The Oppenheimer Report 8/25/14

One of the hazards of growing older is the general obliviousness to one’s growing lack of dexterity. As arthritis begins to set in, something I never thought would happen to me, I am beginning to have some unanticipated problems. The other day, running to the car to avoid a sudden downpour, my hip simply gave out and I stumbled to the ground. Short of a skinned knee and a bruised ego, I was fine, but it was one of life’s little reminders that I am not as spry as I once thought I was. I have lived my life so far relatively careless of my potential to injure myself, and thankfully, I have remained injury free for most of it. This past winter was a wake-up call.

The ice was particularly treacherous up here last winter, and it seemed as if the freeze/thaw cycle continued for months. Our driveway was a skating rink for a good deal of the winter, and while I often wore grips over my winter boots when I took Jasper out for her walks, one fateful morning in January, I neglected to put them on. I have to put them on outside the house as they can mar the floor. Sure enough, that was the day I slipped on the ice and fell. You wouldn’t think a 16-pound miniature Schnauzer could cause an accident like that, but walking down the steep portion of our driveway – the only place TO walk last winter – she pulled me just hard enough to yank my feet out from under me, and down I went, hard onto my right shoulder. That is the same shoulder on which I’d had surgery performed over thirty years ago. I knew I had sustained some trauma, but it didn’t hurt all that much, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it at the time. Within a week, when the injury had not healed and the strength in my right arm was severely compromised, I saw my doctor and began to go for physiotherapy. With no improvement after six weeks, and after an X-Ray and an MRI, it became apparent that the injury requires surgery.

Originally, my surgery was scheduled for August 29^th, less than a month after I had my appointment with the surgeon. The problem with this, apart from the fact that I didn’t want to cut the boating season short, is that it likely means I will not play the guitar for several months. I’m done with the Tree Ring Tuesday performances, which were a lot of fun by the way, but I’m furiously recording songs while I still have Juan Barbosa at my disposal. He did a wonderful job with my first album of songs and now we’ve begun to record songs for a second album. After I have two albums under my belt, I hope to persuade some of the local musicians to cover my songs in a third album. I have lined up some musicians and want to strike while the iron is at least luke warm. Last week, Shauna arranged to bump my surgery back to October 24th, so I will have a little more lead time to get some of these songs “in the can.” While I do not delude myself into thinking this is in any way important to anyone but me, I have come this far and I want to finish what I started. Then I can move on to my next hobby: upholstering couches with squirrel fur.

My last Tree Ring Tuesday performance of this summer was held last week at "Seven Main Café" in Huntsville, where I was joined by a fellow singer/songwriter, Michael “Lopez” Phillips. One of our G-d-daughters, Lindsay Watson, drove all the way up from Toronto to surprise me with her attendance, and that made me extremely happy. I think she genuinely enjoyed hearing me perform. Ever my promoter and biggest fan, Shauna was out in the street before we began, handing out fliers and urging people to attend the free concert. As I said before, Tuesdays are a hard sell, but we’ve managed to attract some audiences. I could not “hear the crickets” at the end of each song. It is my aspiration to somehow promote and sponsor our local community of musicians, young and old. We’ve got great talent up here in the GWN, and Hunter’s Bay Radio, our community radio station, is committed to giving these artists a voice. I will pay local musicians to produce and cover my songs. As well, I intend to contribute to the local organizations that promote young musicians in the area, and help them to learn their craft. Music heals! Sadly, it does not repair torn rotator cuffs.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 8/18/14

Here is my indignant rant of the week. Shauna and I are fans of Jann Arden’s music and songwriting and of late, we have been following her on Facebook. We saw her in concert last year and she’s really funny. Her comments on Facebook are witty and she is a good storyteller. She’s been writing a lot lately about caregiving issues with regard to her elderly parents (who sound like a hoot) and this is of particular interest to me.

The other day, Shauna alerted me to a controversial opinion Jann had posted on her page about a new radio phenomenon. Radio editing has always been an unsavory reality of music broadcasting, and it is not uncommon for a 4-minute-long pop song to be whittled down by 30 or 40 seconds in order to fit the radio “format.” This was usually done with the reluctant approval of the artist, or of his or her record company, but of late, the process has been taken to the extreme. Apparently, there is a top 40 radio station in Calgary called AMP, part of a chain of stations across Canada. They have implemented a new format called QuickHitz, which essentially takes pop songs and cuts them in half for their attention-challenged listeners.  I assume that the thinking here is that listeners do not have sufficient attention to sit through an entire 3:30 minute song, and this allows the station to pack in twice as many hits in an hour. If the artist does not consent, they are not aired, and most artists probably want the exposure, however truncated.

