music « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

music

music / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
May 23

Another part of the neighborhood menagerie

We sat on the deck for a time into the early evening. The weather was fine, the birds were in full throat, the reading needed to be read. There was a baby bunny on the deck with us. See the chair leg? That’s my chair.

It moved from one side of my chair to the other, but he was otherwise quite still. Stayed by us, too, sitting patiently. I’d read a little and then glance down. Still there. Read a bit, look over for my buddy, still there. This went on for a half hour or so. Probably, it was wondering what we were about.

I half expected it to speak up in a Disney-type voice, wondering when I was going to make with the lettuce and carrots.

We return now to the Sisyphean task of catching up on the Re-Listening project. Overall, this is about listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. I figured I’d write a bit about them, embed a video, share an impression or a memory, but never reviews because what the web needs right now is a decades late write up of a one-hit wonder. No, not that. It’s just for fun, and for whimsy which, as I like to say, is what most music should be about. But I’m also chronically behind in the write ups, it seems. So, chronologically, we’re going to briefly return to somewhere in 1998 or 1999. Or, if you prefer, last Saturday.

Often times I can remember which disc came next, but the real fun part is when I have no clue, which was where I found myself, while out running errands, last weekend. When you don’t know what’s next, the transition from one disc to the next might seem even longer. The CD changer makes the disc-changing racket and while the new one spins into action and the laser eye does laser eye things to make the 20th century music play, there’s a long beat of quiet and wonder. What will this be?

This one was pretty bad.

I’m not even sure why I own “How to Operate with a Blown Mind,” by Lo Fidelity Allstars, but I do. It had one single you might remember, and it sat on the US Billboard 200 in the 115th spot. It topped the Heatseekers Albums chart, but, most importantly, it taught me that electronic big beat was not then, and is not now, my genre.

Right now, I’m trying to find a track to embed here, but they just all annoy me. I’ll need to look at the liner notes to be sure, but I am hoping this was a radio station giveaway or something. I’d be disappointed with myself, these many years later, to realize I spent money on this record.

Which brings us to a somewhat better album, and March of 1999, and something that was definitely a station giveaway. (It has the little stamp on it that says so.)

Citizen King’s upper midwestern blend of hip-hop, soul, and punk, on their second album, “Mobile Estates” still holds up surprisingly well, even if some of it has the feeling of someone just learning Pro Tools. (Anyone learning a new production software platform knows what that is like.)

Here’s the big single, it reached the 25th spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.

One of the strengths of the record is how varied they got with the samples. And there’s enough chaotic, everyday noise to either make mastering easier, or infuriating.

There’s some silly low fidelity pretend funk throughout the thing, and all of it feels cheery enough. I have the impression, from this re-listen, that I just played this in the car a lot. It probably got attention from recency bias, until the next stretch of records came along to dominate my listening rotation. And so it was that when the penultimate song began I had almost no recollection of it. But it’s clever in its own Beckesque way.

Then they close the record with a series of totally anachronistic sounds.

This record featured the band’s biggest, broadest success. They split up in 2002. One of the guys bounced around in other musical projects in California, and has since moved to Berlin. Two are well regarded audio engineers and producers. One worked for a long time as a DJ, and even spun records at Lambeau Field before Packers games. He’s still making music these days, among other things.

But that’s enough of this, for us, for now. After this entry into the Re-Listening project, we are only … two CDs behind again.

cycling / music / photo / Re-Listening / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
May 23

They can’t all be momentous

Have you ever had a day where nothing happens, and you still wonder where the day went? You might think that weird, I just think of it as Wednesday.

The building is all but empty. I don’t think I even said anything aloud to anyone today. And, yet, where did the day go? I did reply to an important email this morning, but that was trumped by my peanut butter sandwich, which might have been the highlight of the day.

There will be more to my Thursday, I am sure of it.

Can’t be much less, really.

The highlight of the day was the weather, which was just about perfect. Sunny and mild, it was 74 at the warmest point of the day, but was a warm mid-60s experience on my way out of the office. It was perfect for a bike ride.

The Yankee is fighting off a sinus infection, and so she contented herself sitting on the deck reading, while I set out to turn the pedals by myself. It was just me and my shadow.

The other day I rode down one of my favorite roads in the area. It’s an uppity country road, pretending to be an overly ambitious private drive. Except there are a lot of driveways on that road, but there’s a great downhill and one incredible stand of woods you ride through. I recorded the woodsy part, because everything was so green and perfect.

