joe Jackson’s lovely “A Slow Song.” As was the case with “I Got This” I wrote the lyrics for TMPP aka Kevin Franco on a sheet of graph paper, block printing in blue medium ballpoint. That’s my job done. If Kevin decides to work with my words he comes up with a title, composes the music, works out his vocals and plays all instruments (at least on the demos). To me it’s reminiscent of that church rummage sale fishing game where the kid casts a line over a barrier painted like an underwater scene, smiling doe-eyed Disney fish, and always hooks something good.

I wish “Honky Tonk Women” (“Woman” on my Hot Rocks compilation) was twenty minutes long. A modicum of its magic is its brevity, three and out: Play it again. There are a few other songs which insist on immediate repeat when I’m in charge of the stereo, any Joe Cocker take on John Sebastian’s “Darling Be Home Soon,” Neil mewing “Helpless,” Van Morrison contemplating “Saint Dominic’s Preview” and for reasons I can’t explain, John Mellencamp’s “Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)” – maybe it’s the loud Cuban band crucifying John Lennon. There are others of course, God knows there are others: Those were days of roses, poetry and prose and Martha all I had was you and all you had was me.

Determined not to give Kevin the obvious rhyme of “song” and “gone,” I imagined the chorus of “I Love That Song” as a simplistic nostalgic celebration with maybe an allusion to the Saturday Night Live sketch featuring John Belushi as the party guest who never leaves: I’m just going to flip through your albums again….Guilty!

The verses, scribbled in my Hilroy exercise book, came out very differently when printed on my pad of graph paper. Growing up is very confusing. Adults tell you things but they don’t explain them. I couldn’t figure out why the nuns and priests revered an angry and jealous god who loved everybody unconditionally, but with conditions or else. It didn’t make any sense to me. “I Love That Song” is about coming of age, about dropping others’ tired suppositions and impositions. Rock music and hormones grease the process, that green, almost premature awakening. It’s liberating to climb out of an established doctrinal rut in to one of your own making. But “coming of age” should never, ever be a phase or a phrase followed by a full stop….A rut is a rut is a rut is a rut, right in the nuts, a narrow channel by another name.

Kevin spends a lot of his time down Santiago way. I read a recent interview with him in which he said the music he composed for “I Love That Song” had an absorbed Latin influence, Chile by osmosis. I can’t tell a tango from Santana, mainly because I can’t stand Santana. What I did pick up on Kevin’s initial demo was the “Gimmie (Let It Bleed sleeve; see “Women” vs. “Woman”) Shelter” clicking, whirring noise. I believe this sound is made by a percussive instrument known as a guiro. In both songs it imparts dread, suggesting the internal workings of a clock, toothy sprockets rotating, and time inexorably ticking down toward a grim finality.

The Muster Point Project’s official lyric video of “I Love That Song” is easily found on YouTube. You can also stream “I Love That Song” on all the usual channels; it’s everywhere and on the radio too.             

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of shameless self-promotion since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it from assorted retailers in your preferred format. 

THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

A Song on the Radio

Early one weekday in August, 2003 I was strolling along Calgary’s Stephen Avenue; my morning mass transit respite, a welcome one block stroll between a crowded bus and a crowded train car. As I passed the book shop I saw my name in the window, a poster promoting my first-ever book launch a couple of evenings hence. I took a seat on a public bench beside a trash can and lit a cigarette. My work at the advertising agency could wait for another six or seven minutes; I was usually an hour early to the shop anyway.

I remembered the typed letter I’d received from Quarry Magazine sometime during the winter of 1983. It would publish my short story “The Rites of Spring,” baseball and death, in the spring 1984 prose issue. The quarterly would pay me $5 per page plus five complimentary copies. And twenty years later, here was the publication of my first novel. Eventually I get around to things.

That was some kind of rush that particular morning. I knew my publisher was small time and I knew that was to be my fate too (that window poster hangs in the Crooked 9's furnace room so I'm able to recall that glorious evening each time I change the filter), but here was a middle finger to all those literary agents who’d rejected my manuscript telling me I was very good for a nobody writer, a pretend scribbler because I didn’t live in Toronto. And hadn’t my career path zagged from zigging: army man, hockey player, archeologist, historian, rock ‘n’ roll star, dishwasher, busboy, grocery clerk and freelance writer all the way to God, there’s got to be a better way. Who the fuck was I?

Didn’t I experience that same rush just this last Tuesday morning?

