Big Leather Couch

TIME TO DONATE SOME RICE TODAY!
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Go check out the updated count of grains donated over at Anndi's.

So how many bowls of rice have you donated? Many have become addicted!

HUH? HUH? What? You have not tried it yet?

WHUTTSAMADDAWIDYA?
<-----------GO 'DERE NOW! Bart Nance did not RELISH the thought of opening his eyes and looking over at the clock on the nightstand.

The dream had awoken him in a panic. His eyes opened anyway and they watched as the digital time changed to 12:29. What he did not know is if that were AM or PM. The room was in total darkness.

Totally confused by the dream which had woken him, he felt as if he were in a cocoon lying there in his bed. The covers were pulled up over his chin and he lay on his back and closed his eyes.

The dream was so real. He began to see snippets of it, playing on the inside of his eyelids.

He could see himself entering the law firm where he was a Senior Partner. As it was Friday, he was in a pair of jeans, a button down dress shirt in a pastel shade of pink and his black cowboy boots.

Bart saw the meeting he had with his largest client...replayed the entire 4 hour meeting in the span of 2 minutes…his eyes opened and the clock stared back, the green numbers almost burning into his eyes…12:31….

Closing his eyes again, he concentrated on the dream, trying to determine why this dream had affected him so.

Bart saw himself, once again sitting at his local watering hole. He was talking to Frank, the bartender, and eating his normal Friday dinner, Fried Clams and crispy spiced fries. The band was setting up their equipment. Why did the memory of the band cause Bart to shiver as he lay there beneath the sheets and comforter?

The bar began to fill with men and women, some couples but mainly singles, looking for that someone to make their Friday night more rewarding.

Ordering another drink Bart began to scout the club. Single again after a failed marriage, he had tried the blind dates his friends had set up for him, but they never seemed to work. Frank came over and tilted his head as he spoke, “Bart, new talent over in the far corner, never seen her in here before and she looks like she could be cut from her little group.”

Bart’s eyes scanned over to where Frank was looking and noticed her immediately. She was blond, about 5’7” tall. Her hair down around her shoulders, she was wearing a brick red blouse with that one extra button opened so that a bit more skin on her neck was showing. Her jeans hugged her hips and when she turned, Bart could see a tight ass and her long legs.

The band began to tune up and finish their preparation for the evenings set as Bart rose from his barstool and made his way back to the men’s room. His trip was as much an excuse to get a better look at this lady then anything else, as his journey brought him within 3 feet of her. As he walked by she turned and Bart smiled at her and she smiled back.

Bart’s eyes opened again, breaking away from his replaying of the dream, and the clock almost mocked him as the numbers blazed 12:40. The drapes pulled tight, he was still not sure if the sky outside was pitch black or if the sun were shining brightly, but at this point, he felt a need not to know that fact.

Slowly, his eyes closed again and he saw himself back on the bar stool sipping his drink. The band had begun and slowly the crowd was being drawn to the dance floor. He could, once again, see the woman standing with her friends as they watched the interactions of the crowd around them.

Then Bart watched as he stood up and walked directly over to her. She saw him coming and turned and whispered something to her friend. They both looked over toward him and they were both smiling. When Bart approached he also smiled and said “Hi, I was sitting over at the bar and I could not help but notice you. I was wondering if you would like to dance.”

She accepted and Bart led her to the much too small dance floor. They began to move to the music, their feet moving slowly as the song being played had attracted more of the patrons to get up. As the floor got more crowded they were forced closer and closer together and, even though the song was not so, they ended up body to body as if it were a slow number. It was almost impossible to talk Bart leaned in and semi-shouted “Name is Bart, you are very pretty.”

“Hi, I am Angela, thank you very much.” As the song came to an end, the band began to play a slow dance number and Bart immediately recognized it as the old Beatles’ song “Something”. He put his hand out and Angela put hers in his and their bodies became even tighter. They danced slowly, her head on his chest and Bart could smell her scent and he now remembered how it had intoxicated him.

