When I was in college, LSU's campus radio station, then called WPRG, had what I considered a great format -- pretty much the full spectrum of album rock and college-y alternative fare, plus a minimum of one jazz cut an hour. SOME DJs BALKED at the jazz thing, but I thought it was brilliant, and it made WPRG sound a sophisticated cut above your average college-radio fare. And isn't it funny that -- almost three decades later, during this age of "diversity" -- most areas of our lives aren't very "diverse" at all? What we have is an age of Balkanization, not "diversity." Focus groups of the pathologically self-segregated. Minds closing shut all across the land. ME, I'VE ALWAYS been a freak. I even grew to like a lot of my parent's music, back during a time when there was a wide gulf between "our" music and "theirs." I like rock. I like alt. I like country. And I like jazz. So, today's show is a little like that old WPRG college-radio format. Only more so. If you like real diversity, you'll find it here. It's 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

I didn't expect organic gardening to be this Zen thing for me. ALL I WANTED TO DO was to grow some vegetables in the name of greater self-sufficiency (Take that prepackaged consumerist culture!) and saving a few bucks -- or more -- at the grocery store. And I wanted to accomplish that without putting 47 pounds of MiracleGro and 87 cubic yards of Sevin dust on everything. I also determined to resuse what dishwater I reasonably could to hydrate said garden. After all, that would certainly make getting rid of coffee grounds and grease easier -- dump it all in the pot the dishwater goes into, then dump it all in the garden. Putting organic material back into the earth . . . good. I've even got a little countertop compost box that really, really needs to be transferred into a legit outdoors compost pile. I'll get to it. Anyway, Mrs. Favog calls my horticultural methodology "Nazi death-camp gardening." She'd rather I just unreel a hose pipe to where the tomatoes and pepper plants are, turn on the water, turn on 3 Chords & the Truth and have a cold beer. Let me amend that. She could care less whether I have a cold beer. The missus just doesn't particularly care for carrying a stock pot (or three) full of water across the back yard to the garden, then unloading the H2O into the rows. Heinrich Himmler am I. Or is it Heimlich? I have trouble keeping my genocidal Germans straight. WHATEVER. I GUESS I CAN'T blame her for not having a Catholic Buddhist vibe going when it comes to tomatoes and peppers. Beans, too. If I get them planted in the next week, I think I can get in a crop of pole beans before first frost. For me, carrying pots of recycled water out to the garden -- and hoeing out the weeds and touching up the rows every couple of weeks -- is the Southern Boy Catholic version of raking a big rock bed or tapping sand out of a straw to make a beautiful mandala. The advantage of my Catholic Zen thang over the eastern Zen thang hinges on one thing: You can't eat sand. Or rocks. Tomatoes and peppers are tasty, however. And good for you. What does this have to do with this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth? I frankly have no idea. Maybe it has something to do with crafting sets of songs into something with some meaning -- whatever the meaning happens to be with any grouping of music. Maybe it has something to do with music soothing the savage breast. Maybe it has something to do with being gaga for Joan Jett since I was 16. Yeah, that's the ticket. Listen to 3 Chords & the Truth, the worldwide music service of Revolution 21 -- it's Zen radio. On the Internets. Just go here -- or to the player at the top of this page -- and achieve a higher consciousness. Be there. Aloha.

What if everything you were supposed to believe about yourself -- and where you are from -- was a lie? That's the gist of our centerpiece musical exploration on this week's 3 Chords & the Truth. What if the glorious "heritage" you were taught to take pride in was, instead, a more compelling case for intense shame? WHAT DO YOU MAKE of that? If you -- if your region and culture -- have been held captive by a defining historical lie, how do you make peace with the present and move on to the future? If you have any good answers, contact me at mail@revolution21.org. Intrigued? You should be. It's a hell of a question, and we meditate upon it through some great -- and diverse -- music this week. Of course, in addition to the seriousness, we have a lot of fun, too. That's because the Big Show is the place where you never know what's going to be thrown at you next. Every song an adventure, I say. And you'll be saying that, too. It's 3 Chords & the Truth, and you can listen right now, right here. Be there. Aloha.

