Doomed To Reheat

After Rome, but before Italy, the Mediterranean boot was a bunch of little principalities, city-states, loosely united under the Holy Roman Empire and the Church. It was a loose union as the church and the Empire were often not united to each other very well. In the twelve and thirteen hundreds the politics were divided between the Ghibellines who were more or less united to the Empire and the Guelphs, who were more or less united to the Church. And the disagreements between these two parties got rather heated.

In Tuscany, June of 1289, the Florentine Guelphs met the Ghibelines of Arezzo on the plains of Campaldino and expressed their political displeasure with extreme prejudice on about seventeen hundred of the Ghibi bastards. Dan was a good Guelph, rode in the political parties cavalry that day, and afforded himself well. Having helped free Florence from the yoke of the Imperial influence, he joined the apothecary’s guild and entered into more local politics. You’d think they’d be less brutal.

On this historic day, we were reminded of a concert in Des Moines on January 20 1982, thirty five years ago today. Ozzy was in full character, and high as a damn kite most like, and some fan tossed what looked to Ozzy to be a toy bat on stage. Ozzy had already had an incident with biting the heads off of doves and thought this would be a cute gag. Of course, it wasn’t a toy bat, it was a real live dead bat, and when Ozzy bit it’s head off, it’s teeth bit him back. He was rushed to the hospital for rabies shots. One crazy train indeed.

But we were talking about Nazis. In the early forties, after the invasion of Poland, the annexed territory was just crawling with jews. The German Jew population was mostly under control. The marriage laws has been in place for years, and voluntary emigration had significantly lowered the population. But not a lot of Jews had fled Poland in advance of the invasion, and emigration was not a viable long term solution in light of Hitler’s end game.

They called him the Undertaker. Would have been a fine nom de plume if he were a professional wrestler, or a hit man maybe, but John didn’t have quite so violent a career path. He always wore black clothes, as he thought the were easier to keep clean while travelling. Not necessarily the soundest of reasoning, black shows dust like nobody's business, but I guess he thought he could just brush it off.

John like to cultivate a miscreant persona, a outlaw man for outlaw ment. He didn’t spend any time in prison himself, but did get a couple over nighers in jail. Once crossing the border he was tagged and searched as a suspected heroin smuggler. The narcs misjudged that one and only found eleven hundred pills (a mix of barbiturates and amphetamines). Stupid prescription drugs didn’t get you any kind of sentence at all back in those days. Another time he started a forest fire in a National park, destroying over 500 acres of forest and driving off the local endangered condors.. But Johnny didn’t give a damn about those damn yellow buzzards.

Dave’s kids knew the lyrics to every Rolling Stones’ song. Even in ‘71 that was a heck of a catalog, Exile on Main Street hadn’t come out yet,, but that was still a lot of songs and he should have been impressed. But Dave was old fashioned and thought his kids should have other things in their heads. Like simple multiplication tables. So Mr. McCall decided to have the maths lyricized to help his boys learn their times tables.

As a partner with a New York ad firm, he had access to some talent, but the creative department hooked him up with some local Broadway songwriters, and the results were lackluster at best. Discussing his failing project with his partners, he was referred to Bob Dorough, a Jazz musician out of Texas, and what he got was a bottle of lightning.