The Oppenheimer Report 5/27/19

Does anybody know who Edward Herbert Beresford is? Better known as “Chip Monck”, he was a theatrical lighting designer responsible for lighting the first Woodstock Music Festival stage. His deadpan voice can be heard on the soundtrack for the movie, Woodstock, and on the subsequent Woodstock: The Original Music Soundtrack And More album,. He made public service announcements, including the famous one warning people to beware of the “brown acid”. For anyone who may not know, acid is the street name for the hallucinogenic drug L.S.D, which was especially popular back in the 60s and 70s. I understand it is still available today on the street, although I wouldn’t know. I’m not sure what was circulating around the Woodstock Festival, but acid came in many forms when I was a teenager. With nicknames like “blotter”, “sunshine”, and “purple haze”, acid came in many shapes and potencies, and some of it, not all, was dangerous. From my understanding, it first emerged as a research drug to be tested on human subjects ,and in its purest form, it was not deemed to be life-threatening. How it could affect  one’s mental state is another question. In an altered state of mind, users sometimes ruined their lives. Just ask Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of the band Pink Floyd. The other problem with acid was that it was sometimes cut with other substances, which could be harmful to the body.

I had two noteworthy secondhand run-ins with the drug. The first incident occurred when I was a teenager and attended a wild and unchaperoned party in New York City, hosted by one of my high school classmates. The party took place in a high-rise apartment, somewhere in the heart of Manhattan. There were a lot of drugs being passed around. Joni Mitchell’s Court And Spark album was playing on the radio as I walked out onto the balcony for a breath of fresh air. Much to my surprise, one of my female classmates was out there, standing on the railing of the balcony. I greeted her as calmly as I could, suspecting as I did that she was tripping on the acid which was circulating at the party. Without making too much of a fuss, I calmly asked her why she was standing on the railing of the balcony (which was well over 100 feet above street level), and she happily replied that she intended to jump over to the high-rise balcony across the street. It never crossed her mind that this might be a bad idea. About that time, the host of the party walked out onto said balcony, and together we (mostly he) convinced her that she needed to come inside and help us with something. Thankfully, after some negotiating, she did step down from the railing and followed us inside, after several tense moments. The second experience ended tragically. Someone at our college in Connecticut was manufacturing L.S.D. and while testing its strength, he lost his mind and stabbed one friend to death and seriously injured another. Every “bad trip” acid story I have ever heard has been directly attributable to the potency of the drug.  

In the past week, the opioid crisis has revisited and traumatized our Muskoka community. I’m not clear on the details, but reportedly, there have  been several drug-related deaths caused an especially potent form of heroin. Known on the street as “purp”,  this dangerous drug is laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl, or sometimes the exponentially more deadly carfentanil. There have also been unsubstantiated reports that other locally sourced drugs, like cocaine and even some black market weed, have been laced with these potenially lethal additives. I think back to the potential risks I faced as a teenager, and they pale by comparison to the dangers recreational drug users and addicts face today. Any pill handed out at a party can be deadly, and uninformed drug experimentation today is far riskier than it was over 40 years ago. Disregarding for a moment the dangers an addict faces, anybody, even, straight-as-an-arrow kids, can end up the victim of this exploding opioid crisis. My heart goes out to the families and friends of those victims. By the way, I understand that the girl we talked off the balcony that fateful night eventually became a successful scientist.

Final note:  I never dreamed I’d become a basketball fan, but, now I'm hooked. What a great playoff series the Toronto Raptors have had thus far. GO RAPTORS! You’ve fought so hard to get where you are now. Fans from all across Canada are rooting for you, wishing you continued success in your bid to become the NBA champions!

- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 5/20/19

Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the Muskoka 2/4 Craft Beer Festival in Huntsville’s River Mill Park, sponsored by the Huntsville BIA and Hunters Bay Radio, The Bay 88.7 FM. This year, I believe the attendance was the highest so far, around 1400 attendees, and though the weather was not perfect, the rain held off until the end of the day. I’m convinced everyone had a good time; I know I did. Fifteen craft breweries set up tents down around the River Mill Park bandstand and attendees were able to sample any number of the approximately 40 brews offered, served in little sampler mugs. Hunters Bay Radio (The Bay 88.7 FM) provided non-stop musical entertainment throughout the day, on two back-to-back stages, and there were food stands offering a variety of munchies for  all imbibers.

