Like most people my age, Motown was a given, as omnipresent as the Beatles from my first waking moment. It was still a vital label and musical force, adapting to the changing times, as I became more conscious of pop music and the artists creating it during the early 1970s, with records from Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and the Jackson 5 filling the radio. And as with most people my age, the Jackson 5 were particularly relevant for me. They were just a bunch of kids, fronted by this soulful little singer and smooth dance, Michael. Along with the Beatles cartoons, there was a Jackson 5 cartoon on Saturday mornings. And I had a 45 of “ABC” on cardboard that you could cut out of the back of a Frosted Flakes cereal box. Remember those? Square little cardboard records with a round inlay of vinyl grooves to play on a turntable. I had to be careful that the corners did not fold up or they would hit the needle arm. We had white and black kids in our classes. The Jackson 5 seemed to be for all of us. There was one kid who was taking his second tour of kindergarten, a kid much bigger physically than I was, who, with a few other kids, often built a stage in Mrs. Hall's classroom out of those big hollow plywood blocks. When I brought the cereal-box record in to share and impress them with my shared enthusiasm for the Jackson 5, the two-time kindergarten veteran suggested that I give it to him. When I demurred, he knocked me down, put his sneaker on my face, and took the record without asking me again. But I sensed I was in.
I ever got much beyond those original Jackson 5 singles. Yeah, Off the Wall was around later and enjoyable. But it seemed so smooth and pop light to me when I was more heavily into rock music. And Thriller was something that my kid brothers and sisters had around and was ubiquitous on MTV, but it was with this record in particular that Michael went on to represent much of what I hated about 1980s mainstream pop music; it was slick, cheap sounding, machinated-groove sequences with vocal tracks polished and layered beyond human soulfulness. It was just cheesy to me. Very few of the songs until “Do You Remember,” or “Black and White” did much for me and even those latter two are enjoyable on only a lightweight pop kind of way.
I won’t even get into the freakishness of Michael tragically falling away on a personal level; it has been covered, I believe, by now. It was just not relevant to my life. It was a sideshow from an artist who provided very little music that registered on my radar.
And I am not intending to just lay out some negative karma about Michael in the wake if his death and the subsequent surrounding hoopla. Neither am I trying to draw a direct parallel nor contrast him with Stevie Wonder. But the parallels are undeniably there: two inner-city kids who started out as children/young adolescents on Berry Gordy’s Motown label. But Stevie had already scored a bunch of hit singles and was on his way to making big artistic statements in the album format by the time Michael and his brothers rolled around.
However, while Stevie Wonder also eventually fell into 1980s pap and fluff, he provided one of the greatest streaks of albums and singles in the history of pop music. Perhaps only rivaled for my taste by the Beatles and Stones. And he remains a highly vital performer today. Seeing him perform a couple of years ago was as close to a religious experience as I have gotten. Here was a guy who grew up to completely fulfill -- and then some -- the promise he laid out as a prodigy. I was about the age of both of these guys when they started out as child performers, 10, when I bought my first album purchase, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. I had long ago inherited albums by the Stones, Dylan, the Beach Boys, Mamas and Poppas, etc. My parents had some Elvis LPs. And I had a big rope of 45s from the British Invasion and, later, contemporary top 40 songs I bought on my own. But the first album I remember buying is Songs in the Key of Life . This was a double album with an accompanying booklet and additional 45-sized 4-song “single.” The music was just bursting out of Stevie to the point that it spilled out off of a double LP into another bonus single. I had never seen anything like it before. The bonus record included this incredible piece of updated New Orleans piano funk called “Ebony Eyes.” I played this track until the record wore off. And then, somewhere down the line, it broke and/or got lost.
In college, at a record store maybe, or digging through someone else’s record collection in my dorm, I came across this 45 again and it was like finding the Lost Ark. I had not listened to the tune probably since before high school. It had probably been five years since I had heard it, as this is not a song I have ever heard on the radio, to this day. My friends at college were ecstatic to learn of this track and it quickly became a staple in the dorm DJ sessions we would spin while drinking and doing whatever else one does in college dorms.
Later, Songs in the Key of Life was one of the first CDs I picked up when that format came out, and there was my old favorite in digital format. And of course, nowadays it is always there to pop up on the iPod. When it came time for the residencies at the bar gigs I started doing with the two iterations of Crown Victoria, we started rotating a Faces-like version into the set. So it is a natural that I try it here in the Cover of the Week project. I have enlisted by rock & roll brother, foil, and piano man from Buffalo Tom and Crown Victoria to accompany me. Phil Aiken sent me the track he did back in the Dr. John/Professor Longhair tradition, bringing the song back a little toward New Orleans. I had intended to lay some guitar over it, but Phil played such a beautiful part that I saw no need to sully it with half-assed guitar. And it serves as a nice change of pace, I think. Major props to Philly Phil Aiken.
Ebony Eyes (featuring Phil Aiken) mp3
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Now on Twitter
I needed yet another way to waste time and connect to "the people."
Find me on Twitter @billjanovitz
Well, it was nearly all summer we sat on your roof
Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon
And Id show you stars you never could see
Baby, it couldn't have been that easy to forget about me
Find me on Twitter @billjanovitz
Well, it was nearly all summer we sat on your roof
Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon
And Id show you stars you never could see
Baby, it couldn't have been that easy to forget about me
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Cover of the Week 35
We had some friends over for the Independence Day holiday this Saturday. We had been dealing with a month of almost solid rain in Boston. Seriously, I believe there was something like 20-ish per cent of available sunshine in June. I was starting to lose it like everyone else -- kids in the house all the time, darkness reaching a nadir of mid-winter-like bleakness at the end of the week. A rainy day here and there is good to keep mental stability and to get some work done. And it has been a productive month for me. But weeks solid is enough to drive a man off the edge.
So it was with giddy excitement that we welcomed Mr. Sun back this weekend. And Saturday was pretty much perfect. We got the bocce set, the Wiffle balls and bat out, smoked a pork shoulder for pulled pork with Blue Ribbon BBQ sauce (apologies to my PETA friends), chilled the Pilsner Urquel, cut up some limes for the Tanqueray and tonics, and enjoyed the day with a small gathering of friends and families. It was a fantastic time and I hope it was the same for you. Man, we milked these two beautiful days. I went out for a 22-mile bike this morning, and that was AFTER a night of beer, pork, and gin (sort of in that order). Then, via the largess of my BFF, Mike O’Malley and our friends at the Red Sox Foundation, brought my family to to the only-in-Boston Picnic in the Park at Fenway, where you get to run around in the outfield and enjoy BBQ, more beer, and if you’re lucky, get some autographs. None other than first-time all star, Timmy Wakefield, lent more of his time to raise a ton of money with Mike at the live auction.
But yesterday, my friend, Tommy Ruprecht, and I got to chatting music He asked me if I had heard this Mick Jagger solo song called, “Evening Gown.” I had assumed he had heard it on my music mix coming through in the background, because I had been recently rotating that tune and another of the Jagger solo record, Wandering Spirit, “Don’t Tear Me Up,” after years of not listening to the record. Tommy had only heard the latter come up which is what made him ask about the former. I love that song, I told him. In fact, I believe that album/CD was one of the reasons (along with Teenage Fanclub’s, Grand Prix LP) that pushed us in the direction of David Bianco, who went on to produce our CD, Smitten. Rick Rubin produced the Jagger LP and Dave engineered and mixed, which he did for many Rubin productions.
Tommy and I waxed rhapsodically about what a beautiful song “Evening Gown” is. I remember the record coming out in 1993. The big deal off the record was a duet with Lenny Kravitz wherein the two of them offer a confused take on the great Bill Withers tune “Use Me.” But the other tunes sort of caught me by surprise. I am sure I heard “Don’t Tear Me Up” on the radio and thought it was, along with recent Keith solo albums, some of the best stuff either of them had managed to put together -- solo or with the Stones -- at the time, anyway.
There is something quite vulnerable in Mick’s performance of the tune. Starting with the song itself, of course. It is a deceivingly simple country ballad, two verses, bridge, solo and an outro verse. (By the way, if the lyric and singing don’t get you, the pedal steel solo will bring you to your knees. It is played by the legendary JayDee Mannes, who played with Buck Owens and the Bucakroos, and played on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and other classics.) But Jagger manages to masterfully draw this self-deprecating, back-slapping character, a guy entering middle age and acknowledging this passing of time, apparently still with his wife, who he ultimately is singing the song to, repeatedly bringing back the focus to her in the refrain “But I can still paint the town/All the colors of your evening gown/While I’m waiting for your blond hair to turn gray.”
It is a powerful stanza even just sitting on the page. Jagger manages to capture endless layers of emotion and detail about this guy in so few words, ultra-economically, but the singer still draws us in personally, seeing ourselves and others we know there. I identified with the character even when hearing it at the age of 27 (hard to believe it was that long ago), never mind 43. So I suppose it is predictable that is has wormed its way back into my consciousness, onto my playlists, and ultimately here for a cover version.
I often feel like I so easily lapse into a cliche existence, following many steps about what a guy growing up in America is expected to do, saying the same shit to my kids my father said to me, feeling the inevitable mid-life crisis pulling me in, and so on. I have started to think a lot more about mortality than I used to, almost to the point of obsession. It used to be a subject I would not give much more than a moment’s notice to. We’re here and at some point we all go; sad but true. Now, who's playing at the Middle East tonight?
Don’t get me wrong; I mean, I am not obsessed with staving off my own inevitable passing; it is more of a melancholy, Zen (maybe not) awareness of the passing of time that we have to spend with the ones we love. See what I was saying about cliches? How does one begin to venture into this sort of well-worn subject matter without bumping into and falling far short of Kierkegaard (as Tommy joked in another context yesterday), Shakespeare, the Gershwins.
Well, there you go: that’s how you explore the subject matter, in art -- poetry, drama, music. And Mick does it masterfully here, before you are even are aware of it. Jagger’s lyric comes on like it is going to be one of his tongue-in-cheek country tunes like Far Away Eyes, in other words, devoid of any heavy emotional involvement (unlike, for example, “Wild Horses,” which is just all raw nerve). “Evening Gown” starts off
People say that I'm high class
But I'm low down all the while
People think That I'm crazy
When I flash that California smile
Yeah, yeah, you think. Come on Mick! Bring us something! In 1993, we had been through so much of the beginning-of-the-end of the Stones, with more mediocre and poor music that we - any of us still paying any attention at all -- could be forgiven for just being cynical that there would be any more passion left. But then he hits us -- hard with that chorus, and he goes on to continue to sketch this character. By the bridge, we realize it is himself in there somewhere, under “sports clothes” and “California” smiles.
For Jagger to be singing this as this aging Lothario rock star god was a substantial acknowledgment of his humanity and mortality. I don’t pretend to follow all the gossip about his personal life so I have no real idea of where he was in his romantic life at this moment, but his hammering of the last line of the chorus three times in a higher octave, bringing it home with his enviable country-soul voice, certainly makes the point clear.
“....waiting for your blond hair to turn gray.”
And I had those lines in my head for the rest of the evening, as I looked around at my group of friends -- husbands wives, kids -- until I went down stairs at 11, after everyone was long gone and all the bottles were in the bin and the dishes put away, to record the cover. And the song has stayed with me all day.