They had danced almost every song for the rest of the evening. When the band took a break, they moved toward his seat at the bar and he stood as she sat and they talked, her hand resting on his chest, smiling up at him.

Bart’s eyes opened again and he realized he was now breathing a little too hard. His body was soaked in sweat and he could not understand why. Had she come back with him that evening? Had he done something to make her angry and she walked out of the bar on him? He could feel a problem…a horror, but he could not remember as he laid there.

He heard a thought in his head and it made his shiver, even with all the covers and comforter pulled up tight. 1:01 the green LED numbers screamed out at him, almost accusingly. Now why would he feel that? He thought of getting out of bed, but instantly knew that if he did, all memories of the dream would fade and he would never know what it was about.

Bart’s eyes closed again and he saw he and Angela in a collage of dancing and talking and then kissing. His body reacted to the visions of the kiss and he remembered how good it had felt.

Then they were in his car, driving…and then in a wooded area, kissing again.

Once more he was driving and he saw them pull into his garage. So she had come here. But where was she now he wondered as he lay there. She had come with him, in his car…so she had to still be there. Those thoughts made him feel even more apprehensive.

Bart saw them entering his home…kissing…dancing to the soft music coming from his stereo…and then he saw them walking toward the bedroom. This bedroom.

Bart’s eyes opened again and he looked around the room without moving. Everything looked normal, yet everything looked askew.

Tilting his head he looked at the clock again…and gasped. The LED numbers read 12:29 again. How could that be? Then his heart nearly stopped. The numbers on the clock were not their normal bright green…no the numbers on the clock were now blood red…

Bart Nance leaped from his bed and was again shocked into another reality. Standing there in the middle of his bedroom, he was fully clothed. Turning on the floor lamp, he stood in front of the mirror and looked at himself and shivered.

How could that be? Did all of this really happen, or was it just a concoction of his subconscious?

Why were there dark stains on his clothes? Bart Nance stripped his clothes off. A shower will help to revive him and maybe put everything into perspective. He walked into the bathroom and put his hand into the shower and turned on the water.

As the water began to run he turned and looked into the mirror and saw the black rings under his eyes…they had never been there before…why were they there now?

Then Bart pulled the shower curtain back and his eyes opened wide…his jaw dropped open and he began to move backward…the bathroom run snagged under his feet and he stumbled.

Putting his hands out he was not able to catch his fall.

Three days later, the two police officers forced their way into Bart Nance’s home after a call reported that he had not shown up to work or answered any of his phones.

Guns drawn, they made their way through the house.

When they came to the bathroom, they both stopped and re-holstered their weapons.

Looking into the bedroom they saw the man they were looking for, naked on the bathroom floor, a pool of blood around his head. They could see the blood and brain matter on the corner of the vanity where he had obviously banged his head.

The air was foul and the body in the early stages of decay. Flies buzzed around the room.

But that was the simple part of their vision.

The complicated part and the scene that made Officer Paul Getty turn and lose his just eaten lunch of an Italian Hoagie on the carpet in the hallway was the mass of body parts that they could see under the still running water in the shower…

Detective Steve Cooper thought his eyes were doing TRICKS on him. Sure he had seen the character Regan do it in “The Exorcist”, but to see a body live; the chest against the floor and the shoulder blades facing upward…with the head turned 180 degrees, the dead eyes staring up at him, open, pleading for justice, was almost too much for the 30 year veteran of the Homicide Squad to take.

He turned away from the sight to see through the window, the C.S.I. team climbing from their van. “Let them figure our how someone could snap a neck and turn it around so perfectly.”

“What was that Steve?” This was from Cooper’s partner for the last five years, Edward Young. Everyone called him ‘Eddie’, everyone except Cooper, who insisted upon calling him by his given name, Edward. Cooper wondered if his comment about the C.S.I. was not just in his head and he had said the words out loud.