This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth came into conceptual being with a blog post by someone who was a few years behind me at Baton Rouge Magnet High. TRANSLATION: Back in the day. Anyway, this young lady -- and any woman younger than me is a "young lady," because I ain't old . . . I don't think -- had been searching for a copy of the U.S. Times' "Wanna Go to London" LP for, oh . . . 26 years. And I just happen to have a mint copy, bought at my second home when I was a student at Louisiana State University. That would be Leisure Landing, the fabulous independent record store that lay just off campus. Naturally, Leisure Landing is no more . . . like most of the great record stores. Anyway, I was able to hook Diane up with a pristine digital copy of my pristine vinyl record. Free of charge. The record Nazis might be able to get me on a lot of stuff, but they ain't gonna get me for out-and-out piracy. You know what I'm sayin'? Thing is, Cap, that got me to thinkin' about old days, and music, and how fortunate many of us were to be drunk . . . er . . . hard-studying, model college students when the punk and New Wave scene was happenin' in a town not usually associated with artistic ferment. There was some good music going on in Red Stick back in the day, let me tell 'ya. DOES THIS POST have a point? How about, "Let's take a trip to Back in the Day and listen to some old school garage, punk and New Wave"? Or, how about "If you're from where I'm from, when I was from it, listen to the Big Show and be transported to a time when we bitched about how the suits ruined 'FMF and we clung to the low-wattage signals of WBRH and WPRG for dear life . . . for that is from whence The Music came"? Alternatively, perhaps the point of this post -- aside from a middle-age man's nostalgic leanings -- is meant to be instructive to a younger generation. A reminder that all new things rarely are as new as we'd like to think. "Indie" came from somewhere . . . and this is as good a place as any to start looking. WHATEVER THE POINT -- assuming there is one here -- just check out the latest 3 Chords & the Truth and listen to some righteous music. Do they say "righteous" anymore? It's 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, we're going to be thumbing our way down that folk highway, and then take a side trip down a country road. Either way you go, you'll find some of the greatest music America -- and the world -- ever has produced. FOR ME, country music wasn't an instant-gratification kind of thing. Growing up in the Deep South in the 1960s and '70s, it was, to a large extent, the background music of my young life, but it wasn't my background music of choice. That would have been The Who, the Beatles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Billy Preston, the Meters, Irma Thomas and Al Green. And even the Carpenters . . . and (ahem) the Partridge Family. Country music was the background music of my life in the sense that I couldn't avoid it. It was the music the Old Man listened to on the radio -- and you moved the AM dial away from WYNK, WSLG or WLBI at substantial risk to life and limb. Same deal with the Porter Wagoner Show on television every Saturday afternoon. I yearned for "that g**damn hippie music," as the Old Man referred to my generation's soundtrack. But I also ended up knowing the likes of Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones and "pretty Miss Norma Jean." One of my favorites -- albeit something of an ambivalent favorite -- was "Country" Charley Pride. And if you don't know that it's C-H-A-R-L-E-Y instead of C-H-A-R-L-I-E, you're a damn pretender, son. BACK THEN, however, there were two sides to life: yours . . . and your parents'. The existential question of one's young existence -- Which side are you on? -- required exactly no thought. Whatsoever. It's a funny thing. Though the question was simple, all kinds of stuff got mixed up in it that really had no business there. The Beatles vs. Porter Wagoner is not a fundamental question of good and evil. "It's a big world out there," we young'uns constantly told ourselves. Our actions and our prejudices, however, betrayed our lack of believe in our own party line. In fact, while "Which side are you on?" was -- and is -- the central question in any of our lives, we stupidly applied it to all the wrong areas. And not at all to the Right Area. Then again, neither did our parents, by and large. It is possible, and even quite healthy, to like both the Sex Pistols and Ernest Tubb. It's likewise possible to associate with, and even like, both Democrats and Republicans. Squares and hippies both have their virtues . . . and their vices. The world is big. It's our hearts and minds that tend to be small. Too small, as a matter of fact, to apprehend exactly how cosmically huge a question is "Which side are you on?" THAT, IN A NUTSHELL, is what the Big Show happens to be about this week. 3 Chords & the Truth: It's the show where we ask the big questions and where, this week, we're playing ALL FOUR kinds of music. Rock . . . and roll. Not to mention country . . . and western. Be there. Aloha.