Today, I rode down another of my favorite roads. It’s a dead-end street off one of our regular routes. I’ve ridden it twice, both times in the fall, and on some of the most spectacular autumn days. This 2019 shot, you may note, sometimes appears as a header on the blog.

I’ve made videos of the ride back out from the bottom of the road. This one was from last fall.

Same road, but from my first trip on it, in October of 2019 — and, yes, YouTube did a terrible job on the compression here. Trust me when I say the video looks much better in its raw form. So much so that I kept it on my phone. Give me a shout, I’ll show it to you sometime …

But, I thought, I should try this road in the springtime. Today was the day.

I overcooked it on the first curve today, so I had to abort the video. (Oh no! I’ll have to go back!) But here’s a photo from approximately the same view as the photo above.

It’s almost as pretty in green as it is in the yellows and reds and oranges of October.

We’re playing catch-up on the Re-Listening project, and today is all about the late 1990s blues. And for late 1990s mainstream blues, we’re talking about Johnny Lang. We’re going to address two albums at once, since they show up back-to-back in my CD books. I think I’m in a mini-stretch of CDs that were part of a bulk purchase. (Did I have to complete a Columbia House contract or something?)

Anyway, these are are out-of-order in my book. “Wander This World” is Lang’s third studio album. It came out in late 1998. He was an unbelievable 17 years old.

Is there a live acoustic version of the title track? There is a live acoustic version of the title track.

Really, if you think about it, Johnny Lang might be the key to the ultimate demise of AOL’s social cachet. What else could they do after that?

There’s a lot of great stuff on this 17-year-old’s record. (I drove listening to this and I still shake my head at that.) This might be one of my favorite tracks, and classic twelve-bar blues.

A blues musician named Luther Allison wrote that song. People called him the Jimi Hendrix of blues, and that’s as good a reason as you need to play the original.

Allison died a year earlier, in August of 1997. In January of that year Lang released “Lie to Me,” his second studio album. This thing hit shelves and, the next day, he turned 16. The title track is the first track.

There’s a fair amount of covers, blues standards I guess we should say by now, on this record. Here’s Lang’s live performance of an Albert Collins classic.

“Good Morning, School Girl” is definitely a standard. You can’t have blues as a genre without it. John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson first recorded it in 1937. Here’s another live performance from Lang.

I included the live performances because, under every video there’s a comment raving about his live shows. Never had the chance to see him live. And, sadly, he doesn’t tour any more. He put out five more albums after this pair, three of them going right to the top of one chart or another. He’s been dealing with some sort of vocal cord problem since the very beginning of 2020. Perhaps the last thing he was able to do is play in the house band for this concert.

It seems he’s gone silent online since then. (Maybe he’s got the whole thing figured out.) Hopefully he’s cashing steep royalty checks.

These are great records, for ears both fresh or experienced, and some of these tracks are probably going to take on some importance in a historical sense. I picked them up for atmosphere — some things just seem like the soundtrack for a party or some other event, but never figured out what that event might be. That has more to do with my imagination than the work, because these two discs are still powerfully strong.

IU / music / Re-Listening / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
16
May 23

I criticized the font of the eye chart

I had a nice tomato basil soup for dinner this evening. It aged well.

Which is a thing I can say because the little date stamped on the bottom of the can was well behind me. This is from the Covid 2020 stash. Stuff I bought in February of that year. The Yankee was off to watch a marathon, had probably not even heard the word “Covid” yet, and I went to the store to stock up.

This was the first weekend of March of that year. I hit the grocery store, counted out enough things to get through two-plus easy weeks. Then I went to the hardware store next door and me and another guy there tried to figure out which of the few masks they had on hand were the right ones for the circumstance. I knew a tiny bit more than we did, we made our decisions and parted ways friendly, each with half of what they had — which wasn’t much. At the house I found a big plastic storage bin and stowed all of my new food supplies in it, in reverse order, so the most perishable things, the crackers I think it was, would be on top. I had notes, so that every so often, there would be an injection of those things nearing the end of their shelf life into the diet.

Fortunately we never had to rely on that bin, because grocery store workers were essential workers for a time, whether they were paid that way, or supported that way, or not. For a brief time, as I recall, we even ate better than normal. I remember being on a chat with friends and we were comparing dinner notes and someone shared their menu and I thought, “Who knew dystopia would include crab cakes?” But despite the occasional to regular shortages on shelves, we never had many problems. With the exception of peanut butter, and having to change bread brands for a while, we were exceedingly fortunate.