“Nothin’ Edward, whatCHAgot?” Eddie Young was kneeling by the body, using his latex clad hands to check for some identification on the corpse. So, far he had found nothing in the back pockets on the pants or the side pockets of the jacket the victim wore. He needed to wait for the C.S.I. to clear the body and document its position before he would be able to check the front pants pockets and shirt pocket.

“No I.D. so far Coop, and would you PLEASE call me anything but Edward, I told you only my mom calls me that, and if she does, she is pissed.”

“OK ‘chump’ here comes the ‘trace twits’, so we better give them some room to do their job.”

“Chump is not what I had in mind you clown…”

As Coop and Eddie walked out of the apartment they gave their first impressions of the crime scene to the C.S.I. techs and then began speaking with the neighbors. What they collected was a lot of information about nothing. The apartment was supposed to be empty; no one heard a sound the night before, even the neighbors whose bedroom wall backed to the living room where the body was found.

And that is all we have at the moment. This is now the fourth story we have started, and can not finish…so it is telling us we have to get The Quest out of our brain and the only way to do that is to finish the damn thing…so…back to the salt mines…

As aTREAT, last weekend as we made a big pot of gravy and meatballs & sausage, we were sending teasing emails to our friends associated with the TOOSP email group (Taylor Hicks related), mentioning as we added ingredients. Well, that took on a mind of its own and ended in a ‘challenge’ to video tape my making of the lasagna…Well on Saturday we made more gravy and meat and on Sunday we put together 2 trays of lasagna…each 3 layers of filling thick.

AND……it is all preserved on digital tape. We will be editing over the next day or so and then will post it here on The Couch…

we can tell you that we are not ready for the ‘Next Great Food Network Star’ or anything…

and we probably have a better face for radio than TV…

and we did not have a camera person so all the shots are static…

though we moved the camera a few times…

and it might not all be easy to see...

and we were winging it so there are quite a few ‘ahhh’s’ in there

…OOOOO maybe a contest to see who guesses the number of ‘ahhhh’s’ LOL

And we have to redo the template of one of our friends and we did not get to it this weekend

…so, this week is busy and we leave Friday for Baltimore to see Matt…

Go to MO's for more Manic Monday entires..

Don't you love a cold beer in a FROSTED mug?

Don't you hate waking up in the morning in the fall and having to scrape the FROST off of your car windows before being able to drive to work?

It FROSTS my butt that Cleveland fell apart and allowed the team from Boston to gain entry into the World Series.

"FROSTY the Snowman" was a jolly happy soul.

"WHEN the FROST is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock"...WHAT the heck does that mean?

Robert Lee FROST (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work frequently used themes from rural life in New England.

My favorite is chocolate FROSTING

When we were in our twenties and we had individual strands of gray hair coming in, we actually had someone ask us if we FROSTED it.

Visit OUR FRIEND MO for more MANIC MONDAY submissions...


One of our favorites from Neil Young...nothing to do with the theme today, but it has been in our head for a few days...

Enjoy....

Well voting is done and it looks like....by a small margin....THE DOORS will be our next Tuneage Tutelage...Was actually surprised by the voting and the tight race...

She came out of the small town of Port Arthur, Texas on January 19, 1943 at St. Mary’s Hospital; Janis Lyn Joplin was the eldest daughter of Seth Ward Joplin and Dorothy Bonita East.

Her dad worked for Texaco and mom was the registrar at a local business college and Janis had two younger siblings; Michael and Laura. Janis had a knack for being a painter which is credited back to her mom and dad.

Joplin attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur from 1957 – 1960. As would be the case in her adult years, Janis was different from most of the kids in high school and was therefore shunned until she met a football player named Grant Lyons.

