“.. a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled “How Biofuels Could Starve The Poor” …points out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn – roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year….When it comes to alternatives to cheap oil…The harsh truth is that there are no alternatives to cheap oil – the future is about smarter ways to live with less oil, not dumber ways to perpetuate mindless consumption.”
The Ethanol Scam by Jeff Goodell – Rolling Stone 9th August 2007

“To the French the Tour de France isn’t a mere bike race but a test of courage, morale and character like none other; a forum for epic individual combat, for clarification of the rapports between men and between men and nature.” – Graeme Fife, Inside the Peloton.

“I don’t like bellyachers. If you’re an actor you do what you’re supposed to do. Shakespeare was a journeyman actor. He didn’t realise his plays would be that great. The year that his own King Lear was done, he played a minor role in somebody else’s version of Lear done by his company. And he endured it.” Jeff Corey, Tender Comrades

I don’t ever remember meeting Hugh Attwooll. He was the drummer of my first ever real band, the Stiff All Stars, and together we formed the rhythm section of a bunch of record industry acolytes with dreams of winning some respect and admiration from our peers. We probably never achieved the former and only had the latter because the word ‘begrudging’ was placed in front of it: after all, while some talked at coffee breaks about being enthusiastic music fans, we were actually out there doing it, playing at the Hope & Anchor, Dingwalls, and The Venue on weekends and nights off.

Hugh was bespectacled, quiet and even when he was in a funk he seemed good humoured and approachable. I would love to see him set up his kit. Nothing would hurry him. He would place the pieces in the order that suited him best and then pick them up again only to place them on what seemed exactly the same spot. He would sit behind the kit look at every stand and drum and then get up again, tour the podium, rearrange, somewhat delicately, a cymbal stand or a floor tom and then sit down once more. On sitting down this last time he would take a breath, adjust his glasses, pick up his sticks and ponder for a minute as if thinking about some other matter before he would look up, smile at us all and then, finally, be ready to play. Unlike most every other drummer in the world he had hardly made a sound up to this point.

Hugh and I were the worrying, rusty tack in the sole of our leader Andy’s rock n’ roll shoe. He wanted us to swing like Like Little Feat or rumble like Rockpile, and with my bass playing there was never any chance of that, but we were efficient and light-hearted and enjoyed ourselves and we would crack jokes behind Andy’s back about his Rick-Neilsen-sized guitar collection and his endless search for the right amp-placement on our postage stamp sized stages.

Out of the band Hugh worked selflessly at CBS, as it then was, and I would talk up the fact that without him Julio Iglesias would never have had a hit in the English speaking world. Hugh spoke Spanish fluently and apparently convinced Julio and the label to rerecord his biggest hits in English with the result that the one-time goalie took off in America and conquered the other half of the world he had not already seduced. As a result Julio was able to buy some more yachts, while Hugh received another paycheck.

It is maybe fifteen years since I last saw Hugh or spoke with him, perhaps longer. I realise that maybe I never knew him well – he was the lovely guy I met through friends who was married and had kids. His smile lit up rooms and the way he quietly corrected or disagreed with you was a master class in diplomacy.

As Joni Mitchell and countless others have pointed out, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Hugh died last week from cancer and suddenly it seems that my band suddenly has something in common with Zeppelin and the Who – we’ve all lost our drummers and there’ll never be a satisfactory replacement.

For pictures of Hugh and examples of his fine drumming check out www.myspace.com/stiffallstars

So a new controversy is raging, or at least getting into gear, regarding Michael Moore’s latest doco “Sicko” . How terribly convenient it is for Big Mike and his distributors that George and the lads have decided to look into the legality of his recent trip across the drink to Cuba. If I’d been in charge of marketing for Big Mike’s latest flick I don’t think I could have planned it better.

Sarcasm aside I suppose it’s time to hoist my trucker cap up the For-Big-Mike flagpole or the Against-Big-Mike one. Truth is I wish there was a third flagpole: the Kind-of-OK-with-Big-Mike Flagpole.

All his targets are good ones and I agree with many, if not all of his conclusions, but it’s his methods which concern me. Indeed I think his methods, and what he omits as well as includes, frequently offers abundant ammunition to his detractors and those whose heads he wishes to put on a stake. I remember watching The Big One and feeling a strange sense of sympathy for all the multi-national companies he was gunning for as he tried to ambush them. Continuously, it seemed, he appeared unannounced outside some factory gate and demanded that Joe The Security Bloke organise an interview with the Top Man right now! And, after a few moments of a phone call to the Top Man’s secretary, during which it was possible that Joe The Security Bloke’s job was on the line, Joe The Security Bloke was obliged to tell Big Mike and his crew to take a hike – remarkably Top Man didn’t have a floating slot in his schedule for intinerant doco makers and actually had work to do thank-you very much.

Cut to Big-Mike in front of the factory gates saying, “There you have it – big business doesn’t care!” Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you ask me. He didn’t truly get to argue with big business, he just banged petulantly and without announcement on it’s door and then acted shocked that the CEO’s wouldn’t take tea with him.

(Big exception was Phil The Nike Bloke who invited Mike up to his lair, listened to his questions, made a lot of sense and was even generous enough to hand Big Mike a check which, if I recall correctly, kind of took the wind out of Big Mike’s sails).

They tell me Big Mike is not a nice man and he’s certainly no oil painting either but he does raise issues we need to discuss carefully and at great length and for this he must be honoured and celebrated. I just wish that, for all his bluster, he was a little more careful about not handing his opponents lots of rope to wrap around that rather large neck of of his.

