betweenthegrooves

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2009-01-29T09:40:00.000-08:00

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last dispatch from paris, or the most expensive drink ever

2007-08-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

So I found this on my laptop. I think I nursed a bottle of wine to sleep that night on top of all the drinks at an amazing dinner, and of course, this bar. Things must've gotten foggy. I thought I posted it. Turns out I wrote it in Word:

I always thought that New Yorkers paid way too much for their drinks. Well, after tonight I can say that they have nothing on Paris. After having an amazing meal, which also didn’t come cheaply, but which we were prepared for, L and M wanted to go the Ritz to have a drink. I wasn’t super interested at first and sort of reluctantly went along, but once there I noticed they had a room called Bar Hemmingway. Okay, I could deal with that.

The bartender told me that I needed a stiff man-sized drink and proceeded to pour me a raspberry vodka. It was very strong and quite tasty, but it did have that girly pink glow to it. It went down well though, and if I hadn’t helped L finish a little of her drink, I probably would have ordered another one. “One drink? Most people have sixteen or seventeen here…you start over there and have five or six, and then you move over here.” They just about sold me, but L shot me a nasty look when she saw that I was thinking about it.

So I turned it down. We had to catch the Metro before it closed for the night. It was already nearly midnight. I gave the universal “check please” sign and I, being the gentleman and all, was presented the check. 75 euros for three drinks, one of which was non-alcoholic. My raspberry vodka alone was 28 euros. Yeouch. That amount would get me through some entire days in Spain. Oh well, I drank where Hemmingway probably drank. I got to see his guns, numerous photos and a couple old typewriters. It seemed like a nice enough way to bid farewell to this city. Although I really should be writing about that dinner. But that takes some perspective and metal clarity, and I guess I’m still feeling the effects of that cocktail. Goodbye Paris.

a mad crush

2007-07-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

PJ Harvey was amazing at Summercase in Barcelona on 7/13/07. She played solo guitar and piano and dusted off some classics as well as some brand new songs.

maybe Henry Miller fell down these stairs

2007-07-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

I saw Michael Moore’s new movie before I came to Paris. Sicko is a documentary about the health care industry in the United States. It’s pretty eye opening. Not that we didn’t already know that things were out of control, but this film had a nice way of beating you over the head with the sad fact that getting sick in America can cost you your financial life.

Michael Moore likes to show extremes. We already know that Canada has a far superior health care system. Most of us point to it as an example of what we should strive for. But Moore goes beyond Canada and shows us France, where if you are working and have children somebody will come over to your house and do your laundry for you. Paying a copay? Wondering if a drug is covered or not? Forget about it. You have more important things to worry about. Like how you’re going to spend that 5 week summer holiday.

Having questionable health insurance myself, I was encouraged by Michael Moore’s movie. I didn’t need that traveler’s insurance. France would take care of me. Well today I almost put it to the test.

I’m in a restaurant. A place where Hemingway and Henry Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald would frequent at different times. I cozied myself into a booth, and even got out my moleskin notebook in case inspiration striked, and ordered up a French Onion soup and a large carafe of wine, enough for at least two glasses. I listen in to the conversation taking place at the table next to me, I mean, it is in English after all, and that is a rare thing by this point. I gather that some of them are Italian, and the woman next to me is Spanish. They have come together on some sort of trip, but I can’t tell who is with who and where exactly they are going. But it’s interesting listening. I’m so close to them that at times I feel like it’s rude not to introduce myself, or that maybe they’ll tell me to pull up a chair. Except I’m sort of already there.

In order to get into my table the hostess had to pull out the table. After I was done with my meal I waited awkwardly for the waiter or the hostess to come back and move the table for me so I could get out. The space was super tiny, and I thought I would disrupt anyone next to me if I moved the table and tried to get out myself. I couldn’t squeeze through the narrow gap between tables without the risk of sweeping my fellow diner’s meal right off the table with my backpack or umbrella, or even just my ass. The space was tiny.

The waiter comes and lets me out. I gather up my stuff and make my way toward the door. Except it’s not the door. It’s the stairs. But I don’t realize this. To me it just seems like I’m stepping into a dark revolving door that will take me outside, and it takes a few moments to fully comprehend that I’m falling head-first down the spriral staircase that leads to the basement where the bathrooms are.

It truly was in slow motion. And it really did feel like I was falling into the abyss. I know how people must feel if they fall into an empty elevator shaft. But at the same time your senses are awakened. Adrenaline kicks in. I felt every single step with my hands and reacted accordingly. Desperately trying to stop my body from catapulting all the way down the marble stairs.

I stop. My right arm reaches out and extends itself to a stair three or four steps away from me. The waiter stretches his arm out to me, and he goes for that right arm. But I know that if I let go of that, I will fall all the way down to the bottom. And who knows what I might find there.

So I reach up with my left arm, and the waiter pulls me up, apologizing profusely in French. Of course, this is what I’d like to believe. He could be saying “another stupid American falling down the stairs, I can’t believe you clumsy fucks” or “that’s what you get for coming into this restaurant and only ordering the French Onion soup, who do you think you are, Henry Miller?”

I get to the top of the stairs and the manager is there. Or at least a better dressed version of my waiter. Again, apologies in French and a whole lot of “are you all right’s?” which seem to translate well in any language. I was fine, I suppose. I scratched my knuckles a bit and hit my head, but I didn’t do any major harm. Mostly I just wanted to get the hell out of there. “Look at that stupid American. He drinks two glasses of wine and falls down the stairs.”

But hey, when the manager asked if I was all right and I said yes it wasn’t because I was worried about the hospital bill. No, for a split second I thought that a nice morphine drip in a French hospital with little French nurses and unlimited hospitality on the French dime might be exactly what this boy needed.

Then I went down the stairs, of my own volition this time. Green line. Metro stop. On my way to see Jim Morrison’s grave with a headache not unlike the numerous wine hangovers he surely endured.

This ain't no Amsterdam

2007-07-08T04:04:00.000-07:00

I didn't feel an enormous energy of feeling of place when I stepped off the train in Paris. I stood in line for the taxi after first being offered one for 40 euros, and began my short journey to my hotel. Big white French buildings. Lots of them. The kind that influenced much of the architecture in New Orleans. I realized I was in a big cosmopolitan city, and it was very unlike Amsterdam.

Just when I started to learn my way around Amsterdam and catch up on sleep, I was out the door on my way to Paris. Once here, I suddenly longed for the comforts of that city. It was active with plenty to do, but it was also very quaint. I loved my room. The bed was insanely comfortable, and I had started to frequent a coffee shop. I was in my groove.

Now, I must adapt in a number of ways. I can't wander around aimlessly and still find my way back quite the same way I could in Amsterdam. And now, my decisions often depend on two other people. I'm with M and L. I've been friends with L for years. L invited M along after I had committed, and I met her briefly when we began to book hotel rooms and travels between countries. So far so good, but I told L last night that I would probably be doing a lot more stuff on my own now that I've acquainted myself a bit.

I'm finding that when I'm on my own this city seems much more accessible. I'm able to get by and do stuff even with severely limited French. Most people know some English. But when I'm with the group L will speak in French and translate for me, but there's usually some laughing and uncomfortable moments that remind me of Elaine from Seinfeld, when she's in the Asian Nail Salon and she's convinced they are all talking about her.

I just found this cybercafe. It's the first I've seen. But now that I know my way around, my posts should be a little more regular.

I'll have to consult my tour book again for exact names, but among the places I've seen are Notre Dame and the gardens around the Lovre. Tons of walking around yesterday. Last night was really nice though....L and I took it easy and sipped a lot of wine while we explored new areas. M was jet lagged. She'd just met up with us that day and needed to get some sleep.

It's 1:21pm. Time to get some lunch. Big lunch. I'm really hungry and ready for more than croissants and cheese.

Random Paris Images- Days 1/2

2007-07-08T02:31:00.001-07:00

Vices

2007-07-05T14:11:00.001-07:00

Amsterdam Coffee Relapse

2007-07-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

I gave up coffee three weeks ago. Maybe four. Sleeping was becoming a nightmare and something had to give. Problem was I tried a bunch of things at the same time that I gave up coffee. But I’m sleeping better so I continue to avoid it. Until now, that is.

I landed in Amsterdam this morning at 5:30 am. If you take the time difference into consideration, I pretty much landed at the time that I would normally be going to bed. I didn’t sleep on the plane at all either. I couldn’t if I tried. Even listening to music was difficult in the tiny little nook I occupied. I had one of those seats that’s right up against the wall and I couldn’t recline. But this didn’t prevent the person in front of me from leaning back all the way the entire time. The only thing that seemed to work for me was watching movies. So I watched two. Coming To America because I’m sort of on an Eddie Murphy kick, and Marie Antonette, because, well, I’m going to Paris.

So after landing I quickly figured out the train and got to Central Station. Then I walked around for what seemed like forever trying to find my room. When I found it the sign said that they were not open until 9. This was around 7. Then it started to rain. No problem, I thought, I’ll just find a coffee shop and surf the internet and kill a couple hours. Wrong. I could grab a croissant and eat it in the rain. That was about it. I couldn’t find a place to kill two hours no matter how many streets I walked down.

Then I met Anthony. I didn’t trust him at first. “Hey, are you an American?” Like I didn’t have tourist stamped on my forehead as I wheeled my suitcase down the brick streets- probably waking everyone up with sound. Anthony’s shtick is to give people tours. I needed someone to point me in the right direction badly. So I started walking with him. He’d go on and on about how I had to take a picture of this or that, and I think he described the red light district as being “like a football field, four canals and four blocks” about ten times. He gave me the lowdown on weed, even though I said I wasn’t going to smoke any, and he told me where the best girls were if I wanted to go window shopping later on. But best of all, he pointed me to a coffee shop. Something I desperately needed more than anything. And what was this coffee shop that I had missed during my three hours of walking around? McDonalds. That’s right. A real fucking tourist. But I didn’t care. Anthony kept going on and on how I needed a guy like him to show me around and how he lived in the states for 21 years, but I’ve never had coffee this good from a McDonalds. It came out of an espresso machine and it was great. Of course the finally being able to sit down might have had something to do with it.

Gradually Anthony’s stories became a little more outrageous. He served time for armed robbery in 1982….then something else happened that got him deported from the US. I didn’t want to know too much. But he seemed like a pretty decent guy. I gave him 7 Euros…he’s unemployed and this is how he makes his money. It was totally worth it for pointing me in the direction of the coffee alone.

But now I’m checked into my room. Minneapolis time is 3:28am. But it’s 10:28 here. I’d love to take a little nap. Let’s hope the tiredness can override the coffee.

popcorn, coke and candy

2007-02-02T12:34:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I decided to leave the house after being cooped up for several days. Time off of work and a cold that wouldn't go away really left me with very few reasons to leave the house. I had gone grocery shopping. And I have a cat to keep me company. But eventually it's the search for media that drives me from the confines of home. Netflix only goes so far.

I bundle up, don a hat, and wrap a scarf around my head. I'm completely disguised. I half expect to get nabbed by homeland security agents. I mean, why am I hiding my face? And what's in the jacket?

Well, after making a quick stop, it's a Jimmy John's sub. Homeland Security may not care so much about that, but I have to be covert if I want to get it into the theater.

I'm not the type to sneak much into the theaters. Maybe a bottle of water. That's about it. I'm not popping my own corn or anything. But when you stay inside for a week or so straight with a bad cold, a Jimmy John's sub and a movie start to sound really good. And if you can combine the two, then all the better.

I didn't count on the movie being so packed. After all, this was one of those movies that I felt like a late-comer to. It had been out for weeks, and I was looking forward to picking a prime spot in the back to chow down on my #12 Beach Club (on a sub, hold the mayo).

As the trailers rolled, I found myself in a bit of a predicament. How do I eat this sub without making tons of noise and looking like a giant slob? I hated the guys who did this sort of thing, and I didn't want to become one of them. Somewhere in the heap of clothing that I'd piled up in the empty seat next to me was the sub. I scanned it through the corner of my eye, looking for an opening. There had to be some way to get to the inside pocket without being too obvious about it.

I managed to open up my coat, but I still had a ways to go to actually get the sub out of the inside pocket. This would take some time. Finally just as Babel started to play I summoned up the courage to pull the sub out of my pocket. Success. Now all I had to do was unwrap it.

I did all of this hesitantly while trying to minimize noise. Upon unwrapping my sub, I folded the deli paper over. I never messed with the paper or crumpled it up when I was done. The only distraction to my fellow theater goers would be the image of me chowing on a gigantic sub instead of munching on a bucket of popcorn.

While the visual of eating a sub in a movie theater may be a little unusual, at least it's a relatively quiet thing to eat, and it doesn't emit an odor either. A friend of mine once said that she didn't like going to see movies in the theater because of the popcorn. She said it smelled like stale farts. I used to think she was crazy, but now it's all I think about when I hear someone chomping away. And they do chomp too. Never mind that they're two feet from you, if that. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be better if they just let one rip instead. It would be a concentrated blast, but at least it wouldn't last the duration of the movie like those popcorn buckets.

Last week I had another frustrating experience. Candy man sat behind me. He spent the duration of the movie unwrapping each individual piece of candy. He must have sneaked it in, because no theater in their right mind would ever sell candy that's individually wrapped. Not unless they want to start installing metal detectors at the door.

So soon this candy chomping, individually unwrapping guy decides to take it up a notch. He puts on his nylon jacket. And he moves around it in like he's watching Footloose instead of quirky little drama called Little Children. I shoot him sideways glances, but I'm a little nervous about doing a full-blown turnaround. There's no backing down once you go there. I found that out once when I had a chair kicker behind me who turned out to be my former boss. Whoops.

Things got surreal and comical when the guy crunched up a coke can and threw it on the floor. I looked at my friend for an exchange of a couple wtf's. But that's when I thought we might be dealing with mental illness. And as the credits began to roll, it was confirmed. Walking down a row of seats about five or so rows ahead of him, he looked completely lost as he gazed up at the screen. Then he'd walk back into the aisle, linger a moment, before turning around and doing it all over again. And yes, his nylon jacket was still making a lot of noise. But my image of him dancing was gone.

stop me if you think that you've heard this one before

2007-01-26T08:06:00.000-08:00

The cd player at work is skipping, and my ipod hasn't been updated in a long time. So I decided to do something about it. Go old school, if you will. Bring in cassettes, and crank them up.

First up is a live album by The Smiths called Rank. It came out in 1988, and I haven't really been played it more than a couple times since 1990. I remember liking it a lot though. It was raw and emphasized the guitars. It's basically the sound of a rock band beating Morrissey into submission.

When I was a kid I bought a lot of cassettes. I started out on vinyl, and I bought a lot since then in the late 1990's when I got on a streak, but it was the cassette that pretty much dominated my youth.

Every scrap of money I earned, whether it was my allowance when I was younger, or the fast food paychecks that started around 14, went to buying tapes. Well, that and cigarettes.

The last time I brought in a stack of tapes to play at work was 1988. I was working at this ice cream place called Swensens in a mall in Kansas City. They served sandwiches and had a little cafe thing going on during the day, but at night it was all ice cream, and the place was run by a bunch of 15 year olds.

I was the first of the ruffians to get hired. Then I got a bunch of friends jobs there. Pretty soon we're all sitting at the back table smoking cigarettes and listening to tapes.

I remember a girl I like introduced me to The Clash. Combat Rock. Then she ended up giving me the tape for some reason. Well, probably because she liked me. I also remember playing some R.E.M. albums, as well as the new David Lee Roth album. Weird time. I was into pretty much everything.

It was Led Zeppelin that got me in trouble though. I think it was Led Zeppelin II. My friend Mike had introduced me to Led Zeppelin the previous year. Well, beyond Led Zeppelin IV anyway. I'd had that one for a while. Mike was great. He gave me one tape at a time. Teased me with it, and hinted at what would come next. Man, what I'd give to experience "Houses Of The Holy" or "Led Zeppelin III" again for the first time like that.