Lyons could probably be credited with giving us this remarkable artist, as it was he who played Janis her first bit of the blues; an old Leadbelly record. From that point on Janis began listening to blues musicians such as Bessie Smith, Odetta, and Big Mama Thornton and singing in the local choir.
After high school, Janis attended the University of Texas in Austin and lived in a building nicknamed “The Ghetto” at 2812 ½ Nueces Street. In 1962 she was the subject of an article in the campus newspaper entitled “She Dares To Be Different”. Fashioning herself after her blues heroines, Janis sang at the local coffee houses.

In 1963 Janis headed off to North Beach and then Haight Asbury, California continuing to play the coffee houses singing the blues and folk music.

On June 25, 1964 Janis was at the home of Jorma Kaukonen (who two years later would help found The Jefferson Airplane), and they recorded a group of songs including “Kansas City Blues” and “Hesitation Blues”.

These songs were recorded on a non-stereo reel-to-reel tape machine with Jorma’s wife Margareta playing the typewriter as a percussion instrument. These songs found their way onto a bootleg album entitled “The TypewriterTape” a number of years later.


At this time Janis’ drug use began to increase, with speed and heroin becoming more prevalent in her life. She had also acquired a taste for Southern Comfort which became synonymous with Janis throughout her life.

A few months after the session with Jorma, her friends in California began to get very concerned as Janis was down to 88 pounds and doing far too many drugs. They bought her a bus ticket back home and in April of 1965 Janis was back in Port Arthur, TX. Her lifestyle changed as she sobered up and enrolled at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, TX.

During this time Janis continued to correspond with a man she knew back in California. He was a methadrine dealer and he had asked Janis to marry him a number of times. A one point he showed up at the Joplin home, dressed in a suit and tie and asked Janis’ father for her hand in marriage.

Almost immediately after that, he broke off all contact with Janis and she never saw him again. Was this the catalyst to the heartbreak in the music Janis sang afterward? It is speculation, but it seems to make sense.

Janis began to drive to Austin and perform at clubs there, just she and her guitar. This continued her love for music and when an old Texas friend, Chet Helms, called her from San Francisco and offered her a job singing with a band he managed, she headed back to there.

Chet Helms also ran a company called “Family Dog Productions" which along with “Bill Graham Productions” became the two largest promotion companies of the time.

The band he managed was named Big Brother & The Holding Company and on June 10, 1964 the band performed at The Avalon in San Francisco for the first time.

In August of 1966 the band signed with “Mainstream Records” and recorded their first album. The singles off the album made nary a squeak and the album was not released at that time.

On June 18, 1967 Big Brother (pictured on the left) performed at the Monterey Pop Festival and everything changed. The performance was hailed as a career changer for Big Brother, but especially for Janis.

She became an international star almost overnight – similar to another performer who made one of his first appearances at the festival that same year. His name? Jimi Hendrix.

If you ever see the documentary on this festival, you will see a shot of Mama Cass in the audience during Janis’ performance and she is mouthing the words, “Wow, that’s really heavy”

In November of 1967 the band left the management of Chet Helms and began working with noted manager Albert Grossman (most famous for his client; Bob Dylan) and he began to book venues for the band outside of San Francisco and California, where they had only performed thus far.

An East Coast tour began in Philadelphia on February 16, 1968 and then headed to the Anderson Theatre in NYC for a show the next day. On the last day of their East Coast swing, April 7, 1968, the band performed at the “Wake For Martin Luther King Jr.” concert in NY along with Jimi, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield and Elvin Bishop.

Between April and June Big Brother spent time between LA and NYC recording the album Cheap Thrills which was released in August and debuted as the #1 Album on the Billboard Charts, selling 1,000,000 copies in the first month alone.

It was a collection of studio and live performances and cover artwork by the famed Robert Crumb. The breakthrough hit from the album was, of course, the incomparable “Piece Of My Heart”.



The band made another East Coast swing between July-August 1968 which included a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. The picture on the left was taken during the Festival.