Evening Gown mp3
So it was with giddy excitement that we welcomed Mr. Sun back this weekend. And Saturday was pretty much perfect. We got the bocce set, the Wiffle balls and bat out, smoked a pork shoulder for pulled pork with Blue Ribbon BBQ sauce (apologies to my PETA friends), chilled the Pilsner Urquel, cut up some limes for the Tanqueray and tonics, and enjoyed the day with a small gathering of friends and families. It was a fantastic time and I hope it was the same for you. Man, we milked these two beautiful days. I went out for a 22-mile bike this morning, and that was AFTER a night of beer, pork, and gin (sort of in that order). Then, via the largess of my BFF, Mike O’Malley and our friends at the Red Sox Foundation, brought my family to to the only-in-Boston Picnic in the Park at Fenway, where you get to run around in the outfield and enjoy BBQ, more beer, and if you’re lucky, get some autographs. None other than first-time all star, Timmy Wakefield, lent more of his time to raise a ton of money with Mike at the live auction.
But yesterday, my friend, Tommy Ruprecht, and I got to chatting music He asked me if I had heard this Mick Jagger solo song called, “Evening Gown.” I had assumed he had heard it on my music mix coming through in the background, because I had been recently rotating that tune and another of the Jagger solo record, Wandering Spirit, “Don’t Tear Me Up,” after years of not listening to the record. Tommy had only heard the latter come up which is what made him ask about the former. I love that song, I told him. In fact, I believe that album/CD was one of the reasons (along with Teenage Fanclub’s, Grand Prix LP) that pushed us in the direction of David Bianco, who went on to produce our CD, Smitten. Rick Rubin produced the Jagger LP and Dave engineered and mixed, which he did for many Rubin productions.
Tommy and I waxed rhapsodically about what a beautiful song “Evening Gown” is. I remember the record coming out in 1993. The big deal off the record was a duet with Lenny Kravitz wherein the two of them offer a confused take on the great Bill Withers tune “Use Me.” But the other tunes sort of caught me by surprise. I am sure I heard “Don’t Tear Me Up” on the radio and thought it was, along with recent Keith solo albums, some of the best stuff either of them had managed to put together -- solo or with the Stones -- at the time, anyway.
There is something quite vulnerable in Mick’s performance of the tune. Starting with the song itself, of course. It is a deceivingly simple country ballad, two verses, bridge, solo and an outro verse. (By the way, if the lyric and singing don’t get you, the pedal steel solo will bring you to your knees. It is played by the legendary JayDee Mannes, who played with Buck Owens and the Bucakroos, and played on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and other classics.) But Jagger manages to masterfully draw this self-deprecating, back-slapping character, a guy entering middle age and acknowledging this passing of time, apparently still with his wife, who he ultimately is singing the song to, repeatedly bringing back the focus to her in the refrain “But I can still paint the town/All the colors of your evening gown/While I’m waiting for your blond hair to turn gray.”
It is a powerful stanza even just sitting on the page. Jagger manages to capture endless layers of emotion and detail about this guy in so few words, ultra-economically, but the singer still draws us in personally, seeing ourselves and others we know there. I identified with the character even when hearing it at the age of 27 (hard to believe it was that long ago), never mind 43. So I suppose it is predictable that is has wormed its way back into my consciousness, onto my playlists, and ultimately here for a cover version.
I often feel like I so easily lapse into a cliche existence, following many steps about what a guy growing up in America is expected to do, saying the same shit to my kids my father said to me, feeling the inevitable mid-life crisis pulling me in, and so on. I have started to think a lot more about mortality than I used to, almost to the point of obsession. It used to be a subject I would not give much more than a moment’s notice to. We’re here and at some point we all go; sad but true. Now, who's playing at the Middle East tonight?
Don’t get me wrong; I mean, I am not obsessed with staving off my own inevitable passing; it is more of a melancholy, Zen (maybe not) awareness of the passing of time that we have to spend with the ones we love. See what I was saying about cliches? How does one begin to venture into this sort of well-worn subject matter without bumping into and falling far short of Kierkegaard (as Tommy joked in another context yesterday), Shakespeare, the Gershwins.
Well, there you go: that’s how you explore the subject matter, in art -- poetry, drama, music. And Mick does it masterfully here, before you are even are aware of it. Jagger’s lyric comes on like it is going to be one of his tongue-in-cheek country tunes like Far Away Eyes, in other words, devoid of any heavy emotional involvement (unlike, for example, “Wild Horses,” which is just all raw nerve). “Evening Gown” starts off
People say that I'm high class
But I'm low down all the while
People think That I'm crazy
When I flash that California smile
Yeah, yeah, you think. Come on Mick! Bring us something! In 1993, we had been through so much of the beginning-of-the-end of the Stones, with more mediocre and poor music that we - any of us still paying any attention at all -- could be forgiven for just being cynical that there would be any more passion left. But then he hits us -- hard with that chorus, and he goes on to continue to sketch this character. By the bridge, we realize it is himself in there somewhere, under “sports clothes” and “California” smiles.
For Jagger to be singing this as this aging Lothario rock star god was a substantial acknowledgment of his humanity and mortality. I don’t pretend to follow all the gossip about his personal life so I have no real idea of where he was in his romantic life at this moment, but his hammering of the last line of the chorus three times in a higher octave, bringing it home with his enviable country-soul voice, certainly makes the point clear.
“....waiting for your blond hair to turn gray.”
And I had those lines in my head for the rest of the evening, as I looked around at my group of friends -- husbands wives, kids -- until I went down stairs at 11, after everyone was long gone and all the bottles were in the bin and the dishes put away, to record the cover. And the song has stayed with me all day.
Evening Gown mp3
Monday, June 29, 2009
Wow -- Some Sort of Translation
I found this in a feed I get. I have no idea, but it is clearly some sort of aggregate translator of blog content. The wording is hilarious and I am thinking of replacing everything I wrote with it. This is a translation of my most recent post.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Cover of the Week 34
I almost thought I would not be able to get to this week's cover. Two Buffalo Tom shows, a rehearsal, and a night in the studio earlier in the week, a crazy day job week and, last time I checked, a family to spend a few minutes with. Thanks to all who came to cheer us on through our shows this weekend. We had a great time. My ears are shot, so I have no idea if this week's recording sounds any good.
An inordinate amount of space here has been devoted to moving to Boston, an event that happened 27 years ago. A psychologist could have a field day with this, I suppose.
Nevertheless, one of the defining events of my life was heading into Boston University's Walter Brown hockey arena in 1982 or '83, clad in a home-made English Beat t-shirt that one of my new friends had made for the group of us going to the show. The Beat were at the height of their powers, having just released Special Beat Service, headlining hockey arenas when they weren't on such double bills as the one they played with Squeeze in Nassau Coliseum on Long Island that same year, after I had left for Massachusetts.
We were all pumped up and excited to see the Beat. On my way into the seats, I passed by a few guys that were in a band in a neighboring town I auditioned for who played everything I liked from John Mayall and all that classic Brit blues stuff to this ska that was making a resurgence. I guess I wasn't good enough because they never called me back. It was merely an awkward speed bump.
We took our seats ready to get through the opening band on our way to skanking heaven. But before the uptempo and highly energetic Beat came on, there was this shadowy, murky, enigmatic jangly neo-Byrds-like band that took the stage and held me captivated for the whole set. It was like some new interpretation of jangle-pop, '60s garage pop, less angular Television/Talking Heads-meets-Paper Sun-era-psychedelic-Traffic. They reminded me of all these Left Banke and other 1960s melancholy 45s I had as a kid. But there was something fresh about these guys. The enigmatic lead singer in his baggy flannel shirt rarely moved from his haphazard leaning embrace of the mic stand and said nothing between songs. The guitarist slashed away at his black-and-white Rickenbacker, matching his ensemble of long-sleeved white shirt and black vest. The bass player sang all these interesting counter melodies to the lead singer's main parts, which were rarely discernible lyrically. When words popped out, they were evocative but meaning was elusive.
I was taken away, mesmerized. Here I was ready to party and dance to the pastel-colored ska-pop/blue-eyed soul of the Beat and I was broadsided by the profoundly affecting and recondite opening band, REM. I knew nothing about them. The night went on and I really did have a great time with the Beat, who were just amazing. But through all that good-time party music, I could not shake that sublime opening music and went right out to Newbury Comics to buy Murmur and Chronic Town (I believe they were both available by that time). I felt like I had discovered a new band that very few people knew about.
For the next six years I bought every REM record and went to every show of theirs that I could make. They were one of the main cornerstones of my musical development and ushered me into a whole new realm of new music, going on to discover their influences and peers like Mission of Burma and the Neats (both from Boston), Miracle Legion, Dream Syndicate, Wiretrain, etc. I grew out my hair into my face (long front, short sides and back) and started to write my own songs filled with inscrutable lyrics and vague lilting melodies, trying to find others to convert to the cause of this new "Paisley Underground." I sold my Peavey tube amp and bought an ultra-clean Roland JC-120 jangle amp. Thank God that only lasted a couple of years.
REM was one of the bonding forces between my new buddy, Chris Colbourn and me. We enjoyed and shared a deep mutual love of everything from the Stones to these new acts like REM, X, Gun Club, and Echo and the Bunnymen. We went to see a bunch of these shows together before Buff Tom even formed.
Needless to say, when Buffalo Tom finally did form and head out on the road in 1988 or so, that date marked "Athens, GA" was one of our red letter days on the first (second?) U.S. tour itinerary. We had seen the documentary Athens, GA Inside Out, which spotlighted the college town's post-punk musical acts. We played the legendary 40 Watt Club. We knew darn well that Peter Buck's wife owned part (or all) of the club. We had a great show. She invited us back to stay at their house. I am still jittery writing this now. We were greeted at the house by none other that Mr. Buck himself, in a bathrobe. He played us selections from his amazing record collection all night. I don't even have to tell you how we felt; you know how we felt; all I have to do is relate the events. The record Out of Time had just been recorded but not yet released. Peter played us tracks from it. Her showed us a picture he had taken with Al and Tipper. He said he had been all ramped up to let Tipper have a piece of his mind regarding her then-recent PMRC efforts. But he had been knocked out by the flu and she was so nice so all he could manage was a sort of weak, "I think what you are doing is wrong."
Peter and his wife were extremely gracious to us, and from what I gather, to many other bands who came through town -- one of the good guys of rock. I have met him a few other times over the years but have not met the other guys.
I have read that Buck is not a fan of this week's choice for a cover, so perhaps I should have chosen better. But Fables of the Reconstruction is just one of those records for me> I remember seeing the bans on this tour out at the Worcester Centrum and them opening with "Feeling Gravity's Pull." It was highly dramatic. "Wendell Gee" is a song that has a beautiful melody and haunting, mythical lyric that compelled me to play it repeatedly.
Wendell Gee mp3
An inordinate amount of space here has been devoted to moving to Boston, an event that happened 27 years ago. A psychologist could have a field day with this, I suppose.
Nevertheless, one of the defining events of my life was heading into Boston University's Walter Brown hockey arena in 1982 or '83, clad in a home-made English Beat t-shirt that one of my new friends had made for the group of us going to the show. The Beat were at the height of their powers, having just released Special Beat Service, headlining hockey arenas when they weren't on such double bills as the one they played with Squeeze in Nassau Coliseum on Long Island that same year, after I had left for Massachusetts.
We were all pumped up and excited to see the Beat. On my way into the seats, I passed by a few guys that were in a band in a neighboring town I auditioned for who played everything I liked from John Mayall and all that classic Brit blues stuff to this ska that was making a resurgence. I guess I wasn't good enough because they never called me back. It was merely an awkward speed bump.