I showed up for my shift as usual around 4:30. Tina, the firecracker redhead manager, was still there. Which was a little unusual. Usually she left early and I didn't have to deal with her. I'd had my run-ins in the past. She wasn't too fond of me leaving my Camel Lights in the freezer, for instance. Back at the back table one of my 15 year old friends had told me that cigarettes taste more refreshing if you keep them in the freezer. Tina didn't like this.

I was far from an ideal worker. Some kid sitting at the back table with a smoke hanging out of their mouth isn't exactly what someone wants to see when they bring their grandchildren in for an ice cream cone. I spent more time socializing than cleaning or restocking items too. But I felt like I was sort of invincible because I'd gotten so many people jobs there.

"We need to talk," Tina said. I thought maybe she was going to get on me for smoking at the back table or something. I knew she didn't like me. I was a hire of the clueless old people who owned the place. They were nice and seemed to like me on the Saturday mornings I had to work with them. But they were probably in bed by the middle of my 5-9 evening shift.

"I'm going to have to let you go."

I was shocked and I asked her why.

"For playing Led Zeppelin too loud."

I didn't know what to say. She hit me where it hurt. She insulted Led Zeppelin. "What's wrong with playing Led Zeppelin?'

This got her going. "Some people don't like Led Zeppelin, Todd. I don't like Led Zeppelin."

I was horrified. This was beyond belief. How could anyone in their right mind, especially an older person in their early 20's, not like Led Zeppelin? Suddenly I didn't want to work for her anymore. But I cared about references. My food service career was at stake. What if someone called and asked about me?

"Well," Tina said, "I suppose I could lie a little."

I really missed that place. There was nothing like sitting at the back table with your friends, smoking cigarettes, complaining about school and parents, and then making malts and ice cream sundaes for each other. Life didn't get much better than that.

Thanks Tina. You ruined my life.

...and the cradle will rock

2007-01-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

For over 20 years I've been waiting for this to happen, and now it appears that it has. Van Halen with David Lee Roth. That's right. They're getting back together for a summer tour after first being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in March.

I was a Van Halen freak. When I was 12 years old it's pretty much all I talked about. My dad used to say that if they sold Van Halen toilet paper I'd buy it. I was sort of insulted by that comment at the time, but damn, some retro Diver Down-era Charmin would be a pretty cool thing to have up on a shelf.

Those first six albums rocked my world. They were larger than life. True rock stars in a very flamboyant way. They weren't quite a pretty boy glam band, and they weren't really a hair band either. They were party rock. Or cock rock, more appropriately. And David Lee Roth was lord of the cock rock.

Diamond Dave doesn't quite look the part anymore though. His hair has thinned and he looks like a bad caricature of his former self. Not that he couldn't rock out though. His last couple tours have been almost all Van Halen songs, and apparently he sounds pretty good.

I just wish they'd done this in 1996. They came so close. And they'd look a lot less absurd up there. But I'm willing to embrace a 2006 reunion under one condition, they ditch the bass player.

Eddie Van Halen's 15 year old son has no business being in Van Halen. I don't care that he has the last name. That seems to be part of Eddie's problem in the last several years. The name. How much simpler it would have been if back in the day David Lee Roth hadn't suggested they change their name from Mammouth to Van Halen. We come this close to a reunion, and now Van Halen's original bass player isn't invited? Because he has the nerve to want to play some rock and roll instead of sitting on his ass all the time, and accepts Sammy Hagar's invitation to play with him? Is Eddie Van Halen really that petty? And does Eddie forget that Michael Anthony sang all the backup vocal?

Valerie Bertinelli can't be that thrilled with the prospect of her 15 year old son touring the country with one of the world's most party happy bands. My hope is that she'll threaten legal action and Eddie will realize his error. If this doesn't work, maybe David Lee Roth looking at Wolfie and singing "have you seen junior's grades?" will do the trick. Child Protective Services will come a'knocking, and Michael Anthony will be reinstated in his rightful spot.

It's going to be really interesting though. The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame itself should get the fireworks going with the two warring camps: Hagar/Anthony and Van Halen/Roth all nominated under the name Van Halen. I hope someone's going to document this whole thing. It would make killer reality TV.

things that blog me

2007-01-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

Now that my albums of the 1990's series is complete, what do I blog about? Here are some ideas:

Songs I heard on shuffle
Things that annoy me/irritant of the week
Products I will chose in order to make decision making easier
Bands I don't get
Favorite foods/things that make grocery shopping more fun
Fake bands/discographies
Awful albums in history
Jobs from hell
Overheard conversations
Things that make life better
Digging into my cassettes from the 80's (that I haven't listened to since) and reexamining them, one at a time

1999- MULE VARIATIONS

2007-01-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

Tom Waits records are events. Or at least they were when Mule Variations came out in 1999. It had been 7 years since his last real record. 1993's The Black Rider was more of an exercise in theater than a proper record. But even if you count that one, it had been a long wait. 1992, Bone Machine, I'm living at home while I take some time off from college. By 1999 I'd grown up a bit. For better or worse, Tom's characters were a little more real to me. And he always had some interesting things to say.

Got to get behind the mule, every morning and plow

I had a cat I hated. A kitten actually. A kitten with a rotten personality. I was feeling really down that winter and thought I'd go to the humane society and get a furry companion. A few minutes in the little room and I had bonded with him. "A Siamese," the lady at the counter said, "oh, you're going to have your hands full." I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that.

Niko was a waste of a good name. He liked to climb me like he was a monkey climbing a tree. And he never avoided my face either. I had to close my eyes and hope that he wasn't easily startled as he made his journey towards the top of my head. He liked to sit up there. Right on top of my head. I'd pull him off and put him on my lap or the floor, and then he'd run up my body and do it all over again. And more often than not, he'd jump from my head onto my papers. The little bastard had no respect for me working out of my home.

Mr. Curt lived across the hall. His first name was Curt, but I liked to add the Mr. because he was a very fastidious man. He didn't like me to do laundry after 9pm, for example, because he thought the noise would keep him up- even though the washers and dryers were in the basement and we were on the second floor. And if I had a girl over, no matter what hour she came over or left, he was sure to notice. But he was a good guy. We had our own little Kramer-Jerry Seinfeld relationship going on. The doors were usually wide open, and it wasn't long before he took quite a liking to little Niko.

I don't recall Niko ever making the journey to the top of Mr. Curt's head, so maybe that explains why Mr. Curt liked him so much. Then again, who doesn't like a kitten? His nose had likely never been clawed either, and therefore wasn't hindered in anyway in its sensitivity to smell. "Is little Niko liter trained?" Well, yeah. Or at least I thought so. I mean the stuff in the box was all covered up. I had my suspicions that maybe he was having accidents though. When this happens your nose kind of goes crazy and you think you smell it everywhere. So Mr. Curt was sort of my validation that maybe there was something wrong. I had stockpiled a huge stack of envelopes from the newspaper clipping service I used for sales leads, and I had a sneaking suspicion that he was doing his business back behind my couch where the bulk of those clippings were stored.

Presidents Day. I have the day off and decide to go record shopping. But I don't quite trust Niko. I'd had him about a month, and my apartment was starting to get a little funky smelling. Nothing I could pinpoint though. So I put Niko in my bathroom and closed the door. At least that way I could keep track of him.

So I come back to my funky smelling apartment. Mr. Curt is gone. He didn't have the work perks that I had, and didn't have the day off. I open the door to check on Niko and see him on top of the sink, ready to pounce on me. All around him, on all of the white porcelain are little tiny brown specs. It didn't take me long to connect the dots and trace them back to Niko.

Bye bye Niko. I didn't like him anyway. And he was kitten enough that I didn't feel too guilty. "It just wasn't working out" isn't an excuse that would keep him from getting adopted.

Mr. Curt on the other hand wasn't too happy. I guess looking back it was sort of like his cat too. I did tell him where he could find Niko though, and he didn't seem like he was in any hurry to go there and adopt him.

You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops

You don't. You meet them in rock clubs when your three sheets to the wind after seeing another band perform at another club a few hours earlier. The key was in my car door, but the night was beautiful. The perfect summer night. I didn't know who was playing at the 7th Street Entry, or even if I'd know anybody there, but I was set on making the most of the night.

Margaret liked rock and roll. And she went to shows by herself. If there's a weakness I have for women, that's it. You go to a rock show by yourself, you're pretty cool in my book.

We dated for close to a year and saw a lot of rock shows. Then we broke up. Right after having breakfast in a very coffee shop like place. To the sounds of Joy Division. To this day I can't think of a more miserable band to break up to. Awful.

When you share my bed, you share my name

I always thought this was a real bad ass thing to say, and I love Tom for saying it.

When the weather gets rough, and it's whiskey in the shade, it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane

I'm not a church going man. I wasn't in 1999, and I'm not now. Some of my favorite songs in the whole world deal with spiritual rebirth or the longing for personal salvation though. Chocolate Jesus, however, is not one of those songs.

It does sort of present an interesting idea though. I mean, maybe taking a little time out on Sunday to enjoy a little Chocolate Jesus wouldn't be such a bad thing. If it's dark chocolate it's going to be rich in anti-oxidants, which is good for you. And there's a sort of zen-like quality that comes from taking a few moments out of your day to really focus on something. Even if it's something you eat. After all, people focus when they're taking communion. The way I see it, you're just consolidating things.

Come down from the cross, we could use the wood

Ouch. This one could really put someone in their place. You probably want to be careful who you say this to. I can think of a couple relatives that almost got this verbage from me, but I came to my senses before actually saying it. Again, pretty bad ass.

She's my black market baby, she's a diamond that wants to stay coal

I can't stand it when people ask why other people are still single. Hate it. I mean, right now, I wouldn't mind being married. Does that mean that the next person I go out with is THE ONE? No. Not at all.

It's also weird when people ask what "type" you're looking for. Usually I want to say "someone not like you", because usually the people who ask are so not my type. But I think I'm going to start saying that I want a diamond who wants to stay coal. Seriously. That's my line (well, actually Tom's) and I'm sticking with it.

fell in love with a gadget

2007-01-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

I knew Apple was going to announce something yesterday. My hopes were that they'd finally reveal an iPod that either had satellite radio capabilities or at least a built in FM tuner. I've held off buying a new iPod for this reason, and thought of all of the new iPods received over the holiday season and how those people would be bummed that Apple one-upped them in much the same way that I was when I bought my Powerbook only to have the Intel version launched just a couple months later. This didn't happen.

Instead they came up with the kind of gadget everybody's been dreaming of since the invention of the cell phone. Finally, it appears as if one small device will be capable of everything we need for life on the go. Phone. Basic computer. MP3 Player. Camera.

Currently I bring my laptop, a cell phone and an ipod to work with me on most days. Sometimes I even bring a digital camera. Of these devices, my cell phone is the one I'm most attached to. I have an office computer I can use, and there's an office stereo and stacks of cds and other people's iPods around to fuel the soundtrack to my work day. But if I forget my cell phone it's like I'm running around naked all day. I can hardly remember what occupied the space in my front left pocket before the cell phone. Sure, I can call in and check my messages from my office phone, but it just isn't the same. I mean, someone could call. Or I might need to call someone. Or there could be an emergency. It's my lifeline to the world basically, even though I would hardly consider myself a heavy user.

With Apple's new iPhone, I would probably leave my laptop and iPod at home. I wouldn't get rid of either. I mean, surely the iPod would still be great for roadtrips, exercising or just about any other occasion when you need to have your musical library with you. And a large screen computer isn't going to go away anytime soon. But for everyday on the go use, I can't think of a better gadget than the iPhone.

I might have to be an early adapter for this one. It comes out in June, which means I guess I better start saving now. This thing is not cheap, at around $499 for the 4 gig model. And I'm sure there will be some bugs in it. But I know as soon as I see one I'm going to have to have it.

Brilliant invention.

Nanowrimo Almost Killed Me

2006-12-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

So I didn't finish my novel. Not even close. But I did write 11,000 words, and that has to count for something. An intro. A start. I'll get back to it someday. Maybe even this month.

But first thing's first. This blog. It's been sorely neglected. So much so that I thought about going into the bowels of blogger.com to read the legalities of abandoned blogs. If you're inactive for a long period of time do they cut you off? That's how I lost my yahoo account a few years back. Not that I miss it too much, but I can never read those emails ever again now, and it's mildly irritating.

Life piles up. Things need to get done that must be done, and other times nothing needs to get done. I usually identified with the later.

TV shows I've been watching:

LOST (when it's actually on)
Curb Your Enthusiasm (from the beginning again)
Studio 60 (again, when it was on)
Seinfeld

Movies I've seen lately:

Water
The Notorious Bettie Page
The Kentucky Fried Movie
Stranger Than Fiction
Fast Food Nation
From Freedom to Fascism

Music:

Tom Waits- Orphans
Bruce Springsteen- The River
Neko Case- Fox Confessor
Lou Reed- Live: Take No Prisoners
Sonic Youth- Rather Ripped
The Kinks- Everybody's In Showbiz
Jens Lekman- When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog
Art Brut- Bang Bang Rock and Roll
Regina Spektor- Begin To Hope
The Shins- Wincing The Night Away

Books:

Pat Fallon- Juicing The Orange
Ron Suskind- The One Percent Doctrine

Christmas album guilty pleasure:

Twisted Sister- A Twisted Christmas

Ok..more later. Maybe even a regular post.

The Albino (nanowrimo excerpt)

2006-11-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

I leave the club, and when I know I’m safely out of view I start to run. I don’t want to miss the bus. Just when I think I’ve done just that, I round a corner and see it parked on the side of the street. I run up to the door and bang on it a couple times and someone lets me in.

The whole bus claps. “Welcome back” they say. I can’t help but notice that they don’t seem to be treating Matt with quite as much fondness. Another girl must've turned him down.

He was happy to see me though. “Oh, man. You’re not going to believe this,” I say as I tell him about how much Dana and I were hitting it off. “I just didn’t want to leave, you know? I mean part of me wanted to just stay there and see where the night took me.”

“What’s stopping you?” Matt asks.

“Well, I didn’t want to leave you here. I know you were planning on crashing at my place.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me.”

“Seriously, I don’t want you driving home.”

“Well, here, give me your key and I’ll crash at your place.”

“Nah”

“No, seriously. Give me your key. I’ll crash out, but I’ll leave the door open so you can let yourself in.”

I looked at him, as if to say, are you serious.

“Go” he said. “Go!”

The bus starts to roll just as we end our conversation. “Stop the bus!” I scream out as I stumble forward. “Stop the bus! For the love of God, stop the bus!" The bus stops and just before I step out, I turn to everyone and thank them and tell them we should do this again sometime. They tell me that the party rolls every January and that they'll pick me up next year. I suddenly want to work where they all work.

I go back inside and try to find Dana. At first I think it’s a lost cause. It takes me a while for my eyes to adjust and to locate her group of friends through all the smoke and pulsating lights. Finally I see her. “Hey,” I say, “I missed my bus”.

It’s a cold January morning. The wind is beating against the roof and I’m lying in an attic bedroom. The first thing I notice is the plastic stars on the ceiling. At first I think it’s all in my head. These things can’t be real. There’s certainly nothing romantic about sleeping under these stars. I’m freezing my ass off.

I grab for a handful of blankets, but I can never seem to get enough. There’s always some resistance. My head hurts too. I want to get up, take an Excedrin and drink a tall glass of water and go back to bed. But then I remember that I’ve never had stars on my ceiling. I tried once, but one fell down on my while I was sleeping and hit me in the face. Since then I’d sworn off the idea of building a galaxy in my bedroom. But there's some warmth over there on the right side of the bed. That’s right. Dana. I nudge here and she mutters something about having to work. Damn, I think, I’m really glad I don’t have to do that.

I’m thankful for the excuse to get out of there, and I'm glad that nothing really happened. I tell her I had a really good time and that I’ll call her, and I head for the door. All of this is true too. Although I’m not sure I should really call her again.

“How are you feeling?” I ask Matt when I call him. I knew he would end up driving. As pissed off as I might have been, I was too high on sharing the details of last night to give him any grief about it.

“Oh my God,” he says, “what a crazy night.”

“Oh, man, you’re not going to believe how it ended for me.” I told him that I went back into the club to tell Dana that I missed the bus. She said was cool, and that her friend would give me a ride home. It turned out Dana lives a block away from me, and they’re all headed over there. “Things go really well,” I continued, “and then when we get back to her place her friend is asking me if I party. And I’m thinking, yeah, I mean I’m drunk off my ass, you know?”

Matt laughs.

“So it doesn’t take long for me to realize that they’re not talking about alcohol. Something’s going on in the kitchen and I can hear low mumblings ‘he’s cool’ and stuff like that. Eventually I get curious and leave this cushy couch that I was making out with Dana on and head towards the kitchen.”

“Wow. What was going on?”

“They were cutting lines of coke. Three or four of her friends were sitting around the table taking their turns. And it started to seem like an after school special. They kept telling me that I’d like it, and I didn’t want to seem like a complete novice. I mean, I’d done some experimenting, but I just wasn’t interested.”

“Jesus Christ. They were just sitting around doing lines?”

“Yeah, they said they pretty much did it every weekend.”

Matt is still laughing. “Well did you want to try it?”

“Part of me was curious, but I didn’t want to open those doors. Plus I was hammered. It had very little appeal to me. I wanted to hang out with Dana. Or at least I did before all of this started going on.”

“So what did you do?”

“Like I said, it was like an after school special. Four girls. They were absolutely ruthless. I felt like such a pussy, but I knew I could just say no. I wanted to just say no. Finally when they realized that Nancy Reagan had taught me a little something and I wasn’t going to do any lines, they started going on and on about putting some on my lips.”

“On your lips?”

“They said it would make them tingle and feel good.” I started laughing. “These girls wouldn’t let up. It was just ridiculous. Finally, I agreed, but told them to just use a small amount.”

“So they put coke on your lips?”

“Oh yeah, they rubbed it on. Top and bottom."

Matt laughs.

"I just got home and looked in the mirror and I look like a fucking albino. My lips are completely white.”

Matts dying. “What a fucking crazy night. Did you feel anything?”

“My lips got a little numb, but I couldn’t really tell that I had taken anything. She started acting all weird though. I just wanted to get some sleep, and I couldn’t quite tell what she wanted.”

“You weren’t interested in her?”

“Let's just say it brought out her annoying qualities”, I said “I was interested at first, but then when I got back to her place she put on the Dave Matthews and started doing coke. That can change things up a bit.”

“Well, I know how you feel about Dave Matthews.”

NaNoWriMo

2006-11-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

So this blogger fancies himself a novelist. Well no, not really. But I did write an album in a month a couple years ago through February Album Writing Month. That was a spin off of National Novel Writing Month, which started yesterday and lasts until the end of November. So yeah, I'm going to try to write a novel in a month.

Much like this blog post, most of my novel (okay...memoir) will be written very quickly with very little editing. The goal is to get the ideas out and reach the 50,000 word goal, which is approximately 175 pages. I have an outline and ideas. Last night I wrote the first chapter and a half.

I'll be posting excerpts on here from time to time. Keep in mind that the writing is very rough.

Wish me luck.

1998- IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA

2006-10-31T15:21:00.000-08:00

In the days when entire cd collections couldn't fit in the palm of your hand, you had to be careful about choosing the right handful of cds to take on a trip. A flight to another city to train for a new job meant a lot of time alone in a hotel. I wanted a cd to be more like a novel. Something I could really sink my teeth into. Something I could start on the plane and really get into by the time I had to head back.

I had just accepted a job. A big job. Not in a criminal sense, but a job where college was finally going to pay off. I'd go from having a supervisor time my potty breaks to a boss who would phone me once a week to see how things were going. Laptop. Company car. Four state territory. Life was looking up.

Then I got seated in first class. Nice. I'd yet to meet these people that offered me a crucial step in career advancement. I'd charmed the HR person with my cover letter, and gotten through a couple phone interviews. Now I had to fly to Atlanta for training. A couple questions went through my head. Most notably, how did they know I'm not some really freaky looking dude? After all, I was in sales. Image is supposed to be everything. Well, and an ability to schmooze.

First class was great though. I almost didn't want to put my headphones on because I was afraid they'd offer me something and I wouldn't be able to accept it. But I also had a really intriguing album in my bag.

I'd stopped by the Fetus before my trip. I knew exactly what I wanted from a review I read in City Pages. When the guy at the Fetus couldn't find it I was a little surprised. Right before I left another worker overheard him and found a box.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. It doesn't exactly roll of the tongue. But I had it in my bag. All I had to do was pull out my Sony Discman, slap on my headphones, and keep an eye on the flight attendant while I slipped what was to become one of my favorite albums of all time into my cd player.

But there were other issues to attend too. The seat next to me was open, which meant I could either remain in my aisle seat, or I could move next to the window and look out at the night sky.

Then there was the issue of beverages. Wine sounded good to me, but I would have to decide which red I'd want to go with. I thought I'd make sure that whatever I selected went well with my dinner, but I knew there'd be a few more cocktails before that happened. I'd like to say I picked out a fine Pinot Noir, but I think I was all about the box wine back then.

Somewhere around 35,000 feet I finally played the album. From the first track I was smitten. "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers." I had no idea what that meant, but by the time Mom was stabbing Dad with the fork as he threw the garbage on the floor and the narrator was busy hanging out with his girl and discovering what each others bodies were for, I knew I was hearing something profoundly unique.

Then the song cycle explodes. Jeff Mangum screams "I love you Jesus Christ", only this time religion in music doesn't bother me. It seems so sincere it makes me blush.

Death is part of life in some endless cycle. Anne Frank. World War II. Birth. Mutation. Sex. Reincarnation.

It's all too much. I know from this first listen that it'll take me weeks beyond my stay in Atlanta to find all the treasures in this album. Years even. But I knew that a rock record was moving me in ways in which very few did after the 500th or so purchase.

"I'll take the Seafood Primavera."

"And another glass of wine...Merlot. Thanks."

The Hold Steady- Boys And Girls In America

2006-10-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

Enough with this bar band shit. Seriously. This band sounds nothing like the type of band you’re likely to encounter if you hit just about any bar in any city. If bar bands sounded like this Top 40 radio would be a beautiful thing, American Idol wouldn’t exist, and we may have even spared ourselves from W (sorry I can’t even type his name anymore without feeling sick).

Can you imagine what it would look like? Every small town would be a ripe scene waiting to explode. It’d be like having a 1959 Liverpool, 1967 San Francisco, 1977 London and 1989 Seattle everyday in every small town. “Good to see you’re back in a bar band, baby.” Yeah, maybe at the type of joint you’d find in Minneapolis in 1984.

The Replacements, Husker Du, and the Minneapolis scene of the early 1980’s feature prominently in the Hold Steady’s approach. Like Westerberg, Craig Finn wouldn’t be in a band if he had nothing to say. Fortunately for us, he’s got plenty to say, but he’s abandoned the unfocused jazz approach the got him so many comparisons to early pre-Born To Run Springsteen albums.

Boys And Girls In America is all about economy. Lead Singer/Lecturer Craig Finn sounds like he’s part of the band instead of competing with them. Gone are the long narratives found on 2004’s Almost Killed Me and especially last years concept heavy Separation Sunday, and in their place are concise rock songs. Most feature pronounced piano and restrained guitar. Some of which Craig Finn even manages to sing on.

The album kicks off with “Stuck Between Stations” and tells an interesting story about the poet John Berryman, Minneapolis and drinking. “He was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected/He loved the golden gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters”. Alcohol gets the best of him (“he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration”) before he leaps to his death and drowns in the Mississippi river. Hard lesson. You have to wonder if there isn’t a little band commentary in there.

The album’s other highlights include “Chips Ahoy”, “Massive Nights” and the very Cheap Trickish “Southtown Girls”. Boys And Girls In America’s greatest strengths come with its biggest detours. “Citrus” is a lovely ode to romance and inebriation, and oftentimes the romance of inebriation. Religion creeps its way in as well “I feel Jesus in the tenderness of honest nervous lovers/I feel Judas in the pistols and the pagers that come with all the powders.”

The real highlight is “First Night”. The song is where Craig Finn’s storytelling comes full circle as he resurrects Holly from Separation Sunday. Piano driven with layers of strings and guitars underneath, this song is The Hold Steady as probably nobody could have imagined them just a few years earlier. Indeed, if bar bands sounded like this, it would only be a matter of time before this song would penetrate a prom or two somewhere along the way.

Boys And Girls In America does have a few missteps, most notably “Same Kooks”. Guitarist Tad Kubler is wonderfully restrained on most of the album, but when he lets loose here the song can’t really support it. Elsewhere “You Can Make Him Like You” seems a little pedestrian, and “Chillout Tent” suffers a bit from the guest appearances even if the subject matter and song itself are pretty strong.

But none of that really matters. What really counts here is how brilliant the storytelling and lyrics are on the bulk of the record. Nobody comes close to Craig Finn at his most focused. And there’s plenty of focus here, lyrically and musically. Oh, and it rocks. If only all bar bands were this way.

1997- OK COMPUTER

2006-10-10T13:43:00.000-07:00

You look so tired, unhappy

I was dating a flight attendant. Or, a flight attendant wanna-be, anyway. She certainly looked the part. Tall, blonde, well endowed. She was a friend of my roommate’s friend, and we hit it off when the two of them came to visit.

She was living in Chicago while she was in training, and we’d get together at Red Lobsters and TGI Fridays out in the suburbs when I’d come to visit. Our visits were brief, and I’d have to have her back by 1:00 on Sunday afternoons. There would be hell to pay if she was late.

I’d heard the Flight Attendant School horror stories. Makeup that wasn’t put on right, an imperfect walk down the aisle, leaning too close to the “passengers” on the mock jet while serving them drinks, a.k.a. being too fat. These were all reasons for disqualification. And if you were too fat and you showed up late, well, then forget about it.

She wasn’t fat, but she was miserable. She thought she would love taking off and landing all day long and serving drinks, but the pressure was enormous and she was beginning to have her doubts. With almost nothing in common, it was probably the job dissatisfaction that kept us together.

A job that slowly kills you

I worked in the technical service department of a medical products company. Whenever my phone rang I had to diagnose what was wrong with the blood glucose meters that nurses in hospitals across the country were using. There wasn’t a lot of detective work involved. It would come as a complete shock if the call was anything other than the meter showing an “error 1” or an “error 4”. The answer was always the same. We’d send a new meter out, and include a postage label for them to send the old one back.

So I was on autopilot most of the time. For a while the internet saved my brain from turning to mush. Then they blocked it. Which was kind of cool for a while. It gave me a far more engaging challenge. I’d have to find ways to get outside their “intranet”. Once I got to yahoo, I was usually home free. Eventually they caught on and tightened things up further.

Before going to work I started to do a quick surf of my favorite sights, copying and pasting articles I thought might interest me later in the day and then sending them to my work email address. Usually by mid-morning I had exhausted these resources and needed more. Joe came to the rescue.

I’d send him emails with subject lines like “a job that slowly kills you” and describe the torturous environment I spent 8 hours of my day at in which to pay the rent. Whether it was getting too much information about the sex life of my overweight bearing coworker or getting crap from the scientists who worked there for not being scientific like them and earning a better paycheck, Joe was a sympathetic ear.

Bruises that won’t heal

To every “a job that slowly kills you” email I’d send, Joe had a “bruises that won’t heal” response. He had taken a job through a temp service, but the owner of the company sat down with Joe on day one to chat. That had a brief talk where Joe told him that we was “pretty into vinyl” and the guy got excited thinking that Joe knew a thing or two about vinyl siding. Telling Bossman that he had a vintage copy of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music was not the way to ingratiate himself.

Still, Bossman told Joe he didn’t like working with temp services, and that he wanted Joe to be his employee. But Bossman made it clear that he had to pay off the temp service to free Joe of the contract, and he threw the dollar amount in Joe’s face every time he didn’t like what he did, claiming that Joe would owe him that money if he quit or got let go. He told Joe he was grooming him to be a professional and maybe “run the company some day”. He used this excuse to remind Joe to tuck in his shirt like a real man. Or in one case, zip up his zipper.

When Bossman would leave to attend to his other businesses, Joe would do the only thing he could think of to preserve his sanity. He surfed the internet, and often times he’d cut and paste articles he thought might interest me and send them. Music reviews, interviews, political stories, News Of The Weird. Anything was better than my “error 1, error 4” existence.

Phew, for a minute there I lost myself

Joe had a habit of putting the word “the” in front of bands. Wilco became “The Wilco”. Radiohead, “The Radiohead”. It was probably the “The-ing” of Radiohead that kept me from going to see them play at the State Theater with Joe soon after Ok Computer came out. Going to see The Radiohead just didn’t sound all that appealing. That, and the CD had yet to penetrate my every thought and become my soundtrack for a year or two.

My infatuation with Ok Computer began on a Sunday afternoon after the flight attendant girlfriend left to go back to Chicago. Joe was out of town. I sat in my music room where I’d recently demoed some songs and listened to my dubbed copy of Ok Computer over and over again with the afternoon sun shining in on me and a nice breeze blowing through the room. Joe had bought Ok Computer, but I’d made sure to make a copy before he left. With a little alone time to really listen to it, everything clicked. It would be one of the my most played albums. It spoke to me in every sense of the cliche.

Still, I regret not going to that show. I’ve been able to catch some of my favorite bands within a few weeks of getting into them, but this would not be the case with Radiohead. I’d have to wait until the summer of 2001. But when I finally did see them in Chicago’s Grant Park after pretty much giving up on large outdoor shows, it was incredible. Probably the best show on that kind of scale that I’d seen in my life.

1996- BEING THERE

2006-10-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

Joe was usually up first. He'd put on a cup of coffee and start playing video games. It was always pretty quiet too. The stereo speakers were routed back to my room where you could switch the sound to play in my bedroom, the living room, or both. So he usually waited until I was up to put any music on.

One time I scared the hell out of him and his cat by turning up my stereo and playing "Hey" by The Pixies. Not the whole song, but just the part where Black Francis shouts "HEY" with no music accompanying him. Joe was like "what the hell". I waited a little while, laughing my ass off, and did it again before he noticed it was me. I felt bad later when he mentioned the scratch marks from his cat.

Joe was pretty good at making coffee. He knew just how to ground the beans and add just the right amount of water to make a pretty mean cup. Cleaning up wasn't as easy for him. Powdered cheese and butter on the counter meant mac and cheese. Red stains on the counter and an open pasta box on the edge of the stove meant spaghetti night. I assisted in the coffee making process by putting the coffee beans and grinder away and wiping the coffee grinds off the counter when I got up an hour or so later.

Joe and I were both really into music, and those late morning weekend hours were crucial times to play records. Plenty of thought would go into what to play. Tom Waits was common. So was The Velvet Underground. We'd sit and drink coffee and chat about how bad our hangovers were or whether or not we were going to go record shopping that day, and if Joe hadn't already made some foul smelling corned beef and hash, we'd talk about getting breakfast.

I was friends with a girl who worked at The Electric Fetus, and she'd given me a promo double vinyl copy of the new Wilco record. I'd seen Wilco open for Pavement the previous year and didn't really notice anything that unique or exciting about them. Most of my time was spent behind the noise barrier at First Avenue talking with friends. Since then "Passenger Side" and "Box Full Of Letters" were getting quite a bit of radio play on REV 105 though, and I'd warmed up to them a little bit. But mostly I was just really intrigued by the Being There album cover.

Featuring a close up shot of someone fretting a chord on the neck of a guitar, it looked vaguely country, and it was a double album. I was always a sucker for the double album.

I think Joe suggested it. He'd probably picked up the record and had the same thoughts. One cold fall morning after Joe cooked up his corned beef and hash and I whipped up an omelet, we put it on.

It began with a slow rumble before quieting down to a strummed guitar. "When you're back in your old neighborhood, cigarettes taste so good, but you're so misunderstood. So misunderstood". I understood the sentiment perfectly. Later Jeff Tweedy mentions a party "we all ought to go to" if you still love rock and roll. If you STILL love rock and roll.

