the Crossing, Lawrence Kansas, Chuck Mead and other luminaries

Mead is close to his family and the Lawrence community; old friends greet him all over downtown.   But, it took Mead two decades in Nashville before he got down to writing about home.

“I don’t know, I started thinking about Ivy Honeycutt,” remembers Mead. “This little girl, that was a year older than me in school, that I went to grade school with, out at the Kaw Valley Grade School, who got murdered by her cousin.”

Ivy Honeycutt’s death scared Mead, and he writes about it in some detail in one of the songs on the new record. Mead’s also written about the Clutter family murders, made famous by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.  And there’s another song about the day Confederate guerillas slaughtered abolitionists in Lawrence who were here to make sure Kansas entered the Union a free state.

There’s a love song Mead wrote for his wife, a country girl from Reno County, Kan.  And one where Mead relives one of the crazy nights he experienced as a young musician in Lawrence in the early 1980s.

“We were having band practice, and you know, someone had a little LSD, and we took it,” recalls Mead. “And then I realized that I had to drive pizzas around from 6 to 8. So, I had a couple of guys in the car with me, and we saw this thing in the sky. It wasn’t a star. And then all of the sudden we realized we were looking at a UFO.”

Mead says he and his buddies were pretty sure a Douglas County Sheriff’s deputy saw it, too.

As Mead says, “Kansas can be scary."

http://kcur.org/post/free-state-serenade-chuck-mead-s-ode-dark-side-kansas#stream/0

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smoked a joint rolled out of my own $5 bill with Chuck Mead at Chip Walker's slum landlord termite nest down the street from the Crossing, where I had the key for 2 years, and served cheap free beer to all my frenemies all 3 of them, and all the strangers too

Mauschovonian Love Beat
the Kustom Kar Kommandos

"Local rap artist John Manson, of the Kustom Kar Kommandos, said "Whether or not the controversy is racially motivated, it shows an incredible amount of disrespect for the United States Constitution.

Freedom of speech just doesn't exist anymore."

Manson, who has been performing professionally in Oklahoma City for almost two years, said rap music seems to be an "easy target" because of its "stripped-down verbal message."

"With other kinds of music, you've got guitars and drums, and you don't hear the message as easily. But with rap, you can hear a basic beat and an occasional staccato record scratch. The message is very distinct."

Manson said he believes race also may be involved in the conflict over rap lyrics.

"There's some racial motivation in that it's usually performed by black people looking at their place in society and clearly stating "we're not going to take this ... anymore.'

 It comes out to some people as a threat to the establishment."

http://newsok.com/article/2321085http://newsok.com/article/2321085

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