“I Got This” is the latest single by the Muster Point Project. The Muster Point Project is the musical alter ego of my friend Kevin Franco whom I’ve known for more than thirty years. We like the same bands although Kevin’s much more tuned in to contemporary music than I am.

I wrote the song’s lyrics. I tried to write a Chuck Berry song, a story with an O. Henry twist. Something like “No Particular Place to Go” in which the horny and frustrated narrator is parked on lovers’ lane with his girlfriend on the eve of seduction yet stymied “by a safety belt that wouldn’t budge.” Seatbelts were not standard features of American cars back in the fifties and so there’s a whole knotty bunch of allusion, euphemism and metaphor buried in those seemingly slight, comic lyrics. Chuck Berry’s style is not easy to emulate (and I’ve been told my fiction tends to lose the plot because there isn’t one). But I did manage to write a chorus whose meaning can be taken in two ways, so as Kevin sings the verses a boast becomes a lament.

Kevin composed and arranged infectiously up-tempo music, one of the hooks is the horns. What really makes “I Got This” touch all the bases as a single for me is his vocal delivery. Above and beyond the recording and production there’s a genuine sense that the singer is getting a kick out of telling his story. Kevin’s having fun at work. I picture comedian Billy Connolly giggling while still a digressive minute away from his punchline. The song’s sole spoken word, the doctor’s “Yep” diagnosis is delivered with deadpan schadenfreude.

Full disclosure: I may, maybe, you know, have a vested interest, but I believe “I Got This” has chartbuster written all over it.

Kevin told me he was pleased with his streaming numbers and YouTube viewership of the official animated lyric video. I thought it would be cool for Kevin (and me) to get the Muster Point Project on traditional radio. “I Got This” was worthy.  The only realistic avenue for that was CKUA, Alberta’s public station. As a former ad man I know my self-promotion skills are laughably inept; but promoting a “third” party like MPP didn’t strike me as quite so crass (and rejection would be more impersonal).

One of CKUA’s charms is the variety of its programming. So, much like an ad campaign or manuscript submission, I selected likely targets. I prepared a couple of emails with attached links and files. The logical CKUA host didn’t respond; fuck him. The weekday mid-morning man did, saying he’d check out “I Got This.” A week of radio silence passed. I confess to mounting feelings of agitation and annoyance and suggested to Ann we turn the Crooked 9’s dial over to CBC. I followed up: I reiterated “I Got This” was this summer’s catchiest indie single. Nothing. I fumed.

Tuesday morning I was running late. I was naked in our bathroom running the shower and restocking the toilet paper, multitasking. The door was closed. Ann started shouting from the kitchen. Our house must've been on fire; goddamn cigarettes.

“He just mentioned your name! Kevin’s on the radio! They’re playing your song!”

And I ran down the hall and I stood there grinning in the kitchen in all my glory. I didn’t care that the blinds were up. Thanks to a whole lot of help from my friend Kevin, my words were reaching more people all at once than ever before, more than my combined book sales. Way more. Sure, I once had a weekly readership of over two million when I was writing copy for Safeway grocery flyers, but those were different times.

The cleverly animated official lyric video for MPP’s “I Got This” is up on YouTube. This summer’s smash hit single is also available from all the usual streaming suspects. And, man, it sounds incredible transmitted over airwaves.     

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of embarrassing and awkwardly inept self-promotion since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from assorted retailers.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

I’m Not Buying It

One of the liquor stores I pop into from time to time has a bitcoin machine situated by the cash register. It looks like a standard ATM. I don’t know if the user buys an entire bitcoin or a fraction of one. I don’t understand how cryptocurrency leaps from an ATM in to the buyer’s wallet. I’ve no idea where and how people can spend bitcoin. I can’t grasp bitcoin mining and blockchain technology. A standalone machine in a low rent liquor store in no way suggests a safe investment vehicle nor a secure and documented transaction to me.

But I know what I know and I know advertising and marketing. A classic ploy is the celebrity endorsement. The immediate payoff is the newsworthiness of the publicity and subsequent hype: Keith Richards is hawking Louis Vuitton luggage. The long term payoff is more of an ethereal gamble. Ideally, the target market will impose its perception of the celebrity’s attributes onto the brand and product: Keith Richards, cooler than thou, understands the legendary high quality of Louis Vuitton.

