It was coincidental timing that we saw Barenaked Ladies on Sunday. They were the headliner of the concert I’ve been touching on this week. And they, of course, did their modern version of Brian Wilson. Today, of course, came the news that the legendary musician Brian Wilson had died. It was not BNL’s best sound of the night, frankly. Then again, it’s not Ed Robertson’s song. (Every time I see them I think, Maybe this will be the night Steven Page strolls out from stage left … )
BNL is still a fine band, and they put on a nice show, that one is just off a bit. The live shows were always better with Page, but you understand why they parted ways in 2009. Anyway, here’s Page fronting Brian Wilson for BNL.
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys estimates that he’s heard “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, more than 1,000 times. The very first listen, 50 years ago this month, still haunts him.
“I was driving and I had to pull over to the side of the road — it blew my mind,” Mr. Wilson said, repeating a story that has become something of a legend. “It was a shock.” Just 21 and already frustrated with his band’s basic surf music, he bought the single and set about deconstructing its arrangement and production.
“I started analyzing all the guitars, pianos, bass, drums and percussion,” he said by telephone. “Once I got all those learned, I knew how to produce records.”
Those records, many fans would contend, weren’t half bad, but if you ask Mr. Wilson, they still don’t stack up.
“I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song and I never did,” he said. “I’ve stopped trying.” Mr. Wilson added: “It’s the greatest record ever produced. No one will ever top that one.”
You know it; it’s Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. It’s the Wrecking Crew, a wall of sound. It’s 18-year-old Veronica Bennett in those resonant Gold Star Studios.
My favorite will forever be.
Another bit of coincidental timing: as I write this, there’s an insurance commercial on using a brassy instrumental version of Good Vibrations as bed music. That song turns 60 next year.
Sunday was the sixth time we’ve seen Guster in the last two years. (Proximity has its advantages.) Twice we saw their “We Also Have Eras” tour, which they now call a play. We saw them once in a standing venue. We caught a lunch set they put on for a local radio station. We also saw the second night of their weekend at the Kennedy Center.
I was trying to count how many times, overall, I’ve seen them now, and finally decided to just count the states. It’s at least five. To be fair, I guess, to me, that’s over almost 30 years now. (That is in no way fair to me. Or to them, really.)
Anyway, Ryan did a little crowd work, as has lately become the custom, and he came right by us.
Guster as the feature act, did a tight, nine song, 40 minute set. Which gets us to the headliner, which we’ll play tomorrow.
I had a pretty crisp bike ride this evening. And for 26.7 miles (or 42 kilometers, because it sounds more impressive to the American audience) I held my average speed throughout. That includes when I had to stop to take this photo.
That section of road has been closed for several months now. Ordinarily we turn left there anyway, but the closure has made the nearby stretch even nicer. But today I turned right, just to see what was going on with that bridge. And, yep, the road crews really don’t want you going through there right now.
This was about 20 miles in, and you can clearly see I was going fast by how blurry the asphalt appears.
And now, a reminder about how stop signs work.
There’s a four way stop near our house. I need to turn left to go home. An SUV approached from my right, and stopped, as it should. A car then approached from my left, and stopped, as it should. And then I completed my stop. And waited.
And waited some more.
Finally I shook my head, lowered my eyes and waved on the SUV coming from the right, a driver so flummoxed by car brain and the presence of a person on a two wheel self-propelled bicycle that they did not know what to do at the intersection.
So I ask you, who, really, is making roads dangerous?
This configuration of vehicles is sure to stymie anyone who has forgotten how stop signs work. This is how they work. The person that arrives, and completes their stop, first, is the first to go. In this case, I was last. Also in this case, people had no idea how to behave.
I went out this evening to put the cover on the grill and water a few plants. The air was still. The night was quiet. The moon shone brightly, peering at us through a thin skin of clouds, who’s main contribution to the atmosphere was, well, atmosphere. The clouds had a “We’re here!” vibe. And I wanted to take a photo. Only my phone was inside.
So I finished covering the grill, watered the four plants I set out to water, and then went inside to retrieve the image capturing device. It all took about as long as reading about it, I’m sure.
But when I came back outside, the clouds were gone.
Nobody needs spooky night sky stuff in June, I said to the moon. She had no reply, because she’s an orbiting satellite, and not a character than I can dialog with.
But if it were, the moon would probably say, “I can’t hold those in place, I’m a quarter of a million miles away from your clouds.”
I’d like to share with you this Hemerocallis daylily. Native to parts of Asia, beautiful anywhere in the world. This one is holding down the corner by our garage.
There are always wonders in the yard. I just have to go outside to find them.
Daylillies require almost no care. I wonder why the people that used to live here didn’t have them planted everywhere. But, I suppose, you could ask that of any beautiful thing. And we have quite a few lovely things in the yard — have I noticed this daylily before? — but most of them are quite singular. And most of it takes care of itself pretty well. The rest, well, they’re stuck with us.
There’s a grapevine, and we are trying to rework it over its trellis. Nearby, the honeysuckle seems to be rebounding well from the early springtime work we did on it. Other things are coming along nicely. We had to recently remove a few bushes that had died. I view this as a personal shortcoming, a promise I never made to the sellers of our home, not that I’ve done a lot to help those planted things that struggled and died, even while others have thrived. Everything grows here (weeds best of all!), but some things stopped last year. Maybe it was that drought. Maybe it was something else.
Anyway, the daylily is lovely.
We had a nice bike ride Saturday morning with our neighbor. It’s great. He rides around the loop and right up our driveway. Then he set us out on a course that included a few roads we know, and a few we haven’t been on before. It sprinkled a bit, and the conversation was nice, and the roads were quite empty at that time of the day.
This was soon after I’d done my big turn on a Strava segment, which I felt like I managed quite well if I must say, but did not set a new PR. Our neighbor just sat patiently behind me after the sprint, through the left turn and then the quick right that turned me back up hill. As soon as it pointed up, he went around me.
I was going to sit up, but I had to keep up. And so I tried, and did.
He’s a nice guy, our neighbor, and it’s nice that we have the chance to take the occasional ride with him. You need a few people like that from time-to-time.
When I went out today — a perfectly pleasant solo ride of some of the standard routes ridden backward — I rode alongside a little boy on his BMX bike for a moment. We met at the road that enters-exits the subdivision, but from opposite directions. And that guy was fast. So I had that to think about on my perfectly average pace 27-miler. If he suggests a ride in a few years, when he’s a bit older, I’m probably going to be busy that day.
We went to a concert last night, and I’ll share tiny little clips of that to help fill up our week. Here’s the opening act. You might remember Fastball from the 1990s. A bunch of guys from Texas who scored two Grammy nominations and two or three songs at or neat the top of the charts in 1998. They also went platinum on that record. Later they had trouble because what genre even is this? But musical genres in general, and their style of rock in particular, was struggling at that same time.
I never actually liked this band. They’ve been at it all these years, honing their touring craft, and it shows. I liked their performance. They had a tight 25 minute set and held a crowd like you don’t often see for a warm up. Also, they threw in a bit of Steve Miller, just for fun, as a medley.
Maurice, by the way, means “Gangster of Love.” That was mixed in with their minor 2013 hit, which is peppy.
These days, Fastball says they “combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-’90s mainstream rock,” in which case everyone should love them, right? But I just never got into them. I did enjoy this mini-set, though.
And, tomorrow, we’ll see a clip for the feature act.
On the way to the show, we passed this U-Haul truck. We passed it, it passed us back, like this photograph was meant to be. Of all of those little bits of Americana that they could share …
I just saw a television reference to that fungi. And, as I look at it now, I find I can learn more about fungi on the website, but U-Haul is of … questionable credibility on this issue.
Probably no one who’s rented that truck has thought about it, or tried to look that up on the site. When you’re trying to move, you’re on a mission: minimize the effort and aggravation of the move.
And you hope there are daylilies where you are going.
We were standing in the kitchen this evening, it was 6:57 p.m. We were talking about this or that and I looked into the dining room and saw the sun streaming in from one of the windows on the front of the house.
I like when the sun comes in and I just wanted to show you that.
By that time of the evening, at this time of year, the sun is starting to fall over the house across the way. We’ll soon have new neighbors there — the current hypothesis is they have children in school and are waiting to wrap up their school year and whatever else. I hope they enjoy how the sun falls on the woods behind them after a bright day.
Hopefully they’ll have bright days when they move in. This was an overcast one, until just before that time. And by overcast I mean Canada. And by Canada I mean the huge fires raging up there. It reminds me of 2023, when we moved here, when big swaths of Canada were on fire. Since we can’t blame the climate or the Anthropocene era, I guess we’ll just have to clumsily correlate that to people moving into this neighborhood.
Fortunately for Canada, no other houses around here are on the market just now.
I got dropped most droppedly. Mere miles from the house. I blame the wind. And also the nice ride I had yesterday. And that my lovely bride is riding very well right now. Anyway, this was an out and back, and it worked out to just under 20 miles, total. This is when she was coming back after turning around. My computer said I’d ridden 8.48 miles at the time. Which means that she was already almost a mile ahead of me by here.
Most droppedly.
The next shot on my phone is just an empty bit of road and field, because she flew out of the frame. And, then, the third shot was as I whipped the camera back around to my left.
Do you know how if you hold the shutter button down it’ll just keep taking pictures? The burst mode shoots something like 10 frames a second. So this was three-hundredths of a second? She’s riding very well. You’d be dropped, too.
Ehhh, I’ll catch her tomorrow. Or just hold her wheel. Or at least vainly try to do so.
Let us return now to the Re-Listening project, where we are now only seven or eight albums behind. The Re-Listening project, you might recall, is a now years-long effort to listen to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. More or less that order. I’m a little out of order right now, because I mixed up the books. None of that matters. What matters is that I’m listening to music I enjoy and, for our purposes here, am padding out the site with a little more content. Videos, music, and occasionally a memory or two. These aren’t reviews, because no one cares. Anyway, just press the play button.
Anyway, let’s say it’s the summer or fall of 2002. Counting Crows fourth studio album, “Hard Candy,” was released that July. Counting Crows were, and are, a big, but my interest would wane in subsequent years. But this is still quite good. It went to number five on the charts, was certified gold in the U.S. and in three other countries besides. It was lighter, full of pop, and well received.
Anyway, the title track was the first track, and when I played this in the car recently I wondered if I had to reconsider my stance on the band.
They’re not bad. You don’t buy six records across the decades because you dislike an act. I just outgrew this one, is all.
This was the last single they released off the record, about 11 months into the album (you could do that back then). The layers of it are quite intricate and I mostly remember this as a song I played in an empty apartment which was empty because no one was there but me. I wasn’t enough to fill up the space then, so there was a lot of overwrought pop and rock music, I guess. See, outgrew it.
And despite my saying that, for me, these two deep cuts hold up very well.
Hey, we should all be so lucky as to have two or three things we did hold up after 20-plus years, right?
Anyway, the Counting Crows are still doing it, 30-some years later. They released an album, “Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!” just last month, and they’re touring the U.S. and Europe this summer and fall in support of it. And, if you can’t wait until they come near to you, Rick Beato recently released a well-done interview with Adam Duritz where they discuss making all of these decades of music.
The next record in this book is from a hardcore punk veteran. Only I didn’t know that at the time. There’s great percussion, and it’s singer-songerwriter pop-rock. Peter Searcy was sitting at the intersection of the Crows and the Replacements. And, if I may say so dismissively, it fits 2000 almost perfectly.
This is one of the tracks that got airplay, and probably caused me to buy the record.
This was on a small southern California punk label that shut down a few years ago. And, again, given how I have always heard this whole record it’s funny to me to think of any punk work at all. If I had to describe it I’d say it’s a high charged coffee house record.
It’s a fine little power pop solo effort. The lyrics do get a bit repetitive. Listening to it today, it feels like there’s a formula at play. Not that anyone was doing that in 2000 or anything.
Here’s the title track.
And, for me, those are the biggest thrusts of the album.
Peter Searcy has returned to groups, he’s in a power trio now called Guilty Birds, with Grant Fitch and Ben Daughtrey, two guys with serious grunge and indie and alt rock credentials. He’s also selling real estate in Georgia. I take that to mean he’s playing music for the fun and creativity of it, which sounds nice after all of these years.
I had so much fun ironing pocket squares last night that I didn’t want it to end. So I stopped, and I can do more of them tonight, or another night. It’s a party in the ironing room.
