It's no secret Kid Rock
is more than proud to be an American. He frequents USO shows with
rocking performances for troops - both in the states and across seas -
and doesn't let a concert go by without the presence of an American
flag. However, the rockstar may have just outdone himself this past week
when it comes to his public displays of patriotism for the U S of A. Given the Detroit native's deep unwavering love for America, it
probably doesn't come as a shock that the rocker wasn't too pleased with
49ers football player Colin Kaepernick's media dominating stance
against the "Star Spangled Banner." The 49ers quarterback who began making headlines following his
refusal to stand for the national anthem during pre-season football
games; issued this following statement:
"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,"
Kaepernick told NFL Media in an interview directly following his
initial stance against the national anthem. "To me, this is bigger than
football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There
are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away
with murder."
Apparently Rock took Kaepernick's stance personally and made it clear
he isn't afraid to let people know his thoughts on the matter. Friday
Sept. 9 at his Fenway Park concert which he co-headlined with country
star Jason Aldean, Kid Rock took it upon himself to issue a statement of his own. During a performance of his patriotic banger "Born Free," Kid
Rock interrupted himself mid-song to send a direct message to the 49ers
quarterback. "Man, f**k Colin Kaepernick!" the singer proclaimed met with a resounding roar of approval from the crowd.
Kaepernick has yet to respond to the rockstar's remark . You
can watch the rocker's explosive verbal beatdown (comment made at 50
second mark) below and be sure to let us know what you think of this in
the comments!
My
father, John R Cash, was a man of kindness and tolerance, slow to anger
and quick to forgive. He was full of laughter, joy, hope and patience.
He passed from this world on this day, thirteen years ago. However, his
legacy, music and spirit is as alive today as ever. Miss you dad.
This photo, taken by Daniel Coston on the stage of the Carter Fold in
Hiltons, VA is one of the last times Dad ever took to the stage. The
Circle Endures...
About an hour before every concert, Bruce Springsteen draws up a set
list of 31 songs, written in big, scrawly letters in marker ink and soon
thereafter distributed to his musicians and crew in typed-up,
printed-out form. But this list is really just a loose framework. Over
the course of an evening, Springsteen might shake up the order, drop a
song, call a few audibles to his seasoned, ready-for-anything E Street
Band, or take a request or two from fans holding handwritten signs in
the pit near the front of the stage. Or he might do all of the above and
then some—as he did on the first of the two nights that I saw him
perform in Gothenburg, Sweden, this summer.
That night, at the last minute, Springsteen jettisoned his plan to open
with a full-band version of “Prove It All Night,” from his 1978 album,
Darkness on the Edge of Town, and instead began the show solo at the
piano with “The Promise,” a fan-beloved Darkness outtake. Eight songs
in, he again went off-list, playing a stretched-out, gospelized version
of “Spirit in the Night,” from his first album, 1973’s Greetings from
Asbury Park, N.J., which he followed with “Save My Love,” a sign
request. Onward he went with tweaks and spontaneous additions, to the
point where, by the time the show was over, it was past midnight and
Springsteen, a man approaching his 67th birthday, had played for nearly
four hours—his second-longest concert ever. “Yikes!” said Springsteen with mock alarm when I relayed this fact to
him the next day, at his hotel in the Swedish port city. “I’m always in
search of something, in search of losing myself to the music. I think we
hit a spot last night where I was trying some songs we hadn’t played in
a while, where maybe you’re struggling more. And then suddenly”—he
snapped his fingers—“you catch it, and then, once you do, you may not
want to stop.” “You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly
basis,” Springsteen said. “And sometimes,” he concluded, laughing,
“it takes me longer than I thought it would.” There is one song, though, whose place and inclusion are never in doubt:
“Born to Run.” Springsteen always slots it in near the start of his
encore set, the clutch of seven or eight songs that see out the night.
“It’s still at the center of my work, that song,” he said. “When it
comes up every night, within the show, it’s monumental.” By design,
every concert, no matter what its shape, builds up to “Born to Run” as
the climax, with the songs that follow serving as a decompression from
its operatic intensity. It is not uncommon for an artist to grow wary of a signature
song—Robert Plant has referred to “Stairway to Heaven” as “that
wedding song,” and Frank Sinatra called “Strangers in the Night” a
“piece of shit”—but Springsteen has never tired of “Born to Run,”
which he wrote at age 24 in a small rental cottage in West Long Branch,
New Jersey. Expressly conceived as an important work, it took him six
months to piece together all of its elements, from the twangy, Duane
Eddy-inspired guitar figure with which it announces itself, to its
“tramps like us” refrain, to its appropriations of imagery from the B
movies that Springsteen adored as a kid, pulpy road pictures like Gun
Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. “A good song gathers the years in,” Springsteen said. “It’s why you
can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written. A
good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.” What has made “Born to Run” endure, Springsteen believes, are the
words with which his nameless narrator implores his girl, Wendy, to join
him on the road: “Will you walk with me out on the wire? / ‘Cause baby,
I’m just a scared and lonely rider / But I gotta know how it feels / I
want to know if love is wild / Babe, I want to know if love is real.” “That question gets asked every single night, between me and all those
people that are out there,” Springsteen said. “Every night, I watch
the crowd sing it. Sing it word for word. It’s just something that
connected.” It’s true. In Gothenburg, over two nights, I watched 120,000 Swedes
surrender, full-throatedly and with fists pumping, to “I want to know
if love is real”—notwithstanding the song’s otherwise acutely New
Jersey-specific references to Highway 9 and the Palace, a now demolished
Asbury Park amusement hall. Springsteen’s new autobiography, to be published this month by Simon &
Schuster, is also called Born to Run. Naming your book after your most
famous song and the breakthrough album to which it lent its title could
be seen as a sign of cash-grab expediency or outright laziness—plus,
there is already a well-known Springsteen book called Born to Run, a
biography by the rock critic Dave Marsh from 1979. But to Springsteen
there was no other choice. Those three words have an emotional resonance
for him beyond the song itself. They’re a sort of thumbnail memoir—a
shorthand for a lifelong sense of unrest. To be sure, the latter-day Springsteen projects health and contentment.
Onstage, he’s as limber and high-energy as ever: leaping and sliding in
his concert uniform of black jeans, brown boots, black muscle T, gray
vest, and gray neckerchief, and pulling in close to share a microphone
with his wife, the singer Patti Scialfa, or his oldest friend in the
band, the guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Offstage, across a table, he looks
just as fantastic as he does from a distance, favoring formfitting
snap-button western shirts that few other men his age could get away
with; in one of our meetings, he even rocked the red-bandanna headband
of his Born in the U.S.A. years.
But, inherently, Springsteen is a brooder: a serious, unglib man given
to puzzling out the mixed-up thoughts in his head. In other words, a
born memoirist. When I asked him, for example, about the genesis of that
pumped-up Born in the U.S.A. look, I was surprised by how considered a
response I received. I was posing the question from a superficial,
stagecraft angle: Was his evolution from the scrawny chancer on the
cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town to the muscle-bound W.P.A.-poster
hero of the mid-80s a sort of less extreme version of David Bowie-style
shape-shifting? Was it a conscious image reboot? Springsteen’s initial
reply was that, first and foremost, he was trying to get healthy as his
metabolism slowed, so he took to lifting weights, and “I had a body
that just kind of popped in six months.”
“But if you want to get into it deeper,” he continued, “my father was
built big, so there was some element of ‘O.K., I’m 34. I’m a man now.’ I
remember my father at that age. There was the idea of creating a man’s
body to a certain degree. I suppose I was measuring that after my dad.
And also, perhaps, in some way, trying to please him.”
Then Springsteen went deeper still. “I also found that I simply enjoyed
the exercise,” he said. “It was perfectly Sisyphean for my
personality—lifting something heavy up and putting it down in the same
spot for no particularly good reason. I’ve always felt a lot in common
with Sisyphus. I’m always rolling that rock, man. One way or another,
I’m always rolling that rock.”
The germ of Born to Run, the book, lies in a short, diaristic piece
Springsteen wrote for his Web site in 2009, after he and the E Street
Band played the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIII. The logistics and
pressure of doing the 12-minute show threw even as battle-tested a
performer as Springsteen for a loop, and he thought the experience would
make for a good yarn to share. “Fifteen minutes . . . oh, by the
way, I’m somewhat terrified,” he wrote in one passage. “It’s not the
usual pre-show jitters, not ‘butterflies,’ not wardrobe malfunction
nervousness, I’m talking about five minutes to beach landing, ‘Right
Stuff,’ ‘Lord Don’t Let Me Screw the Pooch in Front of 100 Million
People,’ ‘One of the biggest television audiences since dinosaurs first
screwed on earth’ kind of terror.”
Doing the Super Bowl show, Springsteen said, led him to discover a
“pretty good voice to write in.” With time on his hands after the big
game, he kept at it, writing down vignettes from his life in longhand
while he and Scialfa were staying in Florida, where their daughter,
Jessica, a competitive equestrian, was participating in show-jumping
events. He was pleased with the results. In fits and starts, back at
home in New Jersey and on tour over the next seven years, a full-blown,
500-page autobiography eventually took shape, with no ghost or
collaborator. Every word in the book is his own.
There’s no shortage of levity in Born to Run. We learn that young Bruce,
for all his romantic association with cars and the road, was a terrible
driver who didn’t manage to get his license until he was in his 20s, and
that current Bruce, like many a passionate baby-boomer in the vicinity
of a computer keyboard, is a fan of caps lock. On the seismic impact of
Elvis Presley’s initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show: “Somewhere
in between the mundane variety acts on a routine Sunday night in the
year of our Lord 1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!! Right
underneath the nose of the guardians of all that ‘IS,’ who, if they were
aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call out the
national gestapo to SHUT THIS SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT
UP QUICK!!”
But it’s the less jocular stuff in Springsteen’s life, the material
germane to his autobiography’s title, that gives Born to Run its
depth—and Springsteen knows this. “I knew I was gonna ‘go there’ in
the book,” he told me. “I had to find the roots of my own troubles and
issues—and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind
of shows that we put on.”
Van Zandt remembers the Springsteen he befriended in their teens as
“shut down and closed in.” This was on the central-New Jersey
garage-band circuit of the mid-1960s, when Springsteen was playing
guitar in a combo called the Castiles and Van Zandt fronted a group
called the Shadows. “You remember the grunge guys, with the long hair,
staring down at their shoes? That was him,” Van Zandt said. “People
were always wondering ‘Why are you hanging out with him? He’s such a
weirdo.’ Some people thought he was mental.”
What Van Zandt quickly came to realize was that Springsteen was
preternaturally focused, regarding rock music as his only way forward.
“What inspired me about him, which nobody could really understand, was
that he was completely dedicated,” Van Zandt said. “He’s the only guy
I know who never had another job. I had to do some other jobs and fight
to do it full-time, where he was always full-time. I got strength from
that.”
What made Springsteen so determined? What was Bruce running from? For
one thing, the dead-end, near-feudal circumstances into which he was
born, living with his parents and paternal grandparents in a tumbledown
house in Freehold, New Jersey. It sat on the same block as their church,
St. Rose of Lima, and its affiliated convent, rectory, and school, as
well as four other small houses, occupied by members of his father’s
family. His father’s side was pretty much Irish-American, people named
McNicholas, O’Hagan, and Farrell. His mother’s side, which lived just
across the street, was Italian-American, people named Zerilli and
Sorrentino.
by Navy Mom Mary
Today was another amazing day for Larry, Ray and I. We scouted out,
photographed and talked with bikers, car enthusiasts and many veterans.
Rain does not stop true car enthusiasts. They came out in droves and
kept coming in.
We have some amazing news! Keeping our fingers & toes crossed and of
course, the prayers going as well. We talked with a couple of guys from
the Space Coast. They are taking both flyers back to their corporate
offices to talk to them about - are you ready? Orlando Rocks Benefit,
Inc. ROCKING THE SPACECOAST!!!!! Oh yeah! This is what it is all about!
Spreading the word and helping our brothers & sisters.
This is what I promised at the very first show - " I (WE) will take it
across this great nation of our's." We all came away with a very, very
proud heart.
We have just risen above 3200 hits in 3 weeks. This IS amazing!
NFL Media reporterSANTA CLARA, Calif. -- San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick
has willingly immersed himself into controversy by refusing to stand
for the playing of the national anthem in protest of what he deems are
wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United
States. His latest refusal to stand for the anthem -- he has done this in at least one other preseason game -- came before the 49ers' preseason loss to Green Bay at Levi's Stadium on Friday night. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country
that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL
Media in an exclusive interview after the game. "To me, this is bigger
than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.
There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting
away with murder."
The 49ers
issued a statement about Kaepernick's decision: "The national anthem is
and always will be a special part of the pre-game ceremony. It is an
opportunity to honor our country and reflect on the great liberties we
are afforded as its citizens. In respecting such American principles as
freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of
an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of
the national anthem." The NFL also released a statement, obtained by NFL Media Insider
Ian Rapoport: "Players are encouraged but not required to stand during
the playing of the national anthem." By taking a stand for civil rights, Kaepernick, 28, joins other
athletes, like the NBA's Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, LeBron James and
Carmelo Anthony and several WNBA players in using their platform and
status to raise awareness to issues affecting minorities in the U.S. However, refusal to support the American flag as a means to take a
stand has brought incredible backlash before and likely will in this
instance. The NBA's Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets, formerly
Chris Jackson before converting to Islam, refused to acknowledge the
flag in protest, citing similar reasons as Kaepernick and saying that it
conflicted with some of his Islamic beliefs. Abdul-Rauf drew the ire of fans and was briefly suspended by the
NBA before a compromise was worked out between the league and player,
who eventually stood with his teammates and coaches at the playing of
the national anthem. Kaepernick said that he is aware of what he is doing and that he knows it will not sit well with a lot of people, including the 49ers. He said that he did not inform the club or anyone affiliated with the team of his intentions to protest the national anthem. "This is not something that I am going to run by anybody," he
said. "I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that
are oppressed. ... If they take football away, my endorsements from me,
I know that I stood up for what is right." Kaepernick said that he has thought about going public with his
feelings for a while but that "I felt that I needed to understand the
situation better." He said that he has discussed his feelings with his family and,
after months of witnessing some of the civil unrest in the U.S., decided
to be more active and involved in rights for black people. Kaepernick,
who is biracial, was adopted and raised by white parents and siblings. Kaepernick's Twitter feed is filled with civil rights messages.
The former Super Bowl starting quarterback's decision to go public comes while he is fighting for his football life with the 49ers,
who drafted him in the second round in 2011. He lost his starting job
last season after being one of the most promising players in the NFL
during his run under former coach Jim Harbaugh. Over the past few months, his relationship with management has
turned sour. He requested a trade last spring, which never came. He also
has spent most of the offseason rehabilitating from operations to his
left (non-throwing) shoulder, his hand and knee. His recovery left him
unable to fully compete with Blaine Gabbert for months and has him seemingly in a bind to regain his starting job. He made his preseason debut against the Packers
and played in the second quarter, completing two of six passes for 14
yards. He looked as rusty as you'd expect from someone who has not
played since last November. Following the game, and without any knowledge of Kaepernick's
non-football behavior, coach Chip Kelly said that there has never been
any discussion about cutting Kaepernick. Rapoport added Saturday that
Kelly will make "football decisions" on Kaepernick, despite the quarterback's comments.
A prominent Venezuelan opposition leader has been jailed again after
intelligence agents picked him up at his home before dawn, a brazen move
that the government said was necessary to prevent acts of violence but
which has alarmed the opposition and human rights groups.
Patricia Gutierrez said that the agents from the Sebin intelligence
agency arrived around 3 a.m.
Saturday without notice at the family home
where her husband, Daniel Ceballos, had been held under house arrest.
She said they put Ceballos in an ambulance, saying they were taking for a
medical exam, but instead transported the former mayor of San Cristobal
to the same jail in central Guarico state where was held for more than a
year until August 2015, when he was granted house arrest for kidney
problems.
His transfer to jail comes as the opposition vows a mass protest on
Thursday to demand that authorities allow a recall referendum to go
ahead. A successful "yes" vote this year would cut short President
Nicolas Maduro's term and trigger new elections.
The government said it had intelligence that Ceballos was planning to
flee before the Sept. 1 protests and carry out violent acts.
"The evidence compiled will allow us to continue advancing in necessary
investigations to prevent, uncover and neutralize any act that aims to
destabilize our democratic system," the Interior Ministry said in a
statement.
Gutierrez published a cell phone video in which Ceballos and his
daughter can be heard exchanging shouts of "I love you" as an ambulance
is seen parked in front of an apartment building.
"This is how my daughter Victoria said goodbye to her father," Gutierrez
said on Twitter. "The dictatorship isn't going to destroy my family.
Freedom will come soon."
The transfer alarmed government opponents and human rights groups.
"Authorities in Venezuela
seem to be willing to stop at nothing in their quest to prevent anyone
from criticizing them, particularly as the political and humanitarian
situation in the country continues to deteriorate," said Erika
Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at the rights group Amnesty
International.
The 32-year-old Ceballos was the leader of a wave of anti-government
protests in the restive western city of San Cristobal that rocked
Venezuela in early 2014, leading to more than 40 deaths.
Fear of another crackdown has made it harder for the opposition to coax
its supporters back into the streets. But as Venezuela's economy spins
further out of control, with daily, blocks-long food lines and inflation
topping 700 percent, calls for Maduro's removal have grown louder, even
among poor Venezuelans who still revere his predecessor and mentor, the
late Hugo Chavez.
Electoral authorities, who are widely seen as bowing to Maduro's
demands, say it's unlikely a vote can be scheduled this year. If the
ruling party can delay a vote until 2017, Maduro would be replaced by
his vice president in loses, as polls indicate he would.
Ceballos was initially arrested along with several other activists of
his Popular Will party, including Leopoldo Lopez. He's already served a
12-month sentence for disobeying a government order to remove barricades
during the street protests but still faces civil rebellion charges.
He won a congressional primary from behind bars last year but
authorities later barred him from holding public office. His wife then
won by a landslide in an election to succeed him.
The U.S.-backed opposition has made the release of Lopez, Ceballos and
dozens of other activists it considers political prisoners a key demand.
Maduro considers the activists dangerous coup-plotters.
