My Amazon Reviews: David Baerwald "Triage"

When Boomtown goes to Bust
5 Out Of 5 Stars

David Baerwald had had enough of your s#-t and was going to make sure you knew it. "Triage" is a cynical masterwork, his best album, and one to get angry about. It may have been released in 1992, chronicling the mess that was the Reagan administration, the rise of AIDS, the fall of the middle class, sometimes all in one song. Inciteful (not a typo) and musically beautiful, "Triage" may have been too overwhelming for the times. But oddly enough, that anger still feels relevant today.

Starting of with the cinematic 8 minutes of "A Secret Silken World," in which he asks "Don't you love to hurt the weak when they refuse to fight?" then details a rich person's complaints about being out and about in Beverly Glen on a "lazy kind of night" ("all those hungry people, such a drag. Let's get something to eat"). Sound familiar? As I write this, it's 28 years after Live Aid and just a few days after House Republicans voted to eliminate Food Stamps. The view from the top hasn't changed all that much.

Then there's the vitriolic "The Got No Shotgun Hydrahead Octopus Blues," which Baerwald was opinionated enough and felt so strongly for that he issued it as a single. Or the talking blues the drug war in "Nobody" or the fearful "AIDS and Armageddon"

The day she tried to kill me
She said you know You're gonna die
I said yeah but not yet.

The line in the song that says "I don't want to talk about it" could have cut two ways, in the Reagan years of denial or of the lover who worries that he may have contracted it, but was terrified of the sex that gave it to him. A thing that was all too real a feeling in the '90's. Which corresponds to the fact that the first thing up in the next song, where a recording of the introduction of the president, then leads into "The Postman," the album's gentlest song.

It's a moment of respite on a relentless CD. It's only at the end does Baerwald find some redemption for the ugly world he's just sang 9 songs about in "Born For Love." Make no mistake, however. "Triage" is as intense a singer's album as the 90's ever produced. Like I said earlier; what Baerwald felt with such vehemence then still sounds timely now.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Queen "The Miracle"

Royal Therapy
3 Out of 5 Stars

Queen was in a personal impasse at the time of The Miracle. Brian May was dealing with a tempestuous divorce and Freddie Mercury had been diagnosed with AIDS. Most bands would have found a corner to crawl into and curled up into a fetal position. Queen took it as a chance to regroup and have each others' backs while pouring their hearts into the new album.

"The one thing we're all waiting for
Is peace on Earth - an end to war
It's a miracle we need, the miracle."

Kind of giving the album a purpose, the title song was pure Freddie gold. It bogs in the end with a cacophony before rising back up with a unified and gorgeous harmony front, before tearing into a riff monster from Brian, "I Want It All" (with the single mix on the bonus disc). It's kind of a polar opposite from "The Miracle"; instead of harmony and good will towards men, "I Want It All" let it rip with guitar solos and a lyric that literally demands that you give it up, and give it up now.

There was a little of Queen's issues popping through. It's easy to interpret "Scandal" as Brian having a go at the British Press over treatment of his private life while the marriage was coming apart, and "Was It All Worth It" sounds like Freddie beginning his questioning of life with AIDS, a topic that would dominate "Innuendo" two years later. (Freddie's health also prevented the bad from touring behind this album, despite it being their most successful US album since "The Game." There was a bit of silliness courtesy of Roger Taylor's "Invisible Man," a total 80's dance track (included in a 12-inch mix on the bonus CD). Queen may have been searching for a Miracle as the 80's were drawing to a close, and this CD did a good job of proving the band still could deliver.

     

Keeping America Stupid: Ronald Reagan Sucked.

With all the hooey about Reagen's 100th birthday and the pig vomit being espoused about his greatness, one needs to be reminded not just of Iran-Contra, the destruction of the middle class, his lust for deregulation and union-busting, but most of all for his political homophobia and the ignorance that led to so many of my friends dying tragic, unnecessary deaths,

Aids Activist Larry Kramer wrote The following piece, which was published in The Advocate issue dated July 6th, 2004

Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even. In all the tributes to his passing, as I write this two days after his death, not one that I have seen has mentioned this. The hateful New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”) of course said nothing about this. We still are not fit to write about with total honesty in their pages. Not really. Just as we were not fit for Ronald Reagan to talk about us. What kind of president is that?