The ironing room? You know, the one with the squeaky board and overheated iron and spray bottle (because our German-engineered iron has a leak and doesn’t hold water anymore). There’s also the bloating towel, and a lot of luggage, and an extra bed.
Alright, you found me out. The ironing room is the guest bedroom. Though I think I iron in it more than we have guests there. So we’re renaming it.
Anyway, a lot of squares were ironed, still a bunch to go.
And, this afternoon, I made some more cufflinks.
I’ll soon have a set for any type of playfully colorful situation. I have so many cufflinks. I need more french cuffs.
If you think that’s all I’ve got today, you, dear reader, are wrong! W-R-O-N-G.
There’s a rabbit living in our backyard. It’s a regular old zoo out there. And this critter is not bothered by people at all. I got within about five feet before it took two tentative hops away, to see if I would give chase.
I did not.
And, yes, look at how green that grass is. The last few days of rain have been what we needed to finally get us out of a drought. It started last September. And we might have emerged from it a little more quickly than meteorologists had expected last fall.
Which is great. This was my first drought on well water. I don’t have a good sense of the size of our watersource below us, and some people around here are a bit thirsty.
I do know the aquifer is glauconitic sand overlying micaceous sand. Obviously. It is porous and permeable, of course. I know this because I just found a state aquifer map. The challenge is that we’re on the geological border of everything, here where the heavy land and the green sands meet. There are seven different types of aquifers running on the diagonal, and the map is just vague enough that we could be in one of three or so. So I do what anyone does when they want to know about the glauconitic sand, I overlaid the aquifer map with a working map … and found that, even when you adjust for size, the scale of one of them is off.
Who to believe? The state’s map? Or Google Maps?
And while you wrestle with that …
Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am presently nine discs behind. The Re-Listening project, you’ll recall, is where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in their order of acquisition. Roughly so, anyway. I’m right now working through a book out of order. So the book is from 2007, but these CDs are older. None of that matters. The point of the Re-Listening project is listening to the music, and here I’m just filling space with videos of good music and the occasional recollection. So that matters a little bit.
Which brings us to Melissa Etheridge. I had her four earliest records on cassette, maybe five, and maybe didn’t upgrade all of those to CDs. But this, her seventh album, is the last one I bought. Etheridge turned 40. She’d had her first two kids. She was entering a new phase of life. (All of this is great, of course, but … ) The older material, where she was younger, more intense, raw, dramatic, as she now says, all of that was the best part of her catalog.
And since this was released in 2001 she’s had about two lifetimes worth of experiences. Maybe I should dip back in.
Anyway, the first track is a good one.
And much of the rest is this comfortable kind of at-peace-with-itself pop, when I’m just looking for her to put to words some core feeling and belt it out over a 12-string.
But that didn’t happen a lot here — some artists you just don’t want to change, I guess, even though you know change and growth are good things — and so I never listened to this all that much. I don’t even know all of the lyrics.
She’s still touring. Playing solo dates and with The Indigo Girls. We saw them together last fall. Melissa Etheridge will absolutely tear a building in two from the stage. She’s still got that sort of power and intensity. Its impressive.
And I was blown away by her cover of Joan Armatrading.
The next CD is from Michael Penn, 1997’s Resigned. I’m not sure why that shows up in this book. I’ve had this disc since soon after it came out. (It’s terrific.) I probably bought this off the strength of radio or MTV airplay. Here’s the first track.
Probably it was right about here that I entered into my “I wanna be a songwriter” phase. But, as I told a friend, I’d have to work with someone who sounded like this. My friend laughed at that, and every so often she would ask me if I’d found that person yet. I had not. Also, I never wrote any songs. It was a short phase.
My appreciation for Penn has lasted throughout the years, though. And you’ll just have to believe me that I listened to this record three times this time around.
This whole record was long spring days with apartment windows pushed up and doors opened and the stereo, tied into those big, waist-high speakers, turned up loud. I think there was even multimedia on this disc. But who puts discs in computers anymore? Opportunities lost, there.
Michael Penn has been composing for TV and movies for quite sometime. Probably better than life on a bus. Though, sadly, I never got to see him play live, but I would go to a show.
It’d be “an evening with” event. Black jeans, crisply ironed pocket square.