Signing up a brand ambassador is risky business because real people tend not to behave like tame mascots. Traditionally, if things went sideways there was mutually assured destruction, both parties, the celebrity and the brand, losing that “itness,” that incalculable cachet. A recent example is the nasty breakup of Adidas and hip-hopper Kanye West (aka Yeezus, Yeezy and Ye). Fashion is a huge component of popular music. Why not partner with one of the world’s biggest stars if he wants to design his own sneaker? Look what Michael Jordan did for Nike! Now, Jordan got old and maybe a little distracted by baseball but he didn’t become completely unhinged. Adidas now has a stock issue: millions of dollars’ worth of unsold Kanye runners and a share price not much higher than a rubber sole.

While no single condition can define a society, we live currently in hyper-sensitive times. Everybody’s been victimized and everybody’s outraged. Consequently, contemporary circumstances create scenarios for celebrity corporate mouthpieces to damage their reputations with little or no blowback on their paymasters’. Hockey players Connor McDavid and Wayne Gretzky endorse BetMGM, a sportsbook. What gaming syndicate wouldn’t want to be associated with great players, winners? It’s a perfect fit, a marketer’s dream, synergistic attributes. The rut in the ice is that many Canadians inexplicably insist on viewing professional hockey through the sepia tones of rose-coloured glasses. So, McDavid and Gretzky shilling a societal scourge is anathema. Think of the children! Gordie Howe never did that! Gordie Howe was never presented with that particular attractive financial opportunity.

The invention and subsequent sales and marketing of cyrptocurrencies have since dug a third pitfall or perhaps, pratfall, for celebrity parrots. Cyrptocurrency is a speculative form of universal money-like stuff whose value cannot be guaranteed by the assets of any national central bank in existence. Also, should you ever need to launder actual cash money… 

Last fall the FTX cryptocurrency exchange opened its ledger book right to America’s Chapter 11. Its founder Sam Bankman-Fried now faces more criminal fraud charges than there are ones and zeros in a string of code. But Bankman-Fried understood the power of celebrity. Perhaps that’s all he aspired to be no matter the means. Then again, maybe he understood the sway of the spotlight, the lure of the pitch, on a gullible, ordinary average guy who feels entitled to his share of the big time. Bankman-Fried’s brand ambassador was Tom Brady, a football player and arguably one of the greatest quarterbacks to line up under centre ever. Brady is now being sued by stiffed and busted FTX investors because they listened to him (and there’s no one left to go after). They believed a man who played a violent sport for decades was also Milton Friedman. And, anyway, what could be more “blue chip” than bitcoin and ethereum?

In for a bit, in for a byte: America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last October fined uber C-lister Kim Kardashian’s implants $1.26-million for being a… well, a token or two short of integrity or, essentially, what passes the sniff test for cryptocurrency manipulation on social media. The SEC in March charged (among others) noted financial guru and Warren Buffet acolyte Lindsay Lohan, such a nice stable girl, with illegally promoting crypto assets. Would you buy anything, anything at all on these people’s paid carny barking recommendation? Would you!? God, it’s like Paris Hilton promoting Super 8. Check that, she would if the money was right; I’m not sure if she’s under investigation for her own celebrity crypto gig yet.

Let me now return to Keith Richards and Louis Vuitton, the story of a very wealthy, nomadic musician and very expensive designer label luggage. I am not Keith Richards; I cannot afford Louis Vuitton duffle bags. Keith hasn’t hauled his own luggage since, I don’t know, 1965. Considering some of his documented habits, his luggage probably could never be connected to him anywhere in any way. But he’s travelled the globe enough times to at least have an association with suitcases and carry-ons. Louis Vuitton does not manufacture guitar cases. Still, neither party went, in that cringe inducing public relations phrase, “off brand” in this instance especially as the model’s appearance fee was paid directly to a charity.

Years ago Detroit rocker Bob Seger was accused of selling out for allowing “Like a Rock” to be used in a long running Chevrolet advertising campaign. He said if his song helped General Motors sell more vehicles assembled in his hometown (and by his audience), he was fine with that. His campaign royalties were funneled to the auto workers union. That is “on brand.” The ad campaign was revived in the oughts to the tune of “Our Country,” a song by John Mellencamp. He cited the same rustbelt, heartland motivation as Seger, adding that since his career had ended with The Lonesome Jubilee in the ears of commercial radio, he needed an alternative avenue to reach his audience. That honesty, no bullshit, no spin, is on brand.

I was about to use “truth,” “trust” and “advertising” in a positive context in the same sentence. No, it can’t be done, there’s no blue moon on July’s kitchen calendar page. Just assume every celebrity mouthpiece doesn’t know, understand or care what they’re talking about; it doesn’t matter if you’re buying or hiring, be wary, be aware. 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of gushing celebrity coverage since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from assorted retailers. 

A FAN’S NOTES

Pedantic Controversy

I placed an urgent phone call to my American refugee (2023’s Independence Day gun carnage was just business as usual) neighbour Ted last week. I suspect he dreads seeing me displayed on his caller ID. I telephoned him thirteen times last year. Eleven of those were to ask if I could borrow his lawnmower (a long story and this one will be long enough). Another question I had for him was whether or not a light switch casting blue sparks was anything I should worry about. Ted was over in a flash, like shot to fix that because his infill home is awfully close to the Crooked 9 and, anyway, he knows about stuff like that and didn’t he just happen to have a new switch in his workshop? My last question was, “Kentucky liberal arts college, five letters beginning with B.”

My latest call to Ted began with a lengthy preamble: “Okay, you’re from the Midwest, Cincinnati or Indiana or somewhere. We pretty much like the same music. So, you know Mellencamp’s or John Cougar’s ‘Jack and Diane.’ I suspect you’ve been to a Tastee Freeze. My question to you is, what’s a chili dog?”

“Yeah, he’s from Columbus or Bloomington, I’m not sure. A chili dog is a hot dog with chili, cheese and onions. Why are you asking me this?”

“Are you busy? Am I interrupting anything? Have you got a minute? It’s a long story.”

“Go on.”

“Well…”

Ain’t gonna eat no rice and beans, ain’t gonna suck on a chili dog… (Garland Jeffreys, “Spanish Town”)

Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze, Diane’s sittin’ on Jack’s lap… (John Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane”)

Now, let us immerse ourselves in the vortex of insanity that is social media – although this topic is harmless enough. Someone reposted a bit of music criticism that said in part that John Mellencamp owes his entire career to Garland Jeffreys. Social media is rife with provocative, sweeping statements. These artists are two distinct (Jeffreys is inner city New York, “14 Steps to Harlem”) and distinctly American rock voices. If Mellencamp is indebted to anyone or anything it’s the Stones, side two of Springsteen’s The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (“Small Paradise,” “I Need a Lover,” “Chinatown”) and let’s not forget James Brown. Somebody else replied that the original post was probably a facetious allusion to the “chili dog” line. I suggested Mellencamp’s “chili dog” was more tribute than rip-off and, anyway, there’s only one way to eat one. Another poster quickly corrected me, saying a “chili dog” was in fact an iced drink.

Better call Ted.

Now, the potential transubstantiation of a hot dog loaded with goop into a waxed paper cup filled with goop is a simple shuffle of a mental image. I imagine a Bible scholar or constitutional lawyer would have a very different and perhaps more intense reaction upon being informed they’d misinterpreted a portion of “sacred” text their entire careers. And then, of course, there was the likelihood that the “chili dog-chilled drink” poster is a moron. The rules of social media engagement dictate the utter futility and pointlessness of rational discussion and, besides, the definition of a chili dog is no mound of carbs to die on. And, extrapolating from Tastee Freeze, I’d expect that corporation to serve up, I don’t know, a “Chillee Dawg” beverage or something.

I was reminded of another recent, raging controversy. In “Thunder Road” does Mary’s dress, as much as it possesses the free will to do anything, wave or sway? “Waves” evokes a fluttering hemline in the draught of a slamming screen door. “Sways” is more erotic; Mary dancing to what must be “Only the Lonely,” her swaying hips arousing the driver and narrator. I saw Springsteen on a late night talk show that wasn’t Carson or Letterman and so I don’t know whose and he said he’d been singing “sways” forever and that he missed the error on the Born to Run sleeve. On the other hand, there were no amendments in the anniversary box set nor the Songs coffee table book of his lyrics (and, dear me, there are some glaring typographical errors in the liner notes on a couple of his recent releases). The pluralized “whey” sound dominates all the live versions I have and since Springsteen was not trained in elocution by an Anglican choirmaster, I’ve no clue: “Takealoadofffannie” so to speak.

Ted and his family were guests of the Crooked 9 this past Canada Day long weekend. The first thing he did was pull out his phone to show me a picture of a Tastee Freeze chili dog, an actual chili dog with cheese and onions. I handed him a beer. I said, “What are your thoughts on the ‘pompatus of love’?”

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of rock and roll writing since 2013. I Got This is the latest single from Calgary's Muster Point Project. I wrote the lyrics. Check out the animated lyric video on YouTube.