We took our seats ready to get through the opening band on our way to skanking heaven. But before the uptempo and highly energetic Beat came on, there was this shadowy, murky, enigmatic jangly neo-Byrds-like band that took the stage and held me captivated for the whole set. It was like some new interpretation of jangle-pop, '60s garage pop, less angular Television/Talking Heads-meets-Paper Sun-era-psychedelic-Traffic. They reminded me of all these Left Banke and other 1960s melancholy 45s I had as a kid. But there was something fresh about these guys. The enigmatic lead singer in his baggy flannel shirt rarely moved from his haphazard leaning embrace of the mic stand and said nothing between songs. The guitarist slashed away at his black-and-white Rickenbacker, matching his ensemble of long-sleeved white shirt and black vest. The bass player sang all these interesting counter melodies to the lead singer's main parts, which were rarely discernible lyrically. When words popped out, they were evocative but meaning was elusive.
I was taken away, mesmerized. Here I was ready to party and dance to the pastel-colored ska-pop/blue-eyed soul of the Beat and I was broadsided by the profoundly affecting and recondite opening band, REM. I knew nothing about them. The night went on and I really did have a great time with the Beat, who were just amazing. But through all that good-time party music, I could not shake that sublime opening music and went right out to Newbury Comics to buy Murmur and Chronic Town (I believe they were both available by that time). I felt like I had discovered a new band that very few people knew about.
For the next six years I bought every REM record and went to every show of theirs that I could make. They were one of the main cornerstones of my musical development and ushered me into a whole new realm of new music, going on to discover their influences and peers like Mission of Burma and the Neats (both from Boston), Miracle Legion, Dream Syndicate, Wiretrain, etc. I grew out my hair into my face (long front, short sides and back) and started to write my own songs filled with inscrutable lyrics and vague lilting melodies, trying to find others to convert to the cause of this new "Paisley Underground." I sold my Peavey tube amp and bought an ultra-clean Roland JC-120 jangle amp. Thank God that only lasted a couple of years.
REM was one of the bonding forces between my new buddy, Chris Colbourn and me. We enjoyed and shared a deep mutual love of everything from the Stones to these new acts like REM, X, Gun Club, and Echo and the Bunnymen. We went to see a bunch of these shows together before Buff Tom even formed.
Needless to say, when Buffalo Tom finally did form and head out on the road in 1988 or so, that date marked "Athens, GA" was one of our red letter days on the first (second?) U.S. tour itinerary. We had seen the documentary Athens, GA Inside Out, which spotlighted the college town's post-punk musical acts. We played the legendary 40 Watt Club. We knew darn well that Peter Buck's wife owned part (or all) of the club. We had a great show. She invited us back to stay at their house. I am still jittery writing this now. We were greeted at the house by none other that Mr. Buck himself, in a bathrobe. He played us selections from his amazing record collection all night. I don't even have to tell you how we felt; you know how we felt; all I have to do is relate the events. The record Out of Time had just been recorded but not yet released. Peter played us tracks from it. Her showed us a picture he had taken with Al and Tipper. He said he had been all ramped up to let Tipper have a piece of his mind regarding her then-recent PMRC efforts. But he had been knocked out by the flu and she was so nice so all he could manage was a sort of weak, "I think what you are doing is wrong."
Peter and his wife were extremely gracious to us, and from what I gather, to many other bands who came through town -- one of the good guys of rock. I have met him a few other times over the years but have not met the other guys.
I have read that Buck is not a fan of this week's choice for a cover, so perhaps I should have chosen better. But Fables of the Reconstruction is just one of those records for me> I remember seeing the bans on this tour out at the Worcester Centrum and them opening with "Feeling Gravity's Pull." It was highly dramatic. "Wendell Gee" is a song that has a beautiful melody and haunting, mythical lyric that compelled me to play it repeatedly.
Wendell Gee mp3
Monday, June 22, 2009
FAQ on the Cover of the Week project
Hi all -- I have been getting requests to detail the recording set up I use. If there are any other questions you want answered regarding the blog, let me know under comments and I will try to answer. By the way, I have been recording the most recent Buffalo Tom guitar and vocal overdubs at home with this gear. Thanks.
Recording gear:
Software: Pro Tools LE 7.3 for Mac
Input: Original 2-input MBox
I am hoping to upgrade the software to PT8 and maybe the input hardware as well - soon. I will have to update Mac to Leopard and PT 8 all at once. I don't think I have it in me right now and am wary of disrupting BT overdubs. Knowing how things go for me in this department, I will be on support phone calls for 3 days.
Until the cover of "Brown-Eyed Women," I was using an Audio Technica 33-R small diaphragm condenser microphone, which I have used on acoustics, electrics, and vocals since the mid-1990s recording on my ADAT. I believe this mic cost me around $110. Recently, BT purchased a boutique version of the classic Neumann U47 large diaphragm tube mic. This one is made by Peluso and is the 22 47. I have used this on acoustics and vocals starting on "Brown-Eyed Women." I think it sounds great. I don't have a fine enough ear to comment with authority, but I am amzed that the 33-R captures as much as it does and can even compare to this Peluso, which is a thing of beauty. More here on the Peluso on NPR.
When recording acoustics and vocals with either microphone, I run the signal through a little Bellari tube pre-amp to warm it up.
My acoustic is the one I have used exclusively for years, a jumbo body Guild JF-30
For electrics, mostly my Marshall JCM 800 100 watt, used for 20 years, or a little Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp. Gibson SG from late 1960s; Fender Tele Deluxe from '70s; Hohner Les Paul from 1970s, before they were sued by Gibson; etc.
For monitors, I thank my buddy Matt for lending me his pair of powered Event Project Studio 6.
Someone asked about my pedals. They are constantly changing. Right now and for most of the past 15 years, I use couple of Klon Centaur distortion pedals.
I use Boss and/or Line 6 modulation (tremolo; phase shifter; Leslie) pedals, in addition to owning vintage and reissue Electro Harmonix pedals.
I also use A/B switches to switch a second amp on and off when playing live.
That's pretty much it. The Bomb Shelter "studio" is an office of about 15 X 10 feet and the actual bomb shelter is a slightly smaller space that is mainly used for storage -- all concrete and I use to record at night as an isolation booth to not disturb the family.
Recording gear:
Software: Pro Tools LE 7.3 for Mac
Input: Original 2-input MBox
I am hoping to upgrade the software to PT8 and maybe the input hardware as well - soon. I will have to update Mac to Leopard and PT 8 all at once. I don't think I have it in me right now and am wary of disrupting BT overdubs. Knowing how things go for me in this department, I will be on support phone calls for 3 days.
Until the cover of "Brown-Eyed Women," I was using an Audio Technica 33-R small diaphragm condenser microphone, which I have used on acoustics, electrics, and vocals since the mid-1990s recording on my ADAT. I believe this mic cost me around $110. Recently, BT purchased a boutique version of the classic Neumann U47 large diaphragm tube mic. This one is made by Peluso and is the 22 47. I have used this on acoustics and vocals starting on "Brown-Eyed Women." I think it sounds great. I don't have a fine enough ear to comment with authority, but I am amzed that the 33-R captures as much as it does and can even compare to this Peluso, which is a thing of beauty. More here on the Peluso on NPR.
When recording acoustics and vocals with either microphone, I run the signal through a little Bellari tube pre-amp to warm it up.
My acoustic is the one I have used exclusively for years, a jumbo body Guild JF-30
For electrics, mostly my Marshall JCM 800 100 watt, used for 20 years, or a little Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp. Gibson SG from late 1960s; Fender Tele Deluxe from '70s; Hohner Les Paul from 1970s, before they were sued by Gibson; etc.
For monitors, I thank my buddy Matt for lending me his pair of powered Event Project Studio 6.
Someone asked about my pedals. They are constantly changing. Right now and for most of the past 15 years, I use couple of Klon Centaur distortion pedals.
I use Boss and/or Line 6 modulation (tremolo; phase shifter; Leslie) pedals, in addition to owning vintage and reissue Electro Harmonix pedals.
I also use A/B switches to switch a second amp on and off when playing live.
That's pretty much it. The Bomb Shelter "studio" is an office of about 15 X 10 feet and the actual bomb shelter is a slightly smaller space that is mainly used for storage -- all concrete and I use to record at night as an isolation booth to not disturb the family.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Cover of the Week 33
The Bomb Shelter Recording Studio
I got in last night at around 11 after being at Fenway for a rather miserable loss, though a lovely night at the ballpark with another old friend of mine. We parted ways after the ninth and I made my way back to my car to find my second parking ticket in a row from the Brookline heat. I guess that means my secret parking spot has been discovered and is now getting the clampdown from The Man. Police on my back.
Another thing you will now learn about William Anthony Janovitz from this chronicle is that I get way too uptight driving in Boston. It is the most acute challenge to my inner Zen. It is a true test. For example, in further testimony that I have become that middle-age guy who has just had enough, yesterday afternoon (before the game), I invited an altercation when I should be doing everything in my power to avoid such situations. Some freak was leaning on the horn of his BMW as soon as I stopped in a parking lot -- in a parking lot -- to let out my work partner. There was just a was a single lane. But when I had initially looked into my rear view, there was no car. I stopped and John was opening the passenger door. The guy must have still been rolling up behind me when he started in on the horn.
John closed the door and I gave the guy one of those palm-up "what? Come on!) hand gestures out of the window, but then I immediately started to roll. However, people were crossing in front of me so I stopped. Well, of course the ass really leans into the horn. So now I stop, letting anyone within 20 feet of me pass in front. I'm waving everyone by, infuriating BMW Boy. He's beeping like a mad man. So I casually open my door, step out, and just look at his pathetic twisted face, my head tilted as if to say, "come on little boy, really. What's wrong with you?" He is having a conniption. People around here are way too tense. So I shout at him, "there are people passing. Relax!" He yells something in some sort of eastern European accent, "You go! You GO!!"
"Fuck offffffff" I say and start to get back into the car. But now I see a cop, on foot, watching this whole thing. I give him the "can you believe this guy?' hand gesture, but I get into the car and pull into the parking spot that, there is no doubt in my mind, BMW Boy wanted, hopeful that it would really send him over the edge. He finally rolls past me, ready to kill anyone in his way. I look to the cop and say, "guy's a real hothead."
The cop replies, "was there contact?"
"No, nothing like that..."
"No harm, no foul," was the officer's judgment. I was not looking for him to arrest the guy or anything. It was just one guy to another, like, "can you believe these assholes out here?" Actually, I was hoping he would draw his gun, tear the guy out of the Beamer, and shove him face down into the pavement like they do in Los Angeles, copters buzzing overhead.
So here I am again, offering another startling confession from a guy reaching "cranky old man" stage. And getting another ticket and then driving through Allston and Brighton on the way home (forget trying to cross over to the B.U. Bridge. Those of you in Boston know what I am saying) on a Friday night with all the drunks out, another guy on his horn as soon as every light turned green, only reignited my stress.