Upon returning to San Francisco Janis announced she would be leaving Big Brother at the end of the year and made her final performance with this lineup on December 1, 1968 at a Family Dog benefit concert.


Janis then formed a band called the Kosmic Blues Band which was modeled after the classic soul revue bands. Their first performance signaled their intent on their playing soul music as it was at the Stax-Volt Christmas Show in Memphis, TN on December 21, 1968.

The band, including a complete horn section, began touring non-stop throughout North America and Europe throughout 1969. In September 1969 I Got Dem Ol’ Kosmic Blues Again Mama was released and certified Gold, but never had the success of “Cheap Thrills”.



It included the bluesy, tough sounding song "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder"


The band was short-lived however and played their final gig with Janis at Madison Square Garden in NYC on December 21, 1969 exactly a year from their first performance.
In August 1969, Janis performed at the legendary Woodstock Festival. Depending upon who you speak with or read, she was brilliant, or she was below par that weekend.

For 25 years after Woodstock, the only portion of her performance there that was available commercially -- in either sound or picture -- was a spontaneous dance she did with her band's African-American tenor saxophone player, Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers, during an instrumental break. It is part of the 1975 theatrically released documentary Janis.

The feature film, Woodstock includes several seconds of Janis walking with her friend Peggy Caserta to the festival site in broad daylight hours before she went on stage, but this film omitted her entire performance, even the dance with Flowers.

The 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes just one of her selections from the concert: "Work Me, Lord".

In February of 1970, Janis traveled to Brazil with her friend Linda Gravenites and got clean and sober. Gravenities had designed all of Janis’ stage costumes since 1966 and led a clean and sober lifestyle.

While there Janis met David Niehaus an American schoolteacher who was traveling the world at the time. He also led a clean lifestyle and it appeared Janis had kicked her habit.

Upon returning home, Janis formed a band with a group of drug-free Canadians who had no association with her San Francisco crowd and the Full Tilt Boogie Band came into existence.

In late June 1970, Janis and the band joined the Grateful Dead and The Band on a tour of Canada called the Festival Express.

During this tour Janis began designing her own costumes. Linda Gravenites and she split company after returning from Brazil for no known reason and once again Janis took on the ‘tough first lady of rock and roll’ mantle and did not replace her, instead deciding to ‘rebuild her image’.

Feathers in her hair, multi-colored outfits, downplaying her cleavage and sexuality became the norm. Around this time she also requested that her band and entourage begin to call her “Pearl” though she did not want the press to report the nickname.

Janis thought differently then many of the other stars of the time who encouraged free-concerts. In an article in Newsweek in 1970, Janis was quoted as saying; 'I don't believe in gate-crashing. The people aren't up there when I'm sweating on a stage at a festival, breaking my ass. You can get the money, man. Sell your old lady, sell your dope. Look at me, man, I'm selling my heart.'

She was also very against the common practice at Dead shows to dose people with LSD without their knowledge. In 1970, she said in the presence of Myra Friedman, her long-time publicist, that Deadheads who did that were comparable to the Chicago police officers who had beaten hippies on the head at the 1968 Democratic Convention. A pretty heavy statement for the times.

Janis had a nasty drug and alcohol habit but was never late or missed a show, always telling people she believed in the American work ethic.

In 1970 Janis and the band went into the studio to record a new album. On October 1, 1970, Janis completed the song “Mercedes Benz” in one take and then recorded a birthday greeting for John Lennon, the Dale Evans song “Happy Trails”. It may have been prophetic.


Two days later, Saturday October 3rd, Janis visited the Sunset Sound Studios to listen to the instrumental track for “Buried Alive In The Blues” so she could lay down the vocals the next day. That night at the studio she had a long angry conversation with her boyfriend Seth on the phone, which was overheard by the members of the band. All say she was in great spirits before and even after the phone call when they all went out for Chinese food.