Over time that bin got out of sight, and then out of mind, but recently I dug it up. Now I’m going to work my way through what’s left inside of it.

Meaning lots of soups. But, around here, we say “Hooray soup!”

There’s a School of Optometry at IU. And you can do eye exams there. I’d never gone, but everyone you ask will rave about it. You’re seen by a student studying optometry, and they are supervised by a professor. The only knock is that if you make an appointment you should settle in, because it takes a while.

So I was ready. Appointment booked, calendar cleared. Showed up a few minutes early, even. And then a tall young man came out, called my name, took me upstairs, called me sir a lot and gave me the full two-hour workup. He’d been doing this clinical internship for about two months, he said, but he had the calm, patient and steady demeanor of someone who’d done this for a long, long time. He’s about halfway through the program, he said, and he plans to go home and practice in Winnipeg, where he studied biology in undergrad.

Also, I am a terrible patient. He got to the point of the exam where he had to drip drops in my eyes and my face is not interested in any of that. By the second time of dripping drops — this is a complete exam — my eyelids just refused to open. I had no control of them. The poor guy had to pry my left eye open, like it was a fight.

It’s a water on my face thing, an anything in my face thing, really. I step out of the shower and must immediately dry my face. In the pool, in the ocean, get that water away from my eyes. The dentist’s office? An exercise in zen patience that I can only just muster. Its those hands in my face.

Which brings up that little blue pen light test. It is attached to the exam station, the one where you put your chin in the little cup. The examiner sits on the other side, all the special lens stuff between you, and one of those devices is a long, slender piece of equipment, the blue light which comes right to your eyeball. Right up to it, he says, which was funny because my poor ol’ eyeballs were so recently traumatized by his foreign liquids.

It is some sort of hand cranked device, I think, and he moves it closer. I’m sure it is operating smoothly, but all of this is happening in the most compact focal plane possible, so it felt, to my traumatized eyes, like it was moving in fits and starts. The aversive part of my brain was not having that, either.

I am a terrible patient, but my intern was great. We had to wait for his supervisor to come in for the final sign off, so we talked about all sorts of optometry things. I learned a lot about things they can diagnose before your GP, which was rather fascinating.

And, I had photos taken of the layers of the back of my eyeballs. My guy said they’d had the machine for just a few weeks, and that IU was one of two American universities that had this on campus. My eyes were examined by cutting edge technology.

He also said “Perfect!” a lot in relation to my eyes. After a thorough exam — because my guy is learning — we can say my eyes are, in fact, pretty good. For my age.

No surprise here, but I am very much behind on the Re-Listening project. So let’s get into it so, over the next several days we can get through it. Before long we’ll finally make it into the 21st century. I think we’re in 1999. Remember, I’m playing all of these in the car in the order that I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, of course, but just an excuse to fill some content and play some music.

How far behind are we? We might catch up by the end of the week. At which point I’ll have probably worked through a couple more discs.

Anyway, it’s 1998 or 1999, though this CD is from 1994. It’s the band’s first studio album, though their second record was their major label debut. So after “Somewhere More Familiar,” I went back and found Sister Hazel’s eponymous record. (Universal re-released it because the entire music business is just a naked cash grab.) No singles, but it does have an early acoustic version of their breakthrough hit, “All for You.”

That track got a whole new recording for their next record, and that second version peaked at number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Everything on this particular record feels a lot leaner, somewhere between a collection of demos and a polished high-end production. But sometimes that lets the instrumentation and the heart shine through a bit more.

Also, someone’s dog makes a wonderful guest starring role, which makes the bubba riff forgivable.

The real gem of the record, the one that you’ll want to skip other songs to get to, is the last track, a pretty great Sam Cooke cover.

I’m almost a Sam Cooke purist, but that cover does something right.

Anyway, this was a record for Sister Hazel fans, and, to me, generally a cheery background soundtrack. They’ll pop up once or twice more, later in the Re-Listening project. Or, if you don’t want to wait that long, go see them on tour. I caught them a few times back then, and the boys from Gainesville, Florida (they’ll mention that a lot) put on a good show. They have 28 dates scheduled across North America this summer.

music / photo / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
4
May 23

Dodging other people’s pictures

For about two weeks or so each year, leading up to the spring term graduation, the Sample Gates become a a photographic centerpiece of the campus. Already, it is a bustling place. This is one of those places where town meets campus, there’s a busy bus stop there, a Starbucks is just across the street, and so on. But now, there are crowds there for photographs.