This wasn't a concept album, or worse yet, a "rock opera", but it did have a theme running through it. Unlike AM, which was largely written on the road, and came quickly following the breakup of Uncle Tupelo, Being There was the record where the band's breakup and the bigger questions about living a life on the road in pursuit of rock and roll came into focus. Married with a kid, and a broken up band, Being There is the search for answers to big questions: Does rock and roll mean anything after you get to a certain age? Is it a youthful pursuit? Do family obligations and growing up replace it?

With "Red Eyed And Blue" he's distracted. Drugs, alcohol, recording, missing his girl back home, fatigue. "When we came here today, we all felt something true, but now I'm red eyed and blue."

Later on "Sunken Treasure" he's "maimed by rock and roll", got his "name from rock and roll", and is ultimately "saved by rock and roll."

We sat paralyzed by the record. When we had to switch sides or move to the second disc, it was done swiftly with anticipation. At the end of every side, we wandered how they could maintain what we had just heard.

Somewhere around side three Joe announced that was ready to make the switch from coffee to beer. It was a weekend ritual for him that usually began around noon. Sitting in his rocking chair, stroking his cat and drinking an Old Milwaukee, he nodded his head as the last note of the last song rang out. "Wow." Then I joined him in a beer and we started to talk about it.

A month or so later, Wilco came to town. This time they weren't opening for Pavement though. And I doubt anybody was standing behind the noise barricade talking. It was a cold October night. Jeff Tweedy came out in his pajamas, and the band fed off each other as if their survival depended on it, which they were to eventually find out it did.

Maybe Wilco felt like they really had something to prove by playing multiple versions of "Passenger Side" or The Replacements' "Color Me Impressed". Jay Farrar was probably on his mind as well with the vicious way he sang "Somebody Else's Song". But it was a night where everything worked. A night when you felt like you were part of something bigger. Nobody forgets shows like that.

The band also formed a special bond with Minneapolis. Over the next few years they played First Avenue multiple times, and almost always in October or November. With colder weather came Wilco.

Being There taugh us that rock and roll could mean something. And it was something you didn't outgrow, and it could remain fresh no matter how many shows you'd seen. Which I guess is kind of the point of the album. With Being There, Jeff Tweedy and Wilco gave us a new band to follow, and made us believers again.

1995- ALIEN LANES

2006-09-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

April 8, 1995, Saturday morning. I wake up and put on a CMJ music compilation cd with two tracks from a band I'm starting to hear a lot about. The first song I instantly like. It's a 2 minute pop gem called "Motoraway" off their new album, Alien Lanes. The second song is far less likeable, but intriguing just the same. And it set a standard of expectations I’d come to expect from Guided By Voices. For every album of new material there's always a side project or additional ep released within months. In this case it was a boxset of their first four albums and a fifth disc of rarities. True to a lot of their output, the song from the main release was killer. The other, not so bad.

I end up meeting my friend Laura for breakfast. I had the veggie tex mex omelet and it's delicious. The perfect amount of eggs, salsa, sour cream and cheese. The coffee was glorious too. So good in fact, that I decide to get a cup to go so I can sip it as we peruse the aisles of a used book store. I look around for a Martin Amis book a friend recommended, but I can't find it. Besides I'm distracted. "Motoraway" is stuck in my head, and while flipping through City Pages at breakfast I learn that Guided By Voices are playing at the Uptown that night. I want to get to a record store.

I manage to convince Laura to head to Cheapo with me, even though she knows this is likely to be a painfully long experience of watching me endlessly debate which records to get. I tell her it'll be different this time. That I know just what I want. Besides, I think Morrissey has a new album she might be interested in. This does it. She's game.

And there it is. I recognize the art work form the CMJ magazine. It looks great at full size though. I'm especially intrigued by the band photo on the back. They look unified, like they could be living together. Sacrificing a life of women and children for the pursuit of rock and roll.

I loved the title. And 30 some songs. Then a boxset to devour when I was done, as well as a little record called Bee Thousand. Wow. I always loved it when I got into a band that had a whole back catalog to discover. The problem is, as you get more and more into music, the slew of rock and roll bands with a deep catalog you haven’t already pined gets smaller and smaller. Guided By Voices were fertile ground.

Laura and I sit on her front steps and drink the remains of our coffee. "This band is playing tonight," I say as I check out the album artwork, "if I really like this album, I'm going to go see them."

Back at my apartment I'm pleased that my roommate is gone. This is not unusual though. He went out all the time, and I often had the huge plush couch, vintage lamps, funky tables and 50's kitsch all to myself. The only time he was really around was when Star Trek–The Next Generation was on. He watched that intently and then usually went out. It was great having a gay roommate.

Disarm the settlers
The new drunk drivers
Have hoisted the flag
We are with you in your anger
Proud brothers
Do not fret, the bus will get you there yet
To carry us to the lake
The club is open
Yeah, The club is open
Hey, the club is open
A-come on, come on, the club is open
C'mon, c'mon, the club is open
C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, the club is open...

Oh, dear God. Let me in the club. Let me in. Let me in. Let me in. What is this? Some long lost Kinks or Who album from the 60’s? How many vocalists are there? Why does it sound so lo-fi? What’s in the water in Dayton, Ohio?

One song after another I’m bombarded by fragments that blend into a whole and perfect little pop tunes that lack any trace of studio wankery and endless noodling. The average song length is about a minute and a half. And it’s fucking perfect.

Nothing was going to stop me from seeing that show. I made a few calls and tried to recruit some friends to go, with no luck. No problem, I had just heard one of the best rock albums I’d heard in ages. I’d jump over the bouncer if I had to. Or sneak in through the kitchen door. Whatever it took.

But Guided By Voices just weren’t that big then. I got there halfway through the opening band and had no problem getting in. Positioning myself in front of the stage, about 5 rows back, I awaited for my future rock gods to emerge.

The singer introduced his props right away. Budweiser in one hand, cigarette in the other. A cooler of refreshments never far from reach. Animated and full of facial tics, and microphone jabs and twirls, this was like seeing Roger Daltrey and the Who back when they were just The Who. Lean and mean, but without all the opera. One of Guided By Voices bootlegs was called The Who Went Home and Cried. I was beginning to understand why.

“You’re all good kids….you kids wanna hear another one?” It’s not everyday a singer talks of teaching fourth graders and affectionately calls you kids. Not just kids, but “good kids”.

It was all part of the mystique, but it wasn’t crafted by the marketing department of their record label. A bunch of 30-somethings from a small town had been playing rock and roll in their basements and issuing home recordings for years. Now they’d quit their full time jobs to embrace rock and roll. No pretty boy haircuts and designer clothes. This was real rock with real stories behind it. Shoe gazer rock died upon impact.

I knew it that night. I’d see this band every single time they came to any city I happened to be living in. Over the next several years I saw them countless times, often on the same tour. They’d bombard you with the new material (“you’ll be screaming for this shit later this year”) and then get to the classics. Guided By Voices shows became an event. Rock and roll had rarely been this consistently good, and this much fun.

Unlike some other Guided By Voices records, the songs from Alien Lanes don’t sound as good when they’re taken out of context from the record. It’s those little 45 second fragments and weird interludes that make the record. I’m not sure I want to hear “A Salty Salute” without “Evil Speakers” following it. Or “Motorway” separated from “Auditorium”.

It’s hard to imagine rock and roll without Guided By Voices. They lived out the fantasy that many of us hold on to long after our early 20’s pass us by. Through endless writing and recording, they eventually stepped out of the basement and gave us all something to believe in. It’s usually “I Am A Scientist” from Bee Thousand that gets the most applause when done live:

I am a lost soul
I shoot myself with rock & roll
The hole I dig is bottomless
But nothing else can set me free

Robert Pollard speaks the truth. And he’s probably sitting at his kitchen table, or maybe his rock and roll toilet somewhere scrawling the next rock and roll epic for his “good kids”. More likely, he finished one before breakfast and is at work on the followup. We wouldn’t want it any other way from Uncle Bob.

Jon's Portfolio

2006-09-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

I don’t remember how I got the keys to Jon’s portfolio. I don’t think he gave them to me, but I knew he wouldn’t really mind me staying there as long as I cleaned up after myself.

The space was converted out of an old warehouse. High ceilings, white walls–the place was pretty minimal with the exception of a few framed ads.

I don’t look at Jon’s work. I know I should, but I’m distracted by the portfolio’s nice TV and stereo system. The futons are great too. It’s like a giant crash pad.

I feel guilty by the end of my weekend. Jon’s portfolio was a mess. I struggle to clean it up and get organized when my sister pokes her head in the door. “How did you find me?” I ask.

“Oh, I always come here.”

She goes on to explain that whenever she’s in New York and needs a place to chill for a little while, she comes to the portfolio. I’m confused.

“But you don’t know Jon.”

“We tried all of the doors and this one was unlocked.” I’m outraged. What does she mean she tried all of the doors?

“I can’t help it if I need a place to crash for a bit during the day,” she says, “I say ‘hello’ and wait for an answer. If I don’t hear anything I walk in.” Oh my God. Doesn’t she worry about somebody not hearing her and attacking her or getting killed for breaking and entering?

“Don’t you worry about someone not hearing you and attacking you or getting killed?” I say as I’m choking her. “Someone could have a gun or a knife and really hurt you.

“Yeah, or a pair of pliers,” my brother in law says as he takes over the choking.

Eventually the situation gets resolved, and my sister and brother in law are ready to take off. We exchange hugs. “Well, it was really great seeing you. Drive safely.”

“Yeah,” they say, “You too. See you at Grandma’s”.

I’m still a little stressed. Jon’s portfolio was a mess, and I know I'll need to clean it up before I can hit the road. I start to pack my bag and I hear a noise. It sounds like a cat is outside. I wonder if Jon lets cats in his portfolio and go to look for the cat, knowing I should ignore it and get my stuff together.

1994- CROOKED RAIN, CROOKED RAIN

2006-09-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

Pavement could have been huge. They made mistakes. They were either too eclectic (Wowee Zowee) or they went too soft and got a little boring (Brighten The Corners). But on 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, they made about as perfect of a rock and roll album as you could find.

I always meant to pick up Slanted and Enchanted. The Spins and Rolling Stones were calling it one of the best indie albums, but I never got around to picking it up. I don't even know if I heard a note. But the buzz had been created. My ears were wide open when their second record started to get some airplay.

Not that I can remember hearing it on the radio, although Rev 105 was around then, so it was a distinct possibility. I do remember seeing "Cut Your Hair" on MTV and thinking it was about the coolest song I'd ever heard.

What I wasn't prepared for was what a cohesive whole the album was. From "Silence Kit" to "Filmore Jive', this was a complete album. Full of weird interludes and detours, the album featured some of the best pop songs you'd ever want to hear. But unlike Slanted and Enchanted, this wasn't four track first take kind of stuff. This album sounded good. Like they meant it. "Gold Sounds" and "Range Life", with the Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots jabs were perfect slices of pop nirvana.

And of course we couldn't forget Nirvana. It was sort of an all consuming thing in 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead. A lot of us identified with him. He seemed to have everything any of us would ever want (except Courtney Love), and now he was dead. Yeah, those were some heavy times.

But Pavement had none of that heaviness, and I think that's what made them so attractive. Malkmus was the ultimate slacker. He didn't give a shit about talking about childhood abandonment issues or eating fish because they don't have any feelings. No, he sang silly little songs about range rovin' with the cinema stars and hoping that his girl wouldn't go and get her hair chopped off.

But those silly songs were so fucking great. It becomes even more apparent how great the album is when you listen to early takes of the songs. As essential as Slanted and Enchanted- Luxe and Reduxe was to any serious Pavement fan for its inclusion of tracks previously found only on hard to find eps and singles, the 2004 reissue of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain isn't quite as rewarding. Once you hear the early versions of the songs that ended up on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain you realize that these guys aren't just a bunch of slackers who got lucky in the studio. This album took a great deal of craft. And they captured it on these 12 tracks. The reissue is interesting, but we don't need 37 additional tracks to remind us how great Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is.

Wowee Zowee took care of that.

Ok, I can't end there. Wowee Zowee isn't a bad album. It's just not a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Then again, few albums are.

1993- TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE SATELLITE HEART

2006-09-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

In 1993 Bill Clinton took office. He was the first president I voted for, and since I was too young to really remember Jimmy Carter, he was the first Democratic president for me. My memories consisted of Reagan and Bush. Clinton was a voice of change. It felt like things could happen now–like the youth had spoken to an extent and I was part of it.

I was living at home. I decided to take a semester off from school, and I pretty much vowed that I wouldn't go back to Whitewater. I'd had my fill. It was time for a change, but I wasn't ready to take any radical steps.

I listened to a lot of Tom Waits. Bone Machine was in my cd player for most of the year. My room was below the living room and my mom would ask me who the guy with gravely voice was, and I'd tell her. "I kind of like him," she'd say, "that I don't wanna grow up song should be your theme song."

I'll never forget my Dad's reaction when I brought home The Black Rider. It was one of the rare times when I asked my parents if they minded if I put something on. The Black Rider begins with this circus noise and Tom coming in with a megaphone screaming "ladies and gentleman under the big top tonight, we have...". My Dad puts down his paper and looks at me and says "I don't know how you can listen to this. You call this music?" Sure, I'd long given up the Metallicas and Iron Maidens, and I choose this album to play in front of him? Of all albums, of all of Tom's albums, The Black Rider? It was too perfect.

I worked at this factory that made playground equipment for kids. Plastic slides and swings that came with plans to build a structure to attach them to. You had to look busy all the time. You could sweep the floor ten times and the employees would still get nervous and the supervisor would tell us to look busy. Everyday the temp service would send in new people and the boss guy would go around and fire people who looked lazy. If you weren't moving when he came around, you were a goner. Apparently the temp service owned the factory.

You couldn't smoke there either. If they caught you smoking, even in your car on the way out of the parking lot, you were fired. Punching in was a problem too. If you punched in a minute or two late, they weren't too happy. But if you punched in too early you'd also hear about it. So there was a huge line of people waiting to punch in at exactly six am. And if you were slow, the guy behind you would give you crap. It was a cold dark winter. I wanted to take a Sharpie and write the words "help me" on one of the slides. I'd imagine this perfect scene of a suburbanite dad putting together a swing set for his kids and seeing my unexpected plea.

After helping to fund the city of Whitewater with the finest in police vehicles, SWAT teams and ammo, I finally turned 21. No more hiding in dryers and refrigerator boxes. No more sucking on a penny and praying that it would work this time. No more visits to a lawyer's office in an attempt to be the one guy who would finally stand up to the injustice of not being able to drink a beer at the age of 20. No more of any of that. But at 21 I hardly cared. I was burned out and sick of it. All it really meant for me was that I could finally serve alcohol without supervision at the bar I was working at.

Hotheaded owner aside, the bar job was pretty cool, and it didn't take long before I was bar manager and was pretty much running the place. It brought a sense of freedom and built my confidence up, even though I couldn't use it on any of the customers. Nobody under 40 ever set foot in there, and if they did, it wasn't to sit at the bar.

Mary used to come in and order gin martinis every afternoon around three o'clock. I'd pour her one and she'd nurse it down. I'd hand her another one and reach for ice cube remains of her old glass and she'd slap my hand. "I'm not done with that." I'd watch her suck those ice cubes past her false teeth and suck each one of them dry and spit it back in her highball. Sometimes she did it twice before letting me take the glass.

Then there was this guy named Chuck. He sold real estate, and he was the sleaziest old guy I'd ever met. Every other word that came out of his mouth was "pussy". It wasn't the word itself, but how he said it. He made it sound like the vilest thing on earth. I didn't like the way he ate his ruebens either.

Maureen and Dave were a cute couple. At 70-something years old, they'd been coming to the bar since it opened. Everyday. Without fail. She had a several glasses of White Zin after an initial martini. He loved his manhattans. I never thought about cutting them off even though they had four or five of them. They were like grandparents. They probably drove like grandparents too, only loaded. I tried not to think about that.

