Here's to Dust In Your Eyes!

 March 6, 2025

   Got some rain this morning. Blustery out, but it's cozy in my studio with a fire in the Big Bug Creek potbellied stove.

   Here's a kind of crazy fact: Dan The Man Harshberger and I have been working on zany graphics for, ahem, 53 years! And counting. Yikes! This is a pretty wild stat and almost defies gravity, yes? Anyway, in all that time, I don't think he has created anything zanier than this.

   I will say I am a lucky kid to have him as a partner in zane. Of course, we go back even farther than the beginning of the Razz (1972). Here we are ten years earlier trying to make a Montgomery Wards Mo-Ped look cool. I know, I know, not really cutting it, but we should get points for this being in Dan's family front yard on Chambers Avenue on Hilltop, outside Kingman.

Mo-ped Madness, 1962

(flattops by Chuy at Bond's Barbershop)

   Of course, both of us were in love with the same girl and that would this hot honey:

Annette in a poodle skirt gets down!

   One of the joys of being on social media is enjoying the collective knowledge of my friends. Yesterday, I Googled "Singing Cowboys" and grabbed the first image I liked and posted it without any knowledge of who it was or where it was from. Well, thanks to a certain geekhead musician who reads this blog, here is the back story.

   "Dude, On October 6, 1929 Ken Maynard became the first singing cowboy star with the release of the part-talking film The Wagon Master, a Universal Maynard Production, in which he sang 'The Lone Star Trail' and 'The Cowboy’s Lament'.  The movie was 40% silent footage. This was Ken’s first starring role. In this picture he’s serenading his co-star Edith Roberts playing, or at least holding, what looks like a sweet classic Martin guitar. Ten years previously the first commercial recording of ‘traditional’ cowboy songs on a double faced Columbia disc introduced 'Jesse James' and 'The Dying Cowboy'sung by Bentley Ball. Even with expanding radio play, many scholars attribute the nationwide introduction of cowboy songs through movie westerns for their prodigious growth in popularity in the 1930s. Shout out to an old scholar/writer/performer amigo Jim Bob Tinsley for most of the above. There’s always more if you’re interested. Can’t promise it’ll do anything for helping edit a magazine but it can certainly make you smarter and happier."

—Greg Scott

Famous Last Words, Part XIII

I'll never forget my grandfather's last words to me. "Are you still holding the ladder?"

Another Dust Up From The Duke of Dust

   I don't think it's any secret, but I can't get enough of dust, at least on paper.

Daily Whip Out: "Sky High Dust Storm"

"Conceive an idea. Then stick to it. Those who hang on are the only ones who amount to anything. You can do anything you please. It's the way it's done that makes the difference."

—Augustus Saint-Gaudens