Semisonic "Closing Time"

Recently I decide to start a weekend feature called "Random Ridiculous Songs That Have No Business Being Played In Public Again But I Heard In The Grocery Store Today."

This song should only be played in bars. Or, if you're really depressed, when you're at home drinking by yourself.

It does not make sense in the supermarket. You can't even buy beer in grocery stores in Massachusetts.

The B52s "Butterbean"

Here's another Weekend Post:

This song is so insanely stupid, but wonderful. It's like one of those 80s Chevy Chase comedies that wasn't very good the first time you saw it, but by the 5th time you've seen it, it's the funniest thing ever and you're quoting it non-stop. We loved this one in the UMass dorms. Makes me smile, just thinking about how drunk we must've been.



Weekend posts are a chance to revisit songs that have happy memories, not of anything in particular, other than just hearing the tunes.

Many of these songs were tracks that I played during my 90s stint as an Alternative/Modern Rock radio show. They're tunes that I hardly hear these days, but are wonderful to revisit.

Click on the "Weekend Posts" label below, to see other posts like this.

MxPx "Move To Bremerton"

I am sensitive to the punctuation-ally challenged.

kd lang wants her name in all lower case, despite what Spell Check tells me.

If his name were William, it wouldn't be as interesting as Will.I.Am.

Was (not Was) needs those parentheses.

Panic! At The Disco wouldn't be as urgent without that exclamation point.

I'm sure it's frustrating when they see their names in print, spelled with incorrect punctuation.

And with a name like P.J., you know I know their pain.

When I was in Little League, we were having a championship season, and against one of our big rivals I had the game of my life. Not only did I get a hit all 4 times I went to bat, that last hit drove in the game winning, last inning run.

It made it to the local paper's sports page later that week, with the headline "Finns Fourth Hit Wins Game." I was thrilled, until I read the article.

In those pre-digital days, the coaches sent in hand-written notes to the newspaper for these articles. And when my coach wrote my name, instead of using dots to create periods in my name, he made little, tiny circles.

So the article, my glory story, instead of lauding the offensive prowess of "P.J. Finn," the sportswriter complimented "Pojo Finn."

Pojo.

You know, 30 years later, there are a couple of guys that I can still run into when I go back to my hometown, who'll see me and shout "Pojo! Good to see you!"

That's why I have sympathy for MxPx.

They were formerly Magnified Plaid. They had gotten so locally popular in their native Northwest, that they could produce hand-drawn show posters and abbreviate their name to M.P.

Only, the guy that wrote the posters, instead of drawing dots for periods, drew little x's. And the band suddenly became known as MxPx.

I feel their !@#$% punctuation pain.

Bruce Cockburn "Call Me Rose"

There is a mathematical sequence that goes:

Comedy = Tragedy + Time

Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon was perhaps the lowest ebb of America's 200+ year history.

And yet, Nixon has definitely had the most hilarious Presidential after-existence in Pop culture.

Whether it's the Watergate farce "Dick," or the floating head of Nixon in a jar running for office on "Futurama," our 37th President's fictional incarnations are invariably the funniest of all the Presidents.

As are the RE-incarnations.

I laughed out loud at the first line of the new Bruce Cockburn song, which imagines Nixon reincarnated into less privileged (but more ironic) circumstances.

Instead of me spoiling the joke, you should head to Cockburn's website for a free preview of "Call Me Rose" from Bruce's forthcoming album.

Steve Earle "Carrie Brown"

I often wonder what life was like before instant replay.

I mean, in sports, there are infamous cases of officials making calls that were shown to be blatantly wrong on replay.

And beyond sports, tapes and recordings and photographs offer a chance to look back at a moment, and see it in a clearer light without the distractions of your own bias or self-perception.

Sometimes, you can even see a whole new narrative.

I’d gone with a group of friends to Nashville to the historic Ryman Auditorium, for a benefit show put on by a few groups who had come together to oppose the death penalty.

After an afternoon talk by Sister Helen Prejean (the nun who was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking), we were treated to an evening with The Indigo Girls, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle.

We bought the upgraded tickets that got us to a Meet & Greet backstage after the show, and that was my chance to talk to Steve Earle.

And as I waited my turn for an autograph, I tried to think of something thoughtful to say.

At the time, I was living in Abingdon, Virginia, working at a radio station there. But just prior to my radio gig, I had been a producer at an NBC affiliate in Bristol.

Bristol is actually two towns---Bristol Virginia and Bristol Tennessee. Two towns, two mayors, two police forces, two everything. And the border runs right through State Street. On the left side of the street it’s Virginia and on the right side it’s Tennessee.

By coincidence, Earle had recently put out his first bluegrass album, with The Del McCoury Band, called “The Mountain,” and it contained a song about a young man who kills the boyfriend of the girl he longs for but can't have. And the song contains this great line:

I walked around in Bristol town a bitter broken man
A heart that pined for Carrie Brown and a pistol in my hand
We met again on State Street poor Billy Wise and me
I shot him in Virginia and he died in Tennessee

Perfect! I’ll tell him I live right there! That’ll open up a dialogue and Steve and I will become friends forever!

So my turn comes around and I hand him my ticket and a Sharpie. And as he’s signing the front, I tell him I’m from Bristol and I think it’s cool that he wrote a song set in my town.

He finishes his signature, looks up and hands me back the ticket and the marker, and says kinda gruff-ly, wearily, “Yeah, I thought Bristol was a pretty good place to set a Hillbilly murder ballad.” And he moves on to the next guy in line.

That's how I remember him---gruff, a little weary from working all day (he was one of the event organizers), and just a notch above tolerant.

My friend Rita snapped a picture of a moment in our exchange, and seeing the photo gave me a whole different perspective.

(I didn't see the photo until several weeks after the incident. This story takes place waaaayyy back in 1999, when we actually had to get film developed, so you didn't know how your pictures came out)

Earle's face is much brighter in the photo than how I remembered it. In fact, the moment it captures suggests that his delivery of the "Hillbilly murder ballad" line was gruff and crusty and a bit drawn out, purely for comic effect, and that cracking the joke made him smile.

Here's the photo.

And it even lends itself to a sillier interpretation.

With the ticket and the Sharpie in his hand, and the bright smile on his face, doesn't it look a little bit like Steve Earle is asking me for MY autograph?

Somewhat surprisingly, I couldn't find the Steve Earle/Del McCoury version of this song. But Youtube is always good for some amateurs taking a crack at a good tune.

Esperanza Spalding "Little Fly"

There's a saying that goes: If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

That seemed to be in play on Sunday night, when a gasp went up from the crowd at the Grammys, during the announcement of the Best New Artist Award.

The gaspers seemed to fall into two groups.

One group was angry. They were Beliebers, who had felt with dogmatic certainty that Justin Bieber would be crowned Best New Artist.

And the other group had not been paying attention, because the gasp was something along the lines of "Esperanza who?"

(There was a third group, known as People Who Knew About Esperanza Spalding Because They're Into Jazz, but that group contains so few people that it is statistically insignificant. "JK!" As a Bieber kid might say, or text)

The angry folks---like most folks who spend a lot of their time being angry and want to you be angry too---took the constructive path of threatening Grammy voters via Twitter, and changing Spalding's middle name to "Quesadilla" on Wikipedia.

The folks who were not paying attention said (somewhat inaudibly), "I should probably check her out or something . . ." their voice trailing off.

And as usual, the People Into Jazz just felt a little smug about their music taste. Zing! JK. Love you, PIJ's.



For those of you who weren't paying attention but want to catch up, here's some background

The Replacements "Valentine"

I spent a long stretch of the post-college, pre-Martha’s Vineyard part of my life, living in Abingdon, Virginia.

People always ask me where that is and I say that it’s in the western part of the state.

“You mean, like Charlottesville?” No, more West.

“West like Lexington?” Wester.

“Is it near Roanoke?”

I tell them it’s near the Virginia/Tennessee border.

There is usually a blank expression, which tells me that they didn’t know that Virginia and Tennessee bordered each other.

I wasn’t near any major American city, so if I wanted to see a Name band in concert, it meant a minimum of a 2 hour road trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, or Asheville, North Carolina, or someplace further.

And if the closest that Paul Westerberg was going to come to Abingdon was Athens, Georgia, then dammit, I was driving to Athens, Georgia.

The girl I was dating at the time wasn’t familiar with Westerberg or The Replacements, but agreed to go with me, if we made a full day of it. Meaning, if we left early in the morning, spent some time visiting North Carolina art museums, and had plenty of time to check out the college town of Athens.

Being the somewhat obsessive paranoid freak that I am, when we rolled into Athens at about 3 in the afternoon, I wanted to find the venue, so I would know where it was, and that it actually existed, even if the show wasn't for 6 more hours.

Georgia Theatre was a beautiful old style movie house where cool bands that passed through town came to play. We wandered up to the box office to see if we could grab our Will Call tickets in the early afternoon, to avoid waiting in line that night.

No one was at the Box Office, or at the door, but there was an unmistakable sound coming from inside.

And with no one at the box office or the door, there was nothing to stop us from just walking inside, to stand at the back of the room and listen to Westerberg’s sound check.

It’s hard to put into words, my feelings about Paul Westerberg’s music.

Sometime soon, I promise to write about going to see my first concert ever, The Replacements, which is probably the most important Every Day I Write The Blog entry, in that, it is probably the most influential song/memory of my life in music.

So I’ll just say this about my feelings . . . this was the music I listened to when I was the happiest, when I was the saddest, when I was the most angry, when I was the most confused---when I was the most emotional. My attachment to these songs is most emotional.

To be in this large, empty theatre, listening to my favorite songwriter . . . well, it was about as Fan-Geeked-Out as I could possibly ever get.

Of course, it couldn’t last forever. We got to hear about 3 songs before someone on the Theatre staff politely told us we couldn’t hang out, and we were ushered outside.

I stood outside the theatre, knowing that later I’d be inside for a full Rock N Roll show experience. But I wanted one last taste of my private Sound Check.

See the Box Office in the picture? That’s an old photograph, but Georgia Theatre still looked just like that in the late 90s. The box office window had its shade pulled.

But look closely, and you can
see that little box office slot where you’d slide your dollar through, to pay for your movie. If I got on my knees, I could see through it, into the box office. And the back door to the box office was open, which meant I could see through that door, and all the way to the stage. It was like looking through a spy-glass, with the center stage microphone on the other end of the lens.

Paul led the band through “Valentine” as I watched through my little key-hole vantage point.

And it was there that I reached Fan-Geeked-Out nirvana.





Bonus entry!!!

I love it when you discover something about a tune, years after you first heard it.

I've been listening to this tune for over 20 years, and heard something for the first time today, as I wrote this entry.

Twenty-something me was not musically educated enough to catch this, but after years at mvyradio, I finally realized that Westerberg does what seems to be a hat tip to Joni Mitchell in the lyrics.

"Valentine" -- If you were a pill, I'd take a handful at my will, And I'd knock you back with something sweet as wine.

"A Case Of You" --- Oh you're in my blood like holy wine, You taste so bitter and so sweet, Oh I could drink a case of you darling

Hall & Oates "Adult Education"

Last week I decide to start a weekend feature called ""Random Ridiculous Songs That Have No Business Being Played In Public Again But I Heard In The Grocery Store Today."

I know someone programs the music that plays in the grocery store. They pick songs that make for a pleasant shopping experience, or create a mood, or evoke nostalgia.

But it just seemed randomly ridiculous to unearth this later period Hall & Oates tune, that I can't imagine anyone is really nostalgic for.