So sitting at home around 11:30, I was in no mood to start thinking about going to read myself to sleep. Once I am out, have a couple of drinks, drive through Boston traffic, I am usually a bit too wound up. So I went into what should now be called "Bomb Shelter Studio" and rattled off this week's cover. We bought a 1942 house a few years ago. It has a breezeway/sunroom connector between the house and the garage. One of my fellow agents here in town who had the listing told me he had been told that it was built to double as a bomb shelter. The foundation underneath it is thick concrete supported by steel beams. It is connected, however, by just a heavy wooden door to the rest of our basement, which makes my skeptical about its potential to save anyone from bombs, but in 1941/42, they were not yet thinking about nuclear, so who knows. The reason to believe it is that we are close to Hanscom Air Force Base.
But it is a great place to store gear (heavily secured and alarmed) and record late at night because it is so separate from the rest of the house. It is all concrete. There are no adjoining wood structures that will vibrate and wake up the sleeping family, unlike my office, where I can't so much as lightly strum an unamplified electric guitar with my thumb without getting someone coming down the stairs and giving me the evil eye.
I can go in there and pretty much scream my head off. But the late night session last night was appropriate to take on this week's cover, "Comfort Me," an old Stax Records single from Carla Thomas, written by Steve Cropper, Eddie Floyd, and Al Bell. When Carla was recording it in 1965, Gladys Knight and the Pips were in town for a concert. She invited them back to the studio, and they supplied lush, beautiful backing vocals, which I have tried to mimic here a little. I am neither an Knight nor a Pip, however. If you don't already own the Stax Singles box set, this Carla track is further reason for you to buy it. It is a typical Stax number in some ways, but it is atypically mature subject matter for Carla at this point in her career. And the backing vocals lend a sophisticated smoothness that came more from Northern soul than the gritty Southern style that Stax so clearly defined. But the combination of the two components is magic.
And the subject matter resonates with me lately, having just started John Updike's Rabbit Run, where the title character has just spent the night with a prostitute and is deluding himself into thinking there is "love" there. I could see him having such a sentiment as this lyric in his head. There is a desperate late-night yearning to this song.
Comfort Me mp3
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Cover of the Week 32
Bell Bottom Blues has remained one of my favorite songs since childhood. I remember a friend's father had an electric guitar well before I even started playing. I'm talking around the age of 8, just marveling at this thing. His father could play, sort of, "Layla" along with the sheet music, as if one could actually play guitar along to "Layla" by following the sheet music. I have a permanent image of the music right there on a music stand in the living room of this multi/split-level house.
For me, the Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (a bitterly sarcastic title) LP is Eric Clapton's peak, the descent after which was precipitous, no gradual decline. His raw energy is evident from the time he burst onto the British 1960s blues scene, playing with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, into the Yardbirds, the Cream, Blind Faith and then Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. But, perhaps completely inspired by the personal turmoil in his life, he hits with this one-off band, the Dominos, with a bunch of American cats left over from D&B (Bobby Whitlock et. al.), adds one of the greatest guitarists in rock & roll, Duane Allman, as a foil/partner, has the whole thing recorded by the legendary Tom Dowd in Miami and -- most importantly -- sings his ass off as if this is his last record ever.
I have never heard Clapton sing this well before or since. Almost immediately after this record, he seems to have had some sort of numbing electroshock or partial lobotomy a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and starts singing J.J. Cale and Bob Marley songs as if he were Perry Como fronting a bunch of the Williams Brothers in cardigan sweaters. This is the sort of passion fall-off that instigated punk rock. I mean, here is this guy who displays a steady climb of raw talent and blues soul, with this raw-nerve apotheosis of an album surveying a battlefield of romantic devastation.
Which brings me to the topic, best blue-eyed soul singers ever? We have this discussion in poker. It started after I defended Daryl Hall as a great soul singer. One of our more elderly players at the table derided "Sara Smile" as "fuckin' AM crap." I just thought the whole idea of insulting music as "too AM" was delightfully archaic, like trying to tell a kid he/she is a "broken record."
The category is blue-eyed (politically correct term to avoid just saying "white") "soul singers," as in, traditional soul, not just vaguely "soulful." For instance, Neil Young is extremely soulful, but he is certainly not a soul singer. Included on my list: Gregg Allman; Jagger; McCartney: Steve Marriott; Rod Stewart; Tom Jones; Van the Man; Richard Manuel; Levoln Helm; Eric Burden; Elvis Costello; Paul Carrack; Charlie Rich; John Fogerty; Bowie; maybe Peter Wolf?
My cover of Bell Bottom Blues
For me, the Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (a bitterly sarcastic title) LP is Eric Clapton's peak, the descent after which was precipitous, no gradual decline. His raw energy is evident from the time he burst onto the British 1960s blues scene, playing with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, into the Yardbirds, the Cream, Blind Faith and then Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. But, perhaps completely inspired by the personal turmoil in his life, he hits with this one-off band, the Dominos, with a bunch of American cats left over from D&B (Bobby Whitlock et. al.), adds one of the greatest guitarists in rock & roll, Duane Allman, as a foil/partner, has the whole thing recorded by the legendary Tom Dowd in Miami and -- most importantly -- sings his ass off as if this is his last record ever.
I have never heard Clapton sing this well before or since. Almost immediately after this record, he seems to have had some sort of numbing electroshock or partial lobotomy a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and starts singing J.J. Cale and Bob Marley songs as if he were Perry Como fronting a bunch of the Williams Brothers in cardigan sweaters. This is the sort of passion fall-off that instigated punk rock. I mean, here is this guy who displays a steady climb of raw talent and blues soul, with this raw-nerve apotheosis of an album surveying a battlefield of romantic devastation.
Which brings me to the topic, best blue-eyed soul singers ever? We have this discussion in poker. It started after I defended Daryl Hall as a great soul singer. One of our more elderly players at the table derided "Sara Smile" as "fuckin' AM crap." I just thought the whole idea of insulting music as "too AM" was delightfully archaic, like trying to tell a kid he/she is a "broken record."
The category is blue-eyed (politically correct term to avoid just saying "white") "soul singers," as in, traditional soul, not just vaguely "soulful." For instance, Neil Young is extremely soulful, but he is certainly not a soul singer. Included on my list: Gregg Allman; Jagger; McCartney: Steve Marriott; Rod Stewart; Tom Jones; Van the Man; Richard Manuel; Levoln Helm; Eric Burden; Elvis Costello; Paul Carrack; Charlie Rich; John Fogerty; Bowie; maybe Peter Wolf?
My cover of Bell Bottom Blues
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Cover of the Week 31
When I moved to Medfield, Massachusetts at the age of 16, it was the dead of summer, from my hometown, the town I grew up in, to a place where I knew no one and had little chance of meeting many people for the rest of the summer -- a little town in the woods of outskirts of suburban Boston. I was already bursting with music, hungry for it, for listening and discovering music and playing it. You’re sponge at that age. I was well-versed in classic rock and its antecedents, the British blues and the real old American blues. But I was also discovering punk, reggae, ska, new wave, no wave, art rock, and was open to almost anything. My main mission was to find a band I could join. Making friends would follow. But the only people I met were a couple of kids who lived in this soul-sapping subdivision we moved into, and while they were huge fans of rock and pop, new and old, they were not musicians.
The lifeline, as in so many rock lyrics, was the radio, specifically, the left-of-the-dial college and public radio in Boston. It really was like that Velvet Underground Lou Reed lyric, “…there was nothing happening at all/Then one fine day she turned on the radio, she couldn’t believe what she heard all all/She started dancing to that fine, fine music/You know her life was saved by rock & roll.”
To this day, Boston might be the capital of college radio, which is natural as it is a city with so many colleges that it is difficult to count. WMBR, the MIT station that was later an early-and-often Buffalo Tom supporter; WHRB, the Harvard Station; WERS, the Emerson station; WGBH, the NPR station – these all played the gamut of blues; jazz; punk; garage; reggae; ska; hardcore; classical. It was and is an embarrassment of riches. New York radio was just OK by comparison. I had learned a lot about country blues from the Stony Brook, Long Island station. And WNEW and WLIR were pioneering commercial FM stations. But there was not even close to the amount of fringe music being played on Boston stations. Even the commercial stations in Boston, WBCN, and later WFNX, were better, more daring and free form. Later, when the Replacements song “Left of the Dial” came out, I could not believe at how perfectly it captured this feeling of the importance of those stations to me and what a great metaphor it was for feeling simultaneously like an outsider, but one of a small group onto something special.
One night, one hot summer night, the windows open to the woods behind our house in my lonely new bedroom -- lacking all the history and emotional patina of my boyhood bedroom -- I have the radio dial set to the left there on my Technics receiver, and this howling, haunting sound comes out of my radio. It was this howling echo-y harmonica all wrapped around this cool, mellifluous, resonant baritone voice singing scary lyrics of imminent violence, though with a wry humor, set over this menacing Chicago swaggering Chess Record blues groove. But it was so "new" sounding. Somehow the sound just seemed to float out of those dark pine tree woods that stretched on for a few miles behind the house, coming down the airwaves from some dusty college radio control room in downtown Boston. I waited until the end of "I Think She Likes Me" to find out it was this band called Treat Her Right. The singer was Mark Sandman, who went on to play around Boston in a number of local bands before knocking out a bunch of music fans worldwide with his beloved band, Morphine.
Now, don’t go checking the release dates against my little myth here. I heard a lot of other stuff that caught my ears that first summer, everything from the long improvised piano workouts of jazz improviser and maestro, Keith Jarrett, to the Gun Club and all kinds of Boston-based music like Mission of Burma, the Neats, the Turbines, etc. I am pretty sure, however, that the Treat Her Right song came out later and I probably did hear it first up in that bedroom, albeit on a visit home from college. And I recall seeing Treat Her Right somewhere during college.
Well, later on, after Buffalo Tom got going, we finally had that chance to get into Fort Apache studio. The place was filled with vintage guitars, amps and all sorts of gear, not to mention kitschy tchotchkes, mid-century collectibles, records, and beer. The original Fort was a dusty old raw industrial warehouse in Roxbury, a rough area of Boston. Leaning on the mixing console during our earliest recording sessions, I looked down and saw this thing that looked like a cool old Fender or Marshall amp head. But the logo was a cool 1950s/’60s script font that read “Premier.” I asked the producer/engineer what it was. They told me it was a little spring reverb tank, a unit to run an instrument through. “It’s Jim’s, from Treat Her Right,” they told me. Whether or not I had it explicitly told to me, I decided that this reverb tank was very one I heard howling and echoing down the airwaves that hot summer night. And here I was in a recording studio with this thing that represented my lifeline for a moment in the summer of 1982.
When BT started to get more popular in Boston, I was asked by the defunct seminal local music publication, Boston Rock -- which I had picked up religiously every time I could get into record stores like Newbury Comics in Boston – to come in for a cover photo shoot with Mark Sandman. It was the first time we actually met, though we had mutual friends, mainly Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade at Fort Apache. He was one of the warmest guys I had ever met and way cooler than I could ever hope to be. I was driving back from a family vacation years later, when I turned on one of those local stations once we were back on 128 (“with the radio on”) heard that Mark had died. It was shocking. The guy that was the King of Central Square was gone.
Even later, in the last few years, I have had the great honor and privilege to sit it with the band Session Americana, often right next to the very man who played those wailing lamentations on his harp, the man I heard howling down the summer winds through those lonesome Medfield pines. Well, I got comfortable enough with the guys in Session Americana to suggest, the last time they invited me to sing with them at their recent record release party, that they finally succumb to playing a Grateful Dead cover. They told me this would be breaking a cardinal rule of Session, but relented and we ended up doing “Brown-Eyed Women.”