The summer was winding down and I remembered something. I had been accepted at the University of Minnesota. I'd applied almost a year earlier, but I was good to go if it was something I wanted to do. I knew I was never going back to Whitewater, and I feared if I didn't make a change I'd be stuck in Janesville. I was really curious about Minneapolis too, ever since I got into Prince and The Replacements. I thought the city would be purple.

I moved to Minneapolis in the fall. For a couple weeks I don't think I talked to a soul. School hadn't started. I was alone if my one room apartment. Or at least I thought I was alone. Wake up in the middle of the night and turn on the light, and the roaches told a different story.

One day the cable guy knocked on my door. It was so nice to interact with a fellow human being, so I let him talk me into one of his special introductory packages. This was the Paragon cable days. Back before all of the cable mergers happened. I ended up getting all the basic cable channels plus a DMX music tuner with over 100 cable music channels. The remote would list each artist, song title, album and label the song could be found on. I set it to the alternative/college rock channel.

This song came on that I had never heard. I instantly loved it. It was so poppy. So positive. It made me forget about the creepy guy down the hall who I thought was chasing me up the stairs one night. It made me ignore the roaches and not think too much about the Murphy bed and everybody who slept on it and the bathroom I shared with the guy next to me and how I had to knock to see if he was in there. It made the 100-degree room seem tolerable and the showers I'd rig up in the bathtub and the hose that would usually explode when I had shampoo in my hair and soap all over my body not seem so bad. It gave me hope that maybe this was a just a temporary funk and that school would be starting soon and I'd meet new people and would look back on this time as a defining moment in my life.

Flaming Lips
"Turn It On"
Transmissions From The Satellite Heart
Warner Brothers Records

1992- AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE

2006-08-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

I can't listen to Automatic For The People with other people around. I don't like to hear it on the radio. And it's the most popular, and therefore most overplayed, record of one of my favorite bands.

Yet I love this record.

It came to me at a very dark time. I was halfway through college, directionless, and searching for some answers. I may not have found the answers I was looking for, but Stipe was at least asking some of the same questions.

Lacking the choppiness of either of its major label predecessors, 1988's Green or 1991's Out Of Time, Automatic For The People fulfilled the promise first heard on early I.R.S. albums like Reckoning and Fables Of The Reconstruction. Intense, personal, organic, mellow. This was the 'little band from Athens that could' operating on the world stage, but not sounding like they knew that's where they were.

I caught my first glimpse of the album cover on the back of Billboard magazine in my college library. The unassuming album cover seemed a sharp contrast from the brash Our Of Time cover. In small print at the bottom of the ad were three words: Still no tour.

At the height of their popularity R.E.M. did what few bands had done since the Beatles. They said goodbye to the road. And it's a good thing they did. Coming just a year and a half after Out Of Time, Automatic might never have happened if R.E.M. had undergone a world tour. The last single off of Out Of Time had barely left the charts at the time of Automatic's release.

I was eagerly anticipating this record, but knew very little about it other than the single, "Drive". I had a friend who was working at the campus radio station. He knew what a big fan I was and brought over the only copy of the CD in the city to my apartment three days before it came out. I listened to it and was blown away by the time I got to the second song. R.E.M. had produced a classic. A masterpiece. A record that could stand along side the works of the masters.

I haven't listened to Automatic For The People in a couple years. Maybe even three or four. It remains an intensely personal album for me, and I know a time will come when I'll need something from it, and I'll find it. Some albums are like that. It may not be the most played R.E.M. album for me, or even my favorite, but it occupies a space that very few albums fill. A timeless place. A place I don't want obscured by over familiarity or too much repetition.

*Automatic For The People is best served in the dark. Alone. With a bottle of wine. On a cold autumn night.

Bob Dylan's Modern Times

2006-08-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan has a new album and it's quite good. Much more in the vein of "Love and Theft" than Time Out Of Mind, this seems, as Dylan explained to Jonathan Lethem in his recent Rolling Stone interview, more like the 2nd part of a trilogy that started with "Love and Theft" than the final installment. The only thing the Modern Times really seems to share with Time Out Of Mind is the quality of the material.

Modern Times arrives at a time when Dylan's public and critical esteem is at a high not seen since the mid-seventies, and if the album suffers at all, it is because of this. We've come to expect a masterpiece instead of being pleasantly surprised when he delivers a listenable album. The 80's were not so kind to Dylan. For every Infidels and Oh Mercy, there was a Knocked Out Loaded or Down In The Groove. Inconsistency became the rule. A career renaissance began in the early 90's with his back to back folk albums, but he wasn't fully thrust back into the public limelight when his near-fatal heart problem became public. His recovery came in every sense of the word later that year with Time Out Of Mind.

With five or six years between albums, Dylan's not the most prolific artist these days. Although it's not because he hasn't been busy. Between "Love and Theft" and Modern Times he wrote a book, starred in Masked And Anonymous and contributed interviews to No Direction Home, and hosted a weekly radio show. His never-ending tour is still going.

Modern Times has a gently easy going vibe to it. Some of these songs wouldn't sound out of place on early 70's albums like New Morning or Planet Waves, or maybe even Street Legal. Modern Times has some of the longest songs Dylan has ever put out. With just 10 songs, the album clocks in at over 62 minutes. Brevity is not one of his common traits, and while the songs may initially seem to drag on for a bit, repeated listens warrant the extra verses. Lyrics jump out. Guitar parts leap from the speaker. Carefully produced by the bard himself, Modern Times sounds sublime.

His voice is rough in spots and drops off in others. "Thunder On The Mountain" contains several lyrics where Dylan's voice sounds like an engine being reved up at the end of the lines. "Spirit On The Water" almost requires a volume adjustment to catch what he's saying at certain points. Beyond this, his voice is quite good. Smoother than it's been in ages, and stripped of the production that dominated Time Out Of Mind, Dylan sounds like he's in the room with us, the audience. The band is playing quietly. The drummer uses brushes. Dylan's voice is front and center.

Like most classic Bob Dylan records, the more you listen to them the more the lyrics come out. Dylan seems to have a lot on his mind even if he is sometimes characteristic's vague. "Some lazy slut has charmed away my brains", he sings on "Rollin' And Tumblin' and he wants some woman to do just what he says in "Thunder On The Mountain", yet "When The Deal Goes Down", "Spirit On The Water" and "Beyond The Horizon" rank up there with Dylan's most sincere love songs.

Dark times are on his mind as well. Dylan takes on social issues in "Workingman Blues #2", and there's more than a hint of Katrina in "The Levee's Gonna Break", but his most profound statements come with the album's closing song, "Ain't Talkin".

In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell/ I am tryin' to love my neighbor and do good unto others/ But oh, mother, things ain't going well

His "heart is burning. He's "still yearning" as he walks "through the cities of the plague." The song echoes "Desolation Row" from Highway 61 Revisited. Just comparing a song from the 65 year old's new album to one of his classics would be plenty of praise. But this album stands on its own. Like "Love and Theft" and Time Out Of Mind, Modern Times ranks up there with his some of his finest recordings. And even though the album often sounds like it's from 1945 or 1952, Dylan brings it all home to the 21st century, a new album for modern times.

1991- NEVERMIND

2006-08-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

1991. The Year Punk Broke. Or, more appropriately, The Year Assholes Started Listening To Better Music and Neil Young Became Fashionable. From all of the media coverage then and now, you'd think that 1991 was akin to 1968 or 1977. You'd think that there was this massive youth movement that everyone felt part of. Boy meets girl in their flannel shirts and move towards a grunge utopia where we'd elect a new President a year later put an end to conservative politics and Bush administrations for good. Yeah right.

I bought Nevermind in the fall of 1991. A friend of mine had played Bleach a few times and was talking about how great this upcoming album was going to be. I respected his opinion, and picked it up soon after it came out.

I bought Pearl Jam's Ten right around the same time. That one didn't last long at all. In fact I think I might have sold it back to buy Nevermind. I didn't really start to like the band until I saw them on Lollapalooza in 1992, but even then, my fandom was short lived. There weren't enough pearls in the jam.

But Nevermind. I remember liking some songs, but I couldn't understand why it had such a glossy polish on it. Kurt Cobain later said it was mastered wrong and ended up sounding like a Motley Crue record. I knew exactly what he meant and it was my main stumbling block with the record. It was probably the main reason why I shelved the record so soon after I purchased it.

This is how "grunge” arrived for me: One day I come home from class and the guy down the hall stops playing Def Leppard in mid-song. Cuts it right off. I don’t think too much about it, because I'm pretty sure that some metal meal ala "Cherry Pie" or a Van Halen "Poundcake" is about to be served. But there’s a moment of silence. Probably just long enough to take the cellophane off the CD. Then a familiar riff, big drums, and then everything gets quiet for a mumbled verse. Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Not the album, but just that song. Exclusively. Over and over again. The new Def Leppard had arrived.

So I shut my door and put on some Dinosaur Jr.

Truth be told, I spent a lot more time listening to and dissecting Achtung Baby than Nevermind that year. Lots more time. I’d always had a love/hate relationship with U2. They put out an album and I'd listen to it religiously, but by the time they went on tour their non-stop opinionating on everything imaginable, including religion, would drive me nuts. Too much Bono in the media. It's the reason I never saw them live.

Achtung Baby was a fascinating record though, and it more than made up for Rattle and Hum. It redefined U2 in a way nobody probably thought would be imaginable. It made them dark, somewhat dangerous, and definitely more of a rock band. Gone were the photo shoots of Irish castles, Joshua Trees and a stately looking rock band. This U2 had balls, and as overplayed as that record would become, I could still put it on and enjoy it today.

But Nevermind? It was everywhere, and it all seemed kind of silly. This wasn't a revolution as much as a progression. Kurt Cobain would dye his hair fuchsia and smash his guitar on Saturday Night Live, but anybody with a sense of rock history had seen those moves before.

Nevermind didn't do much for me at the time. Incesticide sparked new interest in them for me because it had a rawness and seemed like punk rock instead of this media phenomenon. But I wouldn't really get into Nevermind until In Utero came out. That was the Nirvana album that really won me over. Angry. Passionate. Haunting. Raw. It was everything that Nevermind was supposed to be.

Every rock-obsessed teenage kid has a band that kicks things wide open for them. For millions of kids it was Nirvana, but they were only the latest in a long line of inspiring bands. Big record labels had signed underground bands long before Nirvana. Husker Du, The Replacement, Sonic Youth and Soul Asylum all had major label contracts going back as far as 1985. College radio had existed for years. Labels like "alternative rock”, "independent rock” and "alternative" had been around for eons as well. Nirvana helped define a new market and give birth to a slew of imitators. They gave us "Grunge". Whatever that means.

And most of their listeners had no idea what Kurt was talking about. Nevermind was popular on the same level that made "Every Breath You Take” and "The One I Love” love songs for 80's proms and "Born In The USA" a re-election campaign song for Ronald Reagan.

Revolution doesn't come easy.

1990- ALL SHOOK DOWN

2006-08-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

It's 1990. I'm 18 years old. I finished up high school and headed into college that fall. Much of the year was spent listening to Jane's Addiction and eagerly anticipating their Ritual De Lo Habitual album. I obsessed over that thing. When the single came out I had one of the most perfect listening experiences of my life. The American flag is coming down in a violent rainstorm. Through the rear view mirror of my car I can see a Perkin's employee trying to hoist the flag up as the tension mounted in the song and Perry Farrell screamed "erotic Jesus!". Yeah, that kind of shit is pretty bad ass when you're 18.

It's kind of hard to look back at Jane's Addiction now through the same lens. Perry's pretty much turned into a clown, and don't even get me started on that reunion record. But in 1990. Wow. Unstoppable. Rock and roll hadn't seen such a provocative frontman since Mick Jagger.

The full length record came out in the middle of my psychedelic summer. I was trying my best to "turn the 90's on their head" and recreate the 60's. Those words are Wavy Gravy's, but I got them off the Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor.

Candles. Incense. Confused kids and drugs. That's what I remember about Ritual De Lo Habitual. Madison, WI. State Street. We all bought the album at midnight and then listened to it all night long. We thought we could find the inner workings of the universe through that record. "Been Caught Stealing" sort of interrupted that process.

I can't remember the last time I listened to that record. I doubt it's aged too well. Although I can envision a time in the near future when I'll light the candles and incense and get to know Viola, Casey and the erotic Jesus all over again.

A far more enduring album for me from 1990 is The Replacement's All Shook Down. The perfect college band kick started my college life with that record. I'd checked out Please To Meet Me from the library when I was in high school, and I'd seen the video for "I'll Be You" on MTV and loved it, and I borrowed a cassette copy of "Don't Tell A Soul", but as a freshman in college in 1990, I'd yet to actually purchase a Replacements album.

It was the single that got me. "Merry Go Round" is just such a perfect song, and a great way to kick of the album. "A hush is the first word you were taught..." Paul Westerberg sucks you in and immediately lets you know that this isn't going to be a party record. This isn't going to be another batch of songs about drinking red wine and Tommy getting his tonsils out and Gary popping a boner, as if any Replacement's record was really that simple. No, this is the flipside to all of that. It's the next day. You're an alcoholic. Your personal relationships are shattered and your band is breaking up. "Now is nothing like when it began".

Images are so profound on that album. Even on the sleeve itself. "Have you seen lucky?" it says on the back of the record. Some flyer stapled to a telephone pole. Inside there are pictures of empty bars, full ashtrays and abandoned beer glasses. And of course, Paul. He's disheveled and lost in thought. On the front of the album we see two wet dogs, looking sad and hungry and facing opposite directions. Nothing is working anymore.

Lyrically the album is a feast. "Popcorn for dinner last night it was cheesecake, a little sleepy-time tea spiked with another heartache." "Still in love with nobody, and I won't tell nobody." "Well you got your father's hair and you got your father's nose but you got my soul."

The previous album, Don't Tell A Soul, was a glossy attempt at commercial radio. It had some good songs, but a lot of it was a mess. All Shook Down was sort of a back to basics record, even if the band was hardly involved. Considered by some to be Westerberg's first solo album ,the record's liner notes even suggest this. "The musicians who played on this recorded thing include:" Among the 15 names are John Cale, Johnette Napolitano and Benmont Tench, right alongside the names of Tommy Stinson, Chris Mars and Slim Dunlap.

You get the sense that Paul just wanted to get it right this time. It's a sad record with it's share of flaws. "My Little Problem" would be the only song I'd yank, but it provides such a sharp transition to "The Last" that its inclusion is necessary.

"You been swearing to God, now maybe if you'd ask, that this one be your last". It was the last. No more Replacements albums came after this one. And for a long time, no more drinks for Westerberg. But it was the beginning of a long relationship with the band for me. Within weeks of buying All Shook Down I found like-minded fans in the dorms. One of the best uses of a Maxell XLII 100 minute tape was my Let It Be/Tim/Stink Replacements compilaton. I wore that thing out. Loved it. Still do, though I play the records individually now.

14 Songs was a shock for me when it came out in 1993. I could sum it up in one line, "I miss the hurt." All Shook Down was full of it. And some fans didn't care for it. But it was real. 10 years on the road had taken their toll, and Paul Westerberg had documented it. The party was over.

soundtrack of my life- 1990's

2006-08-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Pitchfork recently made a list of the 200 best songs of the sixties. A monumental task, I'm sure. I can't imagine undertaking it. I didn't grow up in the sixties, and I would certainly forget a bunch of important songs. Still, it is great to read a list like that. I just wish it came with a giant downloadable file of all the songs.

I was at the Bottle Rockets show last night at the 400 Bar. Midway through the set I started compiling my own list in my head. Not of sixties songs, but of nineties albums. Maybe it was the beer or the company I was with. Or maybe it was my 1993 pick I listened to on the way, but I was able to focus there for about a half hour and figure out what my list will look like. Now all I have to do is write it down.

