New Music Revu! Pete Scobell Band: “Walkin A Wire”

Now, just to reaffirm to you, I only qualify as a Country music critic by dint of my living in good ole Nashville, Tennessee for twelve years through the 2000s until 2012 and because I covered three CRS conventions for Michelle Jasko’s, Nashville Radio Syndication which required me to hang out with copious Country music artists front as well as back stage and reacquaint myself with similar Music Industry types who I knew from my Top 40 radio DJ days, circa, 1979, et al, thereby gleaning that “Country Music peeps are just like everybody else in “the biz” – often quite nicer to interact with. Our country, America the Beautiful, needs more of that kind of cross-cultural interaction!
I preface this thusly because of the incredible man and protector of our American way of life this recording artist, Pete Scobell, is!! How does a Navy Seal become a Country music performer? Well, one reason is because it was always in his nature! Music is not just a hobby nor something else he wants to try to conquer.
Even though the folks who wanted me to review Pete advanced the first single, “Walkin’ A Wire”, which is a catchy song, I quickly passed on that to dig into the whole CD album which they also sent. My ears quickly latched upon cut two, “Guns & Roses”. This is a hit music song with many attributes around relatable lyrics in the “now” plus an equivalence to another world-famous band. In fact, my missing Inna from Ukraine, just LOVES Guns & Roses and Axl Rose. Maybe they ran off together – Pete has a song for that.

In this great album are many songs with relatable and vivid lyrics borne of struggles all of us have experienced. Take, for example, the very tame “WILD”, which is about when your best friend is buried in the ground before your eyes. On the other hand, a few tunes sound like just another country song like “The Fight”. My other favorites are the Country-funky “Dive Bar” (“…where they still play Hank and crank that ole Country with a steel guitar…”) and the very relatable, introspective “Disappear” which caused me to become sad the first time I listened to it when I heard him sing “seems like everything I love slips through my hands….” I took some weeks away – maybe it was the juxtaposition of my personal struggles and Martha sending me this music? So I eventually dove back into the album and found a kind of musical salvation. “Feels Like You Know Me” rocks out with great drum work and a stand-out hook, “…Jesus on Sunday!” For those of us who question whether our prayers are ever heard, let alone answered there is “There’s Gotta Be A God” ~ Amen. I cried real tears at the end of the first time I listened to it. You will want to hear it and again I emphasize the relatable lyrics on this incredible album!
The next-to-last track, “Hearts I Leave Behind”, first struck me due to the military-style drum marching band ending-to-fade which caused me to revisit the song, re-read the liner notes and learn that this was originally a song he recorded with Wynonna Judd! “I Live in the hearts of those I leave behind” is strong stuff with the classic Country American instrumentation. As a drummer, I love the rolling drums to fade!! It is my second-place favorite!
“What ever happened to just seeing what happens” got me off my lazy bed to write more about this music!
Last, but surely not least is “Friends With Money” with a very different, conversational on-location intro. Again, more very clever lyrics that denote how Pete is helping us process our lives today. “I got God and I got church/I got a gun if that don’t work…” lol Love it.
Thanks to a team of songwriters and Pete’s personality, we get to listen to a production of today’s life and frustrations which just might, with appropriate airplay, help cure many of the negative afflictions we hear about here in today – the future which is now.
Hey I am about a rare thing here! Five Gold Guitars!!! I never DO this. I felt this whole album. Maybe it was the South Carolina trip, lol !!

Here is the ACOUSTIC version of “Guns & Roses” for your mind…

Pickhitt: Major Props to Ms. Martha Moore for staying on me to listen and review this album.

**SureShott: check out a more generic version of this review at my new, music-only review site,
https://achilliadsmyvinylrecordshoppe.wordpress.com/ where I am still working-out some of the kinks. Please add your comments to the community!

Pearl Harbor Day 2015 Has More Meaning Than Ever!; Elusive “Dead Man” Sleep and 2015 Loose Ends

subterfuge The excitement of President Obama’s first election has soured sufficiently now that I even notice that he is soft on radical Islam and Muslim extremists. Another Presidental politician’s shell game. It was nice that he became the first non-Caucasian American leader, yet I have never considerd him the “first black President” as so many have. He is not a Black American, in my opinion – he is just brown and not really “down” with us. He has done nothing to promote true Black American men during his tenure. He is a woman’s President.

the use of tricks especially to hide, avoid, or get something;

NOUN

1.

an artifice or expedient used to evade a rule, escape a consequence, hide something, etc

As we commemorate Pearl Harbor Day here in 2015 I wonder how many people I drive next to daily or work with even know the importance of this day and how it is even more relevant now when juxtaposed against the backdrop of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the recent evil perpetuated by the barbarians in France that are spawned in its wake.
I agree with United States of America Presidential candidate, Mr Donald Trump, that we should sequester all “Muslims” who have come the USA in the past ten years or so and make them register as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt et.al did with the Japanese following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. We must stop the madness!