The need for “cardinal rules” is often that there is a temptation to do something other than the “rule” dictates. In the case of Session Americana, we have a group of guys getting a little longer in the tooth, who spent some times on the edgier side of new music at some points in their careers, but grew up and still very much enjoy old hippy rock & roll. They play rootsy, acoustic versions of obscure traditional songs, country, Gram Parsons, classic soul, and every once in a while, improbable roots versions of pop hits. With mandolin, steel string guitars, a stripped-down drum configuration, bass, pump organ, cello and other string instruments, with a blend of multiple-part harmonies, they play stuff that would not be out of place on the Grateful Dead’s Reckoning sets. I mean, dang, they even have earthy chicks dancing free-form as only hippy girls can do. So, I kind of see why they have this cardinal rule, but…come on! Embrace it, says I! And of course, we enjoyed (at least I did) playing “Brown-Eyed Women.”
This is a song I grew up with from the Europe ’72 double-live record of mostly unreleased then-new songs. This is one of those records I got in my prime record-buying/music discovery days. I understand why many people have an aversion to the Dead, what with all the noodling and self-indulgence and patchouli-soaked honkydom that was their audience (a watered-down and more collegiate version of which went on to follow – shivers – bands like Phish and Dave Matthews Band). And my biggest beef with the Dead was an essential part of their sound, i.e. that they rarely, if ever, nailed down the rhythm section in a satisfying way; the drums were more often than not floating in some idea of polyrhythmic roto-tom-ness while Phil Lesh was wandering around the bass neck like a lost child on acid. But when they kept it simple and based in the roots, as they did during their golden stretch from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty through Europe ’72, they were magic and, in many ways, a true distillation of what Graham Parsons conceived of when he coined he term “Cosmic American music” to describe a concept of most of the various American roots, pop, country, soul and jazz idioms coalescing into a brilliant single end product. Some of my favorite records, from adolescence through adulthood , have been those Dead albums. But another great one came later, the acoustic Reckoning record. And the band seems to be a weirdly guilty pleasure for others, like we have to explain why they were so great. But Elvis Costello has always been unabashed in professing his love of the band. Graham Parker (not Parsons) even covered Jerry Garcia’s “Sugaree” in recent years. And I certainly hear a lot of Dead in Wilco and, of course, Ryan (not Brian) Adams.
One of the main pleasures in listening to the band over these years is digging on the lyrics, filled with lyricist Robert Hunters broad knowledge of Americana, allusions to “that weird old America,” as Greil Marcus described the Basement Tapes from Dylan and the Band. In fact, it was that era and maybe even that very record that truly spurred a roots revival in American rock & roll that has never since been abandoned. The Band’s creative success seemed to influence bands like the Dead to leave behind many of their psychedelic inclinations, at least on records and concentrate on embracing and reinventing old folk, country, blues and other roots idioms into something new, and exploring the poetry of the American version of the English language with dense allusions to old events and characters, real and imagined. So in “Brown-Eyed Women” we have the tale of an old bootlegger spanning the decades before and after Prohibition and the Great Depression, but with a very elusive, evocative and personal approach.
Anyway, I just love the melody, the words, and it reminds me of my teenage years.
Brown-Eyed Women mp3
The lifeline, as in so many rock lyrics, was the radio, specifically, the left-of-the-dial college and public radio in Boston. It really was like that Velvet Underground Lou Reed lyric, “…there was nothing happening at all/Then one fine day she turned on the radio, she couldn’t believe what she heard all all/She started dancing to that fine, fine music/You know her life was saved by rock & roll.”
To this day, Boston might be the capital of college radio, which is natural as it is a city with so many colleges that it is difficult to count. WMBR, the MIT station that was later an early-and-often Buffalo Tom supporter; WHRB, the Harvard Station; WERS, the Emerson station; WGBH, the NPR station – these all played the gamut of blues; jazz; punk; garage; reggae; ska; hardcore; classical. It was and is an embarrassment of riches. New York radio was just OK by comparison. I had learned a lot about country blues from the Stony Brook, Long Island station. And WNEW and WLIR were pioneering commercial FM stations. But there was not even close to the amount of fringe music being played on Boston stations. Even the commercial stations in Boston, WBCN, and later WFNX, were better, more daring and free form. Later, when the Replacements song “Left of the Dial” came out, I could not believe at how perfectly it captured this feeling of the importance of those stations to me and what a great metaphor it was for feeling simultaneously like an outsider, but one of a small group onto something special.
One night, one hot summer night, the windows open to the woods behind our house in my lonely new bedroom -- lacking all the history and emotional patina of my boyhood bedroom -- I have the radio dial set to the left there on my Technics receiver, and this howling, haunting sound comes out of my radio. It was this howling echo-y harmonica all wrapped around this cool, mellifluous, resonant baritone voice singing scary lyrics of imminent violence, though with a wry humor, set over this menacing Chicago swaggering Chess Record blues groove. But it was so "new" sounding. Somehow the sound just seemed to float out of those dark pine tree woods that stretched on for a few miles behind the house, coming down the airwaves from some dusty college radio control room in downtown Boston. I waited until the end of "I Think She Likes Me" to find out it was this band called Treat Her Right. The singer was Mark Sandman, who went on to play around Boston in a number of local bands before knocking out a bunch of music fans worldwide with his beloved band, Morphine.
Now, don’t go checking the release dates against my little myth here. I heard a lot of other stuff that caught my ears that first summer, everything from the long improvised piano workouts of jazz improviser and maestro, Keith Jarrett, to the Gun Club and all kinds of Boston-based music like Mission of Burma, the Neats, the Turbines, etc. I am pretty sure, however, that the Treat Her Right song came out later and I probably did hear it first up in that bedroom, albeit on a visit home from college. And I recall seeing Treat Her Right somewhere during college.
Well, later on, after Buffalo Tom got going, we finally had that chance to get into Fort Apache studio. The place was filled with vintage guitars, amps and all sorts of gear, not to mention kitschy tchotchkes, mid-century collectibles, records, and beer. The original Fort was a dusty old raw industrial warehouse in Roxbury, a rough area of Boston. Leaning on the mixing console during our earliest recording sessions, I looked down and saw this thing that looked like a cool old Fender or Marshall amp head. But the logo was a cool 1950s/’60s script font that read “Premier.” I asked the producer/engineer what it was. They told me it was a little spring reverb tank, a unit to run an instrument through. “It’s Jim’s, from Treat Her Right,” they told me. Whether or not I had it explicitly told to me, I decided that this reverb tank was very one I heard howling and echoing down the airwaves that hot summer night. And here I was in a recording studio with this thing that represented my lifeline for a moment in the summer of 1982.
When BT started to get more popular in Boston, I was asked by the defunct seminal local music publication, Boston Rock -- which I had picked up religiously every time I could get into record stores like Newbury Comics in Boston – to come in for a cover photo shoot with Mark Sandman. It was the first time we actually met, though we had mutual friends, mainly Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade at Fort Apache. He was one of the warmest guys I had ever met and way cooler than I could ever hope to be. I was driving back from a family vacation years later, when I turned on one of those local stations once we were back on 128 (“with the radio on”) heard that Mark had died. It was shocking. The guy that was the King of Central Square was gone.
Even later, in the last few years, I have had the great honor and privilege to sit it with the band Session Americana, often right next to the very man who played those wailing lamentations on his harp, the man I heard howling down the summer winds through those lonesome Medfield pines. Well, I got comfortable enough with the guys in Session Americana to suggest, the last time they invited me to sing with them at their recent record release party, that they finally succumb to playing a Grateful Dead cover. They told me this would be breaking a cardinal rule of Session, but relented and we ended up doing “Brown-Eyed Women.”
The need for “cardinal rules” is often that there is a temptation to do something other than the “rule” dictates. In the case of Session Americana, we have a group of guys getting a little longer in the tooth, who spent some times on the edgier side of new music at some points in their careers, but grew up and still very much enjoy old hippy rock & roll. They play rootsy, acoustic versions of obscure traditional songs, country, Gram Parsons, classic soul, and every once in a while, improbable roots versions of pop hits. With mandolin, steel string guitars, a stripped-down drum configuration, bass, pump organ, cello and other string instruments, with a blend of multiple-part harmonies, they play stuff that would not be out of place on the Grateful Dead’s Reckoning sets. I mean, dang, they even have earthy chicks dancing free-form as only hippy girls can do. So, I kind of see why they have this cardinal rule, but…come on! Embrace it, says I! And of course, we enjoyed (at least I did) playing “Brown-Eyed Women.”
This is a song I grew up with from the Europe ’72 double-live record of mostly unreleased then-new songs. This is one of those records I got in my prime record-buying/music discovery days. I understand why many people have an aversion to the Dead, what with all the noodling and self-indulgence and patchouli-soaked honkydom that was their audience (a watered-down and more collegiate version of which went on to follow – shivers – bands like Phish and Dave Matthews Band). And my biggest beef with the Dead was an essential part of their sound, i.e. that they rarely, if ever, nailed down the rhythm section in a satisfying way; the drums were more often than not floating in some idea of polyrhythmic roto-tom-ness while Phil Lesh was wandering around the bass neck like a lost child on acid. But when they kept it simple and based in the roots, as they did during their golden stretch from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty through Europe ’72, they were magic and, in many ways, a true distillation of what Graham Parsons conceived of when he coined he term “Cosmic American music” to describe a concept of most of the various American roots, pop, country, soul and jazz idioms coalescing into a brilliant single end product. Some of my favorite records, from adolescence through adulthood , have been those Dead albums. But another great one came later, the acoustic Reckoning record. And the band seems to be a weirdly guilty pleasure for others, like we have to explain why they were so great. But Elvis Costello has always been unabashed in professing his love of the band. Graham Parker (not Parsons) even covered Jerry Garcia’s “Sugaree” in recent years. And I certainly hear a lot of Dead in Wilco and, of course, Ryan (not Brian) Adams.
One of the main pleasures in listening to the band over these years is digging on the lyrics, filled with lyricist Robert Hunters broad knowledge of Americana, allusions to “that weird old America,” as Greil Marcus described the Basement Tapes from Dylan and the Band. In fact, it was that era and maybe even that very record that truly spurred a roots revival in American rock & roll that has never since been abandoned. The Band’s creative success seemed to influence bands like the Dead to leave behind many of their psychedelic inclinations, at least on records and concentrate on embracing and reinventing old folk, country, blues and other roots idioms into something new, and exploring the poetry of the American version of the English language with dense allusions to old events and characters, real and imagined. So in “Brown-Eyed Women” we have the tale of an old bootlegger spanning the decades before and after Prohibition and the Great Depression, but with a very elusive, evocative and personal approach.
Anyway, I just love the melody, the words, and it reminds me of my teenage years.
Brown-Eyed Women mp3
Friday, May 29, 2009
Cover of the Week 30
This week’s COtW request, for "Bring it Home to Me," comes from one of my old childhood friends, Dan DeBruin. Danny and I, along with some of the other old pals mentioned or pictured in this blog were rock & roll buds, discovering old and new music together, learning guitar, swapping tips on gear, forming bands, and so on. We were joined at the hip during that time of golden friendships, early adolescence. Here’s an oldie we probably discovered together.
Another friend from that time, Chris Campion, just came up last week for a quick visit and a night at Fenway for a Sox v. Mets matchup. After I left town as a kid, Chris went on to drop out of Villanova, move back to New York, and formed the beloved indie NYC/Long Island band the Knockout Drops. They struggled like so many great club bands in the 1990s, just on the verge of making it nationally, getting a label deal and all that golden-goose stuff. In the meantime, Chris went through his own personal struggles. He has written a poignant and funny memoir of this era called Escape from Bellevue, a Dive Bar Odyssey, published by Gotham Books and just recently released. The book was borne out of a successful run off-Broadway at the Wesbeth Theater of his show of the same name. In the show, Chris performed the stories from the book and other vignettes and the Knockout Drops provided a musical counterpoint and anchor, playing some of those songs from the time he explores with his prose. Chris will be an added treat, reading between the opening act, Mean Creek, and Buffalo Tom at the Paradise in Boston June 26
I highly recommend the book. As I have waxed nostalgically here in prior posts, something about having my friends frozen in time in my memory at the age of 16, when I left NY for Boston, has added a bittersweet and seemingly everlasting pang of melancholy and unresolved adolescent loneliness. It does not matter that I have continued to see some of them over the years. To me, these guys will sort of always be trapped in that amber, friends -- boys and girls -- who meant the world to me, from whom I was carried away. So when one of them died, it was not the image of a grown man, married with a child, that I remembered; it was the boy I went to nursery school with, my neighbor and best friend through elementary and junior high school and the sadness was that much more acute, not as painful for me as for the many who were close with him in his more recent years, but a different kind of heartache.
Reading Chris’ book also had a similar resonance for me. First of all, many of the memories, while having a general appeal for readers who do not know him, have specific significance for me – both the early times growing up on Long Island, and the later periods while he struggled trying to make a band work. But it was the young Chris, the kid who made us all laugh, this happy-go-lucky optimistic kid, this was the image of the person I recalled as the adult Chris recounts his travails of beating his own brains with liquor and drugs, as Iggy put it, and getting beat down by the wringer of trying to be the rock star he was so born to be. Disappointment keeps raining down, and it is the head of the sweet kid I was friends with that I picture taking the brunt of the storm.
Chris, I can attest, is still that big-hearted guy. And this is the poignancy of getting older while realizing that, even as responsibilities pile up, marriages form and maybe crumble, career highs and lows are achieved, the inner kid remains in the heart of most of us. Unfortunately, many people’s development and brains also just cease to evolve past that point as well, so we are often faced with decisions made by those with just such a level of development, hence many of the daily micro and macro fugazis in this world.
To illustrate that I have both developed and stagnated, or even regressed in many ways, (depending on your judgment) I offer this anecdote from the very afternoon when Chris came up to the game. It was the Friday before Memorial Day. I left a little earlier than I usually would to go to Fenway, accounting for time in traffic and wanting to spend more time with a buddy in town for only the evening. But traffic was minimal and I made it into the Fenway neighborhood in record time. Pushing my luck, I decided to roll the dice and bypassed my usual parking spot, which is about a 15-minute walk to the park. I was rewarded when I found a sweet legal, non-meter spot next to a B.U. dorm right off of Beacon Street. I was just leaning against my car about to call or text Chris to arrange our meeting when a young college woman (well, she was a girl to me) walked up. There is always a bit of winking and elbowing (and worse -- much, much worse) from men over 35 when the subject of B.U. girls comes up, especially in spring when all of a sudden every man of that vintage in the Boston area is asking each other, “where were all these scantily dressed young hot women when I was 20 and everyone was dressed in shoulder pads and dayglo with their hair all teased into giant hat-like structures?!” We have just aged into sad dirty old men, an inevitable passage. So I was winking inwardly while this skinny young blond in workout shorts and a tank top, a droplet of perspiration (girls don’t sweat) on her forehead, wisp of loose hair in her eye, came up to me and asked me, “do you know anything about cars?”
Now, I am familiar with the classic Penthouse Forum periodical. But I know this girl took one look at my old flabby pale self and was not thinking “hmmm, here is a hot young stud to help me get my car going that I will invite back into my room for lemonade or a beer and whatever happens next.” No. She thought, “I wish my dad was here to help me with my car. Hey, there’s a guy who looks like my dad.”
“Do you know anything about cars?”
There’s a lot I don’t know. Like that other Sam Cooke tune, "don't know much about the middle ages/look at the pictures and I turn the pages." But pretty much anything mechanical needs help, you can be certain I am the worst guy you want around. Things automotive are chief among the list of things I know pathetically little. This is more or less what I told her.
“Is it the battery?”
“Well, the lights work.”
“Hmm, maybe it’s the alternator.” This one was an example of knowing just enough to say something, but not knowing what the hell I’m talking about. “Do you have Triple A?” I asked, sagely, fatherly even.
“Yeah… OK. I will call” she said and walked away back to her car.
I got on the phone to call Chris. After two minutes. she walked back up to me. “Um, I have jumper cables. Would you pull your car back and give me a jump?”
Her car was about 10 back on a street crammed with cars and no more available parking spots. I had seen one or two dudes in Sox caps circling back around looking for open spots, some of them even doing the mimed, arched-eyebrows pointing and mouthing, "you leavin'?". I exhaled some breath in an almost whistle, with that wincing face you make.
“Whewwww….hmmmm…..But I have this really sweet spot and I am supposed to go meet someone. Did you call Triple A?”
Her disappointment was clear in her face. I was not as good a man as her father. But she expected it. I could tell. She was not surprised at the extremely tight limits of my goodwill. Even as I was saying this, my old younger self, that fresh-faced good guy from the past, was kicking me for two reasons. One, before I apparently crossed some sort of invisible threshold into being a cynical selfish prick from Boston, I would have done this for anyone, and two, I would have definitely done this for a pretty young woman with no expectation other than to help someone out. I was in conflict, but the words were said, They had left my mouth. The decision had been rendered. I was actually sort of self conscious, thinking that if I backtracked now, I was going to seem like some greasy old lech after the young chiquita from Omaha.
She started to answer, looking down at her feet, “Well, I was gonna call, but I have to get to work and they take so long and my cell is upstairs…”
“You want to use my cell?” Yes, I am sure that is exactly what she wanted: to use my cell to call Triple A. What a peach of a guy I am, eh?
“No… it’s OK…” she said and walked away.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’m just in a hurry, but if you really need me to, I can…”
But she assured me it was no problem, thanks anyway.
So now you know: I’m an asshole. As a friend pointed out later when I was telling the story, “well, you probably could have just taken her spot.” Thank you. That confirms it: I’m a wanker.
Next time, I will do better. I promise. Just like the good guy I used to be. The Boy Scout. The helpful neighbor. Richie Cunningham. The rock & roller who wants everybody to like him.
Please like my version of Sam Cooke’s classic “Bring it Home To Me,” which Sam originally recorded with Lou Rawls on low harmony, almost a dual lead vocal. I am neither as baritone as Lou nor as high tenor as Sam. I’m somewhere down in the middle for both parts.
Bring it Home To Me mp3
Another friend from that time, Chris Campion, just came up last week for a quick visit and a night at Fenway for a Sox v. Mets matchup. After I left town as a kid, Chris went on to drop out of Villanova, move back to New York, and formed the beloved indie NYC/Long Island band the Knockout Drops. They struggled like so many great club bands in the 1990s, just on the verge of making it nationally, getting a label deal and all that golden-goose stuff. In the meantime, Chris went through his own personal struggles. He has written a poignant and funny memoir of this era called Escape from Bellevue, a Dive Bar Odyssey, published by Gotham Books and just recently released. The book was borne out of a successful run off-Broadway at the Wesbeth Theater of his show of the same name. In the show, Chris performed the stories from the book and other vignettes and the Knockout Drops provided a musical counterpoint and anchor, playing some of those songs from the time he explores with his prose. Chris will be an added treat, reading between the opening act, Mean Creek, and Buffalo Tom at the Paradise in Boston June 26
I highly recommend the book. As I have waxed nostalgically here in prior posts, something about having my friends frozen in time in my memory at the age of 16, when I left NY for Boston, has added a bittersweet and seemingly everlasting pang of melancholy and unresolved adolescent loneliness. It does not matter that I have continued to see some of them over the years. To me, these guys will sort of always be trapped in that amber, friends -- boys and girls -- who meant the world to me, from whom I was carried away. So when one of them died, it was not the image of a grown man, married with a child, that I remembered; it was the boy I went to nursery school with, my neighbor and best friend through elementary and junior high school and the sadness was that much more acute, not as painful for me as for the many who were close with him in his more recent years, but a different kind of heartache.
Reading Chris’ book also had a similar resonance for me. First of all, many of the memories, while having a general appeal for readers who do not know him, have specific significance for me – both the early times growing up on Long Island, and the later periods while he struggled trying to make a band work. But it was the young Chris, the kid who made us all laugh, this happy-go-lucky optimistic kid, this was the image of the person I recalled as the adult Chris recounts his travails of beating his own brains with liquor and drugs, as Iggy put it, and getting beat down by the wringer of trying to be the rock star he was so born to be. Disappointment keeps raining down, and it is the head of the sweet kid I was friends with that I picture taking the brunt of the storm.
Chris, I can attest, is still that big-hearted guy. And this is the poignancy of getting older while realizing that, even as responsibilities pile up, marriages form and maybe crumble, career highs and lows are achieved, the inner kid remains in the heart of most of us. Unfortunately, many people’s development and brains also just cease to evolve past that point as well, so we are often faced with decisions made by those with just such a level of development, hence many of the daily micro and macro fugazis in this world.
To illustrate that I have both developed and stagnated, or even regressed in many ways, (depending on your judgment) I offer this anecdote from the very afternoon when Chris came up to the game. It was the Friday before Memorial Day. I left a little earlier than I usually would to go to Fenway, accounting for time in traffic and wanting to spend more time with a buddy in town for only the evening. But traffic was minimal and I made it into the Fenway neighborhood in record time. Pushing my luck, I decided to roll the dice and bypassed my usual parking spot, which is about a 15-minute walk to the park. I was rewarded when I found a sweet legal, non-meter spot next to a B.U. dorm right off of Beacon Street. I was just leaning against my car about to call or text Chris to arrange our meeting when a young college woman (well, she was a girl to me) walked up. There is always a bit of winking and elbowing (and worse -- much, much worse) from men over 35 when the subject of B.U. girls comes up, especially in spring when all of a sudden every man of that vintage in the Boston area is asking each other, “where were all these scantily dressed young hot women when I was 20 and everyone was dressed in shoulder pads and dayglo with their hair all teased into giant hat-like structures?!” We have just aged into sad dirty old men, an inevitable passage. So I was winking inwardly while this skinny young blond in workout shorts and a tank top, a droplet of perspiration (girls don’t sweat) on her forehead, wisp of loose hair in her eye, came up to me and asked me, “do you know anything about cars?”
Now, I am familiar with the classic Penthouse Forum periodical. But I know this girl took one look at my old flabby pale self and was not thinking “hmmm, here is a hot young stud to help me get my car going that I will invite back into my room for lemonade or a beer and whatever happens next.” No. She thought, “I wish my dad was here to help me with my car. Hey, there’s a guy who looks like my dad.”
“Do you know anything about cars?”
There’s a lot I don’t know. Like that other Sam Cooke tune, "don't know much about the middle ages/look at the pictures and I turn the pages." But pretty much anything mechanical needs help, you can be certain I am the worst guy you want around. Things automotive are chief among the list of things I know pathetically little. This is more or less what I told her.
“Is it the battery?”
“Well, the lights work.”