The journey begins sixteen years ago. But I'm not getting started on it until this hangover recedes.

haircuts and rock and roll

2006-08-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I write and know exactly what I'm going to say. Thoughts swirl around my head for a day or two, and then the opportunity finally comes to put them down on paper. Or plasma screen. Whatever.

Other times it's as if there's almost no thought. No reason to write. Self-loathing times. Doubt sets in.

Go see a movie, I say. And that helps. I saw Little Miss Sunshine the other day and loved it. Like perfect antidote to my foul mood, I felt rejuviated and alive. I could walk in the night air, breath it in and find some reason to put one foot in front of the other.

Music used to do it for me. There was usually a new cd or some classic record I could put on and I'd feel great. Or at least occupied. Lately the music doesn't sound so good. A lot of it sounds the same to me. Pale imitations of earlier giants. Too much focus on haircuts, and not enough on tunes.

Dylan still sounds good to me. I'm very much looking forward to his new album. The guy will have something to say. He's unusual in that he always does, even when not trying to say anything.

I picked up my guitar the other day. I'm thinking about writing some songs. But I haven't had a haircut in three months, and I'm not sure what to say.

Hotter Than Hell

2006-08-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

So I'm getting ready to go out of town. And it's hot. I mean it's beyond hot. Wear black outside for five minutes and it really does feel like you could catch fire. Or that fireballs will come raining from the sky at any moment. Maybe that would be a good thing. It would be pretty hard to argue against global warming if fireballs poured out of the sky.

I go the dry cleaners to see if they'll do some emergency cleaning for me. I have some nice shirts that I'd like to wear on my trip to Chicago. Problem is, they've been lying in a dry cleaning bag since at least last summer. Too lazy and cheap to clean them I guess. Or I've had such casual jobs I've gotten by with just a tshirt over the last couple summers. Anyway, I was determined to look my best so I thought I'd get these shirts cleaned.

The place across the street from my place says they have to ship everything out, and there's no way they can deliver them the same day. I figured as much. Very few dry cleaning places are going to deliver on the same day. Buy hey, worth a shot. And it turns out it's not a completely wasted venture. She tells me to try the place down the street. They do all of their dry cleaning on site and may be able to turn it around the same day.

I procrastinate. I sit in my air conditioning. I surf the internet. I make some lunch. A few hours later I get in my car and go to the other dry cleaning place. Upon walking in the door I feel like I'm going to die. It must be 120 degrees in there. A fan is on the floor and it's blowing behind me. It's hotter than hell. It's as if Gene Simmons is lapping at my legs with that long tongue of his and breathing his fire breath on me. Unbearable. I step out of the way of the fan. It's making things worse. I want to bolt.

An Indian woman comes out with the full headdress and gown on. She's dripping with sweat. I ask her if there's any way she can turn around an order for a couple shirts on the same day and she says no. Or more accurately she says "it's hot." When I ask her when she could get them done she repeats "It's hot." Then she says that she sent the guy that does the irons home. "Tomorrow...hot too.'

I feel like a jerk. This lady could die trying to get my shirts done for me. And if she did them for me I'd probably want them ironed too. Oh, I'm a bastard. So I leave and tell her to try to stay cool, and I head for Target. Maybe Dryell will do the trick. So what if it really doesn't do jack for stains. At least nobody dies.

Excuse me, but you owe me 3/10 of a cent!

2006-08-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to bitch about gas prices, even when they get pretty high. When I'm on a road trip people often ask about gas prices in different cities I've passed through. Until recently I seldom paid attention. I have to use gas, and it's pretty much regulated, so what's the point in using mental energy to keep track of a couple cents difference.

$40 is a big chunk of change to fill up my sedan. Nobody's humping my hummer. My car is fairly eco-friendly. At least by US standards. But when I cross that $40 mark I start to pay a little attention. On a recent trip to Chicago it the lowest I saw was $3.09 in Minneapolis and Wisconsin and the highest I saw was $3.39 in downtown Chicago. But I'm neglecting something when I mention these prices and that is the .9 that's attached to each of them.

How is it that we allow the oil industry to attach an extra .9 to every gallon of gas we buy? Maybe this extra little perk explains some of those record profits. They've had us conditioned to look the other way every time we go to the pump. Was it the original Superman where some huge corporation was stealing a penny from everybody's paycheck? I wish I could add $.00.9 to every hour of my goods and services.

People are talking about how we should get rid of the penny because it costs more to produce it than what it's worth. I say we abolish the tenth of a penny. Or at least start going into gas stations and ask for the remaining 10ths of a cent that's owed to you. Hey, gas is expensive. You have to keep your eye on these things.

library of thoughts

2006-07-21T10:15:00.003-07:00

Minneapolis has a new library and I could not be more impressed. I'm not even a library kind of guy. I check out a book and I only return it three years later when I move and it's under my bed hiding place is discovered. But I vow to make things different this time.

Well, amazing how fast things change. I type that sentence while I'm sitting in comfy leather chair in the Dunn Bros portion of the library. Let It Be by The Beatles was playing. Now it's Air Supply. Or at least I think it's Air Supply. "Here I am, the one that you love...asking for another day...understand the one that you love loves you in so many ways..." Jesus. Terrible.

But I'm not going to let that cloud my judgment of the new library. I can't. The place is just too cool. And very forgiving. My county library books that I just returned after having for two years didn't show up on their system. Lucky break. Instead I owed $16 for assorted fines. They let me pay just one dollar to get me below the $15 limit and scanned my book and sent me on my way.

I got the book I wanted to get too. I'd mention the book but I don't want Farmer Drew to fling poo at it before I get through the first chapter. There's something really reassuring about getting just the book you want. Half the time I leave the library with a stack of books that never get read. The reasons often that there was never a pressing need to get the book in the first place. Not the case with this one.

Oh and this place has a pretty good selection of cds and dvds too. I've been watching too much tv and swapping an absurd amount of music. So I really don't need that kind of media right now.

It's some light pop station. Now there's a commercial for discounted pet prescriptions.

I should probably mention the architecture of this building. Pretty sharp building. It's about 5 stories tall and very open. There's a huge open space running from the front of the building to the back, and lots of natural light shines through. You can enter on Hennepin and exit on Nicollet. It also has plenty of rooms to rent for group meetings. As I write I'm looking out 30 foot tall windows to a brick patio with metal tables and chairs. It's nice. It's hip. Too bad the music sucks. I guess that's what the ipod is for.

Okay...there's another problem I'm having with this place. But maybe it's a good one for the kids. I just tried searching for an image of this lovely library and my search was blocked. I guess image searches are strictly forbidden. I just hope the banning of content doesn't extend to the shelves.

But hey, free wi-fi at a library. Big, comfy chairs. Great coffee. Several bars on the cell phone. Not bad for a virtual office.

And now they're playing "Daydream Believer". Ahhh...I kind oflike this song. Sort of makes me smile.

(wow I can't even use spell check in here. Are they afraid kids are going to look up the definitions of cuss words???)

2006-07-19T09:48:00.001-07:00

Let it rain. Let it rain. Let it rain. Seriously, I don't care if it rains like this for seven days straight. It's such a nice change of pace. There's something about endless summer weather that really starts to get to me. Especially when you have to run the air conditioning incessantly and keep the blinds closed to keep the sun from heating the place up. I'll take a good thunderstorm any day.

Then there's the cabin-like feeling of turning on warm lights on a dark day. It makes me want to read a novel or write a song. Maybe start my own book-in-progress. Creativity flows. It's not stagnated by shorts and t-shirts. Wearing long pants seems to do wonders for ideas.

I took an umbrella on my morning appointment today. It's been a long time since I've done that. It was nice. It made me feel important. I'm protecting my head from the skies because, at least today, it is full of ideas. We're operating on all cylinders baby.

shine on you crazy diamond

2006-07-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

Roger "Syd" Barrett is dead. Any hopes of the biggest comeback in rock and roll history have now been extinguished. There will be no Pink Floyd reunion or Rolling Stone interview with the famous recluse. All we have is grainy You Tube videos and tributes like Wish You Were Here. Oh, and of course, some amazing recordings of Syd: Pink Floyd's Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and Syd's solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett.

People like to talk about the age of 27. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and then later, Kurt Cobain all died at that age. It's sad that those careers ended so early, but Syd's case is more heartbreaking. Imagine seeing the band that you started turn into one of the most successful bands in rock and roll history while you stay at your mother's flat and lose contact with the world. Too far gone to fit into society. Robyn Hitcock said it better in his song "1974":

Syd Barrett's last session, he can't sing anymore
He's gonna have to be Roger now for the rest of his life

Painting and classical music became his thing. But one of his nieces was interviewed several years back and said that she remembered Syd picking up the guitar occasionally. Maybe the best we can hope for is some basement tapes from the man. Some long lost recordings that verify that maybe he was alright. That he got better and chose to stay away. That maybe he had some choice in the matter.

I wonder what he painted?

Goodbye Syd.

choices in modern life (and a guacamole recipe)

2006-07-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

I never know what to say when I'm at a grocery store and they ask if I'd like paper or plastic. Shouldn't we have a clear cut winner by now. Do we really have to make that choice every single time we go to the store?

I make the choice based on two criteria. If the trash is building up under my kitchen sink, I'll go with the paper. If the cat's litter box needs sifting, it's plastic for me.

While I can complain about the grocery stores giving me too many choices, and don't even get me started on toothpastes, it seems like other stores aren't giving us enough options. Drug stores, for example. You buy all kinds of embarrassing thing there, and what do they put your purchase in? A flimsy plastic bag that you see right through.

I was at Walgreens the other day. Even though I had my embarrassables well hidden in the bag, I still couldn't help but notice people trying to see through the plastic when I stopped off at a couple stores on the walk home. I'm asking about a firewire adapter and the guy behind the counter is eyeing my bag. Hey buddy, cut it out. Whatever embarrassables you might see in there would have absolutely nothing to do with you.

Of course some people might find their embarrassables in the produce section of the grocery store. Which would make their choice a little easier.

As for me, well, I didn't need to hide yesterday's grocery store purchase. Lime, avocado, cilantro, garlic, red onion and tomato make a mean guacamole. And it doesn't matter if I take it home in paper or plastic.

Proud Guac (for one really hungry man or two not so hungry...feel free to double)

1 avocado, mashed
1/4 cup red onion chopped
1 roma tomato, cored and chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
cilantro to taste, chopped
squeeze of lime
salt to taste

Think Globaly, Drink Locally?

2006-07-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

Al Gore wouldn't like Hennepin Lake Liquors, and I don't like it either. First off, they don't take credit cards. It's 2006, and they act like it's 1969. Checks are okay. Of course. Like I carry those around.

Secondly, they close at 8pm on weekdays. The laws changed recently to allow liquor stores to stay open until 10pm, so why doesn't this liquor store stay open for a couple more hours? You'd think they'd increase their profits. I went to the door yesterday at 8:10, looked inside, and practically got scolded by the cashier for even attempting to try the door.

Which brings me to Al Gore. I'm not going to go on and on about why everyone should see An Inconvenient Truth, but surely people can relate to the absurdity of having to get in your car and burn precious fossil fuels to get a six pack of beer when you live right in the heart of your city. Nightclubs are pumping. 20-something's are everywhere. But I can't take home some beer. It's absurd. It's the equivalent of restaurants closing at 7pm. Sorry folks, you didn't hear the dinner bell at 5:30, I guess you don't get to eat. Or, well I guess you can eat here, but don't even think about taking that food home.

I hate liquor laws to begin with, but this is ridiculous. I've left 6-packs of 3.2 beer at convenience store counters when I suddenly realize where I live and what laws we're dealing with. And it's not like I'm an alcoholic. We're talking one beer, but damn it, I wanted that beer. And I wanted it at home, at full strength, and not sitting in some bar. I can't pet my cat and read a book at a bar. It just doesn't work like that.

Well, goodbye Hennepin Lake. I guess I'll just have to add liquor stores to my big grocery/Target shopping trips. Those days when fossil fuels burn aplenty in the name of focused consumerism, and my patience isn't tested by some backwards liquor store refusing to sell me my Negra Modelo on a hot summer night when man and womankind should be entitled to beer by birth alone. Much less by turning that magical, but otherwise meaningless age of 21.

A special shout out goes to my good friends at Hums. We'll be seeing more of each other. See, they get it. And now they're getting me. And I'm getting my Negra Modelo. With a lime. You can't beat on a hot summer night around 9 o'clock. Trust me, it's worth fighting for.

Morality lessons in telemarketing calls

2006-06-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

The phone rings. It's early, but not so early that I shouldn't be up. It could be an important call, and I'd be really pathetic if I ignored it because I wanted to hit snooze into a second hour. So I stumble out of bed, searching for the phone. I hear the echo of my second phone and seem to know exactly where that one is, even if the location of the nearer one eludes me. I finally find it, right at my feet.

Caller ID isn't much help. Out of Area. It seems like I'm getting a lot of calls these days that are "out of area". If somebody doesn't want their name to appear on the Caller ID, do they move out of the metro area? Do they ask for an area code a little West of the city, in some land of the technologically impaired?

"Good Morning. Oh...this is Todd? Great."

Yeah, wonderful. "Who is this?"

"This is the Minneapolis Paralyzed Veterans"

"Put me on your do not call list".

There's a pause. The guy doesn't speak. I hang up. The guilt settles in.

The Minneapolis Paralyzed Veterans. Have I really become so hardened that I hang up on them? I picture a man who served in Korea or Vietnam. He's a quadriplegic. His office is majorily underfunded, so there's no headset to wear, and no automatic dialers to call people. So it's with great effort that he nudges the phone off the receiver to nose dial every number. And asking to be on the Do Not Call list? That probably means someone has to wheel over to the large tome and drag it across the office. Probably by their teeth.

Maybe video phones are the way to go after all. I can't help but think that if I had a full body shot of a quadriplegic in a wheel chair to look at, it would be quite sobering and I'd be a little more generous with my time and money when I got a telemarketing call.

I feel bad now.

But what am I going to do? They're "out of area". It's not like I can call them back.

DJ Bitch Slap (The Weasel part II)

2006-06-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

The Weasel Bryce was not alone. Although weasels tend not to make a lot of friends, the Weasel Bryce formed a common bond with the residents of the 7th floor Tower's dormitory through his love of metal. Hard rock must have been frowned upon in the Weasel's home, so college became an excuse to crank it up. Metallica. Dokken. Bullet Boys. The Scorpions. You really haven't seen cheese until you've seen The Weasel adjust his Brewer's cap and say "this one's for the gipper" as he slips the latest Whitesnake CD into your stereo and turns it up to 11.

Before there was "alternative" rock or "indie" rock, there was College music. Back when I was really into classic rock and hard rock my friends and I used to marvel at the transformation that occurs to people's musical taste when they got to college. "I don't get it", my friend Mike said, "it's like you get to college and your taste turns to shit." A year later we'd be rolling in it. The Smiths. R.E.M. Husker Du. The Cure. It wasn't that your taste got worst, it's that you started to look for something a little more real. Morrissey singing about sexual identity or Michael Stipe taking on environmental issues seemed a lot more interesting that Warrant singing about Cherry Pie.

So imagine my surprise when I get to college. It's supposed to be a hotbed for this kind of music, but I'm surrounded by the hair metal bands of the 80's. Or at least their dorky listeners. True, the eighties had barely passed, but this was college, man. I thought I'd be turned on to tons of new bands, but instead the closest I got to musical commaraderie in my freshman year was the bonding I had with the deadhead at the end of the hall. Looking at his 100+ cassettes of dead shows was far more interesting than hearing the Weasel Bryce go on and on about how much he loves his baby's poundcake.

My school was pretty much a commuter college. One of the nice benefits of staying the weekend was usually that your roommate went home. This wasn't the case with the Weasel. College was liberating for him. He could finally act the way most other people acted during their sophmore year of high school. The Weasel had found his people. Maybe his high school wasn't too hip on Trixter, but those guys on the 7th floor, they loved it.