The Sample Gates are a signature image on the IU campus. The gates appear old, and indeed they are to the modern student. It only took 80 years or so to get them built. Students had raised money for them at the turn of the 20th century, but the board had the same plans, so the student-raised money went to another project. After that, the university put the gates on hold. Different plans for the gates came and went over the next few generations. Then, in the 1960s, there was a new move to build those gates, but loud criticism stalled the project. People said it a wasteful expenditure when the money could go to scholarships and financial aid. (Can you imagine?) That brings us to the 1980s. The man who ran financial aid for the university donated money for the gates we see today and named them in honor of his parents, and so we have the Sample Gates — the place where IU folks see it as much as a welcome to the world as a welcome to the campus. That’s been the icon since 1987.

And now, at graduation, young men and women show up in coat and tie and nice dresses and caps and gowns and take their photographs. It ramps up and, by today, there are small crowds patiently waiting their turns, and graduates wasting cheap bottles of sparkling white wine for photographs.

Yesterday, someone had dragged out a professional photographer. They’d brought reflectors and the whole set up. Someone else, in the brightest part of the day, had dragged out a ring light for some reason. Someone else brought their full length mirror.

I have never understood why the university doesn’t close this to foot traffic for the week. Let the IU Student Foundation run things. A few bucks here for a few moments with a clean background. None of these other people in your shots. Or, for a few more bucks you get a few moments and a few professional shots with a photographer they provide. Sure, there are some instagram pros out there, but if you’ve ever asked someone to take a group photograph for you, you know that not everyone is a natural shutterbug. And the graduation pose is definitely one of those moments you don’t want to be cropped at the shins.

We return to the Re-Listening project, where we are listening to all of my old CDs, and in the order that I acquired them. I’m chronologically in late 1998 (or very early 1999) here, and we’re talking about Texas blues, and a 1995 posthumous greatest hits release from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s catalog.

I have the glimpse of a recollection of some news coverage after he and three others were killed, in 1990, in a helicopter crash. It was foggy and the helicopter was living a concert and crashed into a nearby ski hill. The news featured him, or him in Double Trouble, reducing small venue stages to ash, and then one of his contemporaries, I forget who, discussing how it seemed unfair that here you had one of the most talented guitarists in all of the world, he’d finally put his drug use behind him, only to die at the peak of his powers. He was 35.

He would have been 40 years old when people put this on for the first time.

Every song on here I know. I think almost every song on here I knew at the time, somehow, despite this not being my main genre, but sometimes the virtuoso goes mainstream. Indeed, SRV and Double Trouble dominated MTV in the early days. Also, every song on this record absolutely cooks. But you need to see him live. Thankfully, someone invented video and, later, YouTube, where you can see the man play his machine behind his back.

This song is also on the record, though this performance is from Austin City Limits, looking for all the world like the velvet bulldozer, Albert King.

For whatever reason, I don’t really associate a lot of memories with this CD — that’s one of the main points of the Re-Listening project — but the music is absolutely amazing, which is the other, more important, point.

Musically, SRV is critical to resetting the genre of pop and rock stations. He helped kill the synth-pop, and took some wind out of the hair metal scene. Most importantly, his cords held open the door for people like Robert Cray and Walter Trout, and maybe even the renaissance of John Lee Hooker a few years later.

In the next installment of the Re-Listening project we’ll have a debut album, something I came to a decade too late. Also, it’ll be really, really good.

cycling / memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
May 23

After a long time, it got here quickly

My mind wanders better when I ride my bike on the road, as opposed to when my bike is mounted on the trainer indoors. I don’t know why that is. It seems like the opposite should be true. Indoors, I am in a small 8 x 10 light-blue room. There are a few windows showing the backyard, which is quite nice, but it remains a static condition. Lately 90 minutes is the extent of time I want to stay in that unchanging way, but the only thing my wanders to then is, “How much longer?” Where does my mind go the first 75 or 80 minutes?

It is an honest mystery, one that hasn’t occurred to me until after today’s hard-easy bike ride on roads and under sunny skies. Today, I spent about an hour pondering the nature of suddenness. It was 61 degrees and the world felt big with possibilities. This is finals week. Young people are graduating. Graduating? Already? Can that really be the case? So suddenly? People are saying so long, or see you next fall.

How did we get here so suddenly? This feels rapid.

Coming to realize that this is May — that the term is ending, that summer will soon begin, that my schedule can simplify itself, that the weather is maybe finally growing consistently nice, that these are things to be enjoyed and savored, and they are here before me, now — is a small elation. Remember the feeling, as a kid, you had when you thought you were getting away with something? It feels like that kind of giddy.

And how can that be the case? Why, just the other day was spring break, and that felt exactly the same way. Where did this semester, this year, the last three of them, go?

You almost don’t even notice the little voice saying, “Finally … :

I thought on this for most of my ride, but came up with no real answers. You’d think, riding on open roads, you’d spend time concentrating on other things. The wind, your lungs, the sound of your tires on asphalt, how that black Audi deliberately executed a dangerous close pass. But, no, it was the nature of the notion of time. Except for the places where I was riding through curves and turns, and passed that one farm that was a little light on the fragrance of nature, today. Does the livestock know what time of year it is?

Anyway, shadow selfie.

And, later in the evening, having realized how my conscious wandering mind acts on the road versus on the trainer, I have to wonder why. I asked the shadow. He was characteristically zen about the whole thing. Maybe that’s by design, too.

Time to dive back into the music for the Re-Listening project. It’s all of my old CDs, in their order of acquisition. And this is one I listened to twice before I started writing about it here, because there are no rules or expectations here, and I like this record. We journey back to the early fall of 1998 and the third major label release by Better Than Ezra, “How Does Your Garden Grow?” They got dropped by their label right after this record, where they parked two songs in the top 40, again proving the ridiculousness of the music industry.

“At the Stars” made it to 17 on the Modern Rock chart. If you had time for another 1,500 words on this, I’d argue it’s a part of a long-running trilogy-plus arc throughout the band’s catalog. Or you could just imagine all the rom-coms this could have featured in, or the dates it played a part of in 1998 and 1999.

Tom Drummond was experimenting, a lot, with his bass guitars, and the sounds were peppy and eclectic throughout.

Kevin Griffin, in addition to fronting this band for three-plus decades now, has a prolific second career as a songwriter for other acts. I like to think this was the song where he figured out he’d do that.

There’s a line in there, after the bridge, that I told a girl when she broke up with me the next year. It was a direct ripoff, sure, but it also applied. She caught the reference, but not its meaning.

If you had time for a further 2,000-3,000 words on this, I could make a convincing argument that if the producer got really selective, they could re-release the greatest concept EP of all time from just a few of the tracks on this record.

They re-released this record a few years ago in 5.1 stereo. YouTube’s compressions aren’t an improvement on the original mix by any means. But I wonder …

Griffin said:

It’s our most sonically adventurous album. At that time there was some great music happening — not just alternative rock, but an explosion of electronic music like Chemical Brothers, DJ Shadow and the experimental Björk albums, like Post, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. So we made this grand sweeping album with a lot of electronic flourishes and a big orchestral string section. We really went for it and the original recordings had a great sonic character, but got a very compressed, late ’90s mix. So a lot of the textures and nuances were lost in the original stereo release. Richard LaBonté [of Music Valet, the 5.1 remix specialty label that spearheaded the project] was the catalyst for the remix. When he approached us, we were thrilled. The album was initially unappreciated. It probably got us dropped from Elektra Records, because we’d made two very commercial albums before that, and then went down the rabbit hole creatively. But it’s our fans’ favorite album.

Should I start buying things in Dolby 5.1 now? Would I notice the difference?

Anyway, the last time I saw BTE was in 2018. They were celebrating the 25th anniversary of their major label debut that year, on the road with Barenaked Ladies who were, themselves, celebrating a 30th anniversary that same year. These are the acts I like now, I guess. It was inevitable as it was obvious, I suppose. Better Than Ezra is apparently close to releasing a new album — possibly this year. And they’re doing limited dates this summer, though none of those shows are close by where I’ll be. If they were, though, I would be there.

The next album in the Re-Listening project is “Appetite for Destruction.” I bought it as part of a bulk deal. I never had it in another format, and picking this up was really just feeling a need to acknowledge something that was important to rock ‘n’ roll from 1987-1989. The singles, except “Nightrain” all hold up. The rest is just kinda … there, but that’s likely just because I have no strong association with the CD. Plus, after 30 million units sold, it’s challenging to write anything new here. And, these days, it is impossible to listen to this and not picture Slash in a Capital One commercial. The first single is about heroin addiction, and now there’s banking spots. We’re mere days away from reverse mortgage promos and Muzak at this point. I guess i just don’t have … an appetite for it.