A great friend and even greater human being has died.
At long last I can get back to a keyboard to share the very tragic news that Greg Kendig (Kendig97), died suddenly at the end of the first evening of Martinfest.
I got the news as we were on our way to breakfast at the hotel restaurant.
No words can adequately convey the loss for us all, which does not come close to what his wife and family are now suffering.
This has been a year of loss in the dearest, saddest of ways. But no one could have predicted such a tragedy could befall such a strong and vital man, and one of the be persons one could know, at the very event that brought him into all our lives, and which he so loved.
Sunday’s memorial for our departed friends will now be as much for Greg as all the others who have gone before him.
I have suspended posting in my Journal of Adventure for the time being. I will return to it tomorrow, Saturday, if not tonight.
Each year, I am expected to write and post my Martinfest Journal of Adventure
And I must do it whilst trying to play guitar, catch up with old friends, get to know new ones, and maybe find time to sleep. OK, maybe not sleep.
Here is the first installment, just now posted at the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum, the organization responsible for this amazing event.
I pulled into Nazareth, just about a year ago, not having a clue as to what would transpire across the coming twelve months. And now I can reflect a bit as I await my ride to take me to the Shangri-La that is Martinfest – the 17th Annual Martinfest no less.
And as the years have accumulated, this event has started to eclipse birthdays and Christmases as the major milestone marker in my life, and turned into a family reunion of sorts as much or more than a wonderful opportunity to see and play some of the most exquisite acoustic guitars ever created, and hear so much wonderful music, in a setting of all-day, all-night celebration and frivolity.
This Martinfest comes with some significant firsts.
I always enjoy meeting people for the first time, at their first Martinfest. So, if you are a Green Dot newbie, please feel free to seek me out and say hello. And pass that along to anyone you veterans might be bringing as a guest.
I am actually bringing along a guest for the first time ever, myself. And she is quite excited about meeting everyone and joining in the singing of songs and the making of merry. So, in the Martinfest sense, I am a bachelor no longer.
That makes me very happy. But I am also quite sad that she never got to meet Laura Voorhis, as I am certain they would have made fast friends and enjoyed each other’s company and humor immensely.
Laura, who had been to every Martinfest, and who was the hostess supreme of the informal Thursday Night Welcoming Party, had to leave this greater cosmic party early. And as far as I am concerned, this entire Martinfest will be played-out and made the most of in her honor.
No one was more supportive and encouraging of my own music than Laura, from the moment she handed me her first Martin at the first Martinfest and asked me to play it for her, because she was too shy about playing in front of other people. So, I am selfishly sorry she didn’t get a chance to see and her my first commercially available album of original solo guitar compositions.
It will be officially released on August 9, 2018. But until then, it will be exclusively available to anyone attending Martinfest who might be interested in owning a copy. And you can learn more about that at tspguitar.com and One Man’s Guitar.
A copy o f the CD will be auctioned off at the Park on Sunday, to benefit the UMGF Martinfest coffers.
And so I am seriously ready to wind down and unwind after the four months of recording and production, and mourning far too many losses, and to get down to playing guitars just for the fun of it, and the love of it, and for the love of music that we all share at Martinfest, while we can.
May there be much rejoicing and delightful voicing.
July 1, 1968 the band called the Band released Music from Big Pink
They changed American music forever
But not just American music was widely influenced by this scraggly group of Americans and Canadians. Eric Clapton heard the record and decided to quite what he was doing and go do something else. He even considered moving to Woodstock, NY to meet these guys and talk them into letting him join the Band.
Here’s the Band 30 years later, joined by the Staple Singers, performing the most iconic song from that first record.
Uniquely American, Steely Dan in a full concert shot in 2006
For your Fourth of July listening pleasure
Songs
Turtle Talk
Bodhisattva
Time Out Of Mind
Aja
Hey Nineteen
I Got The News
Home At Last
Black Friday
Chain Lightning
Green Earrings
Dirty Work
Band Intros
Show Biz Kids
Do It Again
Peg
Don’t Take Me Alive
Kid Charlemagne
Pretzel Logic
FM
My Old School
Instrumental Outro
The Steely Dan Band
Donald Fagen – Keyboards and Vocals
Walter Becker – Guitar
Jon Herrington -Guitar
Freddie Washington – Bass
Keith Carlock – Drums
Jeff Young – Keyboards and Backing Vocals
Walt Weiskopf – Sax
Michael Leonhart – Trumpet
Jim Pugh – Trombone
Roger Rosenberg – Baritone Sax
Carolyn Leonhart-Escoffery – Backing Vocals
Cindy Mizelle – Backing Vocals
Michael McDonald – Keyboards and Vocals
Three unique voices joined as one for the first time, fifty years ago today… and became CSN
As the story goes, David Crosby listened to Stephen Stills and Graham Nash singing a song at a small dinner party, and asked them to sing it one more time…
As can often happen one half century later, Stills and Crosby differ on the exact where and when it happened. The important thing is, it happened.