I’m not a big fan of top 40 radio, but this seems to be a new low. To me, this is symptomatic of two things. One, it’s another canary in the coal mine for conventional radio. It indicates to me that the music industry is changing and big radio broadcasters of pop music will do just about anything to survive. They are struggling to compete with the growing popularity of satellite radio and the omnipresent availability of just about any on-demand music one wants to hear on the internet. The other red flag is the dumbing down of the listening audience. Perhaps this is what the listeners want, who knows, but in scrambling to satisfy this “demand” by cutting pop songs in half, are not the broadcasters contributing to the death of this art form? Let’s feed the perceived ADD shall we? OK, one could argue that omitting a couple of the forty “baby’s” in Justin Beiber’s hit single Baby might not make much difference to the song, but is this not a slippery slope? Just as reality television is, in my opinion, eroding the intelligence of its viewers, so will the abbreviated song undermine the integrity of song writing. As much as I have begun to embrace the great Satan of social media, I feel the immediacy of Twitter, and Instagram, and Facebook feeds the impatience of a short attention span society. It is most certainly diluting people’s communication skills. I believe the shorter our attention spans become, the less we absorb. What part of Beethovan’s 9^th would you suggest we cut out; after all it is kind of long? And maybe we don’t need the entire statue of David, just cut him off above the balls. Pop songs do not require a lot of grey matter; if a pop song has merit, it has merit in its entirety. Jeesh. There, rant presented and vented.

Cole Porter must be rolling in his grave.   

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 8/12/14

I could not believe the news today that Robin Williams has died, and that his death was a suspected suicide. I’d heard about his problems with alcoholism and substance abuse, but did not realize he was also struggling with depression. My dad was the first person to apprise me of Williams’ comic genius after he happened to catch the comedian in an episode of the ground-breaking sitcom Mork and Mindy. Dad had a wonderful sense of humor, and I’d never seen him so enthusiastic about a sitcom. Of course, I had to see what he thought was so funny, and boy was he right. I thought the guy was hilarious too. There was a rumor that the show’s formula for success was to surround Williams with straight men and women with a basic script, and then to let him ad lib as the cameras rolled. This guy was like no one I’d ever seen before. Maybe Sid Caesar was as funny. Clearly, he was in a league of his own as a stand-up comic, but what I did not expect was that Williams would be a great actor as well. His range was enormous and he could play the creepy photo store guy in One Hour Photo, or the gay parent in The Birdcage, or the tall tale teller in Jacob the Liar, which I think was an adaptation of Isaac Singer’s short story Gimpel the Fool. His portrayal of the psychiatrist in Good Will Hunting was one of my all-time favorite Williams performances, and I think I liked him in everything he was in. I just pulled out my Leonard Malton’s 2012 Movie Guide and I am reminded of the many great movies in which he starred; movies like Dead Poets Society, The World According to Garp, Good Morning Viet Nam, The Fisher King, Patch Adams, One Hour Photo, and the list goes on. There were over fifty movies in all, and I think he made every one of them better. I feel the same way about him as I did upon hearing of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death. I feel as if the world has lost a great entertainer and a good, albeit complicated man. My sincerest condolences to his wife and family.

Last weekend, I travelled to Buffalo for the 2014 Western N.Y Powerboat Association Poker Run, and this one might have been the best so far. The weather was perfect and the turnout was incredible. I started going to these poker runs (which are essentially a lap around Grand Island and, weather permitting, a 20-30 mile run down the south shore of Lake Erie) about four or five years ago because my pal Bob is in the club that hosts them. When I attended my first run, there were quite a few boats, but in the last two years, it has grown to capacity (110 or so this year). It’s funny, because when Bob joined WYNPA many years ago, the club was about to fold. Somehow the members built it up again and now it hosts one of the more popular offshore runs in the country. The owner of Outer Limit boats attended this year, bringing with him four of his more expensive models to display and run. We joked about this year’s run, because it was as if there were two runs on Saturday. There was the Buffalo contingent, some who have big fast boats, but most who are like Bob with older, smaller 60-70MPH boats (Bob owns a 42 year-old, beautifully restored 27’ Magnum sedan cruiser, with a top speed of about 65MPH). Then, there were the extremely wealthy out-of town participants, who travel all around the country with crews and expensive towing vehicles, trailing their very expensive monsters to all the big runs. Boats were separated into classes according to top speed, and there were four classes this year. We were in the very slowest class, and saw little of the fastest boats as they ran (the run is usually over 50 miles). Once we got out into the open lake, I did see a rooster tail or two go by at over 100MPH, but saw nothing up close. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, the most powerful boat in the run was a catamaran, well over 40’ in length, with four 1300+hp big block V8s, capable of achieving a top speed in the vicinity of 170MPH. There is no boat show that I know of in North America that could be as much fun for the powerboat enthusiast as these offshore powerboat runs.

