This, the Twitter thread below, is an extremely true story. I took a nap this evening and have basically gotten back to the point of feeling like normal again. Can’t imagine how she feels, but she’s got the medication! And she can take naps if she feels like it.
I would like to note that while I do appreciate the effort, @kennysmith has literally not had a full, unbroken night’s sleep since I crashed. He’s gotten up to help me, or get meds from me.
I’d say she’s lucky, but I’ve seen the X-rays. I know exactly how lucky she is.
Spent most of yesterday at the office telling people about it, I think. Word gets around. Maybe in a day or two I’ll be back up to full speed, and feeling like it, too!
Let’s wrap up the Poplars Building talk. You’ll remember it was a hotel, and then dorms, and finally some administrative space. The whole building is gone now. They torn down the first half during late August and September. They took the other half last week. But the remnants are still there.
Eventually this will become a green space. I take that to mean they don’t know, yet, what they want to go in that space, but some plan will come along one day.
We should catch up on the Re-Listening Project. If that sounds official, it isn’t. I am working through all of my old CDs in the car. Easy content and, sometimes, good music. These aren’t reviews, mostly just the memories that mark the time.
This is strictly chronological, which is to say the order in which I bought all of these things. My discs cross genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, a whimsy as music should be.
“Deluxe” was Better Than Ezra’s major label debut, and I bought this first as a cassette. “Good,” which they still do on stage as “The one you remember” was released in February of 1995, and I bought it sometime around there. Obviously I thought enough about it to purchase it a second time, as a CD.
I remember playing the tape version almost continuously on a three-hour solo road trip to see a friend.
First of all, no one remembers that Salma Hayek was in the video for the third single off this record.
Her career, in American media anyway, was just about to take off. This was sublimely timed casting that wouldn’t have been possible even a few months later.
Secondly, I have this weird flash of a memory of listening to this record in an Arby’s drive thru. Maybe that was the beginning of that road trip.
It’s a deep cut, but Summerhouse still holds up.
This, along with Rosealia, was one of my favorite songs of the record.
A few years later I was shooting pool in a restaurant — that no longer exists — when a friend came out of the closet to me and the guy playing his guitar in the corner was covering that song. I was the first person she told, she said. She figured I was from the big city, and that I’d understand. But I knew already. And whole, larger story, is an incredibly sharp memory.
I was walking from the control room into the studio — two back-to-back doors — just before a taping began tonight when my phone rang.
My phone never rings.
I have dedicated ring tones for most people, even though my phone never rings. So, even while the phone was in my pocket I knew from the song that it was my lovely bride.
She never calls me. We text.
I answer the phone. There’s some other woman on the phone.
Not good.
And her voice is breaking up. Bad cell signal.
I’m trying to be polite about this, but then suddenly there’s The Yankee on the phone, clear as can be. She’s had a bike accident. She’s OK. Deputies are coming and so is an ambulance and people have stopped to help. She’s going to the hospital because she’s sure her collarbone is broken and where am I.
I’m at work, of course. She knew that, but she forgot it or was speaking without thinking about it, same as I asked her, for some reason, what she’s going to do with her bike and what hospital she’s going to. I told the guy running the TV shoot and the engineer that I’m leaving. I rode my bike into the office this morning, which means I have to ride to the house to get the car to go to the hospital.
This was the fastest I’ve ever made that commute, perhaps even by car. I don’t even remember breathing hard or feeling it in my legs, which had complained all the way in this morning. At one point, just before the last hills, I remember being upset I didn’t have harder, faster gears to work through. My machine wasn’t equipped for the moment or the adrenaline or both, which never happens to me.
That part wasn’t important, of course. I got to the house, doused my head with cold water, put on dry clothes. Grab the insurance card, some snacks and a hoodie. Fed the cats, because who knows how long this will take. Out of the saddle and back out the door in seven minutes, at the hospital in nine more.
Emergency room. Chairs. Someone calls my name and I go to an exam room. The Yankee is off for a CT scan, and she’ll be back in a moment. There’s some of her cycling kit, and her shoes and her helmet. I pass the time studying the helmet. There’s one small displaced part on the left side. One crack inside. Some light scrapes near the crown of the helmet. So it’s her left collarbone. We’re going to match.
A guy wheels her bed back into the exam room. She’s in a neck collar. No one said anything about a neck collar — and there’s just no way to prepare yourself for seeing that — but when the doctor comes along with some of the results from scans and X-rays, he removes it. The neck collar was a precaution that was thankfully not needed. But her left arm is definitely the worse for wear. She’s got one tiny scratch on her knee, and a little scrape on her leg that wouldn’t impress anyone who has ever had a carpet burn. She tore the center pocket out of her vest, meaning she rolled or slid on the small of her back, but her back seems fine.
She was going straight through a small intersection on a straight road. A guy in a pickup truck was coming from the other direction, aiming to turn to his left. Apparently they made eye contact, he slowed, and then he decided to turn across her direction of travel. She doesn’t think she hit the truck, but we know from witnesses that the ass paused briefly and then drove away.
“Bicycle Friendly Community” is another quality B-town joke.
As we sat in the Emergency Room waiting for the next thing to happen one of the witnesses calls. This is the woman that called me earlier. She’s taken custody of the bicycle. She says her husband is also a cyclist. He has pronounced the bike fine. Like that matters.
What really matters is this: In one of those weird moments of normalcy that infiltrates a mild medical emergency, The Yankee says “I didn’t stop my Garmin.” Twenty minutes earlier she was getting brain scans and wearing a neck brace, but now the important stuff.
The lady says I can come get the bike whenever. I thanked her for that, and thanked her many times over for stopping. I think we were all a little moved by that. And so, to lighten the moment, I said, “Since your husband is a bike rider, would you mind asking him to stop her Garmin?”
“It was the first thing he did,” she said.
Cyclists, man.
Now an RN comes in. They’re going to move her to another exam room and put her shoulder back into the socket. This is news. But it turns out, apparently, that the RN was misinformed. Or at least I continue to hope so. I asked the doctor directly, in front of this RN, if we had to reduce a shoulder. And he said no. But he also missed the collarbone later, turns out. (Thanks for that catch, radiologist.)
So it seems there’s a collarbone break, and two broken ribs. And an orthopedist appointment in our future. Fortunately, she has an orthopedist.
She was discharged from the hospital at 11 p.m. We spent a half hour, 30 solid minutes, in the drive through of the only 24-hour pharmacy in a town of almost 100,000 people. There was one car ahead of us.
Our immediate future: Not much sleep tonight. And, if the memory of my own broken collarbone serves, the next month or so is just a bunch of gritting through pain, finding the least uncomfortable position possible and vowing to never move, ever again, and finally, wondering when you can sleep through the night, and waiting to use your arm again.
But we’ll let the orthopedist tell us that tomorrow morning, for sure.
What we are is lucky, and we don’t need an ortho to tell us that.
Funny, how quickly back-to-normal gets you back to normal. I’ve been a bachelor the last two weeks, but my lovely bride returned from a much-deserved family trip yesterday. We, of course, hopped back in the car and went over to Cincinnati for the rock ‘n’ roll show. We got back just around midnight last night. And this morning it was the alarm, a quick bike ride into work, and watching the work over at the half-gone Poplars Building.
I wonder if I can call it the Pop Building, then.
This evening it was leave promptly for a quick bie ride back to the house. We had to return a rental car and that place closes at 6 p.m. After that, dinner, catch up on the new Game of Thrones show, House of Exposition And Time Jumps and then get ready for bed.
Back-to-normal happens quick.
Yesterday in this space I shared some clips from the rock ‘n’ roll show. Toad the Wet Sprocket opened the show. Here’s photographic proof. They had an eight-song set.
I’ve been listening to them for almost 30 years, now, and I’ve seen them twice. Both this summer, 18 songs total. Worth the wait is a weird expression here — particularly since the first show was supposed to be in 2020, and the Monday show was a spontaneous add-on that was, itself, postponed from last month, and — why did I wait to see a band I enjoy? Surely, somewhere along the way, there were intersecting opportunities. Right? But who knows?
Toad opened the show, and the Gin Blossoms were the featured act. They did a six-song pure nostalgia set (down from the nine songs we saw from them in July). And that was fine. I’ve managed to see them a half dozen times, I think. Same jokes, same material. You’re there for the vibe, and to try to reclaim the unreclaimable feeling of a younger day. It’s illusive; it’s Sisyphean; it’s impossible and melancholy.
So, then, Gin Blossoms are perfect for that.
That’s a hasty, from-the-hip mix I made on my phone just now. I am surprised how well it works.
The rest of the week we’ll fill out this space with Barenaked Ladies. (Lots of clever lyrics for titles, too!)
My goal with my bike commute is to make the entire trip without having to put my foot on the ground. I had to unclip four times this morning, but only twice this evening. Had I been just a tad more daring I could have gotten that down to one, but that doesn’t really seem the point. Otherwise, the highlight was this little strip of road here.
They paved this in August/September of 2018 — I have photos — and again this week. The scrapped up the 2018 work on Monday, and it was a nice new ribbon today. How long does asphalt last around here?
Or, put another way, this little stretch of road fronts a Civil War era house. At this rate, it must have seen … carry the two … 36 coats of asphalt over the years.
I’m sure they had asphalt around here then. And I’m sure they treated it about the same way in those old winters as they do now: poorly.
I will not, I will not fall down the rabbit hole on this and read the entire history of asphalt, but just know I skimmed it to see how outlandish that joke was. Asphalt has been around since the Babylonians, and it was first used in the U.S. for roads in the 1870s, so not impossible, but not hardly likely for the tucked away place this was in the 19th century.
An interstate finally passed through here in 2015 or so.
But enough about construction, let’s see some destruction! I have for you, if you peer closely, an action shot of the grout removal going on at the Poplars Building. And by grout removal I mean the Poplars Building.
That’s some 60 years of stone and dust and carpet and dust and dreams falling out of that building just now. You’ll note they’ve got that screen held in place by the second crane. It comes and it goes, that screen. Seems to be protecting the parking deck. Protect the parking deck at all costs!
Sometimes they spray water on the rubble as it falls down. Some sort of safety measure, no doubt. I wonder what determines when they do and when they don’t spray.
I figure by Monday they’ll get to that protruding shaft — possibly the elevator system, I don’t know, I’ve never been in that building and it doesn’t seem safe to go exploring at this late date. If that’s what it is, I bet it comes down quickly.
The weather has been in the delightfully enjoyable 80s the last few days, which means the evenings have been a nice time to sit outside. We even had dinner outside this evening, because why not?
We were rewarded with a nice view.
We ordered Chinese. There were no fortunes in the fortune cookies.
They were just … cookies.
Let’s get back to the music! Last week I decided to start working my way through all of my old CDs when I’m in the car. Good way to mix it up. I did this a few years ago and enjoyed it, but figured, this time, that I could write about some of it. These aren’t reviews, except when they are. Mostly they’re just memories and good times.
The collection crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, as I said the other day, whimsy.
Recently I finished Memory Dean’s second album, which was self-titled, but people called it the “In My Father’s House” record because of the cover art. If that sentence is a mystery, don’t worry. They’re a regional band from Georgia. A good live act. A good college band back in the day. Probably quite popular in bars. I only saw them at festivals.
A college buddy of mine basically grew up not far from them, and had followed them for some time. He gave me this record, which is a curious mix of studio and live tracks. And, if you’ll notice on the Discogs site, they refer to it as the track side and the live side. Because this was a cassette first.
In the live portion they even talk about how they’ll have tapes on sell in the back after the show! This was released in 1993 and let’s say it was produced that same year.
Rather, Memory Dean’s music is an intriguing collision of spring-break choruses, beer-fueled rhythm, and a lightly twisted lyrical sense–all of which bring to mind Flannery O’Connor and Brian Wilson harmonizing on a cypress-cloaked veranda over their morning grits.
Within that Deep South context, it’s hard to pigeonhole Memory Dean’s sound. More than just snappy choruses–there are millions of those floating around, seeking to light in listeners’ brains–the band’s songs are, on first listen, anchored in the instinctively unique vocal harmonies of co-founding guitarist-singer-songwriters Jay Memory and Bubba Dean. With naturally occurring parts that recall the low harmonies and counter-melodies of the Indigo Girls or, perhaps, Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon after a night of tequila, the fluent vocal blend lures you in just long enough for the words to hit you over the head.
[…]
Originally rivals in street-corner minstrelsy, they hooked up and began writing the sort of songs borne of two things: 1) the innate tradition of a town that gave birth to REM, the B-52s, and several other seminal ’80s “modern rock” bands, and 2) the sure knowledge that through music came liquor and sorority girls.
Koster, who wrote that in 1998 and is still working, these days at The Day, in Connecticut, overdid it — by a lot — with the Flannery O’Connor reference. And I think you sense that in the second album, even more so than Koster found it in the third album. And I think people try to sound like they overthink Flannery O’Connor because they think it makes them sound smart.
It doesn’t.
Otherwise, that piece feels spot on. Re-listening to their eponymous record, trying to figure out what it means all these decades later, I had two thoughts. First, there’s an obvious mix of bawdy lyrics that feel too clever to the authors, mixed with some surprisingly deeper material. And when Koster quotes them, they’re pointing out “Yeah, we started writing in college. We’re 30 now.”
At any rate, these days Jay Memory and Bubba Dean are a lot older than 30, and they’re still doing it a bit. There don’t seem to be an album cuts from this record online (you can’t even buy this on Amazon!) but there are a few live performances from recent years with some of these tracks.
Which brings to mind the second thing I thought. Memory Dean is the musical college companion of the entitled annoying guy with the annoying boat on Lake Lanier. Not the one that loved college, but the one that still loves it too much. He’s a little too loud. A little too tipsy. A little too much. He rents that boat. And I’d bet this crowd, with its dedicated fanbase, had examples of that guy, and his “WOOOOOOOOO” wife.
This is misnamed on YouTube. The actual song title is “Beowulf, Captain Hook & The Albatross.” See? College kids wrote that.
And while the lyrics are a little muddled in that recording, the chorus pops pretty well, and this is important. The band is at their best when they’re doing harmony. My friend said that around Georgia people called them the Indigo Boys, which naturally intrigued me.
This is “Peach State of Mind” which is a song about Georgia. This is recorded in Athens, Georgia. There will be barking from the crowd.
For some reason they sped up the tempo of the song there, compared to the record. It probably fits the bar scene better, or maybe they’re just sick of it, but that one change takes away the lament and soul of the song, which is important when you’re talking about being homesick.
I know of which I’m talking here.
This is the funniest song on the record, the crowd participation song, and one of my least favorite. I’ve sometimes wondered, when this came to mind, if they would freshen up the lyrics if they had the chance. Now I know. Yes they do. And they always pick the best low hanging fruit. They say “Rap Music Sucks,” but you don’t get here without an appreciation of the genre. And they reference “Rapper’s Delight” in an important way. It doesn’t get twisted. They don’t point out, as they do when they send up Sir Mix-A-Lot, that this is actually a good song. They just do a variation on “Rapper’s Delight.” As if, even in 1993 they were already saying that the pop version of rap is not all that it could be.
Which, for some white guys from Georgia in 1993, probably seemed prescient.
In our next installment of musical nonsense, we’re going to hear from post-peak Def Leppard. It’ll be a treat.
I did this some time back as a change of pace, and figured it might be time to do it again. But this time, these four years later, I figured I would write a little something about some of it. Who knows how this will work out, where it lead, how extensive we’ll get or even when I’ll just forget about this on one end or the other. The general idea is that I am working through all of my CDs in chronological order.
Yes, I know the order in which I bought all of these things. Somehow that impresses people. I know it, more or less, anyway. There’s a brief period of time where it’s just a guess, but none of that matters. Not that any of this matters. The collection crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no real large theme. There’s too much from the popular catalog for that anyway. It’s not an evolution or path of discovery, it is whimsy.
So let’s be whimsical and listen to old music.
The first CD I bought — and this one is obviously important because it was really considered … not just another record, but an entire format change, and I had a lot of important-to-me cassettes to replace! — was late to the format. And it meant adding hardware. So I bought one of those tape-to-CD chunks of plastic. Plug the tape into my car stereo, run the little cable out of the tape converter to the little lap player. Even then these were growing more scarce.
This was the spring of 1996. It was Tracy Chapman’s newest record, which came out in November of 1995. I bought it that next spring, because the person I was dating owned it and I heard the whole thing and I liked it, and I liked her, and I had always enjoyed Chapman’s music, and so the decision was made.
Chapman won a Grammy, her fourth, off this, an award given for Best Rock Song to “Give Me One Reason,” an incredible popular blues song. She, and that record, were nominated for four other Grammy Awards (her 13th nomination). All told, she shipped north of five million copies domestically, a few more globally, and who knows how many digital plays she’s counted. “New Beginning” was a great record.
None of this is a review, and we won’t be spending a lot of time unpacking philosophy or chord changes, but you should go buy this, if you somehow don’t have it already.
Here’s the title track, number two if you’re playing along. I didn’t know until just now that she plays the didgeridoo here, and that this was controversial for some. The use of a didgeridoo by women, Wikipedia tells me, is taboo in many aboriginal nations. To me, in this song, it just wrapped all of us together for the message. And it really accentuated the rhythm section.
The third track is “Smoke and Ashes,” and it is still one of my favorite Chapman songs, and still feels so sonically perfect. I concentrate on the backing vocals of Adam Levy, Andy Stoller, Glenys Rogers and Rock Deadrick. All these years and spins later, the shift through to the bridge is so gentle and severe and evocative I can’t help but marvel at it. “Only smoke and ashes babe, baby” kills me every time.
The fifth track lays it out, right from the title, “At This Point In My Life.” Chapman was 31 when she produced this. I wonder how it feels to her now.
On “The Promise” the strings almost get lost in the lyrics. Or the lyrics get supplanted by the strings. I can never say. It is such a character-driven song, and it’s gift is that it lets you put the particulars of the character in place yourself.
Here’s the big hit from the record. Again, the vocal work that Chapman can bring are so rich, and so perfectly complemented here. Also, there’s one little moment that always sends me back to the Gulf Coast and a little circular dance of the hand that I re-enact each time I hear this song. It’s a delight of memory and the blues.
“I’m Ready,” is the last named track on the record. Plenty of songs are laments. I’m not sure how many of them are better than this. It gets more potent with each play.
And most crucially to me, the hidden track. Plenty of writers can wax on about music and anyone that knows more about music than I do can do it at great length, with greatly envied success. That’s not what any of this simple exercise, here on my personal site is about. All of this is to just enjoy some of the things I enjoy, and share them with people who might also enjoy them, and to tell you this remains one of the most powerful 100 seconds of audio ever produced.
You get the sense Tracy Chapman just wanted to be a singer-songwriter, maybe in a cafe or whatever, and then that famous Nelson Mandela show that launched her into the stratosphere happened, and then she had some monstrous hits, and maybe, hopefully, she’s just enjoying the regular day-to-day life. She released eight studio records, her last in 2008, and released a greatest hits collection in 2015. She toured through the oughts, at least. She’s been involved in a variety of causes* important to her for probably her whole life, and generally, you would think, just values her privacy.
I don’t think she’s online much, so she’ll never see this. But if she does, or we ever have seats next to one another on a plane, I promise to not make a deal about it. I would absolutely pull out a notebook and ask her for advice on a line or two. It is a big treat to say this verb was suggested by someone whose work you admire.
*My first job was working for one of my teachers. The teacher was moonlighting in the summer doing some landscaping. I was the extra pair of hands. One day she was telling me at great length about how Chapman’s first record, the eponymously named debut album, the one with “Fast Car” on it. Everyone listening to a radio or watching a television in 1988 knew “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution” and “Baby Can I Hold You.” And something in there, she said inspired her and her friends to join the Peace Corps. But we’ll get to all of that, and that duet with Luciano Pavarotti, eventually. We have a lot of other records to get through first. Up next, something you’ve never heard of — unless you live, or go to a lot of live shows, in Georgia.
