Friday, December 17, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
Music: JFCOM Contractor Sings The ‘Jiffy Com Blues’ Over Closure
Boy, it sucks to hear about other contractors losing their jobs. Hopefully these folks will be able to get work elsewhere in the defense industry. Maybe Bobby will have his music as a possible back up plan? –Matt
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JFCOM contractor sings the blues over closure
By Bill Sizemore
09/06/2010
Went to work, got a bit of bad news
Went to work, got a bit of bad news
Ol’ Bobby G said here’s your fate, gonna shut you down, gonna lock the gate
Now we all have the Jiffy Com Blues.
– “Jiffy Com Blues,” by Bobby “BlackHat” Walters
It’s not even a done deal, but the impending closure of the Joint Forces Command already has made its way into Hampton Roads’ pop culture.
Bobby “BlackHat” Walters, a civilian contractor at JFCOM who moonlights as a blues musician, has channeled his angst into a song.
Less than three weeks after the planned closure was announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “Jiffy Com Blues” has been written and recorded and is getting local radio airplay.
“It was a song that needed to be written. It wrote itself,” Walters, a Coast Guard retiree, said Friday. “Sometimes the blues can help you through a bad situation.”
“Jiffy Com” is a longstanding nickname for the command among workers – one that is frowned upon by the brass, Walters acknowledged. But he said he didn’t use it with mean-spirited intent.
“I thought that if I could write the song in such a way that it would bring a smile to people’s faces, it could put a lighter edge on a very sensitive subject,” he said.
Story here.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Music: The Lie, and It’s Destructive Power-Liar, by Henry Rollins
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Music: The Band Acrassicauda Moves Its Metal Out of Iraq
Talk about some exposure for a band? Getting a guitar from James Hetfield of Metallica is quite the thing, and I wish these guys all the best in New Jersey. –Matt
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One Band Moves Its Metal Out of Iraq
By BEN SISARIO
February 3, 2009
It was a heavy metal miracle.
Acrassicauda had been through hell as a rock band in wartime Baghdad. Its practice space was bombed. Its members were branded Satan worshipers and received death threats for making Western-style music. Then they suffered through two purgatorial years as refugees in Syria and Turkey, killing time and dreaming of rocking out in the land of the free.
And on Sunday night, two days after the last of the band’s four members was resettled in the United States, they enjoyed what any metal fan would have to call heaven: bearhugs and “Wow, dude” heart-to-hearts backstage with Metallica at the Prudential Center in Newark. It probably wasn’t necessary for James Hetfield, Metallica’s lead singer, to surprise them after the show by handing over one of his guitars, a black ESP, and signing it “Welcome to America”; their minds were already blown.