In the quirky revealing of his own brilliance, he hoists the banner of long-dead Shakespeare, and how that genius has managed to burst from his own time to enrich so many other times with his written way of piercing to the very heart of what it is to be human. And few have so brought down the high and mighty to show the fragile facade they live behind, like said Mark.
When is his knighthood to arrive? Long over due if you ask me.
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My first thought this morning was wondering if mathematician Stephen Hawking was aware of the day, given that it was his last day. R.I.P.
Beloved childhood comfort food leads to an annual ritual –
Beefaroni on my birthday
Chef Boyardee is a brand of canned pasta products. But once upon a time Chef Boyardee was the head of kitchen at the five-star Plaza Hotel. He is personally responsible for Americans associating “Italian food” with pasta and tomato sauce, and particularly spaghetti with meatballs.
Many of my earliest memories concern eatable entities, at the least the happiest ones. From Play-Doh, which is rather bland, but very salty, to Funny Face, a competitor of Kool-Aid, which my mom would put in milk to trick me into drinking that calcium delivery device, I have vivid remembrances attached to many eating and drinking experiences.
My dimmest memory is a view from my high chair, looking across some sort of food and out the kitchen to the front door some 40 feet away. It hovers in a corner of my mind, dark, as if it is night and all the lights are off. There is a photo of me in that very seat on my 1st birthday. But I assume the remembered event came a bit later.
Childhood Favorites
When it comes to “real food,” there was my mother’s chili. Years later I sought out how she had made it, and was somewhat disappointed to learn it consisted of Campbell’s tomato soup with browned hamburger and about three pieces of raw onion per person. She didn’t even add the chili powder called for by the recipe on soup can.
Another favorite for me and my sister three years my junior was the macaroni and cheese made by our older sister when she would be babysitting us. Again, it proved a let down to learn it was simply boiled macaroni with a large brick of Velveeta melted throughout.
As my childhood comfort food pillars toppled one by one, only one has remained steadfast and forever satisfying. Chef Boyardee’s Beefaroni, part of this complete birthday feast.
Served in vintage Fiestaware!
2017’s Birthday Carbfest was just as grand.
I have enjoyed Beefaroni on my birthday for years beyond count, rarely missing the opportunity, whether I have it for lunch, or supper, as we called dinner back in Ohio, or squeezing it in as a late night snack.
I do not now remember when Beefaroni entered my life. But I remember clearly splitting one 15 oz can with my little sister, on many occasions, after walking home from school for lunch. Now I often have two full cans just for me. But I cannot buy the large cans, as the consistency just isn’t the same. And even with the regular cans, I have to put a good dozen of them to my ear and give them a shake to find the two with the least amount of slosh. Otherwise the sauce is too soupy.
A Surprising Pedigree
I was not able to find any data concerning when it was actually invented. But the chef on the can really was a chef, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, in fact. It was the premiere hotel in the United States. And to provide some perspective, today rooms start at $825 a night.
Ettore Boiardi worked in restaurants in Italy near Bologna, starting at age eight, and then followed his brother over to America in the early 1900s, where he is reputed to have worked his way up in the Plaza’s kitchen to Head Chef.
He also oversaw two major dinners for President Woodrow Wilson, his second wedding, and a White House homecoming dinner for 2,000 World War I veterans.
At some point he anglicized his name to Hector Boyardee, and opened a restaurant in 1926, at Woodland Avenue and East 9th Street, in Cleveland Ohio. Il Giardino d’Italia was both popular and influential in popularizing what we now think of as Italian food in America. As demand for his recipes grew, the Boyardee brothers opened a factory in Pennsylvania for their Bolognese-style dishes, which families could prepare at home. Spaghetti and meatballs soon became a national dish of America as well as Italy.
During World War II, the factory made rations for the U.S. Army, and returned to normal but increased production in peacetime, retaining all of its employees. But they had an added advantage: the vacuum-sealed can, and the machinery necessary to make it thanks to the War Department. And that is how just about every canned food you can think of came into being.
The company was eventually swallowed up by corporate giants, as family businesses usually are, but Chef Boyardee remained a figurehead well into the 1970s.
An Acquired Taste
A taste of the old country remains in Beefaroni, the humble carb and fat delivery device that remains every bit as good as it did when I was 8 years old.
I never liked canned pasta products, and still don’t with one important exception. And when the ingredients consist of hamburger, macaroni and sauce, the sauce matters a great deal. It can be any brand, they all have this same fakey orange color and are far too sugary. While tis true Beefaroni has its share of sugar, or actually corn syrup these days, it has always stood apart, with a tomato sauce that actually tastes (a lot) like the genuine article. I know some of my preference for Beefaroni is related to a pleasant sense memory from my boyhood. But it really is good. And it is not all that bad for you, with less sugar than many grocery store products that claim to be healthy.
Everyone has their favorite comfort foods from their childhood, and others have certain birthday foods they never grow tied of. What are yours?
Please use the Comments form below to share your favorites!
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Here is a commercial I still remember clearly from long ago:
