memories « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

memories

Friday / memories / music / video — Comments Off
7
Mar 25

Re-Listening: One of these has a notorious Star Trek reference

Apropos of nothing, I just sneezed. Some sneezes you can feel coming from a long way away. Sometimes you can sense that a sneeze will be arrive tomorrow, at about 1:30. The lining of your nose gets that first tinge. “There’s something in here!” signals are sent to the brain. The brain fires off memos in triplicate to the body. “We’re going to do it!” Your eyes shut, the tongue moves to the roof of the mouth, and the muscles brace. Sometimes it happens in just a few seconds, or 25 minutes.

That’s not the sneeze I just experienced. This sneeze was a bit closer to the seeing-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes tinged with a bit of “What am I going to do after this, if my nose stays on my face and my organs stay in place?”

There’s no metaphor here. Just the one sneeze, come and gone. Sometimes the nose needs a reboot. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a low-brain reaction to a sternutation.

I’m about 14 CDs behind in the Re-Listening project, so let’s make a small dent in that deficit. If anyone can remember back that far, the Re-Listening project is something I’m doing in the car. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.

I decided, since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” I thought, back when I did that sort of thing. “I can pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.” And I did that, until I kept forgetting to do it, at least, which is how I’m so far behind right now.

So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998. This was a record that wasn’t meant to be a success, but a 1996 single got a lot of airplay and a Grammy nomination. And then the record was certified gold the next summer. And that happened to Duncan Sheik who was used to playing small venues, and suddenly he was on much bigger stages, which was a surprise for everyone, especially the singer, who saw that one song stay on the charts for a year, after peaking at #16. It spent 55 weeks as a radio hit, which was one of the longer stays on the chart at the time.

But there was more to the debut record than just the one single. There were two other singles! And a lot of deep cuts. Probably I picked this up after the second single, “She Runs Away,” but I don’t recall for sure. It was almost 30 years ago … a sentence I find I am now saying a little too often.

Anyway, when I popped this into player, I was hooked by the second track. (It sounded great on big wooden speakers.)

Why did we ever move away from those large speakers, anyway? Everything sounded better. And nothing was re-compressed by an additional layer of digitization.

And, look, that first Sheik record was pure singer-songwriter pop. Except for the parts that weren’t. But he did like to incorporate his vocal range all over the place.

At various times, when I had to do such things, Sheik’s music was a good vocal warmup. Sing along on the way to the studio and all that.

There are 11 tracks on the record, I liked 10 of them, and eight of them still hold up. Sheik has released eight other studio albums and a live record, but none more commercially successful than his debut, which did hit number 80 on the Billboard 200. He’s probably OK with that. I got the impression from interviews that the unexpected success was a little overwhelming.

These days, he’s performing as a writer and composer on Broadway, where he’s won two Tony awards.

I’m sitting here looking at the next disc trying to decide how I have this false memory. The record was released in 1998, just another power pop, post-grunge alt record. And the overriding memory doesn’t fit that timeline. I went to high school, and once worked with a guy who was in a local band. I saw them play, just another group of kids who were inspired and he’d sing the big hit, but he did a cool vocal trick in one spot where he’d sing on top of the note in a key spot. It was just enough different that now, when I think of or hear the song, I hear it his way.

Only, I didn’t work at that place when the single was a single. I hadn’t worked there in probably two years. So how does that memory even work?

Beware of memories, I guess.

A few years later I got an out-of-the-blue email from a mutual friend and it turns out that that guy was going to go to jail for a while. He’d gotten drunk and climbed into his house through his bedroom window, only it wasn’t his window and it wasn’t his house. Extremely common name. No idea what became of him.

Anyway the band was Semisonic — and I mean that made the record, not the band of the guy I knew. “Closing Time” was the single everyone knew, of course, and it was a big hit, climbing to 11 on the US Radio Songs chart, four on the Pop chart, topped the Alternative Airplay chart, 13 on the Mainstream Airplay chart and so on.

But, and I realize I used this above, there was a lot more to “Feeling Strangely Fine” than the one single. The second single, from August of 1998, is a terrific little pop number which found its way into two top 40 charts. I always liked that it was a song about listening to a cassette. It was charming even to me, a slow music format adopter.

Then, as now, there was no way this piano — a keyboard, really — should pair up with that bass sound.

Whenever I picked this up, I don’t recall that either, I listened to it for a good long while. It got heavy rotation during the year of driving back and forth from Little Rock to Birmingham. This was a good late night, empty highway song.

I don’t know your feelings about this, obviously, but I think we all need a New Year’s Eve song. Here’s one now.

There’s one song another song on here that I’ve always liked, but I can’t listen to it, because the weird way the singer treats the chorus is too catchy. It’s just days and days of this, when you play it. You’ve been warned.

That was Semisonic’s second album. They produced two more studio records and a live album. And they’re still at it, touring the U.S. this summer with Toad the Wet Sprocket.

That’s enough for now. The weekend is here!

memories / music / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
27
Feb 25

Go enjoy it again

I’ve got nothing much, and we’re woefully behind on the CDs, so guess what? If you don’t like this you should come over and do some grading for me so I can do something more fun, that’s what.

We are 13 albums behind in the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my CDs in the car, and in the order (more or less) in which I acquired them. More or less because all of them are in CD books. Remember those? And I recently discovered that I got two of the books out of order. None of this matters.

This is the second time I’ve written about Memory Dean in the Re-Listening project. The first time was in 2022, which was just at the beginning of this silly exercise. It hasn’t been a regular feature here, but it has been fun. Memory Dean, their independent album that they were selling out of the back of their trunk in 1993. The obscure “In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” album was half studio production and half live shows. And, in truth, was probably originally a cassette. I got it because a college buddy of mine knew the band, introduced me and gave me that one in the rare disc trade. Memory Dean is a group from Georgia, where my buddy was from, so he could get more copies. He liked a CD I had that really only had one good song on it, by a band that was local to me, a band who’s name I can’t even remember, so we swapped.

In 1997, “So Complicated” came out, their third release, their first as a full band, having added a rhythm section. And they were finally on a small, independent label, Capricorn Records, originally out of Macon, but by then a Warner Brothers imprint running in Nashville. Somewhere around that time I picked it up.

Here’s the title track, which, on the basis of this driving power, they released as a single.

That’s much different than what Memory Dean had sounded like for years in all the little venues across the Southland. It was too guys and two guitars and some good times and singalongs. And there’s some of that on “So Complicated,” too. The problem, for us, is that almost nothing from this album is online. Go figure.

But here’s a demo of track six, which probably should have been the lead off track for all that it signaled about this record.

Despite the new direction, there are some re-orchestrated versions of stuff that had been on their first two releases. “Ghost,” for instance, came out on their previous effort, and it’s in the classic format.

The only thing missing is the Bubba Riff.

Similarly, “Dying to Live” made it on here, too. And it’s a better title than anything else.

Their last release, according to Discogs, was 2001, which is about right. They still played, and then they played sporadically. From what I can tell it was probably special appearances or venues with historical or otherwise convenient ties. It looks like they haven’t played together since 2021. Shame, really. They had a good niche and a fanbase to go with it.

Then there’s this other, even better niche. I don’t recall when I got this, but it was probably in a bargain bin, and it was an absolute steal. When I got it, I probably thought something like “Everyone needs a little Otis.” My apologies for not clearly remembering my inner dialog from more than a quarter of a century ago. I’d like to distract you from that failing with Mr. Dock of the Bay himself.

That’s straight out of the Stax catalog, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This album comes to us from 1968, is still timeless and remains one of the best records ever pressed into any format. Otis Redding’s seventh studio album, and one of the many many posthumously released titles. The last stuff he laid down for this were recorded two days before the plane crash that killed him in December of 1967.

A lot of the tracks collected here some B-sides or things that, by now, are well known to us. “Glory of Love” was basically a standard, and it became a top 20 hit in 1968, four decades into its life here, but I did not know, until just this moment, that Redding had a video for this one, and it is almost 60 years old now. And, aside from a little problem of warbly tape degradation that was sneaking into this before it was digitized, I might prefer this version.

The guy just looks so effortlessly cool there, that even back then in what have to some of the earliest days of what we think of now as a music video, there’s just two shots. I assume the cutaway in the middle is to cover a lip syncing flub.

The Huckle-Buck came to us from Tin Pan Alley (and so I really am curious about the song selection here now) and this is what a crossover hit sounded like after it had crossed back and forth a few times since the 1940s.

Here’s the original, which topped the R&B charts for 14 weeks, if you want to get really historical. And if you hear rock ‘n’ roll here, from 1949, you’re not the only one.

Proving once again that I need someone to create the living breathing flow chart of music, what a site to see that would be. (Music history of the 20th century would be, probably, my fourth interesting area to study, if I could keep all of it straight in my head, or if someone developed that chart. I imagine it like a family tree.)

Speaking of sites to see, this song and the dance craze that came with it mainstreamed enough to make it onto The Honeymooners.

The Tin Pan Alley aspect of the song comes in with the lyrics, of course. Roy Milton sang it first, and he drove the song to the number five spot on the R&B charts.

Frank Sinatra did it soon after and could only push it to 10.

But you wanted a blues standard, I heard you say? Otis Redding is your man. Here he’s got a post World War I vaudeville-style piece that has aged remarkably well, for now being more than a century old.

Remember, I said I got this because I figured everyone needed a little Otis Redding. But what you get out of this album is an education. There’s music from all over the country and spanning three or four decades of the best American art forms, 11 tracks in all, and 10 of them are spectacular. It closes with one of Redding’s own B-sides, a soul-infused blues track that probably is due a remaster, but only so you can study every integral part of the thing.

Wikipedia tells us that “Ole Man Trouble” helped Redding capture the growing white blues/soul market. No citation was needed. Every time this song, or anything on this album plays, I feel like there’s a new sense of discovery going on between my ears. It’s not an ole man trouble, but a young man’s appreciation.

It will never not surprise me to remember that he died before this record was released, and he was just 26 years old.

And that’s 1,200 words on music you weren’t expecting today, but if you made it this far I know you found something you enjoyed. Go enjoy it again.

memories / Rowan / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Feb 25

Tomato soup in a bread bowl

On this date last year, we stumbled upon a video that The Daily Show had recirculated from, I believe, 2013 or 2014. It’s a classic bit of satirical comedy now, and so much of what TDS and it’s descendants do is on display here. Plus, there’s Jon Stewart’s pronounced cheesy New York accent. It kills me.

I know this was a year ago because, for some one-off joke about ordering a pizza, I made a gif about how he wants a real pizza, with the gestures and the over-enunciation. It still cracks me up.

I mention it here because there’s not much to the day. Ten years ago today I was still trying to catch up from a trip. Five years ago today, in 2020, was just another typical day … we had about five more weeks of those before everything got atypical, of course. Too much time in the television studio. I miss the people involved, the students, but not the rest of everything else that came with those long days and longer nights.

So it’s Jon Stewart thundering away about “an above ground marinara swimming pool for rats.”

Seriously, it’s a tight 10 minutes. Give it a look.

On campus today we talked about media and culture, and that’s the last day we’ll discuss that. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t hold the students all that much, I don’t think. Probably my fault. Next week we’ll start talking about different forms of media. Which, once we get beyond print, I’m sure they’ll start to think to is much more compelling.

Today, though, we talked about how we view other places through what we learn about them in our media exposure. And I mentioned the Super Bowl so I could bring this back up again Monday, when I’ll ask, “What does the world take see in us when they watch one of our largest spectacles?”

Today I asked them, “Does the globalization of media undermine national cultures?”

After that we had an afternoon-long meeting discussing the pressing issues of the day. Some of them about curriculum and university stuff. Some on national matters. Rather than the whole faculty and a formal meeting, it’s just whoever is around. And putting in the face time is good, so I make sure to be around for these more casual sit downs. Plus someone brings snacks. And I got to talk about the difference between administrative and judicial warrants. That’s not something I would have predicted last year, when watching that pizza video.

Here’s the A-block of last night’s episode. Desi Lydic is on the desk this week, and she’s been great there since they started this rotating panel process in 2023. I’d like them to go back to skewering media, since the strength of the show was always being media satire, but since no one else is covering the news, they’re doing more and more of that. It’s better in small doses. But there’s a lot of news these days, and, again, someone has to do it.

Lydic’s first turn at the desk was one of those magical weeks where the content gods smiled upon the show. She had four fantastic episodes, and she made it seem obvious: after 27 years and three hosts, our most prominent satirical news show, finally, at long last, a strong female voice, particularly post-Dobbs. I’m so glad she’s still doing this. If they ever lock in a host she should get an opportunity.

She’s apparently from Louisville. I wonder what her feelings on deep dish pizza are.

adventures / memories / music / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Jan 25

We saw The We Also Have Eras show

After a day of email and committee meetings and the like, we went across the river for an evening of frivolity.

We met up with my two-godsisters-in-law (just go with it) and one of their husbands for dinner. We found ourselves in a nice Italian steakhouse themed place with the sort of ambient lighting that suggests a fine establishment. The music suggests you are an extra in a brat pack movie. The waiter suggested a high end experience. The big screen beside our table played … Fight Club … for some reason.

Because just before the appetizers get put on the table, you want that scene about stealing medical waste to make soap.

After the dinner-and-a-movie, we went down the street to see a rock ‘n’ roll show. Guster was in town, kicking off the second leg of their “We Also Have Eras” tour. We saw them on the first leg of this tour, last march in Baltimore. Obviously we were going to see them again. We also saw them last May. We’ve seen the boys from Tufts three times in the last 10 months. I can’t wait to see them again.

One of the best things about the “We Also Have Eras” tour is the comically bad acting. (They’re playing at making a stage production of the life of the band. It’s amusing, and awkwardly so. Also, they play up the awkward for more amusement.) But they’re also playing stuff that they’d semi-retired. Released in 1998, this was Guster’s first radio hit, breaking into the Billboard Modern Rock chart and introducing us to their second album. The fabled 99X in Atlanta (which is BACK!?) (apparently it is BACK!) was a big part of their early success. The late Sean Demery was the music director and afternoon drive jock and I tuned in everyday, via RealPlayer, and discovered all kinds of new acts. Between what Demery was doing in Atlanta and what Dave Rossi and Scott Register was doing in Birmingham and what music was doing everywhere, it was a great time to be looking for new stuff.

I digress, but they, and this, were a big part of the soundtrack of 1998.

I was glad to see some people remembered to bring ping pong balls.

There was a banner, just off to the right, that someone laid over the mezzanine railing. It figures into 2003’s “Come Down Stairs and Say Hello,” though the lyric is obviously mangled for the moment.

I didn’t see it, but someone said when they actually played that song (because it is a show about eras) the person with the sign dropped in the correct lyrics, Be calm, be brave, it’ll be OK.

And here we are after the show. Shivering in the air for another dose of neon. It was 19 degrees.

We’ll see them again in March. Four shows in just 367 days!

adventures / memories / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
14
Jan 25

A most unremarkable day

More editing today. And then we went to a little birthday gathering for the owner of the local bike shop, a friend of ours was celebrating his birthday in his store with his friends and neighbors. It felt small town and happy and great. Do enough of those sorts of things and you’ll begin to feel like you fit in somewhere.

We talked to the bike shop owner, his wife and adult daughter. We saw a guy we run with and a graphic designer we know and a fellow who chatted us up about mountain bike riding.

Then we came home and I edited more stuff for my lovely bride. This one was a seven-page document. That puts the score for the week at 9 pages I’ve asked her to read for me, and 19 she’s asked me to read for her.

Hey, she made dinner. It evens out.

We learned some great news today. Something we worked on last year has led to something … impactful. I’m not sure if it’s something that’s public or not, yet, but it’s exciting.

Otherwise, worked through the day’s email, did a lot of reading, and spent a scant 38 minutes on the bike.

And that, somehow, has been the thrust of a low key day.

At Christmas a few years ago, my wife and I told our parents that we didn’t want presents, but to spend more time with them. And then the pandemic hit. So finally, a year ago, the stars lined up and we were able to take my mother on a trip. It was a lovely little week in Cozumel. We did some diving, we took it easy, ate some great food, did some more diving. It was a great trip. And a year ago, today, that trip was winding up. This was our last lunch there, before we set off for the airport. This was the view we enjoyed at lunch every day.

It was 84 degrees down there when we left that day. It was 32 degrees here today.

You shouldn’t judge one day over another, especially if one was a vacation and the other is most unremarkable, but, weather-wise, one was better than the other.