One particular Friday night rolls around and I have nothing to do. A group of people from our floor decide to go to Hardee's where a live broadcast is taking place with two disc jockey's from a Milwaukee radio station. The Weasel loved Lazer 103 because they played a lot of music he liked. And he thought the DJ was hot. They also played some decent classic rock and I was bored, so I decided to tag along.

The lines were ridiculous. You'd think we were waiting to get into some live show, but that sort of thing never happened in this town. Instead we loitered around people ordering Frisco burgers waiting to talk to Marilyn Mee and her sidekick. Or maybe she was the sidekick. I can't remember. Anyway, we finally get our turn to go up to them and shake their hands. I go up with the Weasel and his stereo cranking rival, Eric. I'm the last one of the three of us to talk to them. Marilyn seems pretty cool. I tell her I like the station. She asks if there isn't something cooler going on than this on a Friday night, to which I had to shrug my shoulders as if to say "this is Whitewater". Then she says "you seem pretty cool." I'm like, "oh, thanks." And then within ear shot of the Weasel Bryce and Stereo Crankin' Rival Eric she says "so why are you hanging around with these dorks?"

It was a minor victory. The Weasel turned bright red and headed for the door. He had been bitch slapped by Milwaukee's most well known DJ, and I felt vindicated. Of course, I couldn't help bring it up from time to time. It was a nice way to cap off the year. After enduring blown stereo speakers, stolen food, missing alcohol, three roommates and a Weasel posse, my freshman year was coming to end.

My sophmore year would be completely different. There'd be no more doing it "for the gipper". I'd lose touch with the Weasel and just about everybody else from the 7th floor. I'd get turned on to good music and interesting books, and I'd indulge in the excesses of college life. I'd find my people. And eventually the cops would find us. But that's another story.

The Home Office

2006-06-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

So I'm hanging out at a coffee shop today minding my own business. I'm keeping a low profile, surfing the internet, and occasionally trying to get some real work done. The place is air conditioned and filled with people who seem to be doing the same exact thing. For some it seems like this place is an actual office. It's a sea of laptops. The Mac to PC ratio is especially high too. Most people are alone, but there are a few people who are sitting at a table together. I tend to think they're doing the same type of work I'm doing, but they look so stern. I try not to think of my work as being THAT serious.

IT guy is next to me. His cell phone startles him every twenty minutes with it's obnoxious ring and he digs for it in his dancing pants. He's far more flamboyant than any IT guy I've seen before. Mutton chops too. It's a real treat. And I'm listening to Morrissey. I swear you can't plan these coincidences.

No new emails yet. I have my gmail placed just underneath this page so I can see any developments that may occur in the inbox. In case I miss the action there, I have my gmail notifier at the top of my display. It's a sealed envelope right now, which is kind of a weird icon to have when you have no new mail. Maybe the empty mailbox is patented by AOL in every conceivable way.

It's a weird existence when you don't have to talk to someone everyday. You clear your throat to make sure you're capable of talking if the need shall arise. I get my practice with the counter girls too. "Just that?" they say, and I get my opportunity to answer back. "yeah, that'll be it. For now." I like that "for now" part. It means I'm not going anywhere.

I had another excuse to talk soon after I got here. I was rocking out and trying to write (yeah, this was before Morrissey) and this guy stands right in front of me. I ignore him. But he doesn't go away. He sort of motions for me to take off my earphones, and I'm thinking this guy really has balls if he's just going to ask me for money or something. I mean, I'm in a groove. Or at least as big of a groove as I'm able to get into this universal home office away from home. So I take off my earphones and what does he say? What are these words he exchanges with a guy who's had very few words with anyone all day long?

"Were you the one I was talking to about anxiety issues yesterday?"

Nope, that wasn't me. At least not yet.

Sketches Of Eddie

2006-06-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

According to Tom Chase, a new age Christian writer who has used astrology and the bible to calculate when the antichrist will emerge, that date is today. 6/6/06. His emergence will be followed by an asteroid collision and a two year battle of Armageddon. The name of the antichrist? He says it's Vladimir Putin. Sort of reminds me of Star Wars and Emperor Palpatine, or whatever his name was.

Back in 1982, a different beastly event was unleashed on the world. It was the release of Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast. By widening Iron Maiden's audience and helping to bring their brand of British metal to the US, it inspired a generation of metal fans to take up art.

Sure I'd drawn a Van Halen or Twisted Sister sign in sunday school or during a boring math lesson, but the intricate work involved in sketching Iron Maiden's mascot, Eddie, separated the novices from the die hards. I'd invent band names, album titles, tracklistings, and even complete bios and career trajectories of bands, but the cover art was always very rudimentary if it existed at all. Just like the Kiss logo before it, I knew that you had to use the right fonts when you wrote down a bands name, but actually drawing Eddie was far too complex for me.

I keep thinking of some of those metal kids. Long hair hanging over their faces and blocking their books in study hall so they could keep their head low and nobody can see what they were doing. Sometimes one of them would lift their head up at the end of the period and show you what they sketched. It was pretty amazing, if not a little disturbing. Eddie yielding an ax with Margaret Thatcher clutching at his leg. Eddie coming out of a grave and tearing off his clothes and howling at the stormy sky. Eddie with a chain around his neck, shackled to a prison wall.

They were nice kids. Just a little misunderstood, but weren't we all. They had a certain bond. They were united by metal and they showed it proudly with torn and frayed blue jeans, a black metal shirt with their favorite band on it, and a jean jacket to top it off. Sometimes they kept it simple with pins of their favorite bands on the front. Other times they went all out and put a huge patch of Metallica or Iron Maiden on the back of the jacket. It was a statement. It said "I do not like fake metal. In fact I hate it. Fuck Poison and Bon Jovi". It felt permanent, or as permanent as black metal got in suburbia. Tattoo parlors had yet to find their niche.

Eddie fed the imagination and illustrated Iron Maiden's music in much the same way that Stanley & Tchock's packaging colors Radiohead's music today. And it gave them an identity. As easy as it is to picture some of those kids in one of VH1's Fanatic shows with thousands of pictures of Eddie covering their walls and life size models of Eddie rising from coffins in their living room, the reality is they're probably just like you and me. Accountants, lawyers, dentists, truck drivers and cube occupants.

Although I'd like to think that at least a few of them took up art. I'd like to think that those long hours of sketching Eddie paid off in some way. Maybe I'll have to probe a little bit and ask the next graphic designer I meet what they were listening to when they grew up. If they could navigate through the hair bands in the 80's and find something with substance, they're probably doing it in their careers as well.

Or maybe if the fundamentalists are right about 6/6/06, we'll all be drawing pictures of Vladimir Putin come tomorrow.

The Salad Garden (Remnants of VH)

2006-05-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

I always associate the Van Halen split with sliced roast beef. If I tune into a classic rock station and hear “Why Can’t This Be Love” or “Best of Both Worlds” or David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose” I instantly smell my Rax Roast Beef uniform. Sweat, roast beef and the remnants of my once favorite band on the stereo. It was summer, 1986.

I was too young to use the slicer. That was okay though. I was too young to earn minimum wage as well, and I guess you really should be making at least the minimum your employer can possibly pay you if your limbs are at stake. I was willing to smell like a roast beef and cheddar to finance my tape collection, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my fingers before I even get to my sophomore year of high school. Besides, I just started smoking and was quite fond of the way a cigarette fit between my index and middle fingers.

My responsibilities included busing the tables and stocking the salad bar. Instead of having large receptacles labeled TRASH with a little shelf on top where you could put your tray when you were done with it, Rax thought it would enhance the dining experience if they hid them. Only the bus boys knew where they were. So after years of being conditioned to dispose of their own food wrappers, our customers would stand at the door with trays in hand completely dumbfounded. “Oh, let me take that,” I’d have to say and quickly dispose of their hideous messes of catsup stained French fries and half eaten sandwich buns.

High class dining extended to the care of the salad garden as well. We didn’t want people to think of it as a salad bar. No, that was far too Mickey D’s. We wanted people to think of this as a garden. You start out with iceberg lettuce and you pick some frozen peas and cauliflower and top it off with some bacon bits and a little dressing we brought in from the ranch. Rather than exposing the garden for what it was, we covered up the ice that was packed around the containers with tough plastic lettuce. Or something that sort of looked like lettuce. It was actually a real plant. Kale. Years later when I found out it was edible, I was horrified.

We stored it in 5-gallon pickle buckets filled with bleach and water. Everyday I’d ring the solution out of that stinky weed and put it out on the salad bar. As the days and weeks went on the stuff started to look less and less green. It was soggy, slimy and its stench started to smell more and more like rotten trash. But a job’s a job, and they wanted their salad bar to be a garden.

One day I’m sitting in the break room, flicking my Marlboro Light into an aluminum foil ashtray and nursing a Mr. Pibb. Jason, the fry guy is bitching about his new Triumph album. Apparently there was some slip up at the manufacturing plant and even though the cassette was labeled correctly, when Jason put it his car’s deck it played the previous Triumph album. So much for the magic power. I guess even the band realized their better days were behind them.

So anyway, I’m back there enjoying the final moments of my smoke break when the assistant manager tells me to come out to the garden. Apparently there was something wrong with the salad bar. I get out there and see this older lady wrinkling up her face and holding her nose. Her plate is pushed to the far edge of her table and she’s looking back at the garden in horror. Her husband looks at me and says, “that’s the stinkiest salad bar I’ve ever seen”. I wanted to correct him and tell him that it was actually a garden and that sometimes gardens didn’t smell so good, but I resisted.

I look back at the assistant manager and he’s got a bucket. Only this one doesn’t have bleach in it. He starts grabbing the kale and frantically pulling the weed from the garden. I go around to the other side to help out. I grab the slimy stuff and start to throw it in the bucket and in a few minutes we’re done.

He runs in the back looking for fresh kale and I try to look busy by collecting all the miscellaneous pieces of lettuce, egg and cottage cheese that had managed to slip under the guard of the kale. When I looked over at the old woman she instantly shoots me another look. That’s when I took a whiff and knew that the kale had spewed its nasty stench far beyond its bleach stained exterior. The ice, the containers and even the food were all victims of its fowl menace.

The assistant manager comes back empty handed. He’s sweating profusely. His uniform is now wet under the pits and he’s adjusting his visor to keep his hair out of his face. He must’ve ripped open every box of produce we had looking for the kale only to find out it’d been months since someone had thought to order it. He tells me to get more ice and make it look nice. I keep thinking of the older lady though. But I don’t need to tell him. He gets close and realizes the whole garden has been compromised. He starts to dismantle the thing and tells me to tell the cashier that the salad bar is closed.

I get in a little scuffle with the cashier. I try to quietly tell her that the garden is closed but she keeps shouting at me that she has customers. When I get a little louder she doesn’t believe me and starts to shout for the assistant manager. He’s furious and looks over at me and shakes his head. Slamming a German potato salad down on the garden’s counter he shouts, “the salad garden is closed”.

As I walk back from the register I see the older lady again. She’s standing where she thinks the trash bin should be. I walk over to her and say “let me take your tray ma’am.” It was the least I could do. We were a classy joint.

How I learned to love Frank

2006-05-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

The Pixies were one of the best bands of the last twenty years. Nirvana may have broke things wide open, but the Pixies pretty much invented that loud chorus/quiet versus thing.

Between 1987 and 1991, they released four amazing albums and an ep. One a year. They became a soundtrack for my late high school and early college years. When I decided to switch over to cds and could only afford one, I bought Doolittle. Everything was so perfect about it that I didn't really care about buying anything else for quiet a while.

Drunken dorm room sing alongs to Allison were just the beginning. Trompe La Monde came out my sophomore year of college, and my roommate and I dissected that thing as if it would lead to the path we should lead our lives down.

We saw them live on that tour. You could tell there were tensions within the band. Every time Black Francis said something, Kim Deal would roll her eyes. Of course the rest of the time I though she was looking right at me with a big grin on her face.

I was in love with the Pixies. Sure, I liked Kim. I followed her Breeders side project, and I loved her background vocals. Joey Santiago and David Lovering were pretty amazing too. But Black Francis was what it was all about for me. What an amazing character. Songs about slicing up eyeballs, incest, being alone on thanksgiving "here I am with my ham", wanting to be a singer like lou reed because he likes lou reed, and of course the girl with the tattooed tit that said number 13.

The tour tshirts said "Death to the Pixies". But nobody believed it or wanted them to end. In early 1993 when they called it quits I was sad. I went to a party that night and felt like I lost a friend.

"Just look at it this way", a friend of mine said, "now we'll have the Breeders AND Black Francis solo albums." He was only partially right.

Black Francis was killed off. Frank Black absorbed him into his ever-widening torso in early 1993.

The first couple Frank Black albums were okay. "Los Angeles" and "Headache" were great singles, but the albums lacked that something special that the Pixies had. Namely Kim Deal and Black Francis. The newly christened Frank Black was a totally different animal. Much tamer and more professional.

By the time The Cult of Ray came out, I'd lost interest. Frank Black annoyed me. On occasion I'd read positive reviews and pick up an album of his. I even saw him live on the first Frank Black and the Catholics tour. He played 2-3 early Pixies songs and shocked everyone that he still had those chops, then he bullied us with every Frank Black rarity and b-side he could dig up. And he has a lot of them. The boy is productive.

Flash forward to 2004 and the Pixies reunite. If ever there was a band that it seemed would never get back together, it was the Pixies. They had more bad blood than Pink Floyd. Their reunion, as well as the brief reformation of Pink Floyd, proves that bands never really break up anymore. They just go on hiatus.

The Pixies reunion was thrilling. At least when viewed from afar. The warm up show was here, but it would have been more accessible had it been in Africa. Tickets were impossible to get. The tapes sounded great though. It could have been 1989 again. Frank Black as Black Francis was back.

By the time I saw them on their regular tour stop here in Minneapolis, a lot of the excitement had died out. It was cool, but it sort of seemed like they were just going through the motions. Just one new song too.

About a year after I saw them live a peculiar thing happened. Instead of being annoyed that Frank Black put out a solo album while he continued to tour as a Pixie and deny us new band material, I started to like what I heard. Sure, I held out. At least six months. But eventually I checked out Honeycomb and was pretty impressed.

I'd like to say that I was blown away by Frank's latest. But Honeycomb isn't the type of record that blows you away. It's as familiar as a back porch on a rainy day, and it take a while for its sound to slowly envelop you. I didn't really notice the songs so much when I played the album straight through, as I did when I had my itunes on shuffle. Wait...what's this.

Apparently Frank had been in therapy. His marriage had ended, and he was searching for meaning. Not only did this result in the Pixies reunion, but it also provided the background for a much more serious singer-songwriter album.

Honeycomb was initially going to be called Black on Blonde, as a tribute to Dylan's Blonde and Blonde and the Nashville musicians who accompanied both Dylan and Black. The songs are loose, but not careless. And they're a million miles from the Pixies. Maybe it took this amount of distance for me to respect Frank Black and not curse him for abandoning Black Francis. Or maybe it was seeing the Pixies reunion and realizing it verged on becoming an oldies act.

Either way, I'm now a Frank Black fan. From 2004 on, anyway. He's set to pull a bit of a Red Hot Chili Peppers or Smashing Pumpkins by releasing a double cd in June called Faster Man/Raider Man. It may be a wealth of material, but I know that even if I can't digest it in one sitting, it'll always sound good when it comes up in a shuffle.

And I've stopped caring so much about the current Pixies too. If I want to listen to a little Black Francis, I'll pull out Surfer Rosa. But if I want to hear Frank Black I'll put on Honeycomb. I've even started filling my Frank Black section away from my Pixies section in my cd case. He deserves to stand on his own, and anyway, Frank Black was never in the original Pixies.

party over, oops, out of time

2006-05-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

The downtown Minneapolis Sam Goody is closing. Or Musicland, as I'm fond of calling it. Same company. Same policy of opening up shops in malls to allure vehicularly challenged kids and musically handicapped moms to shell out $20.99 for a cd.

But I have to thank Sam Goody/Musicland. Plenty of research was done there as a kid. I lived just a few blocks from a mall during my formative years, and I spent many hours perusing the racks of vinyl and cassettes and learning important musical distinctions. Like that the Cure had 5-6 albums before Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, or that "Teenage Wasteland" was really called "Baba O'Reilly" and was off the album Who's Next.

I kept the staff busy too. I'd ask when the new Van Halen or Motley Crue album was coming out and watch as they shuffled through papers and occasionally made calls in an effort to further whet my appetite. Back then I'd usually buy the records there too. But when I outgrew the cock rock and my friends started to drive, I'd venture further and further from home to hipper (and much cheaper) record stores and Musicland became a convenient place of research and nothing else. It was sort of like my allmusic and amazon, in those pre-internet days. The staff had to be frustrated when I never showed up to buy the new Morrissey album. They probably had a copy behind the counter waiting for me.

Some thievery was done there too. Not in my name, but in my honor. I got huge into R.E.M. when I bought Document and Lifes Rich Pageant on the same day. Then I found out they were coming to town in a month. So I bought Fables of the Reconstruction. I already had Murmur from a trade I did with a friend of mine for Clapton, Beck and Page's White Boy Blues. All I needed was Reckoning and Chronic Town. With a gullible neighbor kid, the problem was solved.

I know. I should feel bad. But the thing is, Musicland's been ripping off kids for years. And I was 15, so I guess it's okay now. But with all of the price gouging these guys did, it makes me feel pretty good to go into a Sam Goody store all of these years later and take 50-60% off of their cds and dvds. I try to suppress the smirk at the checkout.

Bye guys. So sad. You don't even have the research thing going for you anymore. And after today, I don't think you have anything else I'm interested in either. Regardless of the price.

The Weasel

2006-05-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

I had a roommate my freshman year in college named Bryce. And he totally fit the name. What a little weasel. We hated each other. I'd leave to go out and the Scorpions would rise in volume with each step I took down the hall. He blew out my speakers twice in the first two months.

He ate my food, and lied about it. Stole my liquor. Never left the room at all when I had my girlfriend over.

I came home one night drunk and turned on some music (very quietly) and sat up in my lofted bed to listen to it as I went to sleep. "Turn that off" the little weasel Bryce cried, "Turn off that noise".

"Go ahead and turn it off..it's right next to your bed", I said

But the little weasel Bryce kept whining that I should get up and turn it off. "you turned it on" he said.

"But it's bothering you..and it's right next to your bed" I said to the little weasel Bryce.

Finally I freaked out on the little weasel and told him I was going to get out of bed and kick his ass. I started shaking the top bed like I was coming down for him.

Pretty uncharacteristic for me, but he finally reached over and turned off the radio.

The next week the weasel Bryce moved out.

songs and other things

2006-05-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

the long player, our old friend 33 1/3

2006-05-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Double Album in 1966: 71 minutes and 40 seconds

Single Album in 2001: 72 minutes and 50 seconds

Both are classics. This is rare. Most artists don't have an album as good as either one of these in their entire career, yet just about everybody today is putting out double albums. At least by vinyl standards.

Vinyl records had limits. Rules. Formats you had to stick to. Roughly 22 1/2 minutes per side. Rarely would you find a record over 50 minutes. The extra songs were used as b-sides, or they found their way into the band's vault. And I doubt most bands were forward thinking enough to envision the 5 CD box set.

The Ramones first album was 28 minutes and 53 seconds. Nobody called it an ep. The Fiery Furnaces put out an ep last year which was 40 minutes and 54 minutes long. Its title? EP.

Now, with 80 minute CDs artists can pretty much fill up the thing. Maybe they want to take a stab at a reggae song. Or the drummer wants a chance to write. Or they want to play jam band on a track or two. Many band arguments are probably solved by maxing out CDs.

We're constantly being told that we increasingly work longer hours and have less leisure time. So maybe it's good that you don't have to flip over the cd like you did a record. It saves a little time.

But do we really have the attention span for 70+ minutes of music on a single CD? I'm pretty into My Morning Jacket, but I end up buying their new albums before I've fully digested the older ones. They're just too long. And don't even get me started on The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie or that new Red Hot Chili Peppers double CD? 2 hours of music with people as grating as Billy Corgan and Anthony Keidus? That's equal to almost four records in vinyl terms. Fuck. Even Bob Dylan couldn't pull that off.

Songs in the key of life

2006-05-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

Neil Young has the touch again. For a while there was this theory that at the end of every decade he had a creative rebirth. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in 1969, Rust Never Sleeps in 1979 and Freedom in 1989. I'm not sure whether or not Silver and Gold from 2000 counts or not. It was a year late, and six years later it's really not that memorable.

The other theory around Neil Young is that his best work follows periods of intense personal conflict. The "doomsday" or "ditch" trilogy of Time Fades Away/On The Beach/Tonight's The Night, followed the deaths of his guitar player and roadie. And now following a near-fatal health scare and a corrupt US administration, we have 2005's Prairie Wind and this year's Living With War.

If Prairie Wind sounds like the redheaded stepchild of Harvest Moon's bastard son of Harvest, it's understandable. At least initially. It seems slightly hokey with odes to his guitar, Elvis Presley and of course the wind which blows across his prairie childhood home in Canada. But once you marry the songs with moving pictures, you'll never hear the album the same way again. Heart Of Gold, the Jonathan Demme concert film of Neil's performance of Prairie Wind and other acoustic-Neil classics, does that job, and it's a masterpiece. Watch the film and you really understand how important Neil is, and how close we came to losing him. Prairie Wind was written and recorded in a brief period of time after Neil was diagnosed with a brain tumor and told he had to have surgery. The album is reflective and conceptual, and it's the sound of old friends coming together to record new music under what could be dire circumstances.

Now, with Heart Of Gold still generating plenty of press and not even out on DVD yet, and a mere 7 months after Prairie Wind was released, Neil Young has a new album out. Living With War was written and recorded in late March and early April, it is truly amazing that this album is already on record store shelves. Credit should be given to Warner/Reprise for rush releasing this album instead of riding out the Heart Of Gold marketing plan and setting a release date for Living With War six months from now. But what's even more amazing is how good this record is.

It's easy for people to attack Neil for this record. It's anti-Bush. It has a song called "Let's Impeach The President". It has over the top lyrics and song titles like "Shock and Awe" and "Looking for a Leader" And Neil's from Canada, in case you didn't know. Never mind that he's lived in California for decades and raised his kids here. But what is truly amazing about this record isn't the press surrounding it.

Easily his best since Sleeps With Angels or Mirrorball, this album is the sound of Neil fired up and pissed off, as well as passionate and hopeful, despite the current political situation. While many artists have released political songs in the past five years, most of them are buried under metaphors and preach to the choir. Living With War is in your face, and doesn't know what subtlety means.

Recorded with a spare backing band, a trumpet player and a 100 piece choir, Neil confronts the Bush administration head on. He's living with war in his heart every day and damnit, he's going to say something about it. He's not going to rock out like Crazy Horse either. There are no extended solos here or any sort of jams. The songs are short and build off of each other. It's the sound of an artist writing a batch of related songs. There aren't any hanger on's from previous sessions. Everything is fresh and timely in a way few records are capable of today. It's simple dirty rock and roll. The type of music that would fit in well in the "ditch" trilogy. Or maybe "doomsday" was the better word after all.

Neil is back though. And whether it's his own mortality or that of a soldier's fighting a questionable war, Neil's found the perfect vehicles for delivery.

Office Coffee- An Ethical Question

2006-05-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

Some offices have really shitty coffee. We've all worked in them. Usually they're the places that demand that you pay for it as well. A friend of mine described this type of coffee as "water and black". I think that's accurate. Older people seem to have a weakness for this coffee too. It's like they wave the greenest of beans over a cup of hot water and think they've brewed a cup of coffee. I don't know. Maybe that's what drinking Folger's Crystals in the 70's does to you.

My office has good coffee. It's not great, but it's rather good. Well, provided you can find a French Roast or Sumatra, or a little Dark Magic (extra dark coffee) and not decaf. Or blueberry. Yes, blueberry.

This coffee comes in little "k-cups". They look like giant creamers, but they're filled with coffee grounds. You put one in the machine, it punches a hole in it, and brews up a nice 8oz cup of coffee. The problem is, you hardly ever find the good k-cups on the shelf. Instead it's vanilla or hazelnut. Or vanilla hazelnut decaf.

Which brings me to my dilemma. If you're faced with decaf or flavored coffee just about every day, but you've managed to find a box of the good stuff, do you take it for a private stash? Is it justifiable if you feel like your contributions to the organization are at stake? What if it's absolutely imperative that you have a good strong cup of coffee in the morning or nothing but watery nothingness is going to come out of your head? Does it make it better if you share it with like minded people?

It seems like a fair trade to me.

Pearl Jam- A Failed Democracy

2006-04-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

Okay. I've only listened to the new record once. So let me admit that from the start. But you can tell a lot about a Pearl Jam record from it's initial spin. Mainly that you don't want to spin it again.

The record comes out soon. Next Tuesday, I think. But it's leaking all over the web. Jamming up the iPods of music lovers everywhere who hail the band as a survivor. A band that's been around for a long time. As if this they should be honored for this feat alone. I'm sorry, but it's pretty easy to stick around when you've got a ton of money. This isn't the Ramones touring around in a stinky bus, as much as Vedder wishes they were.

I liked Pearl Jam, and I suppose I still like Eddie Vedder. It was obvious right from the start that he possessed a pretty unique talent. "He understands women", a friend of mine said when I couldn't understand how she could get THAT into Ten. And it's true. There are several songs that really have a tenderness for women and their issues, without speaking out on "Women's Issues". He's also pretty good looking. And when you look at the singers of most of the hair bands that were dominating the day, it's pretty easy to see his appeal to women, as well as men. "Black", "Jeremy", "Alive"- these all have substance lyrically. It's a far cry from "Cherry Pie" and the Nelson twins.

They put on a good show too. Eddie Vedder would climb the rafters and you'd have that fear that maybe this time he'd hurt himself. But that got old quickly. The best part of seeing them live at Lollapalooza 1992 wasn't the Pearl Jam set. It was a 20 minute set that Eddie Vedder did with Chris Cornell on the sidestage. Without the internet to tell everybody about it ahead of time, this improptu show was played to just a handful of people. They sang "Hunger Strike" and a couple other acoustic songs and sounded amazing. Vedder was the highlight of course, and he sounded great.

Here's what happened. Vedder dominates the band for the first four albums. The slower more introspective songs, some of which were written pre-Pearl Jam, tend to be the best cuts. Not coincidentally they're almost always written solely by Vedder. Around the time of No Code the band must've had it with him. The world beat edge. The Dead Man Walking soundtrack. Maybe we can blame it on that Neil Young record that they played on. On Mirrorball, the band stood up and people noticed. Or at least Eddie did.

Since then they've had countless writing credits in the band. Everybody gets their shot. Even one of the drummers wrote a song. I'm sorry, but this band is not the Beatles. They love to be compared to the Who. So here it is: Townshend would never let Daltrey write the songs. So why did Vedder relent? Especially with the lyrics. C'mon!

With each Pearl Jam release we get less and less of the "Elderly Women" and "Wishlist" kind of songs and more and more of the ROCK songs. The type of song Pearl Jam was never that good at anyway. He slurs through the lyrics and gets excited about stuff, but half the time you can't understand him. Give me "Yellow Leadbetter" any day. I can't understand what the hell he's saying, but I feel something. And that's way more than I can say about the last few Pearl Jam records.

Life During Wartime

2006-04-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

This is Neil Young's new album. He recorded it earlier this month, and it should be streaming by the end of the week. Wow. It looks like music with a message is alive. And so is the spirit of putting out music without a detailed market plan. I'd hate to have to wait until Christmas to hear this one.

Leave it to Neil to stand up and say something. He's said he kept waiting for the younger bands to step forward, but none of them did. Sure, At War With The Mystics by the Flaming Lips certainly has it's political overtones. As does Josh Ritter's latest one. But still, subtlety isn't working, and it looks like Neil is going to deliver. I just hope it's not too cheesy.

I love this little blurb from Fox News. Neil's a druggy, you see. That's why he hates the president.

A Blessing And A Curse

2006-04-24T08:50:00.003-07:00

Some things take a while to reveal themselves. When I heard "Feb 14" back in January I thought it sounded okay, but it was a fairly average rock song, and it seemed to lack the storytelling aspect that's at the core of the best Drive By Truckers songs. It sounds like the Replacements, sure, but I don't necessarily want the Truckers to sound like the 'Mats.

This album doesn't really sound like the same band that made Decoration Day or The Dirty South either. Of course, that's kind of a foolish thing to say. If any band has a unique identity these days that they can really call their own, it's the Drive By Truckers. But the storytelling/conceptual edge of the last three records is missing from A Blessing and A Curse, and it can be a little unsettling.

This is Patterson Hood's album. The last couple records best moments often belonged to Jason Isbell, but on this record the DBT founder seems re-energized. "Remember it ain't too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into everything you got" he sings on "A World of Hurt" and it's as if he's done just that. It must be a hell of an inspiration to have Isbell and Cooley to compete with for song inclusion, and with this record Patterson proves he's up for the challenge. He even managed to write the best Stones song in years with "Aftermath USA".

It's Mike Cooley who has the finest moment on the disc though. "Gravity Gone" is the lyrical high of the album, and may be the best song Cooley has had on a Truckers album. He sees the trappings of fame and phrases it in only a way a Trucker could. "Between the champagne, hand jobs and the kissing ass by everyone involved/Cocaine comes quick and that's why the small dicks have it all."

So the sound is there. And the stories are there too, even if they aren't as unified as previous records. The Drive By Truckers know how to give the whole package too. It's pretty easy to download songs these days and make a snap judgment and move on to the next thing. In a beautiful gatefold cd which recalls the 70's double vinyl days, the Drive By Truckers invite you to sit down and absorb the whole experience. Look at Wes Freed's artwork. Read the lyrics. Get the stories. Then slap it on your ipod and make it part of your life.

What Can I Do?

2005-12-19T22:09:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to Antony and the Johnsons and wondering why I didn't include it on my 2005 compilation cd. Well, I know why. It's the type of record best listened to from start to finish in one setting. It doesn't lend itself to the randomness of a mix tape, ipod shuffle or year end best of cd. Damn though. Sounds pretty amazing right now.

I missed Antony when he came through here a few months ago. Tickets were kind of pricey, and if I remember right I had something going on that night. Something so important I no longer remember a single thing about it. Hell, even Lou Reed sings on this album. How many albums has Lou Reed ever sang on besides his own? I can't think of one.

Here's the tracklisting for my 2005 year end cd:

The Mountain Goats- This Year
Spoon- I Turn My Camera On
My Morning Jacket- It Beats For You
Sufjan Stevens-Casimar Pulaski Day
Andrew Bird- A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left
Death Cab For Cutie- Soul Meets Body
The Hold Steady- Your Little Hood Rat Friend
Clem Snide- The Sound Of German Hip Hop
Fiery Furnaces- Single Again
Calexico/Iron and Wine- A History Of Lovers
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club- Devil's Waiting
Eels- Railroad Man
White Stripes- I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals- When Will You Come Back Home
The Clientele- Since K Got Over Me
Low- Death Of A Salesman
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah- The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth
Bright Eyes- Road To Joy

Again, not necessarily the best songs from the best albums, although some certainly are. But these songs flow together, and in my mind present a pretty good picture of the music that did something for me in 2005. Someday I'll expand it to 2 CD's and I won't have to worry about eliminating the Sigur Ros's and Antony's of the world.

Lost

2005-12-19T20:29:00.000-08:00

So this was supposed to be a music blog. Or at least that's what I think. I honestly can't remember coming up with the name Between The Grooves, but I'm pretty sure it had to be around the time I created another blog on this site, which is now defunct. That blog was completely unrelated to this one, and really wasn't much of a blog at all. Hopefully this one will be different.

What will this blog consist of? What is the mission statement? Jesus, I have no idea. I suppose I'll talk about rock and roll and ideas, sex and work, books and lists, and all of the things that make up my world. Well, maybe not in that order or combination.