I have been writing a long work of history which I call The American People. I chose this title because in every speech he ever made Reagan went on and on about “the American People.” We of course were never a part of his American People. And we knew it. Year after year of his hateful and endless reign we knew we were not a part of the American People he was President of. He would never talk about us, of course, or do anything for us except murder us. There were no social services for us. There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies. How could he not have seen us dying? The answer is he did see us dying and he chose to do nothing. There was no representation in his government of us. There was never anything for us but his ignoble dismissal of us. All of Washington, indeed the world, knew that Reagan hated us. How could they not? Most of them did, too. And when Daddy doesn’t love you, who is there who will stand up to Daddy? This is a trick that Hitler used and which I believe the young Reagan learned from him. He never had to say much out loud himself about his hatreds; but everyone knew what they were. Gays were as hated under Reagan as Jews were under Hitler. It is a trick that both George Bushes have carbon-copied. We have not been included among their American people either.

I could never understand why Reagan’s hatred of us was so intense and manifest and never-ending. Some of Nancy Reagan’s best friends were gay, the self-loathing Jerry Zipkin, at one time her principle “walker,” chief among them. It is said he taught her how to dress. In my play, Just Say No, I dramatized my own theory of why she and her husband kept gays off their agenda as if we were the plague, which of course, as in some hideous self-fulfilling prophecy, we became. Ron Reagan, Jr. That is why. It was no secret in an ever-widening circle that Ron Reagan, Jr. was suspected of being gay. In his freshman year at Yale (I believe this was his only year there; perhaps there were two) I have been told he had numerous gay experiences. I am well known at Yale. Indeed, I have established the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale to document the evil acts that American “history” has performed on us.

And just as damning of the son’s reputation of course, because it could not be hidden, was that Ron Reagan, Jr. was a ballet dancer. This did not look good and was obviously exceedingly embarrassing to a father who rode so many horses. So off with the tutu and on with a wedding ring. Junior was married off and sent to far-off places in positions of low visibility. I have gay friends in Hollywood, equally closeted, who knew him and know him and protect him. To know him is to be sworn to some sort of pact of secrecy. What a hideous life Ron, Jr. must have led all these years. To be denied a life and to have been so utterly gutless about fighting back. (Well, we know all about that.) While his own mother was gallivanting around with some of the biggest fairies in the world. What hateful parents to have had in the prime of your life, “the great communicator” of a father out there communicating how much he hated you and his wife out there going along with this. I suspect by now Ron Reagan, Jr. actually believes he is straight. By now he may very well be. He may well have been all along. He just looked so suspicious, and of course it was this perceived suspicion that, one way or the other, is what caused his father to murder so many of us. Why does history not recognize this monstrous and never-ending history of hatred and the inestimable number of deaths it continues to cause?

People magazine called me for a quote on Reagan’s death. “I wish he had died before he was elected” is what I told them. I wonder what they will run.

It is remarkable that two of the so-called “greatest presidents” have also allowed the greatest perpetrations and perpetuations of mass murder. Franklin D. Roosevelt was shamefully inept in dealing with “the Jewish question,” (see my play The Normal Heart), most ironically since so many Jews were his most loyal supporters, the Jerry Zipkins of their day. No one really writes about this. Roosevelt is one of history’s great gods. Just as no one really writes about Reagan and “the gay question.” These two major murderers so far have got away with helping to cause the two major holocausts of modern history. Just as Jews are asked to never forget their Holocaust I implore all gay people never to forget our holocaust and who caused it and why. Ronald Reagan did not even say the word “AIDS” out loud for the first seven years of his reign. Because of this some 70 million people, so far, have become infected with HIV/AIDS. I wonder what it feels like to be the son and the wife of a man responsible for over 70 million people so far becoming infected with a virus that has killed over half of us so far. I wonder what it felt like while he was alive to ponder this. For surely he must have thought about it. How could he not? He has been called the consummate actor who came to believe all his lines. Does this not make his legacy even more grotesque? It should.

Hitler knew what he was doing. How could Ronald Reagan not have known what he was doing?

But of course no one is writing about this. Reagan too is one of history's gods.

So far he has got away with murder.