Monthly Archives: August 2019

New Music in 2019: Part 3

Downloadables

The story so far: After a 4-year hiatus, we are approaching The Coming Out Of Some New Things, so in the coming months, I’m releasing odds & ends that fell through the cracks during that gap.

Today’s entry is (FINALLY) our first original track in this series. It’s a demo of a track I’ve been playing live for a while, and it’s also a somewhat shocking true story.

In early 2006, Russia finally revealed that late one night, more than 22 years earlier, their missile defense early-warning system (named Oko, old Russian for “Eye”) reported five missiles coming in from the US. The supervisor on duty that night, Stanislav Petrov, read the warnings and determined it was unlikely to be a real attack. Had he followed orders (as most of the military folks who rotated on that shift would have done), it could have meant the end of the Cold War in explosive fashion. Fortunately, he was right to ignore what turned out to be a false alarm. (Which falsely alarmed repeatedly that night.)

Stanislav Petrov saved the world, and you never even knew about it. The whole story around it is nuts, and Wikipedia is a good place to start digging into it.

So my love of history gave me the idea, the blues gave me the structure, and the Beatles and the Russians gave me the title. Check it out here: The Ballad of Petrov and Oko.