Final notes ...  did you know that there is a musical coming out, I believe in Toronto, called Rob Ford the Musical? I’d love to see it! Rumor has it Ford is trailing in the polls for the upcoming mayoral election and John Tory, the guy I like, is in the lead. We’ll see what the Ford Bros. tag team wrestlers have up their sleeves, but I think they may be on the ropes for this match. Tonight, I play my second to last Tree Ring Tuesday performance, in Burk's Falls, with Hunter's Bay Radio host and fellow singer songwriter Christine Heron. My last performance will be next Tuesday in Huntsville, and I can safely say I have enjoyed this experience. While I will never count myself as much of a performer, I can cross this off my bucket list now of things I did that scared me, and I've met some great fellow songwriters.

 

Robin, I'll miss you and I mourn the uncreated art you had yet to give us all. 

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 8/4/14

An old friend from Buffalo and his wife came to visit us last week and it was wonderful to see them both. Billy and I grew up down the street from each other in Buffalo, and he and his brother and sister were in our carpool to school. He has a very interesting family, and I enjoyed the chaos that ensued whenever I waited in their kitchen for that ride to school. His family was a sitcom waiting to be made and I was always jealous. While his family was animated and funny, my family was, by comparison, a little like that painting American Gothic – you know, the one depicting the farmer and his wife standing stone-faced and holding a pitchfork.

Billy and I attended the same boarding school, and we have remained friends for over 50 years. He, along with several other neighborhood pals and I came up with the unique Buffalo tradition of raffling off tickets to shoot a television set on New Year’s Day. That long standing Buffalo tradition endured for over a decade and became a rather large gathering. By the end, the event involved enough firepower to take over a small country.

Many years ago, I attended Billy's wedding to his wife Avra in Boston, and that celebration is etched in my memory. I and my best friend Bob rented a yellow Lincoln Town car, decorated it with pink pompoms (classy huh?), and ferried wedding guests around Boston. We used that car during the bachelor party and I distinctly remember driving down into Boston’s notorious combat zone and double parking the car while we sampled some of the local “dancing” establishments. The car looked as if it belonged to a pimp, and nobody touched it. Throughout that weekend, much of it a foggy blur, I also remember one of the other neighborhood friends, sitting in the back seat yelling over and over, “NO GUTS NO GLORY” as I nervously attempted to weave through congested Boston traffic.

One thing Billy and I have shared throughout the years is our love of good music. An excellent guitarist and pretty good keyboard player, Billy has made a good living producing music and video on a professional level. Over the years, when we have had the opportunity see each other, we inevitably break out the guitars and jam, tag team playing whatever songs we’ve penned. He came up with the musical arrangement for my hit single (sarcasm intended) How Come it Hurts When I Pee? and, to this day we get a laugh – we certainly make each other laugh - whenever we dust off that old chestnut. When their first son Max was born, Billy and Avra nicknamed him Noopy, and I wrote a parody of the McCoy’s hit Hang On Sloopy entitled Hang Ten Noopy. I wonder where that recording went, it might have been the worst song I ever recorded.

Now that I and my peers are rapidly approaching 60 years of age, it is comforting to note that some of us still go way back. I lost Frank last week, and of late my mortality has been haunting me. What is my legacy, if I die tomorrow will anyone remember me, have I done any good in my life … that sort of thing. One of the songs I played in last week’s jam session with Billy was Scrapbook, a song about summoning the peaceful, good moments in one’s life, in order to cope with the ever shifting sands. My most recent song, which I just completed, is a dark song called The Edge, about the regrets of an addict. While it is largely written from imagination, everything I write has a piece of me in it.

Certainly Billy and I have lived through our share of life’s drama. We may have achieved some success, inevitably we have stumbled, but throughout it all, we have remained friends. Though he is now known as Roy to most of his non-Buffalonian friends, he will always be Billy to me, and I will always be “Hyman” or “Grinder” to him. Don’t ask.

Sometimes old friends are the best friends, and today I remind myself to be thankful for all of them.

 

How come it hurts when I pee?

Darlin’ please tell me did you do this to me.

I appreciate the love you spread unselfishly,

I just hope what you’re spreadin’ don’t begin with a ‘G’ …

 

 Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED