Lennon on the BBC

We caught a bit of the BBC special "Imagine: John Lennon" the other night, a documentary made up of bits of interviews and film clips of the mostly post-Beatles Lennon, including a lengthy and somewhat cringe-worthy bit on the whole 'Bed Peace' charade.

What struck me was how frankly pointless alot of what Lennon said really was. Apart from the whole 'world peace' and anti-materialist screes that Lennon became sainted for, the guy seemed so often like someone who tried to be profound and tried, in some ways, to justify the adulation that the world heaped on him, and yet failed. Much of what has come out about Lennon since his death in 1980 hasn't been particularly flattering - his narcissism, his selfishness, his sometimes appalling treatment of women. Some of that actually bleeds through in bits and pieces in this documentary, although not enough to really give the observer a sense of whether his personality flaws have been accurately portrayed or overblown merely to sell books - none of which, we'll concede, we've read.

He was desperately flawed in some ways, and seemed sometimes to hate being loved for being a Beatle, wishing he could be loved for something he couldn't really make himself be.

But the special was revealing, refreshingly free of interpretative analysis, and remains still one of the most cruely truncated cultural parables of the late 20th century.

He would have been 70 last October. Thinking about a 70 year old John Lennon is an achingly tantalizing exercise, isn't it?

John McLaughlin at BT

A few things struck me about John McLaughlin's show at the Theater last Saturday night.

First off, some trivia: McLaughlin's accent seems to have drifted a bit off the French-professor patois we recalled from our phoner with him in 1986. A bit more of the original UK English, a little American, some lingering French. One never knows with this cat.

We're not sure we'd ever say this, but it was arguable that Johnny M was actually trying to keep up with his band, counter-intuitively. Gary Husband's keys were generally warm and created the right harmonic bed around McLaughlin's guitar, a must for any successful McLaughlin keyboardist. Generally fleet and informed, although occasionally drifting into staccato pointlessness (fusion is, believe it or not, an artform that thrives on subtlety).

But the life of the show was their stand-in drummer, Mark Mondesir, a cat McLaughlin first encountered when Modesir was playing with Zawinul's band a decade ago. Utterly unstoppable, one of the fastest riffers and between-beat craftsmen I've ever seen behind a kit, he absolutely propelled the band into thin air at times, and his duo with Husband (no slouch himself) was fun and breathtaking.

As for the maestro, he relied mostly on a medium-to-heavy fuzz solidbody sound, and his playing was generally excellent. It did occur to me that his mastery of tone and micro-harmonics is one of his least lauded skills, and frankly, as far as sheer firepower, any number of modern rock shredders (Buckethead, say, or even Morse) could probably wipe the floor with him at this point in his career, and that from someone who first saw McLaughlin thirty five years ago, and has always counted him amongst my biggest heroes.

I found the quieter sections generally more intruiguing - McLaughlin has always appreciated and nurtured space when he gives it to himself. But he still has a keen sense of dynamics and knows completely who he is. He is undeniably a musical treasure, and still plays like he owes no fusion-skeptic anywhere any apologies. We were pleased to hear "The Last Dissident", a seventies nugget from Electric Dreams, although it took us a few bars before we recognized it.

He was generally engaging with the crowd, tossing a few senior-moment jokes out, and having a good time. He obviously treasures this band, and it's hard to think of a better showcase for the Lion in late autumn.

This guy got better pictures than I did, being up in nosebleed balconyland. His review speaks for itself (uh...), but the pictures are very good.

Gary Husband

Former Level 42 drummer, now sideman to John McLaughlin and a host of others, Husband has just released Dirty and Beautiful Vol 1, the first of a series of sessions he did with...get this...McLaughlin, Steve Hackett, Alan Holdsworth, Jerry Goodman, Jan Hammer, Robin Trower.

Not all in the same room (in case we got some Mahavishnu fans' blood pressure up momentarily there, sorry), spread across this quizzical disc as a kind of 70's-hero all star revue. Husband - accomplished drummer and keyboardist (kind of a fusioneer DeJohnette) - is likewise a decent composer, keenly attuned to the nuances of guitar-driven melodic fusion.

Full review coming soon, but as I wrapped up my McLaughlin story for the Weekly today, I thought it was time to actually spin this disc. It's already a favorite, and what in the world would droopy old fusionheads like me do without Abstract Logix?

Catching up

We found ourselves skimming through handy dandy USB flash drive the other day - we use it for everything, and we're notoriously lax about cleaning it off at the appropriate time - and we found a review of the Rush show we caught at Red Rocks last August. It was intended for this site, can't remember why it never made it on, but here goes.

There was a guy we met on the stairs at Red Rocks last night, a gold medal Rush fan, fiftyish and a little bit lubed up on margaritas, who explained about the impressively tenured Canadian trio, "You either love 'em or you hate 'em..."

Interestingly, I countered, I felt myself an exception to that rule, being neither a fan nor a skeptic for as long as I've ever been aware of these guys, which extends back into the mid-seventies. For progheads BITD, like me, Rush was a bit like prog-lite - minimal on soaring, virtuosic keyboard indulgences, fantasy-rag imagery, the requisite bombast of Marshall-stack re-imagined neo-classicism. I was, back in those days, quite smitten by the rich drama of mainstream prog, and Rush always struck me as sort of cultish offshoot. I roadied for a band who covered 2112, but I never bought their records. I neither resisted it nor embraced it - it was always someone else's thing.

The only real point to all this self-professed agnosticism is that I personally felt myself in a somewhat unusual place - being immersed in a Red Rocks ceremony surrounded by thousands of fans - many of whom were seriously hardcore and/or long timers, and not really being one of them. My critic side tends to bristle a bit at hardcore fan devotion as a matter of professional necessity, but I started as, and remain, a music lover too, so I know about this on a personal level and understand.

Anyway...as far as the show goes, a few things struck me about the formidible trio and their three hour/two set show, the second in a two night stand at the Rocks. Impressive set and production design - the video feed was flawlessly timed and directed. The lights were very good, some pyrotechnics and yet another uselessly stationed fog machine on the always-breezy Red Rocks stage. Whatever.

The band itself was just shy of stunning - moving confidently from material as old as 35 years, and as recent as a few months (they have a new record coming out). Geddy Lee's uniquely stirring falsetto struggles just a bit at some of the higher notes (we suspect, although don't know for a fact, that some of the older material is now performed in a lower pitched key to accomodate Lee's voice). The second set featured the entire Moving Pictures album, which includes the single "Tom Sawyer", the one Rush single non-congregationalists are likely to know best. I actually found the album segment surprisingly short, if decidedly well received.

As far as the band goes, there is a certain sense of a forty-year tenured rock institution finding its way between providing its hits and what its fans came for, and keeping the show vibrant and alive. It's a tough thing for anyone (I ask bands about it all the time, and even if everyone has an answer to the question, as if they have answered it for themselves, no one ever seems to have a magic formula) - I've heard and read that the band typically peforms everything more or less note for note, but I did hear some passages (Lifeson's acoustic figure leading into "Close to the Heart" for example) where the band strayed a little from rote catechism, as well as some Lee-Lifeson interplay I suspect was genuinely improvised. But these guys are no jamband, their music can be spectacularly complex, and their fans don't expect jazz. They expect Rush. And I really don't think they struggle with this issue. One thing I can say about these guys; they know who they are and what they do, and always have. that's both a trivial observation and a profound one. Rush doesn't reinvent itself, and few of the prog bands they are compared to can make that statement.

I will say that I grew some admiration for their musical personality, a kind of relaxed athleticism that promotes measured but effective instrumentation aggression, broadly sweeping without succombing to posturing self-indulgence (they seldom let you forget they're actually a rock band, bred from the musical ethics and the aesthetics of the seventies) or showy preening.

Lee's bass playing is genuinely impressive, grounded in standard rock bass but accounting for a large measure of the music's melodic content - Lifeson, on the other hand, ostensibly the guitarist in a power trio, relies heavily on broad and textured chording, sweeping across the rumbling rhythm section, picking solos off here and there but generally painting a sonic landscape more than sketching details. He's a good player, not a virtuoso, and I do think the band's unique personality is due in large measure to his role as a guitarist. He's basically a rhthym guitarist in a rock trio, and quick, name two others. Hell, name one.

And of course, there's Neil Peart. Adherents will tell you he's the greatest rock drummer of all time. I could see a case for that, even if based on personal experience I'd probably land him near the top and no further. Still, he absolutely DID have the biggest kit I've ever seen, and I found his drumming both lithe and thunderous. He has an obviously acute sense of tonal character in his druming and uses that to great effect, building and relasing crescendos with colored runs and fills, and generally building surprising complexity into teh compositions. He could play forty percent less to sustain the material, but the material would suffer - his role is deceptively central to the band's musical personality.

His solo, duly and unapologetically seventies-indulgent, included a very cool big band interlude and a neat Afro-electro segment that I thought brought unexpected and welcomed depth to what could have been a mere display of chops...something Peart, even at nearly 58, still has in spades.

The mix, I thought, was 20% too guitar heavy - from decent seats near dead center of the venue, 43 rows up, I literally couldn't tell in places whether Peart was actually playing, and plenty of segments where I could see (courtesy the video screen) that Lee was playing but couldn't hear a note. I know getting the sound just right at the Rocks is often challenge, and I wouldn't scream for my money back, but yeah...too much guitar in the mix, both sets.

It'd be a litle preposterous to self-annoint myself a Rush fan at this point, but certainly I'd paid again to see this show - it is both a vestige of a brave and provocative rock world I used to know very well, if through different bands, and for all the critic complaints about band's growing and maturing and experimenting - God bless the ones who do - this is a band that has a unique formula, devoted fanbase and a great live gig, and has kept those things more or less the same for nearly forty years, and sorry, but that's a good thing too.

Motet redux

We'd be remiss (actually, we have been remiss) not to mention the brawling, brash and utterly baddass Earth Wind and Fire trib that Dave Watts and Motet staged last Halloween weekend - we caught the Aggie show - see previous post....

With the three singers dressed as - what? wise men? pharoahs? - Watts led the 12 piece group through throwdown funk and jazz jam workouts with nimble turbulence. Watts' drumming, as always, was sharp and robust - the horns were excellent, if a little under-miked at times, and Jans Ingber stood out with hair-raising reach and fully hiphugging-bellbottom emotiveness. The guy is an absolute scary talent, fully at home in 70's soul both soloing and in conjuction with the other two.

Our first trip to the Aggie; the Ft Collins Halloween crowd was predictably weird and well-lubricated, and the theater itself has a rough, almost warehouse-like scruff to it that has a strangely charming appeal.

As for the picture, sorry about the idiot with the plastic light saber - this is the best of the four or five shots I managed to get with my crappy phone camera.

Motet

We had a great chat with Dave Watts a couple of weeks ago, in preparation for what might be their Motet's most demanding and ambitious trib show ever - Earth Wind and Fire. Three nights - Aggie, Ogden and landing at the Fox for Halloween. Piece ran in the Weekly yesterday (Thurs).

Faced with an indifferently uncooperative Fox publicist (did I say something about the BT/Fox merger being basically invisible??) and an editor busy with his own job, I found myself suddenly without a GL spot for Sunday's Fox gig.

Called the nice girl from the Aggie (Cornelia - my new bff) and she slapped me on their list + 1 for tonight; no begging/pleading/'don't you guys have a laminate?' bullshit. To and from Ft Collins will be a bit of a pain, but this show I want to see,

Which...gave me an idea. We'll be following up on this soon.

I'm still a little perplexed how I got to the place where I have to compete for one night's use of a communal BW/Fox laminate, for a show I actually covered (led the section), in a paper I've written for for 16 years, about a band I've covered for a decade....with people who have never covered a Fox Show, ever, once. I swear I'm doing something wrong.

RIP T

We just happened across the terrible news yesterday that keyboardist T Lavitz died last Thursday Oct 7 unexpectedly, in his sleep.



T was a breathtaking player, one of the few keyboardists bred from the soils of seventies fusion who could bind sheer firepower and uncommon warmth in the same bar. In the early Jazz Is Dead incarnations, T always struck me as the band's connective tissue, able to reach into the elusive soul of the original material and give it substance and challenge for the jazz-fusion players around him. Multi-lingual.

He always struck me as a friendly guy, a bit of a nerd and a reluctant virtuoso if there ever was one. One of the few guys at that level I never cringed over interviewing.

We were fortunate enough to interview him at least twice, and we'll include a paragraph from a 2000 piece we did on The Dixie Dregs, quoting T.

“But, you know what? Ever since I joined this band, when I was 22 years old, I have never, ever gotten tired of playing this music. There’s just something about Steve’s writing that makes this material so challenging and so much fun to play. It’s just incredibly orchestrated – I find that after a few days of playing a set, I know exactly how many seconds I have to change the settings on my keyboard for the next tune, how many seconds I have to towel off, scratch my nose, everything. Thing about this stuff, if you miss a bar someplace, you have to sit out a long time before you can jump in again, it all goes by so fast.. It’s fun, and it’s a workout.”

RIP man. Jeez, way too f-ing soon...

The Kids are OK

In reminiscing about their Hamburg days, Paul McCartney once recalled to an interviewer that the Beatles used to hear shouts of "macht shau! macht shau!" ("give us a show!") from the drunken and cynical nightclubbers they played three two hour sets a night back to in the day, a call to do a little more than stand like rail-thin scousers and strum their Rickenbackers, and even if their career led them to places where the talent to make the same 60 songs entertaining onstage was ultimately shelved in favor of studio extravagance, they never really lost that sense of projecting charisma.

We're not ashamed to to admit that, as smitten as we've become with their videos recently, we had some reservations about what kind of a show OK Go was going to deliver at the Fox the other night. If video killed the radio star, broadband dances on his grave.

So, we were pleasantly surprised when the Chicago-founded quartet's first Fox appearence delivered onstage, and with barely a passing reference to their storied video artistry, a fun, solid and energetic set. Keenly tapping references from skinny-tie post-wave pop, techno-dance Prince channeling and indie-rock agita, OK Go bears its influences unapologetically twelve years down the road, having survived their early years dismissed by tastemakers like Pitchfork as lame Weezer-wannabes and maturing into sly popmeisters, balancing craft with spontenaiety, and showman's cheese with craftsman's beef.

We are more partial to thir later material - "This Too Shall Pass" and "White Knuckles" - but even their earlier material like "Invincible", "WTF" and "Here It Goes Again" (the latter sounding like an early Ocasek-Orr thing) came across with stout and confident resolve, with singer Damian Kulash up-front striking his best Doug Feiger poses, belting out post-slacker anthems of ennui and puny redemptions as if, holy smokes, he really means it. And yeah, they had a video feed running behind them, but no dogs and no Rubes and no treadmills, and after it was all said done, they could have delivered just as well without it. The confetti cannons and odd interludes (they did one piece, I didn't know it, straight a cappela, accompanied only by hand bells; a neat and deeply musical trick and an endearingly touching surprise) were unforced and well-timed.

For a band relatively unknown to the routinely insular Fox audience (the show didn't look sold out to me), they turned thier crowd into instant believers, and us too. My wife asked me what "indie rock" really meant as we were walking back to the car, and in the context of OK Go, I was more or less at a loss. Not on a major label? Not beholden to mainstream tastes? Who knows, because if these guys are the reigning poster children of indie-rock, they sure don't seem reluctant to become whatever indie is supposed to be a reaction to. They appear to be just hitting their stride and ready for their closeup, an ironic thing in a broadband world where careers are made and lost at download speeds.

Someone obviously keeep reminding them that just showing up isn't the point. It's "macht shau", isn't it?

Leon and Elton

It was a little surprising hearing the lead track to Elton John and Leon Russell's new record, The Union on KBCO the other day. Just heard a little but may download the thing.

Anything to put a little of the soul back in Reg's singing, and anything that foists the Space Cowboy into the spotlight again, has got to be a good thing...the added benefit of T-Bone Burnett behind the dial probably helps. Neil Young, Brian Wilson and Booker T guest on it - sounds crowded, but like I said, it's always nice to hear from Leon.

And, I guess, Elton....

Game jones

Been drifting into Diablo 3 news and vids of late. Also, although I hadn't been paying much attention, there's a new Fallout game coming, due on shelves in the US Oct 19th. May just jump on that.

Robert Plant won't go away

I swear, you can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting Robert Plant somewhere or another, pimping his latest CD Band of Joy.

We appreciate anyone who covers Los Lobos ("Angel Dance", one of their better old nuggets), but haven't had much interest in the rest.

Honestly, the guy has been out there doing his Americana-roots shtick nonstop, interviews all over the place for the CD release, tapping into this thoughtful-elder pose about rediscovering Americana, blah blah blah. This is all following up on the unexpected success of his collaboration with country/bluegrass songbird Alison Krause, which was a decent record but arguably in spite of Plant, not because of him.

I think Plant in general has mostly lost his deep talent for re-imagining American roots music after the first Zeppelin record - when he was channeling Willie Dixon through Promethean post-psychedelia. What he and his band created back then was far more interesting and enduring than this kind of Tony Bennett-in-a-hayshed routine. And I'm not even much of a Zeppelin fan. That was at least him - this stuff fails as trib and mostly fails as interpretation. Talk about someone trying as hard as possible to be someone else.

Fine, he's 62 and rock 'n roll bores him. We got it. The problem is, most of the shit he's doing now bores the rest of us.

OK GO

Coming to the Fox. Time to dust off and get back in the ring?

Break

As in, taking one. Need it. Really.

Feeling...

...shaken, definitely not stirred.

Michael Been

Across the spread of rock music history, Michael Been will not be considered a milestone figure, but his band The Call enjoyed a notable shuffle through the limelight in the 1980's, with hits like "And The Walls Came Down", "Let The Day Begin" and "I Still Believe" - all of which I personally found compelling and surprisingly passionate offerings during a period where chilly detachment rules the rock singles charts. The band opened for notables like Peter Gabriel and Simple Minds.

Anyway, Been passed away of a heart attack a few days ago at a music festival in Belgium, where he was doing sound for his son's band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He was 60.

"I don't think there ARE any Russians/And there ain't no Yanks/Just corporate criminals/Playin' with tanks."

Indeed.

The critic as scorned diva

How exactly do you signal your acute disappointment to a publicist, who insisted you were on a guest list to a Los Lobos show, that you were in fact NOT on any such list, that the cheerless twentysomethings at will call and walking around with iPhones had never heard of you and couldn't care less that you had covered their show and helped in some small way to contribute to their pittence, without sounding like a whining drama queen primadonna asswipe?

This is something I should have an answer for, but curiously do not.

And the same publicist for whom said critic has extended himself this whole summer, and who is now faced with a meager four days to produce a cover story based on two interviews said publicist has done little to facilitate, thus guaranteeing a last minute firedrill for which they will bear absolutely zero accountability.

It seems my careful parsing of language must now be devoted to bullshit. Something here is just not right.

RIP Richie Hayward

Good guy, great band, and a monster of a drummer. I struggle to think of another drummer who just loved his gig as much as Richie.

Cancer steals another. mf

Little Feat in their 70's prime.

What took so long?

Caught a flash of Michael Franti's latest hippie-carib hit song on a beer commercial last night. It sounded like...this is where it belonged, all along. Funny, that.

Letting go the Haight

Saw this piece on MSNBC today, on the 15th anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death.

Joel Selvin was one of the last of a dying breed, a fulltime major city rock critic, and most of the time not a bad one. He certainly had the good fortune to write in San Francisco during and after the city’s great rock epochs, and as such, he is well qualified to be quoted as an expert on the Grateful Dead, who were, despite the broad reach of their repute well after the fact, favorite sons during a period when the city’s rock scene had its pick. Most critics, incidentally, dismissed the Dead with varying intensity levels of scorn.

So I wouldn’t begrudge Selvin’s claim to longtime scrutiny of the Dead, but I was a little disappointed to see the same inch-deep canonization about Jerry Garcia on the 15th anniversary of his death you could have gotten from anyone. This in particular really bothered me:

“Jerry turned out to be an enduring American archetype,” Selvin said. “He was one of the few people of his era who stayed true to himself and pursued a steady mission, undeterred by fame, fortune, marital problems, and all that kind of stuff. Jerry was about what Jerry was about in 1965 as he was when he died. And I think that’s the sort of consistent message that you need to have that kind of impact.”

In fact, I can think of any number of artists who, whether they got famous or not, stayed "true" to what they were, depending on what you really mean by that, or what they thought they were on the planet to do. Coltrane, Miles, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard...even less artistically influential artists. Personal faves like Leo Kottke and Richard Thompson come to mind. Lou Reed. Pete Seeger, for chrissakes.

Garcia and the rest of the band lived a hippie lifestyle in the mid 60’s, but graduated to Marin County and BMW’s as wealthier grown men. Everyone is entitled to the comforts afforded by years of hard work, we don’t take issue with that, but it seems to me that much of the stodgy materialism and flat American conventions at the center of the bullseye of the hippie counter culture is based in precisely that. So it couldn’t be that the message was entirely one of rejecting some middle class comfort. What was it, besides 'have a good time and don't hurt anyone?' Because if it was just that, maybe his cultural influence is overstated. If it was ‘do what you do, regardless of what happens to you in the meantime’, we’re not sure that’s such a great idea.

If you're a Deadhead, you believe it's a virtue that a chubby, middle-aged guy keeps touring and keeps playing 30 year old songs despite failing marriages, lousy and deteriorating health, drug busts, etc. The music matters more than that.

It may be criminally uncool to suggest that it could be just as admirable for a guy to say, 'Hey, I'd like to have a life and a relationship and improve my health, and so I'm going to unplug for a while to rediscover those virtues.' Jerry did that a little, and went some distance to regain control of his body, but we don’t hear Selvin giving him credit for that. We’re not cheerleading for rehab or detoxification, but we’re also persuaded by landing epoch-topping garlands on people simply because they put their work – artistic or otherwise - above their own family and their own health isn’t necessarily the most generous application of life lessons. I’m not sure most Deadheads would reserve the same reverence for an insurance salesman who worked and partied himself to death at 55.

Musicians, in the main, are generally not particularly remarkable people, at least insofar as they often have limited skillsets with which to reinvent themselves. This isn't a slam - the fact is, fan worship tends to cast a lot of virtue onto artists that is often misplaced, and it can be challenging and sort of un-fun (even for a critic-fan like Selvin) to simply regard a virtuoso musical artist as being just that, without trying to turn them into cultural saviors.

And I would propose that the disciplines that make one a truly virtuosic musical artist in fact hinder one from personal reinvention. Concentration, self-criticism, deep immersion into one's artistic oeuvre, an enforced myopia. Reinvention, whether for good or ill, would comes more easily to someone who doesn't know who he is in the first place, or had lost faith with his primary mission. He may end up a better artist in the end, perhaps, but you can write off that cultural savior thing.

This quote also bothered me.

Garcia’s message, said Selvin, was largely one of “music for music’s sake,” which has been “virtually eradicated in the digital era.” Whether playing with the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Jerry Garcia Band or his bluegrass ensemble, Old and in the Way, Garcia played on, oblivious to the world of commercial music.

Please. The whole "digital era" in contemporary music wouldn't exist if it weren't for thousands of artists toiling in obscurity, playing "music for music's sake". Selvin seems to embrace this notion that there's the Dead, and there's Lady Gaga, and really not much in between relative to the machinery of contemporary music distribution, which has broken down to the point that those toiling in obscurity probably have never had it better in terms of reaching their fans and latent fans, if they know how to coax the technology. What a pity he was quoted like this, because as much as I'm liable to complain that Selvin suffers a bit of Dead-fan myopia, I cannot believe he believes Garcia is the only or nearly only guy in contemporary popular music who pursued a career resistant to commercial influence and its corrosive effect on artistic substance.

It may well be that a generation or two of American kids who were raised on commercial art, or least marinated in it, saw the Dead as the anti-rock star heroes; sure they were, but there were plenty of other anti-rock star heroes whose music was far less palatable to mass audiences and thus regularly escape critical canonization.

It also helped that the Dead matured and graduated more less intact from a chaotic and self-immolating psychedelic scene, with all the cachet of 60's cool and thankfully little of the narcissistic craziness that brought down many of their contemporaries. And as good as some of the Dead's songs were, and some of them are undeniably treasures, some of that was at least as much Hunter's work as Garcia's, in a lot of cases. Hunter gets mentioned here, but in passing.

From a critical standpoint, I've been personally assailed by Dead skeptics as being a "Deadhead", which was meant as an insult at the time that I didn't take as such, and I've been criticized by genuine Deadheads for "not getting it", or misunderstanding the community, the music, the message. I have always actually kind of appreciated being semi-loathed or derided from both sides.

My view of the Dead is this: perhaps surprisingly, I think a case could be made that the Dead are the greatest American rock band, in terms of longevity, resistance to commercial influence, stalwartness of its fan base and overall quality of the material. I'd argue that case on its merits, if not necessarily with much passion....

I also see them as a connection between what was primarily white, upper middle class kids to a kind of idealized 60's tribalism that resonated with them at a mythological level. Following the Dead around wasn't really an option if you were 18 and had to work at the factory to support your young family. Plenty of American youth, unfortunate enough to spend their lives on the harder side of certain economic and educational realities, were NOT plugged into the Dead phenomenon. They couldn’t be.

For all the deeply ingrained skepticism about materialism and middle class conformity that coursed through the Dead subculture, it was completely and entirely a phenomenon built on postwar prosperity, a kind of American paganism posed against the deities of suburban complacency and materialism. The fact that it cast a skeptical eye on the pillars of middle class values is irrelevant - hell, it would have to. As long as there's a culture, there has to be a counter culture. The Dead, quite unintentionally, benefited by the disillusion and indifference that a lot of children of relative prosperity had toward that prosperity - infuse some ancient American mythology, epic concerts, a tight weave of like-minded fans, plenty of recreational stimulants, pleasing iconography, and you've got yourself a new religion. Nice hymns, unobjectionable sacraments, high priests, little in the way of disconsonant resistance and an embracing community. There were believers, true believers, and adherents of convenience, stopping in for the party. A lot of those.

But I wouldn't credit Jerry Garcia with strategizing or even inventing all this, even if writers like Selvin credit him for presiding benevolently over it. He was a guitar player and songsmith of considerable import, a direct link to the yielding of 1950's American culture into the questioning and iconoclastic spirit of Kerouac and Ginsberg, the proto-hippie, leading a band very capably through good and bad, commercial indifference, many years of deeply insular woodshedding, and for all that he deserves great credit. His influence was significant, musically...culturally, I do see his success as a byproduct of the world he resisted and poked some gentle, good natured hippie humor at. He didn't take very good care of himself, and had a little trouble managing his own life. Lots of people do, especially people who spend many years doing little else than playing rock music and taking recreational drugs. Garcia was, to some extent, the ultimate Deadhead, and his sad demise in some ways belies the emptiness that a lot of cults ultimately mask.

His canonization was inevitable, and I won't complain too loudly about it. I liked his music but only saw the band twice. I think there actually IS a story about the Dead, and most rock bands from that day cannot really make that claim.

But I do wish the narative would grow a little, expand a little, and that those who spend so much time witnessing the Dead and writing about the Dead from the front row, could manage to put them into a broader context.

Yeah...work is work

...but then there's



...and for a day at least, the universe smiles at ya.

Days off, and not really off

Spent Friday between conference calls and paperwork for day gig, and assembling a piece on Jamie Janover for BM - the piece went okay, generally, although I struggled mightily for a lede and came up with something a little lame. I hope it flies, or at least comes back to me in time to rewrite.

Los Lobos today - somewhat garbled and typically lowkey interview with Steve Berlin on Wednesday. One of the things I like about these guys is their complete and pathological refusal to get real excited about what they do. Makes my life as a writer somewhat more difficult, but an admirable quality. We do what we do, we've been doing it for a while, we're glad a few people like it. Anything else?

Pretty sure

...we're getting close to the end here. It bothers me that this should be so, but part of me also accepts it.

I mean, seriously. Isn't it time to yield to younger, more deeply passionate and articulate writers who attribute every quote and place their commas and ellipses properly?

OK

Frisell piece went pretty well. Bill is one of those guys, and amongst those with careers as lengthy as his there aren't very many, who seems perpetually puzzled that people ever want to interview him.

Bill Frisell

Chat with him tomorrow, small piece in advance of a fundraising gig at Unity Church. LAst minute request from Dave at BW.

I like Bill and his music, but never sure what an interview is going to be like.

Back

The road back from Cuyahoga County was somewhat less grueling than I had feared, included an utterly amazing Iowa sunset Saturday night.

It was, however, somewhat shrouded in gloom as we got a phone call Thursday night that the neighbors had 'forgotten' to tend to the animals...who were left alone, unfed and unwatered, in the house for a week.

Hysterics, tears, anger, chaos all ensued, with the two dogs ending up at a 24-hour vet facility, and Cassie in critical condition. Blood work numbers all over the map, acute dehydration, etc. Doc said when the dog came in she looked half-dead. Bagoas, amazingly, was healthy. Cats appeared to be okay, Swasey being little more than very pissed off, and Smudge apparently (and thankfully) oblivious.

Seriously bad miss on the neighbors' parts - they are absolutely fired from any further pet sitting, and probably some beyond that.

Finished two stories while out there, pieces on Big Head Todd and Paper Bird. Pitched quickly on a Bill Frisell piece for next week, and a BM piece on Jamie Janover approaching.

More on the music stuff shortly.

Greetings from Lakewood, OH

Utterly sweltering here in NE Ohio. Trip is okay so far - some timing and scheduling issues, didn't make it over to Pgh. Work is burbling - writing and day gig - and I'm spending way too much not-fun time in front of a PC screen. Not as bad as last year.

Behind on my sleep, and not looking forard to the journey home, or the brutal week that awaits just beyond. But...we're okay for now.

Last weekend before Cleveland trip

Looks like rafting in the rain for Saturday (there's worse things), and not much else. Which is fine - vacation cramped with panic story assignments or acute day-gig drama are stressful and usually no fun, and I don't need that.

Curious I haven't heard from the Weekly - pinged them about BHT&M new CD coming out. David may be out this week or something - I'll hit them again next week.

Looks like the BM story on Jamie Janover is a go - Mary seems pleased, at least until I have to ask a few days indulgence on deadline. Some things never change.

Repent Walpurgis

No idea why, but this musty old title from Procol Harum's first album popped into my head today. Pleased to see a decent 1971 video of a TV studio performance of it.

UM story in, cheerleading

Did a great interview with Jake Cinninger from Umphrey's McGee last week, actually one of the few jam scene's veteran bands I find consistently interesting, probably due to their shameless progrock indulgences.

They're doing a show at the Rocks, twin bill with Galactic and the Wailers supporting.

Piece went ok.

In other news, David tells me that the Weekly wants to "concentrate on local bands in the next few months", and I didn't really ask for clarification. It DID strike me as consistent with a comment he made a few months ago, that the paper valued my presence since I was one of their few local writers...so I've been a litle hung up on this notion that they keep me around to cheerlead the local bands, and have their outside writers cover the other stuff.

I can't say I'm altogether comfortable with either an unnaturally sharp focus on local musicians, or with me being pigeon-holed as their "guy on the local beat", something I've never really wanted to do, and doubt I'd be very good at anyway. I have covered locally-oriented stuff the last month or so; Otis Taylor, who lives here but doesn't play here much, and the Sonic Bloom Festival, focusing on Jamie Janover.

My complaints about "we cover local music" are fairly simple; 1) being local doesn't mean you're any good 2) being local shouldn't trigger press coverage, being good should and 3) extraordinary focus on local subject matter for its own sake, in my view, only serves to amplify Boulder's runaway narcissism and render the paper little more than a mirror for it.

From my perspective, I really don't think people "support local music" just for the sake of doing so, and never really have. Club goers with limited discretionary spending will pay for something they like.

We'll see where this leads, but for now I'm laying low.

Writing back

The Weekly is going to do a piece on the merger of the Fox and Boulder theaters this week. I told David I'd contribute a little something.

The good news is that my old pal Cheryl Ligouri is taking the new company over. The bad news? Well, I'm not sure. I've always felt Boulder was best served by two competing high-profile venues, but business is business and I suspect at the end of the day it won't matter much in terms of quality of talent.

Also have some pieces coming up for July.

Little concerned that we appear to have no investigations on deck. Hopefully that will change soon.

Weekend wrapping up

Weather turned cold and rainy this weekend, so we decided to bag rafting and did a ton of cemeteries in El Paso county instead.


I was impressed by the poverty out there - house after house boarded up, junked out spreads with rusted old trailers on them, practically deserted little farm towns. Surprising and a bit distressing.

Well...back

The trip is done, we've been back a week. A few notes.

1) Flows - my obsessive concern about flow, heightened to an absurd crescendo shortly before we left by an absurdly low NOAA forecast, turned out to be (thankfully) unwarranted. I did get stuck, but it was on the first day, downstream from Butler while we were still in cattle country, and it was on a lowly shoal on river left. The flow dramatically spiked (as Ryan Christenson from BuRec indicated) about the third day out there, and when we hit Gov't, it was flowing about 2400-2600.Easy drop into two waves on the left - lasted all of 4 seconds.

2) Weather - Excessive wind, the first three days. I couldn't safely keep a fire burning the third night. The first few miles after Mexican Hat were a struggle - massive upstream blasting out of Pontiac Wash, then downstream for a few miles. Then hard upstream again, then some down. We got a little on Day 4, but it eventually stopped and we had a nice fire. Day 5 and 6 were essentially windless...but 100 degrees.

3) Camping:
Big Stick - the ranger asked us not to take a large site, but the trwo or three she recoemmended were all taken. We took it anyway.
Pouroff - a nice pre-MH site, river right. Only two decent tent pads, but located just downstream from a beaver lodge. Sharon got great pics.
Mile 42.3 - Navajo side, a sandy and fairly broad campsite, good landing but little shade. We considered laying over there, but I felt a little uncomfortable, largely due to wind, with a commitment to do almost 24 miles in one day to last campsite. It was the right decision.
Mile 54.7 - Navajo side, awesome spot. Sandy and easy landing, tent spots high on a sandy terrace above the beach, plent of room for fire/chairs/kitch at water's edge. Early shade in afternoon, late shade in morning.
Slickhorn A - Never been before; a very nice spot. Four or five decent pads, probably first Slickhorn in shade in afternoon, nice view. Would happily take this one again.

4) Equipment - Broke a tent pole first evening setting up. Annoying but we rigged it and it worked. Sharon left the silverware at home accidently, we borrowed from another party. Platform cracked, working now on a solution to that one. No issues otherwise.

5) Misc - We took about 1400 pictures. The flats had plenty of water, saw a few sandbars but didn't hit a single one. Stayed way right most of the way down. Trimble is gone. Actually saw 4ft Rapid for the first time - water was lowish early in the trip. Ran Ross too far left. 8 Foot jogged right at the top, straightforward center-left run, big rock/hole near bottom in center. Ledge was a few strokes, no big deal. Not a drop of rain. Beaver, bighorn, cattle, horses, toad, deer, herron and usual lizards.

Excellent trip, wasted after the driving but already looking fwd to next year's.

Guitarists aplenty

Caught a couple of shows recently that I wanted to scribble a few notes about.

Larry Carlton and Robben Ford swung through for a one nighter at the Boulder Theater a couple of week back, a show I previewed for the paper.

Apart from their respective resumes, which aren't bad, the two guitarists have a pretty lengthy history playing together, and the quartet show at BT didn't disappoint. Swinging between gritty blues stomps and fusiony light jazz, Carlton the technician and Ford the blues gut-buster have a seamless alchemy between each other - both capable of sheer flamethrowing chops, impromptu nuance and impeccable taste, I generally found that Ford was the better player that night; his playing was looser and seemingly more effortless.

Carlton, who we reviewed in these pages last August when he led a trio through here, just seemed tight, a little over-considered and never really managed to find his swing. Most working guitarists would cut off a foot to have Larry Carlton's off-night, of course, and overall the show (featuring Travis Carlton on bass and Gary Novak on drums, fresh off a recent project with Ford) was very good. Perfect venue for them, too.

Pat Metheny brought his Orchestrion project to the Paramount a week or so ago. We previewed this one as well (via email interview, not my favorite format, but it worked out pretty well), and were intently curious what the thing would really be like. Metheny has always staged terrific large format shows, so he had a pretty high bar to clear.

The Orchestrion, briefly, is a series of instruments activated through his guitar and controlled by solenoid and midi-type technology, built somewhat around, and designed similarly to, a Yamaha Disklavier. In essence, and this is a pretty significant over-simplification, Metheny orchesrates everything through his pick and strings. Most of the rig is percussion - there are vibes, bass, guitar-bot as well, but the vast majority of the machinery is percussion - a resonance, we thought, from the heavily Brazilian-influenced Metheny Band stuff of the last decade or so.

Without too many details, we thought the project and the show was about 80% successful - he played the entire album composed and produced with this rig, and a did few other impromptu things as well (even reaching for his guitar synth for a number or two). The response dynamics were impeccable; Metheny has obviously figured out how to make this stage-consuming contraption work, as well as building enough space for himself to both execute on his long-format compositional inclinations, and, happily, solo his ass off. Never a joyless perfomer, Metheny nonetheless also seemed to be having a hell of a lot of fun with this thing. (We won't describe it detail, but leave it to say that once the entire thing rig is revealed, it's almost breathtaking contraption to witness...) As far as his playing, I can't say I ever heard him play better.

One the downside, there were times when I did feel as the pieces, generally densely written and heavily composed, came across a bit sterile and two dimensional. I generally prefer his earlier band material, more jazz and less salsa/shaker percussiony, so I found the pieces' busyness a bit much at times. And..I really did miss hearing an actual piano solo, a side effect of too many Metheny band shows with Lyle Mays, I guess.

But I will say that I do think this an intriguing and genuinely musical experiment on Metheny's part, and I applaud its ambition and sucess. I won't say this was my favorite of a dozen or so shows I've seen, but it was excellent and provocative nonetheless, and if you get a chance to see it...do.

Vacation before the vacation

As I posted a few weeks back, I was really getting wrapped around the axle between work, getting ready for the trip and the writing thing. Not entirely sure what it was; a bit of exhaustion, periodic bouts of self-doubt lingering from The Event (yes, six years ago), a very tough winter at work.

Whatever the cause(s), I made a few adjustments. The SJ trip promises to be a chilly scrape, so we moved the launch date back to May 26 - something of a gamble, since the snowpack in the Animas basin isn't that great this year - in the hopes that the temperature would be warmer and the water a bit more generous. So far, weather appears to be cooperating; end of this week will really tell the tale.

I also sent a note off to Dave at BW, letting him I was really strung out and basically needed the month of May off to get my shit together, a request he obliged with the added encouragement of pitches for June, which I'll fulfill this coming week.

So, getting a little extra sleep, trying to stay fit and getting my head straight for the SJ trip. Work is still worrisome, but not letting it get to me. And rafting season is right around the corner.

Done

The Face story is basically finished and MJ is happy, and the Otis story is off to Dave at BW.

This week - evidence review for the DFM, an update or two to SBP, Pat Metheny Wed night and watching the River Flow.

Getting thru it

Managed to send off two versions of my Boulder Magazine piece on Face late this afternoon. Neither is terrific, but both are competent and reasonably well-written. Hopefully Mary takes one or the other and doesn't try to crank it into something it's not. Fan mail never had much appeal for me, and less as time goes on. She could completely ruin my friggin' week if she asks for a rewrite - unlikely, but entirely possible.

My interview yesterday with Otis was predictably nothing much to write home about. He was groggy and still recuperating from a recent hospital stay, so it was a struggle to get him going, more than usual. I think I can stretch to 1000 words on this, but a stretch it will be.

Then...done. Till after SJ.

On a better note

Managed to string together a couple of permits for San Juan. Launch 5/9 (yes, early) for a SI-MH run, then 5/10 for a MH-CH run. Six days total.

Little worried about the weather, since the cool-spring to hot-spring divide seems to typically hit the area about a week later. Question will be if it comes early this season (hello, global warming?), or if not, how cool the cool part will be.

Right now, it's snowing here in the People's Republic, so yeah, a little worried.

Here's some stoke.

Oh sure

Now it....
's

The 70's go on forever

Just purchased two tickets to see....Rush...at Red Rocks, in Aug.

Never a huge fan myself, but neither a certified hater (and I definitely knew some), they've always occupied kind of a sidebar presence in my experience. Likable, not compelling, prog-lite without the cape and candelabra arch...

The one thing I can seem to recall from BITD was that most of the kids I knew who liked Rush were better at math.

I suppose this dates myself...but tough shit. At some point, you stop apologizing for violating some vague crit-hipster code of conduct, and just like what you like, listen to what you listen to, and just live.

I'm still learning this.

Day 11, and that's all, folks

Had it not been for the couple of frsh inches they got the night before, and the inch or so that fell during periods of amazing whiteout, the last day at Loveland would have really sucked. Not quite corn, not quite packed powder, conditions were generally abyssmal - we did manage to find some pockets of untracked and we got in 19 decent runs, but forgettable. But we did get a nice end of day pic, looking up the creek toward an empty mountain.




And as it's been 70-ish down here since then, I'm fine with calling it a mediocre season and turn my attention to the streamflow.

Now if only the BLM would serve me up a cancel on SJ, we're good.

Phew

Spent a beautiful spring day inside, cranking on The Project , and carving up blurbs for the BW Best of Boulder edition.

Off to the gym. Last Loveland post of the season later. Bye!

Well...

...turned a day older yesterday. Damn you kids, get off my lawn. Nice to get so many hb's from Facebookers, and odd the omissions...

Robben phoner went okay last week, Larry phoner today...hopefully short and useful. Questions off to the Metheny people, let's see how that experiment works.

The Fray may have resolved itself. Nope, guys, I didn't find you.

Lots of writing coming up, debating on a corn day at Loveland on Saturday - debating time and weather.

BLM isn't opening up...yet. Hope springs eternal. Not really, but it sounds good.

Jammed up

A string of two or three setbacks in quick succession have led me to a place where I'm seriously considering either calling the newspaper gig quits, or at least taking an extended break.

The Spankers thing still stings, getting completely stiffed on Phoenix, a so-so chat with a surprisingly standoff-ish Robben Ford yesterday, a quickly arranged chat for tomorrow with Otis, with whom I have a decent relationship but will be probably unprepared for (and I know how he hates that), being relegated to an email interview with Metheny for 'Orchestrion', and probably in the process of getting stiffed for a piece on the Fray...one after another, I'm feeling like I'm swinging at air here. Part of this is my fault, part of it is a series of events or screwups outside of my control, but combined they suggest that I'm just not packing the kind of punch I used to.

As recently as a couple of months ago, I felt like I had this thing really under control. Will see how the next week plays out - I can't walk away from the obligations I've already committed to - but I have to take a breath and re-evaluate.

Ah, to be the toast of the ...universe

Unsurprisingly, scheduled phoner today with Thomas Mars of Phoenix got cut, amidst hurriedly blurted publicist promises of a reschedule for tomorrow or Friday.

This is what happens when you are the the most (indisputably) blogged about band in the world right now. Which may last until...what, the end of this post?

A Little snark, but hey, if I had a dime for phoner that got rescheduled...so no biggie, and I do like their record, and it gives me another day to practice saying "comment ca va?", which I am regrettably out of practice doing.

Surviving springtime...

...in the Rockies.



Holy smoke, Day 10 at Loveland was epic - high winds, blowing snow, zero visibility. Only saving grace was that it was April, with moderate (20ish) temperatures. Snow was very nice, but the winds were gruesome. Last endurance day of the year (we presume), spingtime beckons.

The Project is improving day by day.

Crummy

Still feel crappy about my gaffe, even if they've already forgiven me themselves. It is, as I've come to realize, far more a sign of my own ignorance and hackwriterness than it was an insult to them.

Anyway....

Seeking an audience with The Fray is not looking particularly easy, which also helps remind me that I've been swimming amongst the guppies for lo these many years.

Dare I make my approach on Pat Metheny and Larry Carlton?

Ski tomorrow, even though it'll be blustery, cold, little new snow and probably hard as concrete.

Screwed up

Wammo and Christina Marrs are not married.

Laughed at on Facebook, groveling before my editor, and truly embarrassed.

Shit.

Hello Spring

It was 70 degrees today, supposed to be warmer tomorrow.

I still have 3 ski days left, if I stick to my schedule, but I've been thinking rafting, and especially Utah, all day today.

And there's a SJ date...4/28. Sharon will say no.

As we micromanage our media experience

Truck went back to Car Toys (sorry, you guys don't get a link...) because they wiped out my climate control lighting. Also said the CD was dropping out periodically, the guy said, well, we'll just pop a new one in there.

Swell, so I drive off after re-tweaking all the EQ and radio settings ( I may not bother with the clock, since the display is too small for me to read), and the damn thing still drops out.

As far as the sound goes...okay, it seems better (I also tweaked the power amp gains to better align the fade), but very thin when the volume is low. Beginning to think that the 6x9's in the door, a gift from Sharon right after I bought the truck, are really the weak link. May go for 6"/1" separates.

Day off from the slopes

Crummy weather has settled in and I'm taking a day off from the slopes.

The SBP site looks nice now, think I conquered a few hurdles understanding design and widgets last night.

Installed an Alpine CDA-117 in the truck yesterday - satisfaction level is about 78%, I still don't think the rears are getting enough juice. Will call today and see if they can tweak - may bite and have them replace the speaker connects with RCA's. Sound is good and the RF crackle appears to be gone. iPod sounds like...well, iPod.

Is it done?

Maybe....

April

Looks like

(maybe) Whigs 4/8 edition
Phoenix 4/15
(maybe) Larry Carlton-Robben Ford 4/22

And I've decided that Pandora mostly sucks.

Pandora

In a fit of frustrated fatigue, I switched off Soma and logged in and set up an account on Pandora.

Built one station around Steve Roach (their choices are dubious, to say the least...) and also added their pre-packaged Electronic/Ambient station, which is okay.

It'd sure be nice if Lone could go in and stir the pot a bit on Cryosleep. But...it's been years.

Fixed

...the second Day 8 is actually Day 9.

Whew.

Been getting swamped with mail...

...regarding the fact that we have TWO SEPARATE 'Loveland Day 8' posts.

The outrage...the sadness....the sense of betrayal and confusion....hang with me, my beloved readers. Do not despair, the Statistics Department has been notified and is working round the clock to address, diagnose and stabilize the situation. Hazmat teams are on the scene.

Thank you for your patience.

Redemption?

March is running out of chances, but we have another wet 'n sloppy one bearing down on us as we speak - missed my walk, damn.

They say 8-16"...Sharon is freaking out, especially as we both have to leave early tomorrow to go visit Louisa The Tax Goddess, to assess our contribution to US society for 2009.

Loveland Day 9

The much-anticipated 'big March dump' turned out to be a bit of a dud - we got 7" or so around the house, but Loveland only got 3". Hardpack underneath some loose stuff, but mostly (despite bright sun all day) it was freakin' cold. -1 in the morning, maybe warming to 8-10 degrees above zero by mid afternoon. Third week of March felt like January.

20 runs, the cold slowed me down a bit.

Snark

Just read a comment on TPM regarding the threats of some HCR protester about a new civil war, suggesting they move to Texas, aka "Baja Glennbeckistan".

Alex Chilton

Maybe, quite possibly, rock music's most endearingly iconic cult figures, Alex Chilton passed away suddenly yesterday of an apparent heart attack at 59.

He had his biggest hit as member of the Box Tops at 16 with "The Letter", which I remember hearing as a kid of 9 or 10, and went on to form one of rock's most influential and commercially neglected bands, Big Star.

Big Star represents everything that makes aspiring rock writers get all moist around the loins - commercial failure, lush and elegant melodic instincts, the band's enduring influence on the jangle-guitar indie rock of the 80's and 90's. Chilton gave the mainstream world a compellingly enduring single in the sixties, and a relatively obscure but stalwart and respected actual rock band in the seventies. Few rock artists could claim such a gracefully schizoid career. It's a fine thing that Chilton had lived long enough to enjoy the recognition for Big Star, they had a show planned at SXSW tomorrow night, but a tragedy that he he didn't even make it to 60.

I'd say I'm at a point where it seems that dying at 59 seems young.

March dump

Finally, a standard issue March dumper lurches into the state, promising something like 8-16" down here, and as much as 16" (predicted) for Loveland.

Spring appraches, and I wish I could enjoy its proximity with an actual permit in hand. Haven't given up yet.

It's alive !!!

www.spiritbearparanormal.com

May be kicking myself before long that I initiated yet another online hobby that my rapidly diminishing free time can't sustain, but it's a means to an end, and getting a little blog-design/wordpress experience can't be a bad thing.

At this early date, the site is still disagreeably clunky and woefully bereft of content, but at least I got it loaded and functioning. Off we go.

Strangely appealing juxtaposition

Just got a pimpmail alert for "Presale: Iron Maiden at Comfort Dental Amphitheatre".

Why does that strike me as funny?

The project...

...hit a milestone yesterday, and approaches rapidly toward deployment. Stay tuned.

Pavement adds a Colorado date

From a distance, a safe distance, it frequently appeared to me that the whole 90's indie rock scene, which took its cues from a generally receptive and hipper media and a cultural bias already comfortable with characters wearing outside-the-mainstream attire, benefitted enormously from the indie scene of the 80's, which was markedly smaller and which generally had to fight for everything it got. Which is not to denigrate its best people, of course...if anything, the sst's and other tiny labels cranking niche skatepunk or cowpunk or thrash or what have you allowed less obviously extreme indie artists to get some attention with music that less extreme listeners could connect to.

The Cobains and Vedders, of course, stood astride the aesthetic and commercial posture platforms - one might say that the chasm grew too wide for Cobain - and somewhere along the line it became kind of okay to regard indie heroes as genuine heroes, rather than fear tainting them with the kind of blind adulation once reserved only for cashier-type mainstream poster boys.

Stephen Malkmus was one of the best examples of the post-struggle indie rock icons, a sensitive-to-a-fault and awkwardly unsettling songwriter, he and Pavement became antihero heroes in a way that, say, Bob Mould before him and Rivers Cuomo after him never really could be.

Pavement was product, almost perfectly, of its time, gutter poets in a time when gutter poetry hadn't yet lost all its grime, even if it hadn't entirely earned it either.

They just announced a reunion tour stop in Colorado, for September. Little doubt the place will be crawling with white teed IT types, probably with their second wives, scrutinized by press types buzzing off a vague sense of the importance of the event, even if most of them couldn't name three Pavement songs if their jobs depended on it.

Haven't decided if I'm going to pitch BW to cover it, and even if I do, I have to wonder if Malkmus is doing any retail press.

Big snow?

Loveland barely nudged past the 200" mark a week or two ago. Mediocre snow year, although conditions have been generally pretty good.

Picked up 4" last night; we noted the obviously-typo'ed total YTD tally, which seemed to reflect a bit of wishful thinking on their part. (All of our parts...)

Loveland Day 8

Started out a sunny, packed-powder burner, more than hints of approaching spring. Mountain knocked down all over (groomed lanes down Scrub and Firecut), warm temps and barely a breath of wind.

By 2PM the sun had gone in, moderately heavy cloud cover, snow started hardening and the light went flat.

Still a good day. 25 runs, and the last chair up Lift 6.

Sea Salt

No complaints about the Great Big Sea show last Friday at Boulder Theater. Rousing crowd and a genuinely fun, affable band. Couple of things struck me about them.

There's a very neat balance between the three principals - guitarist/vocalist Alan Doyle is the MC, funny and self-effacing, a natural showman and keenly in tune with his audience and how they respond to the band. Did a funny and recurring bit about making out with Emmylou Harris at Telluride, as well as leading off an 80's cover singalong (who cops Rick Springfield onstage on a dime?). A bit kitsch in spots, but he had the bobbing and singing and nicely lubed-up audience more or less in the palm of his hand.

Sean McCann plays the balladeer, probably the best lead vocalist of the three, reserved but comfortable in his role. Played a ballad or two from his recently released solo album, Lullabyes for Bloodshot Eyes.

Bob Hallett, the quiet fireplug multi-instrumentalist on stage left, is the least effusive of the three, more or less content to lend the accordion or bouzouki or fiddle fills around the band's big-acoustic arrangements and sit out the onstage banter and joshing. He sports a bass/almost baritone vocal that plays a deceptively key role in the band's vocal harmonies, and one senses he's the quiet anchor behind GBS, they guy who keeps them most obviously tethered to their roots.

Couldn't help but think this division of labor, even if an unintended by-product of their lengthy tenure, is a central component to the band's success.

Probably the other thing a GBS neophyte might notice, at least someone using their albums as point of reference (and Hallett, in his interview with me, cautioned that the albums are barely more than a formality in the band's career at this point - the live show is really the point...), is that the division between pop/rock and Celt-splashed Newfie folk - the shanties and jigs and so on - is decidedly more blurred on stage than on CD. Most of their pop songs are heavily weighted toward folk-rock stylings, and most of the trad (or trad-inspired) stuff is played fast and loud.

It underscored a point I think Hallett was trying to make in our interview - that short of the times when they delve really deep into Newfoundland or Irish traditional folk, and they can, most American audiences think most of what they do actually is trad...clearly it isn't, but it's to their credit that they polish their pop stuff with that fisherman's pub veneer so gracefully you barely notice the hybridization at work, and even if you listen closely enough to hear it, you don't feel like throwing a flag for larceny. These guys have grown up well past their influences, and visit them in earnest only sparingly.

Their gig is well traveled (17 years?), not overly polished, and they seem to genuinely enjoy doing it. Can't overstate the importance of watching a band that challenges you to have as much fun as they're having.

Fearing for tiering at Loveland

With a foot of freshies in the last week and promised sunny/outlandishly beautiful weather tomorrow, I am in acute dread state about not getting up there early enough to make the upper lot.

This, of course, is a holdover from Karin, who'd get very surly about being relegated to the Valley, and then mostly because it disrupted our after-ski beer in the Rathskeller, having to catch the last 4:30 shuttle down to the valley. Even downhill, it's a long walk humping skis - I've done it.

Funny how those things linger.

Although, to be fair about it, the Valley lot is a complete PITA. And if it's busy enough to send me down there, the whole place'll be a zoo.

So, some of it lingers from BITD...and some of it is now-reality based.

TT

...make that, Temper Trap phoner tonight....

GBS

...made the BW cover this week. First time (I think) since my Otis Taylor piece in...yikes, 2002?Maybe 2003. Can't remember.

Ever show up at a party in your work clothes where everyone else was dressed up?

Really wasn't that happy with the piece, although I did work on it longer than usual and cleaned it up quite a bit from first draft.

Fact is, I'm seldom very happy with any piece I do anymore - it's a clinical thing, I think.

Temper Trap phoner tonight.

The Stanley goes spirit viral !

...or something like that....

I like to tell people I've been in the ghost hunting business long enough to remember when hotels - especially expensive, image-conscious, postcard-worthy, legendary or near-legendary hotels - got squirmingly uncomfortable if you asked about their ghost. Bad for business, either because the whole subject of ghosts is vaguely offensive to acutely religious people (it is, in some cases), directly offensive (at least credibility-denting) to stalwart atheist/materialists, or a little scary for the believers...in all cases, a drag on the business.

But, at least in the case of the Stanley Hotel, the 'Ghost Hunters Effect' has taken full hold.

I noticed that Sharon had friended up with/fanned up with them on FB, so I did too. And what have we seen? Regular exhortations about ghosts: 'who's up for our Friday night investigation this week?', 'check out these cool orb pics!', 'here's some tips and tricks for newbie ghost hunters'...etc etc.

It's marketing time, kids.

And it's true, while the Stanley has hosted 'ghost tours' and been generally paranormal-team friendly over the last few years, through social media it has now connected aggressively, enthusiastically and almost exclusively with the 20-30something Ghost Hunters crowd right where they live - orb pictures, DIY investigations, guided tours, ghost stories, etc etc. And check out our discounted room rates this weekend. Oh yeah.

Maybe it's the old-fogey in me, but I have a kind of knee-jerk "get off my lawn" reaction to all this. The practice of ghost hunting, to whatever extent you believe it's a pursuit worthy of the time and effort, is something that should be undertaken with a level of seriousness, skepticism and focused reticence. The image of all these gawking 30 something females snapping pictures in the Concert Hall and squealing when they capture the inevitable orb hanging like a semi-transparent Xmas ornament over a grainy, twilight-dark exposure of nothing kind of cheapens the allure that Stanley has held for most of us longer-than-1 year ghost hunter types. The place is, deservedly or not, a kind of ghost hunter's Promised Land. And my ire isn't helped by being a Colorado resident, imbuing the whole thing with a second level of proprietary ownership I hate to see callow interlopers challenge. Grrr!!!!

And on a more practical level, this may well make it a bit harder for us, either in DGH or FME, to get back in there and do a decent investigation. (We were up there a couple of years ago, and didn't get a thing except snapping a few orbs and getting nearly mauled by a grouchy momma elk on the front lawn...) Kinda reminds me of The Ladders TV commercials - y'know, the tennis tournament when all the slobs climb down onto the court to start playing, and ruin the whole thing.

Ah...I've become such an elitist.

Related to this, Sharon and I are discussing starting our own group. I may wonder in a few months why I even considered it (either because I did and it made obvious sense, given our currently precarious and usually frustrating role with the other three groups we 'belong' to....or I didn't, for some other reason), but from where I sit, we just have to.

Cards, website, stickers, blog, domain...the whole thing. We just have to.

First thing to do is pick a name.

Flatiron Paranormal Inquiry is my favorite, followed by Spirit Bear Paranormal.

Shall see.

Lenny !

Just got a pimpmail from Big Hassle that Lenny White's got a new solo CD coming shortly - first in a decade.

Clarke, Jimmy Herring, David Gilmour (!?!). Asked to get a copy - we'll see...

After the RTF reunion debacle, a few of us old fusioneers hoping for some redemption from the 1st generation. Lenny is down with it.

Loveland - Day 7

Been a bit slack about keeping up with ski-blogging, but we'll report that we've hit Day 7. Snow-wise, the season got off to a very slow start and has proceeded steadily if unspectacularly - I don't think they've had a single snow report of over 5", but no long droughts either.

Day 7 was not bad - 21 runs, generally cloudy and breezy, snow off and on.

Last few days have been 20, 21, 24 and 21 runs (if memory serves), and I'm looking at a 12-day season, with 2 or 3 weekends off to hang with Sharon...or whatever.

Desolation

I felt, a little bit ago, an oddly embracing 'ok-ness' about running Desolation with Sharon this year. Like...late August.

Yes, the date is significant.

I expect I'll snap out of it...but maybe I won't.

New adventures in ambientia song titling

Per Drone Zone....M. Medi :"You Always Run Away Why Not This Time Just Stay Away?"

Great Big Sea

Had a nice chat with Bob Hallett from Great Big Sea yesterday, the commercial-rock/Maritime fishing-song band from Newfoundland. Their music, which I had had only a passing acquaintance with in years previous, is completely, shockingly without guile or pretense. Their rock bits are, generally, wide-open anthems of heroic love/devotion, personal triumph/tragedy...something about them reminds me of U2 before they started believing all their press.

Their folk songs - either traditional or band-composed - are neat little bits of Celtic fishin' 'n drinkin', replete with dangerous, roller-pin wives and whiskey-doused sailor jiggin'. I'd hardly be the right one to judge their authenticity, but they're fun and at least honestly delivered.

Probably not enough to make me a devoted fan, but good stuff, and looking forward to seeing one of their two Boulder Theater shows next weekend.

Scanning, indeed

Spent much of yesterday (..not blogging, but...) going through old pics and managed to find the sequence Karin took of me running Chittam in 1998. Actually came out pretty well.

Deciding which pictures to scan, of course, is a bit of a psychological exercise (how many Deso trips do I need? Do I only scan the "healthy" pictures of Karin?), assuming one does not engage in scanning everything. Which may not necessarily be a bad thing, but would certainly present a significant investment in time.

Scanning the past

We picked up Pandigital photo scanner thingie this week, a neat little device not much bigger than two cell phones stacked, that scans photos and saves them direct to a memory card. No PC required, although it does come with a USB cable.

Results are pretty good so far. The scan process takes about 4 seconds per photo, and while at 300dpi the images are just okay, it's a decent way to quickly digitize mountains of 4"x6" pics. Alot easier than lining them up on a flatbed.

I already have saved a number of photos I had of Karin, around the condo and on our various outings, as well as a Mt Sherman climb we did in 1992 (?) and one Desolation trip, which I believe was 1997. Will probably throw one or two of these up on Facebook by the by.

Missing the days when the actually photo process date was printed on the backs of prints. Our documentation for all these pictures wasn't real good - relying on memory and bits and pieces in the photos themselves to date them.

It occurred to me, especially scanning the pics of Karin, I could not have managed to do this 5 years ago. No way.

Time blunts, does it not?

Near Floyd Experience

I'm not typically much for cover bands - standard issue critic snootiness, I guess - but I pitched BW on a whim to cover Wish We Were Floyd, a Denver-based Pink Floyd cover band, comprised largely of members of Savage Henry members and a few (quite a few, actually) friends.

I saw Dave Herrera's Westword review of their Cervantes show from last year, and since he's an actual music critic, I was curious as to whether or not their alleged marksmanlike precision was the real deal or simply the unexpected gush of another Floyd fan getting a decent dose.

The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think...(couldn't resist)...but actually, they were pretty good. Note for note precision? Eh...mostly, I suppose. Singer Damon Guerrasio seemed more comfortable with the Waters numbers (he admitted in our interview that Gilmour's voice is very tough to really nail), but the guitar work (Stuart Miller and Glenn Esparza) absolutely slayed the guitar parts. Most of Dark Side, predictably, but for my money the highlights of the evening were a thunderous, triumphant "Mother" and a bruising, melt-the-walls rendition of "Sheep".

And a special mention for Kate Shoup, designated "Screamin' Diva", who sent chills through the Fox audience with a brilliant, mostly-but-not-completely textbook read of the "Great Gig in the Sky". Shockingly effective and utterly gorgeous.

See 'em, Denver area folks. Great stuff...fun show...

Happy Anniversary, Bear

Six years ago today, we were married at the top of Lift 2 at Loveland. Gorgeous day - blue sky, near perfect snow.

I have the picture, and the wedding Coors Light they gave us.

I'll always remember it, and I'll always love you. My Bear.

New music

Steve Roach has released a double live CD of a 2007 performance at Grace Cathedral, in SF. If I had half the mind, I'd try to get a review published somewhere.

Serrie's also got two new releases, both space-themed - not the simpy New Age stuff he occasionally drops into.

May be checking out two or three of these offerings.

Also heard a nice bit on Drone Zone today by an artist named Dan Pound, from a 2006 release called Trance Meditation. Very nice stuff.

Lady who??

I usually don't go much for glitter pop-babes, since they typically chafe against my snooty critic sensibilities...but I think Lady Gaga is kind of cool.

Obama's fall

Must say, his proposal to institute a budget freeze (which doesn't take effect until 2012) draws toxic scorn from the left, and increduluous chuckles from the right.

I mean, seriously, how anyone could call this guy an ideologue is beyond me. The guy plays everything right down the middle - frustrating for those of us who believe that hard 'left' contains remedies to the relentless corporatism and subsequent Wal-Martization of America, but still worthy of some admiration.

Detritus

In my now twice daily attempt to keep my work email with the size/space guidelines (or else they start whacking features like fwding or attachment, kind of lobbing off functionality appendages...), I came across a bit I wrote in 2005 about the closing of Penny Lane, the neo-Beat coffee shop down on Pearl St that fell not unexpectedly 5 years ago to rent pressures.

It was a short recollection of a Fred Frith show I saw there, prompted by a request from Pete Miller to write something like an RIP. The show was sometime in the late eighties - I want to say 1987.

I had the paragraph stored in my drafts for some reason, and oddly, I felt a momentary pang of fear that I could lose it, just like that - and it's a neat little remembrance.

So, here it is.

The crowd, 30 or so of us, were equally constitued of guitar geeks, live music junkies and the usual smattering of East Pearl counterculture undead. Frith, bearing the demeanor of a semi-retired British literature professor, took his place on a stool and proceeded to launch his uniquely merciless assault on twentieth century harmony, an hour or so of bouyant neo-Celt/folk figures adrift in an ocean of ecstatic sonic agony. It was like touring the cosmos from seat of a jalopy amusement park spin-you ride, and you either walked out profoundly confused or profoundly changed, or you weren't paying attention.

Hendrix never sleeps

Heard on NPR today that a 'new' Hendrix record is on its way in March. "Valleys of Neptune" comes from Jimi's storied post-Ladyland London sessions. Heard just a snippet on the piece...eh, sounded like, well, a Jimi outtake.

They at least had producer Eddie Kramer on there to talk about the release, which he spent a year cleaning up and re-mastering. Kramer is still in awe of Hendrix - I guess most of the rest of us are too, although can anyone think of any dead musician's closet tapes so thoroughly exploited as Hendrix'? With the possible exception of Elvis....

Me again

Hat in hand, returning again to the blog. All sorts of excuses are possible, some legitimate (work, for one), but also a bit of the reverse entropy that probably 98% of bloggers suffer.

Anyway....

Day 2 at Loveland - crowded and no surprise, since the past two weeks have been absurdly cold up there and yesterday was the first real break, with temps in the high teens/low 20's. Decent snow in the trough runs, thin cover elsewhere. All of Lift 6 is open, with pretty decent snow, and we managed to get lots of sun and 23 runs in.

Interview this week with Erik Deutsch, former Boulder keyboardist now trolling sessions with some Pretty Big Names in NYC. I don't have his CD, but then did that ever stop me?

Past that, uncertain.

Winter seems long this year.