When I arrived “Tonic Lane” was onstage, and if you have the opportunity, you owe it to yourselves to see these kids. They are all top-notch musicians, spawned in large part from the remarkable music department at Huntsville High School. I wish I’d had their talent when I was that young; I wish I’d had the kind of mentoring available in this community. I’ve been playing the guitar for fifty years and I still don’t have their chops.  My friends Paul Noonan, who might be the best kept secret in our musical community, and Sean Cotton, who has so far produced four of my songs, performed a great acoustic set. After they played, I spoke with Paul, who is a recent emigrant from Wales,UK about our good fortune to be living in such a music friendly locale. With so much emphasis on popular recognition, and with the ever-eroding quality of commercial radio, it is incumbent on community and college radio stations, as well as musician-friendly venues, to carry the torch. Kudos to Jeff Carter, managing director of The Bay 88.7 FM, for his undying support of local artists. Another one of my producers, the always entertaining and talented Juan Barbosa, did some of his tried and true originals, accompanied by his musical partner and collaborator, Jeff Stamp, a.k.a “Stampy” “, “Ol Stampy” and a few other aliases. In their set there was a cameo by up and coming young artist Sawyer Lance, who knocked it out the park with a passionate rendition of one of his latest song Fireball. That kid could sing the phonebook and sell it, and he’s fast developing into a capable songwriter as well. The first time Sawyer played the Live Drive at The Bay 88.7 FM, Jeff Carter insisted we broadcast one of his songs from the recorded show and use it in regular rotation. That song ended up reaching #1 on Muskoka's Top 20 Countdown. Jeremy Waterhouse, rock/reggae guitarist and singer song writer, performed a fantastic with his band Waterhouse, which included the tight rhythm section of Phebus Phebus on bass, Barry Hayward on congas, and Imre de Jonge on drums. Adding to the groove were backup vocalists (Imre’s daughter) Bronwyn Boyer, and Tamica Herod, with Dick Fairthorne II filling out the mix on keyboards. Among other songs, they played great covers of Pink Floyd and Santana in a reggae time signature, and they really got the crowd rocking. Christine Heron and Jason Bradley Hack did their inspiring and quirky take on country covers with a hint of psychedelia, Hunters Bay Radio Canadian Country host (airing on The Bay from 3p.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays) James Van Meer played some of his original songs. Hip hop band Taktikz won the award for inspiring the most audience participation.  Hip hop is not a genre which I embrace, but front man Adam Lee is doing his best to make a believer out of me. These guys were really good and had me dancing like a fool before their set was over. As a songwriter, I am always interested in expanding my range, and every so often, when I am exposed to the more melodic, lyrical element of hip hop, I can relate. Taktikz had an undeniable groove and it was just good fun all around. Adam Lee is an engaging artist and, judging from his audience, he has a loyal and growing fan base. We have had a few conversations about the genre, and he has generously offered to teach me a little bit about hip hop, which is so unfamiliar to me (but not most of the rest of the world). Closing out the afternoon, alt-rock band Overplay, including frontman Jesse Cotton, performed a rousing set of their original tunes.To Clayton Earl and his  band Another Anxious Tomorrow (featuring Jack Nickalls, son of actor and Hunters Bay Radio morning show radio host Grant Nickalls), I'm sorry I missed your set, but I'm sure it was great. All in all, it was a wonderful day of music, beer, food, and celebration. By the way, there are video clips of many of the acts available on the Hunters Bay Radio Facebook page. I know because I shot some of them.

For me, it was all about the live music. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the music business is slowly sucking the last bit of creativity out of music. While good songs and musicians abound, 90% or more of them are eclipsed by the robotic sameness which drives mainstream pop today. I volunteer for this little community radio station to offer an alternative to the soul-sucking pop drek that passes for commercial radio. I am surrounded by like-minded volunteers and musicians at The Bay 88.7 FM, which generously offers a voice to under-recognized musicians. Every on of my friends who performed who performed at the Muskoka 2/4 Beerfest brought their “A” game, and it was exhilarating to see them perform so well in front of such a large audience. Though I had little to do with the success of this event, or the artists who performed therein, I felt like a proud father.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED     

The Oppenheimer Report 5/13/19

Me with Mom (Grampy in the background)

