Teegs?  Sar-Sar?  Two quick notes:

1. Tune your damn guitar.
2. Sarah – you know that thing where you scoop your voice like a quarter-step sharp in the middle of a phrase?  Stop it.

That is all.

I’m way, way stoked to note that not only is Marah – one of the best bands you’ve never heard – still together and touring (having escaped the “acoustic due” ghetto that used to seem so hip, and now just screams “can’t afford to haul a band around”), but they also have a new album coming out soon.

Note to Serge and David Bielanko; tour the friggin’ Midwest.

That is all.

My “Fiver” homey Bovious tells me I sorta kinda made the big time:

The Iron City Houserockers were Pittsburgh’s entry in the Heartland Rock Sweepstakes that occured after the success of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. They had literate lyrics, tough rock and roll backing, and clear-eyed vision. Led by Joe Grushecky, a special ed teacher by day, produced by Miami Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band, and possessed of tunes like “Junior’s Bar” (youtube), they seemed poised to hit the big time, but it never quite happened, which is the music audience’s loss.

They link (beginning of the graf) to a tribute site I designed almost five years ago to the Houserockers (aka “the greatest band you never heard of, unless you’re occasional commenters Don or DaveInPgh”) – a band whose only fan west of Chicago, ever, may have been me. Not that that stopped me.

I’ve gotta get some of that on the Ipod, now…

Annie Lennox abandons stage in the face of a guy in a gas mask:

BOULDER, Colorado (October 18, 2007) – Popular singer Annie Lennox fled the stage when a man wearing a gas mask and cape appeared in the crowd towards the end of her set at Macky Auditorium on Tuesday.

Lennox spotted the man approaching the stage, tossed her microphone to the ground, and ducked backstage without saying a word to the audience. She describes the incident as “really freakish and disturbing” on her Blog.

To be fair to the guy, I thought the same thing about the video she did for “Sexcrime”

…there may never be a better cover song than the Four Tops version of “Walk Away Renee”. 

That is all.

I found a record of a night I unaccountably missed a year ago in writing my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series.

I’ve been to a fair number of concerts in my life. Good ones (U2, Saint Paul Civic, 1987; Ian Hunter, First Avenue, 1989; Stevie Ray Vaughan, Riverfest, 1986), fair-to-middlin’ ones (Hüsker Dü, First Avenue, 1987), awful ones (The Butthole Surfers, First Avenue, 1987) – and a few that are drilled into my head as great moments in my life; Los Lobos and Warren Zevon (different nights a week apart at First Avenue, 1991); Bruce Springsteen (several times, but especially on the second night of the Born In The USA tour at the Civic in ’84 and on his greatest hits tour in ’99)…

…and, 21 years ago tonight, Richard Thompson at the First Avenue, touring in support of Across a Crowded Room.

I went to the concert with my usual gig posse from back in that day; my fellow Don Vogel producer Dave Elvin, and his college classmate, whom Twin Citians now know as MPR’s Chief Political Correspondent Mike Mulcahey. It was a chilly night that kept whispering “winter is coming”.

“Rue Nouveau”, a local band led by art-pop-rock stalwart Gary Rue, opened. They were actually really good, although I don’t remember much; I point it out merely to show that I do, in fact, remember they existed.

And then – a set-change and two beers later – Thompson took the stage, playing (as I recall) “Little Blue Number“.

And I’ll have to confess – while I was a huge Thompson fan, at that moment I really only had two of his records – Shoot Out The Lights, the 1982 classic I wrote about at some length last year, and I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, an equally-classic 1972 album that was my introduction to Thompson and his by-this-time ex-wife Linda. At any rate, I didn’t know an awful lot of the songs, which spanned what was already almost two decades of recorded output.

In a way, it was a good thing; sometimes hearing something for the first time, without preconceptions, enhances the impact. At least, that’s one possibility for why that concert, 20 years later, is still pounded into my head.

The band was one of the most fascinating ensembles I’d seen. Clive Gregson played guitar and keyboard; Christine Collister, about 5’0 and 105 pounds (and five were hairdo) played acoustic guitar and percussion and contributed improbably-big, booming contralto backing vocals along with Gregson (with whom she recorded several albums apart from Thompson); Dave Pegg played Bass, Dave Mattacks was the drummer, and Danny Kirkpatrick sat on the drum riser playing the three-row button accordion.

And, above all, Thompson himself, the most amazing guitar player I’d ever seen. He played a brown Fender Strat, and had a peculiar picking style; most guitar players either play a flatpick (between the thumb and forefinger) or they fingerpick (using their fingers, or, like Nils Lofgren, metal picks perched on their fingertips). Thompson did both – held a flatpick, and also picked heavily with his middle, ring and pinky fingers…

…all of which sounds technical and clinical, and explains nothing about the impact watching him play had on me, standing there, swaying limply back and forth, trying to absorb it all, vowing to repent of everything I’d ever done on the guitar and start over from scratch later that night.

The rest of the setlist? I didn’t know most of them in the first place, other than the ones from Shoot… and Bright Lights, and the titles of some albums (“Hand of Kindness” stood out), so the only thing that still registers, twenty years later, was that it was all amazing. Thompson is either the world’s funniest depressing artist, or the world’s most depressing funny artist; his music swerves from odes to hope and joy (“Wall of Death“) to harrowing trudges through the darkest of nights (“Shoot Out The Lights“) to keening pleas for forgiveness (“For Shame of Doing Wrong“).

Two moments stand out, still, though.

One – very late in the night – was a long, gorgeous version of “Calvary Cross”, the centerpiece of Bright Lights; the lights dimmed, and the song started, quieter and more subdued than the original (it’s the audio track on this Youtube video, although the video itself has nothing to do with Thompson or the song), with Thompson weaving the vocal through his reedy guitar part. Collister and Gregson hummed the background parts from dim backlight as the song – about the unpredictability of a writer’s muse – swelled through the second verse and then through a long, inspired improvisation on the guitar that left me pretty well physically drained.

And then – as the clock closed in on 1AM, and after two encores that left the crowd cheering for still more, Thompson took the stage alone, holding his Strat, and played “End of the Rainbow“, also from Bright Lights, the most depressing song in the history of the English language. It didn’t “clear the room”, per se – he knocked the song dead – but the audience was subdued as the lights came up; they filed out pretty quietly.

Dave and Mike dropped me off at the house. I went downstairs and started on my mission to re-learn the guitar.

For a sense of what the night was like, check out this series of Youtube vids, pulled from a video Thompson released from that tour. Same band, and much of the same setlist.

Still hate ’em.

Yes, I watched it about 500 times over the weekend.

Not sure why.

Bill Tuomala notes that…:

Replacements Book Out On November 15th

The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History by friend of Exiled Jim Walsh.

Replacements concerts from the pre-Tim era are like Game Seven of the ’91 Series, or presence on the 35W Bridge on August 1; ten times as many people in the Cities claim it as could possibly have qualified.

But the book oughtta be good.

And I was so looking forward to our duet of Mandy at the next Patriot Forum.

It’s not to be.

I guess Ms. Hasselbeck and I will just have to sing something.  Maybe “Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye”.

(Via GeeEmInEm at TvM)

…the name of a Led Zeppelin song. 

It’s the one that goes “Grunk-grunk-grunk [pow] grunk-grunk-grunk, grunk-grunk-grunk, Graaaaaw, grunk-grunk-grunk, [pow, bump bump pow] “Oooooooh”, grunk-grunk-grunk [pow] grunk-grunk-grunk, grunk-grunk-grunk grunk grunk-grunk-grunk [pow, bump bump pow].

Any ideas?

TREBEK:  “Mr. Berg, you have the board…”

BERG: “I’ll take “Relationship Roulette” for $600, Alex”

TREBEK:  “This is ‘about as promising as dating Courtney Love…”

(Ding!)

TREBEK:  “Mister Berg?”

BERG: “What is marrying Amy Winehouse?”

TREBEK: “You are correct, and you control the board…”

From Pianomomsicle – a local blog that I wish were a lot more prolific – I loved this bit:

So tonight i was looking for my old “Adoration” part, and found it and the piano part. i thought it might be fun to revisit it on violin, so i pulled my dear violin out again. And i opened it, and it wasn’t something hateful at all. It was my beloved Merrick (yes I named it) and it was looking back at me like “Why have you forsaken me?” And i played Adoration on it, and despite my very rusty technique, especially my horrible vibrato, IT still played as pure and true as it could. And i apologized to it afterwards. And will continue to play it, so i can get back up to feeling like my vibrato doesn’t sound like a beginner and my shifting doesn’t sound like sliding again. And i feel like a more complete person. The piano part is so pretty, and i was able to play it without much pausing, and that will be great. But the real victor was my relationship with my violin. i think the reason i hated it was because maybe i thought it was taking away from my piano playing, but now that i am known as a piano player, playing violin again has brought back memories and made me realize it’s wonderful. Maybe being with something 20+ hours/week makes you forget about its good qualities or something. You could probably relate that to marriage, too. Well, after coming back to it, i definitely don’t want to let it go.

I point it out partly because of the story at the top – how she became a violinist in the first place – and largely because re-discovering things you used to love had been a big theme for me lately…

…no, not quite.  I should have said “rediscovering things with which I used to have deeply-dysfunctional, codependent relationships, and trying to do it right this time” has been a big theme for me lately. 

My old cello needs a ton of work – so I don’t get to play much lately.  But a few weeks ago I went into a store, and sat down and tried a cello.  A nice one.  I started playing a few old things I’d memorized maybe 25 years ago – some little Küffner etude that I used to do as a warmup exercise – and it felt like the sound was shaking something way deep in my brain.  I kept on going, playing more old stuff, feeling deliriously comfortable, like the vibration of the instrument was a drug.

Damn.  Fun.  Gotta do that again sometime.

Anyway.  Talk radio?  Biking?  I’ve been doing that kind of thing a lot lately.

My dad never had all that many records when I was a kid – but the ones he did have, I remember pretty clearly.

Common weekend listening was his Clancy Brothers record, with Tommy Makem.  I can still hum/sing most of the stuff; “The Rising Of The Moon”, “Dirty Old Town”, and a bunch whose names I can’t remember but whose tunes I can’t forget.

Makem died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer.

Red?  Sure she remembers him:

Dear Tommy Makem: Your voice basically WAS my childhood. I still listen to those old Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem albums, and it’s always the oddest feeling, a mixture of present/past. Am I a child? Are these records playing on a battered turntable as I dribble a popsicle down my T-shirt? Or is it now? These songs are woven into my life, they’re just a part of who I am. I will leave it to others to talk about how the Clancy Brothers influenced an entire generation of singer/song-writers (Dylan is eloquent on this) … For now, I mourn the loss. A fragile thread of connection to my childhood, the continuum.

Very, very true.

Kevin Cullen has a wonderful obit (what, you thought it’d be by Lars Tostengaard?) at the BoGlo:

Tommy Makem was an Irish soul singer, and souls don’t die. His music is preserved, on the old vinyl LPs he made with his pals, the Clancy brothers, more recently on CDs, more intimately in memory, in the hard drive of any brain that heard his basso profundo voice.

To hear Tommy Makem sing “Four Green Fields” was to hear Enrico Caruso sing “Vesti la giubba,” or James Brown sing “I Feel Good.” He was for Irish traditional music a great ambassador, and a consummate performer.

Sigh.

…I’m not the only Allison Krause et al fan in the MOB…

It might make a great addition to one of her workout IPod songlists…

In April, 1985, my college stage band went on its spring trip. 

I played guitar on the jazz stuff (and percussion on the classical stuff), which was a fun stretch for me, since I’d not had a huge jazz background.  Spring tour was usually a 2-3 day jaunt, playing 2-3 gigs a day at rural high schools in the Dakotas and, once, rural Manitoba. 

But in ’85 – my senior year – the band’s director had a serious case of short-timer’s syndrome.  A college music teacher since he’d graduated himself, 13 years earlier, he was burning out on the long hours and short pay at our tiny college; he’d spent the previous couple of years getting a BA in Computer Science in his off-hours.  So instead of organizing a gruelling working tour, he took his tour budget and splurged on taking the band to Minneapolis to see the Dave Brubek Quartet at the Northrup Auditorium (and, unbeknownst to us, interview at Sperry/Univac in Roseville, for a programming job he got and started shortly after I graduated). 

Anyway.

The host of the evening with Brubek was an MPR host named – and I’m not kidding when I say this – “Lake Hammond”.  I thought it made sense as an air name for a Minnesota radio personality.  

It’s sad to see Leigh Kaman is retiring after 400 years in Twin Cities radio…

(Idiot that I am, it took me years before I realized his name wasn’t Lake Hammond.)

…and interesting to see I’m not the only one who woofed Kaman’s name, at first.

(I, myself, didn’t learn his real name until a year or so later, when I’d moved to the Cities and did a bit on the Don Vogel show spoofing Kaman’s psychedelic delivery)

Just a note – everyone who’s anyone is coming to the..

 THIRD ANNUAL MOB SUMMER BASH

at Keegans, tomorrow night!

Boilerplate:  The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is a non-partisan group of bloggers who exist, mainly, to further blogging in Minnesota.  As such, we invite all bloggers, and for that matter all non-bloggers, to come on down!

Now, yesterday Jeff Kouba from TvM wrote in my comment section:

It being the MOB at all, there should be a rule that we can only play “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the jukebox…

Of course, Journey’s 1981 classic – which had a couple of years’ association with the TV show Scrubs – will now forever more be linked to The Sopranos, because of its prominence in the final epi.  So naturally, a good MOB party should play it prominently.

