From ‘The Avenue Of Champions’

The air blowing into the open window was warm enough to warn of the heat to come but not yet unpleasant. The wipers smeared their way back and forth across the greasy windshield, trying to erase the light drizzle that had begun to fall. The homeless were already busy making their way through the late summer fog, eyes wild and blazing. A group of three staggered like the undead toward the Belvedere 7-Eleven that was behind my old house on Pine. It was almost six o’clock — when they started selling booze again. We rolled our small convoy urgently past them and got it on further downtown, supercans rattling around in the steel cage that formed the bed of the stake body truck, the bags inside the cans whipping recklessly in the wind.

So begins a new novel by Clay Blancett, entitled The Avenue of Champions. You can read the rest of the first chapter on his blog, fig.1-Worm Drive.

The whole thing just became available on Amazon. Here’s the summary from there:

A recently divorced single father struggles to maintain his identity and integrity working for the City of Richmond’s Solid Waste pick up. The protagonist negotiates the environments of manual labor and family life while trying to avoid the costs of his alcoholism on his family, his past, and his sense of himself. Nearly brought to suicide, the protagonist survives by discovering the basic beauty of the humanity he shares with the people he works with.

I have posted before about authors before who include Oregon Hill in their stories. Of course I have followed Howard Owen, with his detective thriller, Oregon Hill, but don’t forget the post-plague Harbor On The Hill. I would love to post more.

August 20, 1968 – Hendrix Plays The Mosque

Times Dispatch music review the next day:

He calls it the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and like it or not, that’s what it is.
Hendrix is a soft-spoken Negro. He plays his innovative style of music with two English boys, and While the sound is white, what Hendrix himself does is alternately intellectual or frenzied.
He was dressed for last night’s Mosque concert in bellbottom cerise pants. He also wore an exotically embroidered vest over a black shirt, two belts — one wide and gold — and three ornate rings. His carefully clipped hair stands high and round like a topiary tree.
Hendrix, who taught himself guitar by listening to old rhythm and blues artists, has put that style of music aside.
Instead, he has originated a music of his own, using amplifiers and electronics as a part of it.
The result is a lot of noise and harsh sound, but listen carefully and there are some startling musical effects emerging.
Such as when he uses the shrill sound of feedback as a key note in his harmony, or when the overtones that swell over and beneath his music become an intrinsic part of it.
Intricate Figures
Other than that, his musical understanding is shown in the intricate figures he weaves on the guitar, often holding the instrument tight against his chest, as if he were a human resonator. At other times he is strictly a sensational showman, as when he swings the guitar between his legs, or lifts it high and seems to chomp on it like an ear of corn. All time he keeps playing, never losing the thread holding the song together.
Between shows the 24·year-old sensation of Europe and the United States, was a warm, but shy person, tired from the hectic grind of one-night stands, on an eight-week tour, but happy to make his music and have it appreciated.
Traveling in the same musical package is a group known as The Eire Apparent, a group of terribly young and strangely dressed young men – one looked as if he had borrowed his Aunt Fanny‘s hat – who display a good deal of talent; and a three man group called The Soft Machine that features a topless drummer, a leather-jacketed organist and a guitarist, complete with Stetson hat, who looked like Cat Ballou, as he slumped over his guitar.
It was almost impossible to bear the music out front, as it was so amplified. But backstage, where the resonance wasn’t as strong, the music the two lesser—known groups made was much more palatable. Too bad they can’t give up those umbilical cords that tie them to their sound boxes, or at-least hear how they negate their own efforts with the amplification.
When the amplifiers are lowered, and the music emerges a bit more, one realizes that Hendrix is playing blues and protest songs, as much as he is fiery, possessing ones.
He dedicated “I Don‘t Live Today” to “all the self-appointed soldiers in St. Petersburg, Chicago, Vietnam and, or yes, the American Indian.” The song ends in a special effect like a catcall. His “Red House Blues” displayed his original harmonic technique around the old jazz form, but his version a squalling, wailing blues — the lament is there, but it is shriller. In fact, if the music is representative of Hendrix’ own soul, then his soul seems to be a shrieking and demanding a place in the sun.