If you are going to immigrate to “the West” and in-particular, the United States, then you should dress as WE do. No burkas or other loose clothing that can conceal bombs or suicide vests allowed! Have we not learned this by now? Here at the the end of the year 2015, there is no longer a place for “politically correct” defense of my country. Ah, “politically correct” – a phrase created by the President William Clinton and his wife who is, not so coincidentally running for president in 2016 – another dumb move and I will move to another country if she and her band of idiots is elected.

We lost the fight after “9/11” and ever since the Camel Jockies are increasingly kicking our collective traditional asses with these cowardly surprise attacks upon innocent people trying to have a life – and for what gain? I am including Paris, France and all of the “NATO” winners of World War II in this. I am including Russia in this summation. Now is the time for the nations who built a positive world history in the wake of World War I and II and of the past three hundred years or more to conciliate a succinct Hiroshima/Nagasaki strategy to annihilate this annoying “Isshit” threat once and for all so that we can come back to at least an 1980s-style, Peace on Earth, collateral damage and all. They asked for it, we should give it to them! For our present and for your children’s future.

2015 Pick Hitts: A fashion trend which should end in 2016: “Hoodies”. They make you look suspicious, like a thug, “terrorist” or even like a Ku Klux Klansman (Citadel cadets). I have observed foolish guys who drive with them on inside their vehicles! Stupid – you cannot hear enough and it dulls your all of the senses you need to drive and avoid a wreck!
Hoods used to mean “thugs” or gangsters in the 1960s; Hooded sweatshirt were once only a functional item in our closets to be worn in bad weather! So lets return them to that status in 2016!

I long for the days when I could “sleep like a dead man”. Do you remember when you were a carefree kid and your sleep was sweet? I remember when I slept so deeply that I could not recall my dreams! Now, with so much shit on my mind daily, it is difficult to “quiet the mind” enough to sleep long and soundly – without “PM” drugs, lol Bring back the good old days! Is this what is it when you are over sixty and healthy – things like cuts and colds take two months to heal? I am sure that once I move to my next and final destination with my new wife and my music free from basement storage, I will have “sweet dreams are made of this” again. Pray for it – for all of us.

~ And finally, Dear network television and radio News Directors, Please find other words to use other than “terrorism”. It is so played-out that “terrorism: now reminds me of Halloween! There are so many other words that more accurately portray the barbaric violence of people blowing themselves up in the name of Allah or randomlyly shooting up innocents that you can use that would even galvanize we-the-people to rise up in-force to combat this meanace! Here are one-hundred-sixty-two of them https://www.powerthesaurus.org/terrorism

Oh, I forgot, you are in bed with the corporations who perpetuate this fear-mongering to improve your ratings. As TV sportscaster, Warner Wolf unsed to say, “Turn your set off there!”

Comments and corrections are always cheerfully encouraged and thanks for supporting my blog all of these years.
~ Naphtali

If You Could Choose Your Skin Color, Which Would You Choose?

I thought this was “settled”!  Then came a lull and apparently Uncle Sam allowed too many colored immigrants to become “citizens” without qualifying them as to the history of how American Blacks fought to overcome segregation and conduct ourselves correctly while raising our kin to do likewise. The police are not our enemies – this is not the 1960s!  So to you newbiees, Cocoanuts from the Caribbean and you from wherever you are who is reading this post, I ask, “If you had a choice of skin colors, which one would YOU choose?”

I remember when this song came out and WWRL AM 1600 in New York City (Woodside, to be exact) played it.  It was a cause célèbre because the late Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions had, once again, articulated an argument musically that was going on at the time. I don’t agree with all of the words the lyrics have to say, but the song, unfortunately, still resonates today.

Therefore, it amazes me that it is still a source of American political and social illness here in 2015!

Yet I know why: I am like Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions in that we are Black Americans; descendants of slaves on this continent who came up via the American south lands and whose parents ultimately and after the American Civil War into the beginning of the twentieth century, migrated northward on the east coast. Over time in the mid-to-late twentieth century, “the man” [angry white man establishment who still did not want to embrace us, who were never any threat to the slave master] allowed a whole influx of similar looking people from Caribbean and continental Africa into the continental USA, who have no clue as to the struggle or gains we made and that Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions sang their song unto.

“With just a little bit more education and love for our nation would make for a better world for you and for me.”

Please choose your choice of skin colors in the “comments” below – and I will tell you mine, which I told my parents, waay back in the 1960s when I was a little boy! They were surprised, lol

ALL lives matter.