“Hmm, maybe it’s the alternator.” This one was an example of knowing just enough to say something, but not knowing what the hell I’m talking about. “Do you have Triple A?” I asked, sagely, fatherly even.
“Yeah… OK. I will call” she said and walked away back to her car.
I got on the phone to call Chris. After two minutes. she walked back up to me. “Um, I have jumper cables. Would you pull your car back and give me a jump?”
Her car was about 10 back on a street crammed with cars and no more available parking spots. I had seen one or two dudes in Sox caps circling back around looking for open spots, some of them even doing the mimed, arched-eyebrows pointing and mouthing, "you leavin'?". I exhaled some breath in an almost whistle, with that wincing face you make.
“Whewwww….hmmmm…..But I have this really sweet spot and I am supposed to go meet someone. Did you call Triple A?”
Her disappointment was clear in her face. I was not as good a man as her father. But she expected it. I could tell. She was not surprised at the extremely tight limits of my goodwill. Even as I was saying this, my old younger self, that fresh-faced good guy from the past, was kicking me for two reasons. One, before I apparently crossed some sort of invisible threshold into being a cynical selfish prick from Boston, I would have done this for anyone, and two, I would have definitely done this for a pretty young woman with no expectation other than to help someone out. I was in conflict, but the words were said, They had left my mouth. The decision had been rendered. I was actually sort of self conscious, thinking that if I backtracked now, I was going to seem like some greasy old lech after the young chiquita from Omaha.
She started to answer, looking down at her feet, “Well, I was gonna call, but I have to get to work and they take so long and my cell is upstairs…”
“You want to use my cell?” Yes, I am sure that is exactly what she wanted: to use my cell to call Triple A. What a peach of a guy I am, eh?
“No… it’s OK…” she said and walked away.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’m just in a hurry, but if you really need me to, I can…”
But she assured me it was no problem, thanks anyway.
So now you know: I’m an asshole. As a friend pointed out later when I was telling the story, “well, you probably could have just taken her spot.” Thank you. That confirms it: I’m a wanker.
Next time, I will do better. I promise. Just like the good guy I used to be. The Boy Scout. The helpful neighbor. Richie Cunningham. The rock & roller who wants everybody to like him.
Please like my version of Sam Cooke’s classic “Bring it Home To Me,” which Sam originally recorded with Lou Rawls on low harmony, almost a dual lead vocal. I am neither as baritone as Lou nor as high tenor as Sam. I’m somewhere down in the middle for both parts.
Bring it Home To Me mp3
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Ballad of Tim Wakefield ({Non}Cover of the Week 29)
Wake and I rocking Hot Stove Cool Music at Fenway 2005 (photo by Steve Latham)
Buff Tom was in the studio this week working on new songs. Work has also been very busy in my day job. I feared not being able to get to the Cover of the Week this week and, while that is technically true, I did get inspired by another dazzling knuckleball performance by 42-y.o. Red Sox legend, Tim Wakefield last night. So with 2 cups of coffee in me, I whipped this little homage up this morning. Also, finding it's way into the song is this article from the Boston Globe this AM.
When rock and rollers hit a certain (middle) age, many of them feel compelled to write a baseball song. But having one of our own still going at 42, well, that just begs a songs. So in the tradition, hopefully, of Zevon and Dylan (and not so much Fogerty), here is mine:
The Ballad of Tim Wakefield
Lyrics:
The Ballad of Tim Wakefield
He don't need no injections in his ass
He makes the ball flutter, it don't need to go fast
Hitters swinging just like a cartoons when it passes
The knuckleball from Timmy Wakefield
I remember all the late innings of June
But there came a night with a big harvest moon
And an October game when a Yankee named Boone
Hit a long one off of Tim Wakefield
But fishing off of Melbourne in the off-season glare
Knowing that middle-aged men everywhere
Are harboring dreams that they could be up there
Pitching just like Timmy Wakefield
When the boys are all flailing as the weather gets warm
He always remain the calm eye of the storm
There are 18 year-old people who might have been born
When a night game was pitched by Tim Wakefield
Batters strike out, pop up, heads bowed low
And into dark dugout tunnels they go
And still confused as the video shows
They were defeated by Timmy Wakefield.
Boston may not be the easiest place
It's not every player they warmly embrace
So just go ask Keith Foulke if he would trade places
In history with Tim Wakefield
You know what they say about saving nine
Well Doug Mirabelli was his stitch in time
The State Police escorted him for no crime
We just needed him to receive Tim Wakefield
Taking the mound or offering his time
for charity's sake and then on down the line
There are plenty of people who will be crying
When they hang up the spikes of Timmy Wakefield
Dylan has written all about Catfish
I may never write like Bobby, Wake like Pedro won't pitch
But true Red Sox fans will always know what they wish
To have nine players just like Timmy Wakefield
Nine players just like Timmy Wakefield
Give me nine players just like Timmy Wakefield
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Cover of the Week 28
This is a sad old Hank Williams Song. Johnny Cash also provided an authoritative version.
My acoustic was being worked on by the unparalleled Yukon, of the Music Emporium, so I went with very little guitar, some electric.
More rambling to come in coming weeks, but been up to my neck lately and have only had time to get the songs done. Speaking of which, both Session Americana shows are sold out this coming Thursday and Friday for the goup's record release parties. I will be sitting in on Friday for a couple of tunes. Hope to see those of you who scored tickets. Thanks for tuning in!
(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle
My acoustic was being worked on by the unparalleled Yukon, of the Music Emporium, so I went with very little guitar, some electric.
More rambling to come in coming weeks, but been up to my neck lately and have only had time to get the songs done. Speaking of which, both Session Americana shows are sold out this coming Thursday and Friday for the goup's record release parties. I will be sitting in on Friday for a couple of tunes. Hope to see those of you who scored tickets. Thanks for tuning in!
(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle
Friday, May 8, 2009
Cover of the Week 27
Not much time to ramble on this week, Cutting to the chase, one of my oldest faves, CCR's Lodi.
Here is an old review I wrote of the song, about 8 years ago.
Lodi
Here is an old review I wrote of the song, about 8 years ago.
Lodi
Thursday, April 30, 2009
(Non)Cover of the Week 26
Florida (mp3)
Out on Highway 41, the Tamiami, he pulled into off at a McDonald's because the boy saw the giant colorful play structure, an arching series of caterpillar-like tubes and slides that made it a human Habitrail. The 4-year-old boy inquired about the "playground at Mickeh Donalz," as they slowed for the red light, and negotiations with the mother started. He fancied himself as more spontaneous and whimsical than most fathers settling into middle age -- comfortably or not -- so he decided and then quickly announced, "why not" and pulled into the lot, listing, as he negotiated the other cars, the requisite details of this hour's parent-child deal being hammered out and finalized as he pulled into a faintly diagonally striped non-spot near the entrance and the second drive-thru window; No burgers or fries would be purchased; some drinks OK, the subsequent specifics would be laid out by their mother. These kids are pretty much as happy as can be 8 hours a day in their grandparents pool, with a short break at the McDonald's playground. Sure, Disney World is more fun, but that much more fun? Like, hundreds of dollars more?
After a 30-minute period during which the parents sat at a built-in table on the exterior of the shabby stucco pre-fab building in need of a new paint job, enjoying their gamboling children who were generally very well behaved and were enjoying this impromptu triumph of the will, they all lumbered back through the dining room itself, past the scattered diners, mostly elderly couples sipping coffee and having a snack or early dinner. Passing the final couple before the registers and, then, the exit, he looked down to the woman who was positively beaming with a genuine smile as the children passed before her, her eyes coming up to meet his as he smiled back, feeling a vague warm acceptance and resignation in the context of this whole trip to Florida. Each subsequent visit made him, naturally, reflect more on mortality, cycle of life and the human condition.
Out again from the air conditioning into the pleasant Florida heat coming from the midday sun and from the blacktop below. After considering potential lawsuits that might arise from possible mishaps over on the play structure -- after all, people sue over spilling hot cups of coffee on their own genital regions -- it did not take long for his imagination to run away from him. Here, in this balmy parking lot as cars speed by on a 6-lane highway flanked by never-ending plazas of Publix Supermarkets, CVS Pharmacies, strip-mall taverns and thrift shops and bric-a-brac shops and Mexican and Olive Gardens restaurants. In this failing economy, with another swine flu outbreak, wars and global warming, it was not a far stretch to envision pretty much the unraveling of civilization as we know it, starting maybe with some perceived slight or misunderstanding and escalating into a crisis as in a novel by Russell Banks, perhaps such a spark getting picked up in the wind and burning faster and closer to threatening neighborhoods like the constantly burning brush fires miles away that were at this moment filling the air with the acrid smell of smoke all the way to the coast, reminding one of the "white noise" of constant threats to illusory peace and prosperity in Don DeLillo novels. Or maybe like a Cormac McCarthy observation of society starting to come undone when people stop being polite. It would not take much more than 30 seconds to feel he could easily reach out and rip back the cheap facade of this tenuous civilization, as flimsy as this stucco McDonald's or the boarded-up amorphous-shaped commercial place across the street, a mauve-colored stucco place that was most likely another fast food joint or gas station in its better days. This did not take some sort of Matrix-level complicated method to catch a glimpse of some alternate reality; it was simpler than that. He thought that most of what we know and see and depend on is simply too flimsy and in the hands of people no more mentally developed than children. It could all be pushed over with one, maybe two hands.
His reverie started by remembering he was parked in that "illegal" spot. Was there someone to enforce this fast-food legal structure? It was not a handicap spot. Was there some private police force that was going to jump out at him. He had a vision of a flabby man in an ill-fitting manager's uniform shirt and baseball cap who could have been 20 or 40 was chatting with a tow truck operator as the rig was being hooked up to his father's Buick Regal.
"What are you doing?" he would ask rhetorically. "This is a mistake. This is our car."
And it would unravel from there, in front of his wife and children. A fight to the death. Fighting a tow truck operator and a sweaty, greasy McDonalds manager on the hot blacktop and likely getting his ass kicked. He was not able to predict how he would behave in this situation. Would he find the humor in it, as Richard Ford did in Independence Day, when his hero was confronted by a teenage private security "officer" in his ex-wife's new gated community? Or would he go off it some sort of base-level self-protective violent episode as one of McCarthy's characters might? Most likely, he would throw up his hands and find some melancholy jokiness in it, pissed off, sure, that he had to explain to his father what had happened and deal with his still-caustic asides as he, once again, had to be rescued by the grown-up, even if he himself was now 42 and his father in his upper 60s.
I had this little daydream in the span of about 20 seconds during our vacation to Naples, Forida this past week. The city has a ritzy old part with a vital downtown center near the ocean and extreme amounts of money on display in $25 million beachfront compounds, and Bentleys and Ferraris everywhere you turn. Then one crosses a bridge and drives through strip-mall land peppered with gated golf communities for another 30 or 40 miles north toward Ft. Myers and also southeast, until one hits the Everglades. These communities vary slightly in their level of luxury, filled with retirees from all over the US and Europe. The real money may be out on the coast, but many of these people in the other highway-side communities worked hard, saved their good chunks of money, and pulled most of their nest egg out of the market before it went belly up.
My folks live in one such place and we are thankful they do. First of all and most importantly, they are extremely happy. It is not where I could see myself when I am that age, but we enjoy seeing them and luxuriate in their largess at having us share their great house, with a pool and a lanai, on a pond with a gator lurking in eye shot. They can't get enough of the kids at this age. I don't golf, as my dad does, but if I did, it would be heavenly. Our kids can spend all day in the pool, until we drag them out for lunch at a sidewalk cafe and a few hours at the beach. It is a really nice cheap vacation for us. It is not a completely soulless development; the houses are fairly modest, close together and lushly landscaped with tropical fauna, lending the place a certain terra firma and neighborhood permanence. The neighbors all seem genuinely happy and satisfied, they are all out chatting, taking walks, riding bikes, waving to each other. At night, they might drive the 20 minutes or so into downtown Naples to have a meal at some of the top-notch restaurants or, closer to home, drive a minute down to the clubhouse restaurant or bar & grill. It's a pretty great way to go out. By the look at the bar scene at one of these restaurants, with all the expensive but futile plastic surgery on display by those trying to pick each other up, some were not going gracefully, but go we all must.
And this is what retirement is. When my friend's parents told the adult children that they were retiring to Florida, the father did not cite any of the usual -- golf, beach, pool, or even weather; he bluntly announced, "we're goin' down there to die." And that is, in a nutshell, what my song "Florida" is about. I grew up going to visit my grandparents in the decidedly less-swanky retirement community called -- I kid you not -- Leisureville, in Pompano Beach. These were little cinder block houses with 2 or 3 bedrooms, screened porches, a community pool and club house built for the same families that post-war suburbs like Levittown were, only now they were nearing retirement. My grandfather was one of those returning G.I.'s, who retired fairly early after working for the New York City Department of Sanitation. When we visited, though it was a far more modest version of the situation my parents have, we were as much in heaven as our kids are when they visit. The whole deal-- grandparents, sun, pool, family togetherness, vacation time in general.
My grandfather died in 1986 and my grandmother was never the same. Her mood darkened. He was everything, her whole world. She never even learned to drive. She eventually sold her house in New York. Her body was very strong and she was in great physical health, but as the years went on, her mind started to go, and then she started to lose sight. Along the lines, she had to sell the house in Leisureville and my parents and mother's brother moved her close to my uncle, who looked after her final years. She lived along time. She's buried in the cemetery directly across the street from the big yellow cursive Leisureville sign at the development's entrance.
We left my parents Tuesday. Dad is recovering from a quadruple bypass. Mom successfully battled cancer last year. The kids sobbed as we left them. And the pool, and vacation time, and family togetherness. We're very conscious of time passing and the fact that the kids won't likely always cherish this sort of thing.
This song, from my solo record with Crown Victoria Fireworks on TV, is sort of my poor-man's "Veronica." It's about a few things, but is focused on my grandmother. At the time that I wrote it, at the end of her life, it felt appropriate to attack the song as I did in that original recording, i.e. thrashing and raging away sort of helplessly, careening out of control, screeching at the very limits of my vocal range. In reflection of this recent trip, I am picking it as one of my own to reinterpret for a Cover of the Week, giving it a more spacious and quiet reading. That opening riff actually reminds me of one of Buffalo Tom's first, if not the first cover we recorded, a song called "Blue" by the Rain Parade.
Florida (mp3)
Out on Highway 41, the Tamiami, he pulled into off at a McDonald's because the boy saw the giant colorful play structure, an arching series of caterpillar-like tubes and slides that made it a human Habitrail. The 4-year-old boy inquired about the "playground at Mickeh Donalz," as they slowed for the red light, and negotiations with the mother started. He fancied himself as more spontaneous and whimsical than most fathers settling into middle age -- comfortably or not -- so he decided and then quickly announced, "why not" and pulled into the lot, listing, as he negotiated the other cars, the requisite details of this hour's parent-child deal being hammered out and finalized as he pulled into a faintly diagonally striped non-spot near the entrance and the second drive-thru window; No burgers or fries would be purchased; some drinks OK, the subsequent specifics would be laid out by their mother. These kids are pretty much as happy as can be 8 hours a day in their grandparents pool, with a short break at the McDonald's playground. Sure, Disney World is more fun, but that much more fun? Like, hundreds of dollars more?
After a 30-minute period during which the parents sat at a built-in table on the exterior of the shabby stucco pre-fab building in need of a new paint job, enjoying their gamboling children who were generally very well behaved and were enjoying this impromptu triumph of the will, they all lumbered back through the dining room itself, past the scattered diners, mostly elderly couples sipping coffee and having a snack or early dinner. Passing the final couple before the registers and, then, the exit, he looked down to the woman who was positively beaming with a genuine smile as the children passed before her, her eyes coming up to meet his as he smiled back, feeling a vague warm acceptance and resignation in the context of this whole trip to Florida. Each subsequent visit made him, naturally, reflect more on mortality, cycle of life and the human condition.
Out again from the air conditioning into the pleasant Florida heat coming from the midday sun and from the blacktop below. After considering potential lawsuits that might arise from possible mishaps over on the play structure -- after all, people sue over spilling hot cups of coffee on their own genital regions -- it did not take long for his imagination to run away from him. Here, in this balmy parking lot as cars speed by on a 6-lane highway flanked by never-ending plazas of Publix Supermarkets, CVS Pharmacies, strip-mall taverns and thrift shops and bric-a-brac shops and Mexican and Olive Gardens restaurants. In this failing economy, with another swine flu outbreak, wars and global warming, it was not a far stretch to envision pretty much the unraveling of civilization as we know it, starting maybe with some perceived slight or misunderstanding and escalating into a crisis as in a novel by Russell Banks, perhaps such a spark getting picked up in the wind and burning faster and closer to threatening neighborhoods like the constantly burning brush fires miles away that were at this moment filling the air with the acrid smell of smoke all the way to the coast, reminding one of the "white noise" of constant threats to illusory peace and prosperity in Don DeLillo novels. Or maybe like a Cormac McCarthy observation of society starting to come undone when people stop being polite. It would not take much more than 30 seconds to feel he could easily reach out and rip back the cheap facade of this tenuous civilization, as flimsy as this stucco McDonald's or the boarded-up amorphous-shaped commercial place across the street, a mauve-colored stucco place that was most likely another fast food joint or gas station in its better days. This did not take some sort of Matrix-level complicated method to catch a glimpse of some alternate reality; it was simpler than that. He thought that most of what we know and see and depend on is simply too flimsy and in the hands of people no more mentally developed than children. It could all be pushed over with one, maybe two hands.
His reverie started by remembering he was parked in that "illegal" spot. Was there someone to enforce this fast-food legal structure? It was not a handicap spot. Was there some private police force that was going to jump out at him. He had a vision of a flabby man in an ill-fitting manager's uniform shirt and baseball cap who could have been 20 or 40 was chatting with a tow truck operator as the rig was being hooked up to his father's Buick Regal.
"What are you doing?" he would ask rhetorically. "This is a mistake. This is our car."
And it would unravel from there, in front of his wife and children. A fight to the death. Fighting a tow truck operator and a sweaty, greasy McDonalds manager on the hot blacktop and likely getting his ass kicked. He was not able to predict how he would behave in this situation. Would he find the humor in it, as Richard Ford did in Independence Day, when his hero was confronted by a teenage private security "officer" in his ex-wife's new gated community? Or would he go off it some sort of base-level self-protective violent episode as one of McCarthy's characters might? Most likely, he would throw up his hands and find some melancholy jokiness in it, pissed off, sure, that he had to explain to his father what had happened and deal with his still-caustic asides as he, once again, had to be rescued by the grown-up, even if he himself was now 42 and his father in his upper 60s.
I had this little daydream in the span of about 20 seconds during our vacation to Naples, Forida this past week. The city has a ritzy old part with a vital downtown center near the ocean and extreme amounts of money on display in $25 million beachfront compounds, and Bentleys and Ferraris everywhere you turn. Then one crosses a bridge and drives through strip-mall land peppered with gated golf communities for another 30 or 40 miles north toward Ft. Myers and also southeast, until one hits the Everglades. These communities vary slightly in their level of luxury, filled with retirees from all over the US and Europe. The real money may be out on the coast, but many of these people in the other highway-side communities worked hard, saved their good chunks of money, and pulled most of their nest egg out of the market before it went belly up.
My folks live in one such place and we are thankful they do. First of all and most importantly, they are extremely happy. It is not where I could see myself when I am that age, but we enjoy seeing them and luxuriate in their largess at having us share their great house, with a pool and a lanai, on a pond with a gator lurking in eye shot. They can't get enough of the kids at this age. I don't golf, as my dad does, but if I did, it would be heavenly. Our kids can spend all day in the pool, until we drag them out for lunch at a sidewalk cafe and a few hours at the beach. It is a really nice cheap vacation for us. It is not a completely soulless development; the houses are fairly modest, close together and lushly landscaped with tropical fauna, lending the place a certain terra firma and neighborhood permanence. The neighbors all seem genuinely happy and satisfied, they are all out chatting, taking walks, riding bikes, waving to each other. At night, they might drive the 20 minutes or so into downtown Naples to have a meal at some of the top-notch restaurants or, closer to home, drive a minute down to the clubhouse restaurant or bar & grill. It's a pretty great way to go out. By the look at the bar scene at one of these restaurants, with all the expensive but futile plastic surgery on display by those trying to pick each other up, some were not going gracefully, but go we all must.
And this is what retirement is. When my friend's parents told the adult children that they were retiring to Florida, the father did not cite any of the usual -- golf, beach, pool, or even weather; he bluntly announced, "we're goin' down there to die." And that is, in a nutshell, what my song "Florida" is about. I grew up going to visit my grandparents in the decidedly less-swanky retirement community called -- I kid you not -- Leisureville, in Pompano Beach. These were little cinder block houses with 2 or 3 bedrooms, screened porches, a community pool and club house built for the same families that post-war suburbs like Levittown were, only now they were nearing retirement. My grandfather was one of those returning G.I.'s, who retired fairly early after working for the New York City Department of Sanitation. When we visited, though it was a far more modest version of the situation my parents have, we were as much in heaven as our kids are when they visit. The whole deal-- grandparents, sun, pool, family togetherness, vacation time in general.
My grandfather died in 1986 and my grandmother was never the same. Her mood darkened. He was everything, her whole world. She never even learned to drive. She eventually sold her house in New York. Her body was very strong and she was in great physical health, but as the years went on, her mind started to go, and then she started to lose sight. Along the lines, she had to sell the house in Leisureville and my parents and mother's brother moved her close to my uncle, who looked after her final years. She lived along time. She's buried in the cemetery directly across the street from the big yellow cursive Leisureville sign at the development's entrance.
We left my parents Tuesday. Dad is recovering from a quadruple bypass. Mom successfully battled cancer last year. The kids sobbed as we left them. And the pool, and vacation time, and family togetherness. We're very conscious of time passing and the fact that the kids won't likely always cherish this sort of thing.
This song, from my solo record with Crown Victoria Fireworks on TV, is sort of my poor-man's "Veronica." It's about a few things, but is focused on my grandmother. At the time that I wrote it, at the end of her life, it felt appropriate to attack the song as I did in that original recording, i.e. thrashing and raging away sort of helplessly, careening out of control, screeching at the very limits of my vocal range. In reflection of this recent trip, I am picking it as one of my own to reinterpret for a Cover of the Week, giving it a more spacious and quiet reading. That opening riff actually reminds me of one of Buffalo Tom's first, if not the first cover we recorded, a song called "Blue" by the Rain Parade.
Florida (mp3)
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