I’m a Smoker, I’m a Joker Thursday, Jul 31 2008

In this crazy week preparing for Beatles Festival, I took a few hours off to head to see The Dark Knight (the new Batman movie).

If you’re on facebook, everyone and their mother has posted as their status “OMG, BATMAN WAS SO EFFIN COOL!!!! ”

Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker is worth the price of admission alone. I never thought Jack Nichelson could ever be topped as The Joker from the original Batman movie in 1990. That was role playing at its best, I thought he personified the Joker in every detail.

Heath Ledger did a one up on him though.

When I collected comics when I was in grammar school, there was always this deal with Batman comics…some reflected the “comic” end, slightly humorous, with the “adam west” treatment. Then you had this Batman movement with dark characters…the story often dealt with the story of Batman as a vengeful night image that basically punished criminals. I always thought some of that was a little too dark…but it made for good stories.

The new batman franchise is more of a focus on this darker side of Batman…and thank GOD they went to that formula. After the last Batman movie with Mr. Freeze (as PLAYED BY GOV. ARNOLD! “EVERYBODY CHILL!”…the entire franchise was in need of a major reboot. “Batman Begins” was the first prequel that gave the characters a much needed shot in the arm.

ANYWAY, back to the point, The Dark Knight is a very fast-paced movie, made for the majority of the public that suffers from undiagnosed A.D.D. The movie never really stops, 2 hrs and 45 mins. It does not feel that long.

The graphics…great….action…fun….Batman is Batman, beats up guys, drives cool cars….typical Batman formula. Isn’t that the James Bond formula too?

THE REASON for watching this movie is to see the way that Heath Ledger explains the character of The Joker. He is the PERFECT combination of humor, chaos, madman, drug addict. Heath stepped into the performance for which will make him a part of film history. To be honest, I had no clue who he was prior to this, I have no idea of his prior work. I do know that this character of his will be referred to forever. It’s that powerful of a role, so suited for him. If Jamie Fox was Ray Charles, then Heath Ledger is the Joker.

Without a doubt, his death will add to the myth surrounding his final role. I seriously doubt, had he lived, that he would have ever topped his performance in The Dark Knight.

If you’re an action movie fan, great. You’ll love it. Batman fan? Great, you’ll love it. But GO see this movie for the pure love of watching character development. A lot of people can’t tell you why it’s a great movie…but trust Mr. Credo. The only reason this movie is GREAT instead of very good is for the reasons I listed above.

AND TRY TO IGNORE the entire TWO FACE thing that happens that totally TOTALLY ruined the movie for me. I won’t dwell on it. The entire movie is somewhat believable (unlikely, but believable), until the TWO FACE crap. Whoever OK’d the editing of that should also be shot. Whoever OK’d the plot at the end of the movie should be fired. CRAP!

It’s ok to leave before the last 15 minutes.

“MY BALLOONS! They’re Stealing MY BALLOONS! Bob? Gun!”
~The Joker, Batman 1990.

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It’s Beatles Week, Y’all Monday, Jul 28 2008

This coming Saturday is THE BIG DAY, the 2008 New Orleans Beatles Fest at House of Blues! “I CAN HARDLY CONTAIN MYSELF, REN!”
Check out some Fab Four moments, some of my favorites, as courtesy of YOUTUBE!
Coo Coo Ca Chu

Yesterday

The Beatles, Live @ The Budakon 1966. The only time that “Yesterday” was performed by the entire band, usually, it was just Paul playing with an orchestra or taped strings as the other members left the stage. This arrangement has full bass, drums, and guitar. Gotta love it!

Hello Goodbye

From the Magical Mystery Tour album, this was a video given to one of the major TV shows at the time to fill a demand for a Beatles appearance on TV (They stopped performing live in 1966). This video is from the end of 1967. The end of this song is just good times and always makes me dance, regardless of where I am (hope the choir never plays this in church).

I Am The Walrus

C’mon. It’s Walrus. Does it make any sense at all? nope.

Notice at the end, the band sings “everybody smoke pot.” that’s not popular rumor, those are the actual lyrics.

Something

One of the best ballads ever written. Period. This is a video taken around the last sessions of The Beatles together, at the end of 1969. Notice Harrison’s wife, Patty Boyd Harrison, who would later become “Layla” a year later…the love inspiration of Eric Clapton’s best work with Derek and The Dominoes.

Free As A Bird

The song that started it all for me. This was the first “Beatles” session post the break-up….recorded using the voice of John Lennon from a track he made in 1978…the surviving Beatles adding their parts in 1994 for the Beatles Anthology. This video is AMAZING, putting visuals to all of their songs. Can you pick them all out? I’ve been trying for 13 years….good luck!

Beatles Festival this Saturday at HOB…it will be amazing! Don’t miss this tribute to the most amazing band ever! 8pm

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Zip and de Doo Da’s Saturday, Jul 26 2008

Eddie Zip may be a name you’re not familiar with right now, but that’s about to change.

About a month ago, I was chatting backstage with Ed White, who is one of the most well-known booking agents in the Gulf South. He was telling me an idea for a band that was a New Orleans “show” band…meaning….there is no real New Orleans group that highlights their show and their music. Most New Orleans musicians are naturally talented enough that an idea of a “show” is not something that comes up. Most musicians in New Orleans are satisfied to stroll on stage, play two hours, and stroll off.

In contrast, go sit in Las Vegas at Legends in Concert. This is the pinnacle of Vegas shows…a total imitator act of the mega stars…Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Britney Spears, and Elvis. The band is tight musically and there is an entire scripted show.

As far as I know, this has never been done before with New Orleans music. Until now.

The entire idea is to make a band that will play for convention work…tourist coming in from out of town that want to hear the classic New Orleans songs. Locals often shy away from the standard artists for some reason (hard to be a hero at home, ya know). Having just played two conventions with Amanda Shaw in the past two weeks, I saw the potential of a band like this in the New Orleans convention market.

There’s a fine line though with show vs. performance. You don’t want to make the experience too campy or put-on. It needs to have that same talent level that you’d see walking down Frenchman St at 3am, but with a lot more direction to it. To pull this off, we needed someone who was the REAL DEAL.

AND we found him!

Jonathan Hoerner is the guitar player from The Bag Of Donuts. He’s also the guitar player for Newsflash: The Huey Lewis Experience with me. He’s also a great friend and one hell of a nice guy to know. Jonathan’s uncle is a man named Eddie Zip. I am ashamed to say that I was unaware of Eddie before we had a conversation about this new band.

Eddie was one of these guys who was around in the 60s when black R and B was rolling in New Orleans. Unlike a lot of the white population, he wasn’t scared to get to know and associate with black artists. Eddie’s main axe is the piano and, as I say sometimes, “man, that cat can JUMP!” He’s comes from the same influences as the best New Orleans piano guys in town: Professor Longhair, Dr. John, John Cleary, Joe Crown, Huey Smith, Allen Toussaint…

He’s the real deal.

Eddie left New Orleans to head to California when he was a young man to do session work. His list of albums and artists is most impressive: Stevie Wonder, Sly and The Family Stone, Dr. John, Joe Cocker, the list is endless! He’s also worked with Derek and The Dominoes drummer Jim Gordon, which I have yet to ask him about but cannot wait to hear the story about Jim (considered one of the best rock drummers, he killed his mother in the mid-70s after the breakup of the Dominoes and is now in solitary confinement in Atlanta.)

Eddie has since moved back to New Orleans and is doing some solo gigs. We had our first practice last Thursday with this new group…it was quite an experience. Rob Schulte on drums, Jerry Christopher on bass, Jerry Sr. on guitar, Jon Hoerner on Guitar, myself on Hammond Organ, keys, and guitar. The horn guys are coming in soon too…I am very excited about this project as it develops.

Zip and de doo da’s for a name? I doubt it, but it’s a good working title right now.

The best thing about this group…
IT’S NATURALLY NAWLINS!
Click here to see Eddie Zip do his thang

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Beatles Fest Cometh Soon! Sunday, Jul 20 2008

Are you ready? We are.

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Amanda’s Cute Guys Sunday, Jul 20 2008

I was honored to perform once again last weekend with Amanda Shaw. For those of you living under a rock, Amanda is one of the premier talents of Louisiana Music. She’s about to turn 18 on August 2nd and has the State and the South in the palm of her hand. Her touring work over the past few years with her band “THE CUTE GUYS” has got her name out to the better half of the nation…and her new CD “Pretty Runs Out” is selling in an industry where media doesn’t sell anymore.

Not too bad when you’re 18.

Besides her incredible talent on the fiddle (she plays as though she’s had 50 years on the instrument….her tone and note choice are truly sophisticated), Amanda’s attitude and general warmness makes her one of my favorite people to play with. Despite her success, she is incredibly humble and seems to take each show with a new-found interest and determination. Her courage to stand up to the Disney corporation when they told her to “conform or else” really proves that her heart is inside the music she plays.

It’s an honor for me to perform with her, Mike, and Ronnie on any occasion …and also an honor to be considered a part of that team.

Download Amanda’s new album “Pretty Runs Out” on iTunes. Available now!

Chuck

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THE MIXED NUTS @ SOUTHPORT HALL FRIDAY NIGHT! Monday, Jul 14 2008

10pm.
It’s ma BIRTHDAY! We gonna pawty like it’s ma birthday!

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Get Back Thursday, Jul 10 2008

What religion are you?

“Well, I was baptized Catholic, but my family never went to Church. I tried to be a Buddhist in college, but it wasn’t for me. Looked at being a Jew, but they scared me. I don’t like the guys on bicycles, they’re just strange. I went to a Baptist church and everyone was jumping around….
…so I guess I’m a Catholic.”

(Before I start my rant, I want to say that this is NOT directed for folks outside the Catholic Faith, only for those who are Catholic who have fallen away and forgotten what it REALLY means. This is no way directed to you if you are of another faith.)

In the days following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, HISTORY will show that a movement began throughout the outskirts of the Roman empire in quiet homage to a man that many considered to be the Messiah of the Jews. The coming years of early christianity would be the most trying and disturbing times in our faith…throughout the rule of Nero, the popular image of christians being sent to the lions as a popular game came to pass. Finally, there was a group in history that was even beneath the Jews in terms of persecution. Christianity was nothing more than a cult until Constantine, through his mother, made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire.

Think about that for a minute. For three hundred years, Christians are killed because of their belief in Jesus. In 334 AD, Christianity becomes the cornerstone of the largest empire the world has ever seen.

Back to my point, the early christians faced the everyday challenge of living their faith. Their environment is something we can try to place in history, but it is a reality that we in the 21st Century cannot understand. The persecution to the death of an individual for their faith is not something the common public has dealt with since the fall of the Nazi empire in 1945. We cannot comprehend the fear that these people lived in and the horrors they faced to spread the word of Christ…so that it would eventually overtake the pagan lifestyles of Rome, thus sending history into the Holy Roman Empire stage.

Reflect on this and think about yourself.

……

When we are baptized into the Catholic Faith, we experience a purging of the soul that separates us from what is known as original sin. In a figurative sense, original sin is the result of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise. Believe the story or not, at SOME POINT in history, we believe that man fell out of favor with God. Our Baptism allows us the chance to transfigure the soul into what God originally planned for us and allow us to take part in God’s new covenant with his people as per the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (thus linking the old and new testaments together). Baptism allows us to move beyond the fall from paradise and allows us a cleansing of the soul from original sin. Are you still with me? good. keep reading.

When we are CONFIRMED, we are usually high-school-ish age. We accept the responsibility of being an adult in the Catholic faith and are given the gift of The Holy Spirit (the 3rd person of the Trinity) to help us through hard times.

…that’s the textbook definition that you had to write on your confirmation test in 8th grade.

Let me explain a few things you might not realize.
When we are Confirmed Catholics, it means exactly what it says. We have taken a renewed vow to uphold the fine points of our faith. We stand as adults and pronounce we are Catholic-Christians…but EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY, WE ACCEPT THE CALLING OF SERVICE that is also a cornerstone of our faith (James 2:20).

For 99.9% of us, it was a night where we went to dinner with our parents after going to Church on a Thursday. And we had Friday off from school. That’s it.

As a 13-year-old, the entire meaning of all of this should not be totally clear. It takes going through life to discover what it actually means, it takes experiences, many failures, doubts, and speculation before we begin to get an understanding of this….

BUT all of that is based on the idea that WE ARE moving forward in our spirituality.

Many people hold the mindset of my first quote. “I DONT KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE!” “I DONT UNDERSTAND ALL OF THIS!” So, nothing gets done. We become last minute religious folks….or as Bill Cosby said, “…that’s an old woman trying to get into heaven.”

I get very frustrated with people’s non-interest in education and excellence. I get fired up when people simply do NOTHING and never go beyond their means. I get MAD when people I know have made their confirmation and the very THOUGHT of trying to grow in the faith is as foreign of an idea as anything else. It upsets me that people fall to fear and ignorance instead of fighting and learning.

If you are a fallen Catholic, get back to Mass. If you can’t do that yet, go get a Bible and start reading. Take it from a Kindergarden level. DO SOMETHING. GROW in your faith, even if you have to start from square one again. If you are Confirmed, USE the gifts that you have been given…pray for guidance, receive the Sacraments, and never stop learning.

AND CHECK THIS OUT…if you’re a confirmed Catholic…DON’T MAKE THE RELIGION UP AS YOU GO ALONG. This isn’t Picadilly, you can’t match up what you like and leave what you don’t. LIFE doesn’t work like that, neither does Catholicism. Can you disagree with dogma? Sure. Can you not like ideas and movements? sure. Can you doubt!? yep. ….But when you do, ask yourself this: “do I believe this is the christian church started by Jesus Christ?” (you say so at mass when you go and say the creed). AND really consider this point:

“DO I, as a person living here on Earth, firmly believe that MY comprehension and MY interpretation of the Catholic Faith and the Universe is so advanced and sound that MY opinions are far more logical than 2000 years of Catholic teachings?”

Do you think like that? Do you just say, “I think…I reason…therefore….must be true!” Do you do that?

Take a piece of humble pie and get back with me when you wake up.

If you’ve really read this entire thing and think I am pretty fired up right now, you’re right. I want to see all of my friends in church and getting their spiritual act together. I don’t demand that you believe what I do, but I do demand you believe in something…and if you DO believe what I do, do it right.

Peace,
Chuck

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Entourage Thursday, Jul 10 2008

I have an Entourage.

These are the people you will see ride in my limo after “Quarter Life Crisis” goes platinum.

There are a few folks missing from this picture *(you know who you are).

A lot of people spend their lives looking to surround themselves with good people. Some people don’t realize they are surrounded by good friends until they’ve run them off or run themselves out of a group. Some folks never get a good group of people around them to know what they are missing.

I am blessed to be surrounded by a fantastic group of friends who are all fantastic people.
There is no one who is a slacker of the group. There are no leeches.

There’s no drama in this group. There’s life drama that we all deal with, but as a whole, there is no drama caused from internal strife. It stands out like a sore thumb if any comes up. The ultimate desire is for all of us to succeed.

This is my support system, my entourage, my conscience, my friends…and very much my family. I am blessed to be around all of them, and I am blessed that they have stood by me through my hard times in life.

Chuck

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Nutsapalooza 2008 Wednesday, Jul 9 2008

Before this past weekend, the biggest party that I’ve ever been a part of was Ultra Prime…a party to symbolize the end of college and our own “Thursday Night Prime.” That remained the best party I’d been to for years.

Until Nutsapalooza.

This past July 4th, my group of friends through a party that was one of the best times I’ve had in a long while. With 80 people in attendance, Nutsapalooza was a meeting of so many different groups of people…many from all different walks of life. This is our version of “feed the multitudes”…maybe I should start the Credo Fellowship Church? Maybe not.

The entire event was four months in the planning…REALLY, since Jan 1st 2008 after another great spacewalk party. The LSU Krewe de Spanky van was parked infront the house for a week as set up began on Monday. A total transformation of my backyard took place as a 5,000 gallon pool was brought in (which still remains in my backyard…I have learned how to take care of a pool, scary thought). I have to say, I am loving having a pool in my backyard…I love people coming by to jump in at all hours…loving that I am finally starting to swim again, and loving the weekend parties that are planned from now till Labor Day.

My reason for this blog….the best aspect, the greatest thing about Nutsapalooza…it was a total family affair. The core group of friends (see the next blog when I write it) brought their entire families with them to party with us. It is such a blessing to have all of these wonderful people around with the ability to spend quality time with all of them. I am truly blessed from God with the best friends and family.

So that’s it. Anybody want to come jump in the pool, c’mon in. I’ll even start a whirlpool with you.
DONE!

Chuck

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Supreme Mistake Wednesday, Jul 2 2008

The United States Supreme Court overturned a Louisiana law this week, denying the death penalty for child rapists. Two convicted felons that sit on death row for child rape will receive new sentences that will take them off of death row.

From the Washington Post:

“The court went beyond the question in the case to rule out the death penalty for any individual crime — as opposed to “offenses against the state,” such as treason or espionage — “where the victim’s life was not taken.”

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, if you’re outraged enough to write thousands of letters to your government officials about their PAY RAISE, but could care less that an individual that rapes a defenseless child WILL NOT receive the full punishment of the law….

THEN GET A CLUE AND WAKE UP! This is a total outrage and the Supreme Court’s rational for their ruling is total nonsense. The neglect of children and the elderly, of the handicapped, and ALL Americans who cannot defend themselves due to physical detriment or maturity…ANYONE who purposely or willfully neglects these groups…. SHOULD be subject to the full penalty of the law. PERIOD.

Here’s your thought of the day:
“The majority of America lives in their own bubble with no real clue of what goes on around them.”
~Chuck Credo IV

Sorry for the rant, but this is a total outrage.

CCIV

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