But there are other good Mob – if not MOB – related songs to choose from:

1. The Night Chicago Died, Paper Lace (naturally, the referenced “East Side of Chicago” exists on the same plane as, well, the Jukebox at Keegans). 
2. Meeting Across The River, Springsteen – maybe the best song ever about small-time hoods.
3. Dance With Me, the Iron City Houserockers – great song about a small-time hood and his girl out for a night on the town.
4. Princess of Little Italy, Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul – and I’d suggest it even if “Little Steven” Van Zandt didn’t also wind up playing Silvio Dante for the show’s whole run…
5. Big Man In Town, the Four Seasons – it just sounds right.

OK, what the heck, your turn…

The Night Writer apparently whacked his head on the same thing I did, somewhere along the way:

It was a warm summer evening, in the gathering twilight that I like best when it is still light but the sky is beginning to gray and the lights of the cars and houses really seem to pop. I swung out onto the almost deserted highway and flipped over from radio to CD and was rewarded with a couple of songs from Springsteen’s Born to Run album.

The quality of light, the open road in front of me, a couple of anthems from my youth…it was as if a screen door slammed in my mind, a dress waved, and a vision danced across the porch as the radio played.

I put the pedal down and off I screamed into the night.

Cool!

Just one look, a whisper…

…and I’m off to Keegans!

I think it was Leonard Bernstein – or Keith Richard, I always mix the two up – who said that 95% of any genre of music, classical or blues or jazz or rock or pop or afro-worldbeat – is rubbish.  5% of pretty much any genre is going to be great, no matter what genre.

But – apropos not much – there’s a long list of songs that I’m told I should like, but for whatever reason just…can’t. 

I’m going to kick the list off right about now:

• What’s Going On, Four Non-Blondes: Cringeworthy retro-hippie bilge.  Sung by chicks!
• No Rain, Blind Melon: Cringeworthy retro-hippie bilge.  Sung by chicks!
• Lay Down Sally, Eric Clapton: Clapton is one of the great guitar players alive.  He pretty much invented the “white guys doing bluesy-rock” genre.  Marcy Levy is one of the coolest background singers ever born.  Combining the three should be a no-brainer.  And yet I can’t stand it, partly because it’s just a pointless song, and partly because it kicked off about 10 years of really bad music from Clapton.  And why would anyone listen to LDS when “The Core” – which features Clapton actually playing some amazing guitar, Levy actually singing a cool harmony part, and a song that actually works – is available on the same album?
• LA Woman, The Doors: Actually, except for “Hello, I Love You”, pretty much everything the Doors ever did stank.  One of very few topics where the Oliver Stone movie about the subject was better than the subject. 
• No Rain, Blind Melon: Yep.  Still cringeworthy retro-hippie bilge. 
• Sunspot Baby, Bob Seger: Don’t get me wrong – Seger has had his moments.  Many of ’em. I flip on “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” when I need wash Jefferson Airplane out of my head.  “Hollywood Nights”, “Beautiful Loser” and “Night Moves” have prominent places in the soundtrack of my teenage years.  And “Main Street” is one of the best songs ever written.  Chalk it up to having to play SSB for too many drunken mooks in too many crappy bars, and getting very tired of that same 12-bar progression, over, and over, and over, and over…
• You Spin Me Round, Dead Or Alive: Adam Sandler’s cover was actually a huge improvement.
• What’s Going On, Four Non-Blondes: Still cringeworthy retro-hippie bilge.  Not all that sure about the “chick” thing. 
• Everything “ZuZu’s Petals” Ever Did: No, I don’t care that the lead singer is married to Paul Westerberg.  Twin Cities underground rock died the day ZuZu’s Petals became a headliner.. 
• Eternal Flame, The Bangles: The sound of promise being shattered; the band that in 1984 gave us the incandescent “Dover Beach”, four years later gave us a Desmond Child outtake. Sung by chicks!
• Everything You Want, Vertical Horizon: The day alt-rock died.
• You Shook Me All Night Long, AC/DC: No, I love “Highway to Hell”, “It’s a Long Way to The Top”, “For Those About To Rock”, “Love At First Feel” and a zillion other AC/DC songs.  But YSMANL wore out its welcome by about 1983, never to return.  Instant tune-out. 
• What’s Going On, Four Non-Blondes: Yep.  Still cringeworthy.  And I think the bass player was really a guy.

That’ll do for now. 

Paul Schmelzer at the MinMon writes:

City Pages accused of fabricating quote: City Pages’ Peter Scholtes is getting heat for his cover story, “Where the ladies at?” Among the complaints about his piece on the B-Girl Be hip-hop festival: that he fabricated quotes.

Posted by Mitch Berg in Media, Music| 3 Comments »