According to many sources, here is what happened next. Her boyfriend Seth was at Janis’ home in Marin County playing strip poker with a waitress he had met that day. This caused him to miss the date with Janis.

Sometime Saturday Janis bought heroin from a known dealer. She was staying at the Landmark, which was known to draw drug users as its guests. That afternoon she told the front desk to not put any calls through to her room.

It seems that Janis ended up making her way to Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood and drank for a while there.

The next day when she had not shown back up at the studio, Full Tilt’s road manager drove to The Landmark and found Janis dead on the floor. It would seem that the dealer’s normal ‘cutter’ (the person responsible for taking pure heroin and mixing it with a substance to lessen its strength) was not available and whoever cut this batch lef it much too pure. There were other deaths in Los Angeles around that time that were linked back to this dealer and that batch.

A service only attended by Janis’ parents and her aunt Mimi was held at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in LA and then her ashes were scattered by plane into the Pacific Ocean and along Stinson Beach in Marin County.

Two months before her death, Janis provided a gravestone for her idol, Bessie Smith at Philadelphia’s Mount Lawn Cemetery.

In 1979 Bette Midler stared in and earns an Academy Award nomination for “The Rose”, a story loosely based on Janis’ life.

Janis…along with Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane opened doors to women in rock. The genre was dominated by men until these two remarkable women came along and changed the face of the music.

Music journalist Ellen Wills asserted that “Joplin belonged to that select group of pop figures who mattered as much for themselves as for their music. Among American rock performers, she was second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation’s mythology.”

Rock critic Lillian Roxon summed up her influence with these words: “[Janis Joplin] perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation – to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love; to [reject] every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life.”

Janis's albums have gone gold, platinum, and triple-platinum. Her Greatest Hits album still appears on the charts in Billboard. Several new releases have followed her death, with wide acclaim for her boxed set, Janis.

She was the subject of a 1973 feature documentary, "Janis" and numerous TV documentaries, the most notable being VH-1's Legends program. She is currently the subject of two hotly contested biographical movie projects.

Not recognized by her hometown during her life, she was remembered much later. In 1988, her life and achievements were showcased and recognized in Port Arthur, Texas by the dedication of the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original bronze, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark.

Joplin was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.


So much information on Ms. Joplin...we hope we gave you a little insight into this remarkable woman and her music...


Janis Joplin & Jorma Kaukonen
• The Typewriter Tape (1964, bootleg recording)

Big Brother and the Holding Company
• Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967, Mainstream Records)
• Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967?, Columbia) Contains 2 extra single tracks.
• Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967, CD 1999 Columbia Legacy CK66425) Contains 2 extra single tracks.
• Cheap Thrills (1968, Columbia)
• Cheap Thrills (1968, CD 1999 Legacy CK65784) Contains 4 extra tracks.
• Live at Winterland '68 (1998, Columbia Legacy)

Kozmic Blues Band
• I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969, Columbia)
• I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969, CD 1999 Legacy CK65785) Contains 3 extra tracks.

Full Tilt Boogie
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, Columbia)
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, CD unknown date Columbia CD64188)
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, CD 1999 Legacy CK65786) Contains 4 extra tracks.
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, 2CD 2005 Legacy COL 515134 2) CD1 contains 6 other extra tracks, CD2 contains a full selection from The Festival Express Tour, from all 3 venues.

Big Brother & the Holding Company / Full Tilt Boogie
• In Concert (1972, Legacy CK65786)

Later collections
• Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits (1973, Columbia)
• Janis (2 discs 1975, Columbia Legacy)
• Anthology (1980)
• Farewell Song (1983)
• Cheaper Thrills (1984)
• Janis (3 discs 1993, Columbia Legacy)
• 18 Essential Songs (1995, Columbia Legacy)
• The Collection (1995)
• Live at Woodstock: August 19, 1969 (1999)
• Box of Pearls (1999, Sony Legacy)
• Super Hits (2000)
• Love, Janis (2001)