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I posted a photo on Facebook of me and my mom when I was about two or three. The photograph was taken at our summer cottage near Crystal Beach on the north shore of Lake Erie, at the house I sold shortly after my mom died in 2011. I should have sold the house long before she died, but held onto it for all the wrong reasons. I felt I could not sell my mom’s summer home, in case she might want to visit it again. Mostly, I suppose, I was in denial that I would never again be able to recreate those fabled family gatherings, full of laughter and barbecues, and maybe sometimes a little too much booze. I’m not sure when it was purchased, but her father bought it when there were few other houses on the beach, perhaps in the early 1930s.  I kept deluding myself that the house still meant something to her; it was, after all, such an important meeting place for our family, and a house where we gathered from our distant homes to reunite.  In fact, for the last five years of her life, Mom suffered from a degenerative illness known as Lewy Body dementia, and she most likely did not know the house even existed. It was on an acre of waterfront land and was expensive to maintain. I finally let it go.  

As the picture suggests, life was good back then, so good in fact, that I’d say most of my happiest memories occurred in that old beach house. I wrote four or five songs about the experience, and recently recorded one of them, “Grampy’s House”, about the feeling that I have not been in sync with the passage of time. It is about taking a walk on the beach near that property, shortly before I was about to sell it, and describes the haunting regret; the feeling that time was just rolling over me like a bulldozer. When I sold the house, I went in to clear out the chattels that were not included in the sale, and stuck in the back of a bedroom closet I found old paintings my mom had made as a young art student. Everywhere there were mementos of the distant past; trinkets, linens, furniture that I could not keep, and photographs. While it made me sad to let most of the contents go, the memory of that house conjures up a thousand happy memories, and for this I am thankful. Besides, “you can’t take it with you.”

I remember my first boat, a tiny little red wooden boat that my grandfather gave to me when I was the little boy in the above-mentioned photo. It was barely large enough for a little boy to sit in. I’ve loved boats and water ever since the day I first floated around in that one. I remember Bassett’s Farm (a.k.a. Longmeadow Farm) near Crystal Beach, where Mom and Dad kept their horses in the summer. I remember the sound of the clunky old water pump that delivered water to the barn. I recall the omnipresent smells of livestock, manure, and hay, and some of the people who ran the farm, including old Mr. Bassett, the owner. I remember the sound of cicadas in the hot, humid nights, walks to Windmill Point to explore the ruins of that spooky old windmill, and the bellow of the old foghorn coming from the Point Abino Lighthouse. Most of all, I remember my parents when they were young and healthy, and when we all had so much life ahead of us.

One of the songs I began to write ten years ago, then shelved until recently, is a song about an old photograph of my mom sitting on a horse in Palm Springs, and the working title of the song is “Laughing”. There is a line which reads: “wherein lies the truth behind the flash of a camera smile?” The photograph was taken in the late fifties, shortly after my thirteen-year-old sister Joanne was hit and killed by a truck as she ran across the street. The song is about loss, and how we deal with it. Appropriately, it is unfinished, because at 63, I’m still trying to figure it all out. My mom was so many things to so many people. She was a volunteer at Buffalo Children’s Hospital, she sat on many boards, was a generous supporter of local charities, she ran a large house, and raised a family. While she came from privilege, she was full of love and she gave it freely to anyone who was receptive. Those who knew her well knew were aware of her accomplishments, but she was also a complicated, creative person, who had endured formidable heartache in her life. It took me a long time to realize what an amazing woman she was.

I can’t slow down the torrent which is time. One minute, I’m a three-year-old kid, safe and happy in my mother’s arms. Before I knew it, sixty years have passed and I’m lost and feeling like I’ve been left at the starting gate. Today, beach houses, long-gone friends, pets, old boats, cars, celebrations, memories, and yellowed photographs, are all swirling around in my head like those spinning newspapers you see in the movies to connote the passage of time. Sometimes, I get a bit overwhelmed, especially on a damp, cold, gloomy Monday such as this one. My mom was many good things, but most of all, she loved me and cared for me unconditionally. For this I am thankful. I love her and I miss her dearly, and I owe it to her memory to do my best  to follow her example.  