Sicko opens, if Mike gets his way, on June 29th.

“One quarter of the (Iraq) war budget would have fixed Social Security for the next seventy-five years.” Charles M. Young – The $2 Trillion War – Rolling Stone, Dec 28th 2006

At such a time, the biggest mass shooting in American history, I have, once again, to ask this simple question: How many innocent people need to die before we all take a look at the gun laws in this country and see sense?

Ian Wallace died today. As well as being a wonderful chap he was a world class musician and I got to know him last year when he played on 8 songs that are now deeply embedded in the DNA of Callback. His credentials are remarkable – he played with everyone from Dylan to CSN, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, King Crimson…and, incredibly, me.

The first time I visited him at his house I stopped on the staircase and gawped at a photograph taken from backstage looking over the shoulders of a large band to a massive outdoor arena packed to the gills with fans. “What’s this?” I asked. “That’s me at the back playing with Dylan in the stadium in Nuremburg where Hitler used to hold his rallies. But what’s really cool is that it’s packed with 80,000 German kids who all have their backs turned to where Adolf used to stand and rant, and they’ve all paid to watch this Jewish guy sing and play his guitar!”

Yes. That’s pretty damn cool.

In a funny kind of way life is like a gig. All too soon it’s over and after a brief wave at the fans you’re whisked off-stage to an awaiting bus before you’re driven off into the night. I don’t know where Ian’s next gig is but I am quite sure that, as he steps up to his kit, there will be another huge audience, with their backs turned to the devil, eagerly waiting for Ian to count the band in.

You can find that photograph, and plenty of others, on Ian’s website at: www.ianrwallace.com

I’m mid-way through my ride along PCH this morning when who should overtake me but David Zabriskie. Wow! How cool is that? I was still basking in the glory of riding the same piece of tarmac as the current US time-trial champion when, on a slight hill, another rider flashed past me.

Now, it’s one thing to be overtaken by a rider half your age who’s worn the coveted Yellow Jersey at the Tour de France and won stages in all three grand tours, but it’s another to be overtaken by a guy who’s obviously a few years older than me…and only has one leg!

Pride comes before a….OUCH!

After 21 years in Hollywood I have become a might jaded by what goes on here but this morning brought a surprise: ice on the sidewalks.

The radio woke me up with the news that Moscow’s Red Square is amazingly snow-free and so warm today that even ice-making machines can’t keep the water cold enough for ice-skating to take place. Then I stepped outside my garage to go for my early-morning ride and there was thick ice on the sidewalk – occasionally it dips to freezing up in the Hills but down here in the flats? Never.

After my ride, as I grumbled to myself about climate change, I loaded up my bathroom with bog paper after yesterday’s late-night shopping trip. As I unpacked the ecologically sound bathroom tissue I found this quote on the side of the packet from the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy: In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.

…and to think the white men who invaded America and viciously destroyed these people and their lands had the nerve to call them savages.

When you do whatever it is that I do people like to give you stuff and sometimes the stuff people give you is their latest piece of work and this can lead to all sorts of problems.

Once an acquaintance gave me his new film to watch – a film that he’d written, directed, shot and starred in. It was absolutely, embarrassingly awful. I lied and told him it was “not bad.” When he sent me his second film I lied again and told him that I had so many reels and screeners to watch that I wouldn’t have time to watch his movie. He was righteously pissed off and concluded that I’d gone all Hollywood and had no time for the little people any more. Was this better than him knowing the truth that I thought his work sucked and I didn’t want to waste another 90 minutes of my life on him or his dreadfully feeble, self congratulatory film-making attempts?

On Friday I shot an Alka Seltzer spot and we hired a guy called Gilbert to be in the commercial. It was only the second time we’d worked together so you can imagine my horror when, at the end of the shoot, Gilbert approached me with a DVD entitled Frank & Cindy and said: “I’d like you to have this. It’s a documentary about my Mom and Dad. He’s a drunk and she’s a…” (can’t remember what he said about her now, probably because I’d already started tuning it out.)

Cut to Sunday morning and I’m transferring .omf files into my pro tools so I can work on my own movie. It’s tedious and dull work and involves watching many green lines inching slowly across the screen as various files go from A to B. As I was so completely, utterly bored I decided to pop in Gilbert’s movie thinking, “Another piece of crap I feel obligated to watch.”

(If you’re thinking “curmudgeon!” right now, that’s OK.)

But Gilbert’s ‘piece-of-crap’ was mezmerizing. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Within five minutes the file transferring had taken second place to watching Gilbert’s movie. The story is in many ways heartbreaking and may be summarzied as: Hollywood blonde marries loser musician who descends into alcholism while she struggles to pay the bills, keep herself on the straight and narrow, and keep custody of her son. But what emerges is that Gilbert seems to love his crazy, charismatic parents with a fierceness and compassion that I can’t easily describe, accepting their many failings, and has the confidence to simply ask them to discuss with him episodes in their lives which are so painful that nearly any other family on the planet would do anything to change the subject.

It’s really quite an extraordinary piece of work. Thank-you Gilbert for the gift of your DVD and I’m more than glad I took the time to spend 73 minutes out of my life to watch the film you’d made of your life.

You can read more about Gilbert and his Mom & Dad at www.bionicfilms.com and I understand Frank & Cindy will be featured on This American Life on NPR quite soon.

“The pain of endeavour is better than the pain of regret.” – Alastair Humphreys – round the world cyclist.