Dandy Warhols "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth"

Here's another Weekend Post:

I kinda knew that the punk-ethos that had invaded mainstream music of the 90s (through Nirvana and the like) was gone, when I saw this (otherwise awesome) video, replete with fashionable choreography and bright colors, from this Next Big Thing band.




Weekend posts are a chance to revisit songs that have happy memories, not of anything in particular, other than just hearing the tunes.

Many of these songs were tracks that I played during my 90s stint as an Alternative/Modern Rock radio show. They're tunes that I hardly hear these days, but are wonderful to revisit.

Click on the "Weekend Posts" label below, to see other posts like this.

Wanda Jackson "Shakin' All Over"

The last decade and a half have seen some notable, and nice, comebacks of aging genre icons via a younger, savvy, and generally unmeddlesome supporter/producer.

The template for this, of course, the the Rick Rubin produced Johnny Cash "American" series.

Pre-Rubin, Cash had been dismissed and relegated to the "ignored old guy" status. But Rubin knew that Cash still had power, and spurred Johnny on to create these great albums. Most remarkably, the records are pretty devoid of any kind of producer "stamp." If you had received the record without any liner notes, there would be virtually no way to tell that this was a Rick Rubin-produced record.

And that's a good thing, because it cleared away all the brush, put the man and his voice up front and reminded you that Johnny Cash was amazing.

Numerous records have been made since under this model. And they have been fun to champion, because you felt like you were supporting a worthy underdog.

Solomon Burke made an amazing comeback record with Joe Henry. And Henry did what no other producer had been able to do in nearly 40 years---get folks to pay attention to the bursting supernova that is Bettye Lavette. Rubin had less commercial success with his Neil Diamond record, but it was still an artistic step forward for Neil. And though Mavis Staples has made solid records in the last decade, her collaboration with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco seems to have made the most hay of her considerable talent.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch, was the Loretta Lynn/Jack White project.

It was the first real indication that White wasn't just an indie-rock guitar guy---he was a restless listener and experiencer with a wide range of taste and knowledge. And while they didn't seem like an obvious match, one listen to "Van Lear Rose" and it became obvious that they were making better records through chemistry.

I mention all these records, because they were my first real entree to each of the aforementioned artists. And a large part of the reason I turned up to listen in the first place, was because I am a fan of the aforementioned producers.

All that, to get to this: When the new Wanda Jackson record came in the mail, before I listened to it, I put it into my laptop's iTunes. That is to say, I was pretty sure I was going to enjoy it, simply based on historical precedence.

It seemed great on paper.

And if you check out the video below, you'll see that White is clearly in control. The band is absolutely smoking.

But . . . I dunno. I'm not sold on Wanda Jackson here.

I feel mean even saying that.

She's a legend. She's an icon. And at 73, it's fucking amazing that she's fronting a band of any kind.

But the other examples I cited . . . Johnny Cash, Bettye Lavette, Solomon Burke, Mavis Staples, Loretta Lynn . . . they all seemed to retain their power, and their listen-ability, in their comeback. Stripped of any band of studio aces, they could still kill it. Check out low key numbers like Burke's "Fast Train" or Lavette's version of "Isn't It A Pity."

But Ms. Jackson . . . her voice hasn't aged the same way. It didn't gain gravity. And unfortunately, it seems to be the weakest element of the record.

Low expectations and high expectations.

I wonder if part of the success of the relaunch of Johnny Cash and Mavis Staples and the others had to do with the fact that little was expected of them at this point. There was no reason to think that they could do what they used to do.

But now I have this expectation that a great performer can actually become greater with age. And if they don't it's a disappointment.

Is that fair? No.

Is it rude? Well, no. But it feels rude.

Because if I go on Letterman in my white fringe jacket at age 73 and sing my damn heart out, and some punk blogger poo-pooed my performance. I'd want to kick him in the teeth until he had to wear dentures, too.



For a taste of what she used to sound like . . .