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED     

The Oppenheimer Report 5/6/19

As I begin to write this week’s instalment of the Oppenheimer Report, the flood waters are receding in our community, and I can now see the stairs of our retractable dock at the waterline. The road leading to our house has re-opened, and I don’t need to make a 15-kilometre detour to pick up our mail down the road. Our phone lines are still out, but I won’t complain, because less than two miles away, along the Magnetawan River, people have had their homes destroyed. Indeed, we were very lucky, this time. The other day, I took the paddle boat out on the lake and surveyed the nearby shoreline. As I suspected, many of the rental cottages down the way, which have perennially flooded in the spring, are still underwater. One of the oldest cottages on the lake, across from us and long uninhabited, is showing visible signs of structural collapse. Today, as I waited in line for my turn to dump our garbage at the local landfill, I noticed one of my neighbors with a trailer full of debris from the flood. The cleanup from this one will be long and arduous. Even before this latest disastrous flooding, the winter of 2018-2019 was a destructive one for us here at Jasper Bark Lodge. Underground frost heaves and the wildly varying temperature changes have wreaked havoc with our out buildings and our land. Our hydro pole is at a 45-degree slant now and one of our garden sheds, where I keep the ATV, has sunk about 8” in the front. The other day, when I drove the ATV back into the shed, it started to roll back out. That was when I first noticed the new and pronounced slant to the building.

As I’ve mentioned several times before in this report, there is a segment that I enjoy every weekday morning at 10:10 a.m. on Hunters Bay Radio, called Tech 5. Hosted by my octogenarian friend Ben Harrison, this morning’s topic was Facebook, and Ben mentioned two statistics which surprised me. First, he said that Facebook was now worth about $600 Billion. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had any idea his social experiment would grow into the monster it is now, when he illegally put up its precursor, FaceMash, on the Harvard University private network back in 2003. The second statistic Ben sited is that, in 50 years, it is predicted that the number of Facebook pages dedicated to dead people will be greater than those of the living. This in turn begs the question, what impact might these posthumous pages have on the recording of history? Some, I included, argue that there is too much information out there, and ironically, sometimes too much information can obscure the truth. There are plenty of examples of rants people put up that I’m sure they wish they hadn’t. While one can take down a post, once it’s “out there” it’s hard to expunge. These days, with the truth on injured reserve, I’m not so sure a damning post would be as harmful as it used to be. When I think of some of the scandals that brought down former presidential candidates (e.g. Hart and Dukakis), and compare those to the raw sewage our Commander-In-Tweet routinely spews out onto the social network, I’m not sure the truth really matters to many people anymore. It’s certainly difficult to ascertain. I can’t help but wonder, what will my legacy be? What digital footprint have I left that will reveal my deepest darkest secrets?  

One of my musician friends, who performed on last Thursday night’s Live Drive show at the station, told me he’d just taken a brief Facebook holiday. I asked him about it because Shauna, who does a lot of the social media posting for Hunters Bay Radio, tried to tag him for the show announcement, and she was unable to do so. He said Facebook had become a suck on his limited spare time (ain’t that the truth) and that he needed to cut himself off. More and more, I’m hearing the expression “Facebook holiday”. What information have we, in a weak moment, inadvertently revealed during our 2-20 hours per week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.? Especially now that we are in this superheated era of political correctness, where sometimes inappropriate humor becomes a career-demolishing blunder, I’d be concerned if I were ever to aspire to public office (which I most certainly will not!) that my words would inevitably come back to haunt me. I’ve been writing this report for close to 30 years, and for the past 25 years, it has been posted in some form or another on the internet. Thankfully, I have about 13 loyal readers, but there are plenty of things I wish I hadn’t said, mostly nasty things about self-important celebrities, athletes, and politicians.

Nothing much happened last week in the news. U.S. Attorney General Barr stonewalled the Senate Judiciary Committee, while being questioned about the legitimacy of his de facto exoneration of Rump; in Russia a commercial jet was hit by lightning and exploded in flames while making an emergency landing, killing about 41; there was a failed coup in Venezuela, wherein opposition leader Juan Guaido attempted to unseat dictator Nicolas Maduro; and oh yes, the royal bun is out of the oven. Today, Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex today announced the birth of their baby boy, who is now our first biracial royal. The haters should be all over social media commenting on this last story. Can’t wait for that “truthiness”. Gotta go, Facebook is calling.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED