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18
Apr 23

Three days until spring

We’re counting down, because it seems a fun thing to do this week really, and I noticed an unusual thing today.

Everything went green. Bright, wavy green in a big, big way all of a sudden. This is a blurry view of the trees from my campus office. Blurry because, I don’t know why, but I like it.

And this is the same tree, just a few moments later, in focus, and from beneath it’s now bountiful limbs.

But that’s different. This is the same tree, roughly from the same angle as the blurry one, though the linear distance is different.

So that’s three photos of the same tree. Forgive me. It’s all so bright and new still, here in the third week of April, and it will take a few more days for the foliage to feel familiar. It’s like the shock of the seasons. There is that indistinct time where you stand at the door and mentally prepare yourself for one condition outside — hot, mild or cold — but then get something different. It is, in fact, the shock of the season.

Three days until the local, officially recognized beginning of spring. Since 2017 it has always arrived the weekend of the Little 500, the two big bike races.

Ha! I just looked at the weather. Friday, the day of the women’s race, the forecast calls for rain, with a high of 58 and a low of 44. The men’s race on Saturday will be under partly cloudy skies. The high is projected at 54, with a low of 34 degrees. Tomorrow, which has no bearing on this whole spring-arrives-with-the-bike-race phenomenon, the high is 82. Weird year.

Anyway, here’s another photo. A different tree. It just looked cool.

Cool, I say.

I was in the studio this evening with the news team, the penultimate news show of the year. It’s a wonderful feeling when a semester winds down, more so when it’s the end of an academic year, but bittersweetly so. For the news crew in particular, we’ll see a few key people graduate, but there’s a whole platoon of freshmen who have this year gained incredible experience for next year. The news side, I am happy to see, will continue to make good strides, having built a nice pipeline, evenly balanced between older and younger students. Now, they’re always growing and growing, helping each other grow, and I pitch in on the little things.

Tomorrow will be another night in the studio, with the sports gang, and that may be their last taping of the year. Bittersweetly so.

It seems we’re always playing catchup on the Re-Listening project, and that’s what we’re doing today. We’re doing that with Alanis Morissette’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.” The album was released in November of 1998, but I picked it up in early 1999. It was another freebie, and, through the Re-Listening project I have discerned a pattern. I didn’t always fall in love with the freebies I picked up way back when.

From this remove, my time with Alanis Morissette feels like a stream of consciousness ple goes like this: Jagged Little Pill has been everywhere for two years, no need to buy that. Also my roommate has a copy, so … Dave Coulier!? The next one, I’ll get the next one. Oh, there it is on the giveaway table (probably) so put that in the pile.

The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 and set a record for the highest first-week sales by a female artist, a record she held for two years. It stayed on the Billboard 200 for a solid six months, and has moved millions of units … but, because it is the music industry, being triple platinum after “Jagged Little Pill” was 16-times platinum in the US, this was underwhelming. (The music industry is weird.) And I’m going to gloss over all of it.

I’ve listened to it. I tried to dive into it. I paid attention to every track this time through. There are 17 tracks here, the runtime is almost 72 minutes. It’s a long record, one which has never resonated with me. I find that odd, since we all watched her grow up. Grew up at the same time, whatever. The woman has lived her entire life in front of the public eye, all of the stages and phases a person goes through, we’ve seen them. For 1998, this was fine, but watching an artist’s march through life leaves a different sort of longitudinal vulnerability. Some of this feels dated now, though, that I finally figured out what always troubled me here. It’s the background tracks. There’s just too much nasally, head voice harmony on here.

Anyway, the stream of consciousness takes us far beyond this 1998 record, end with the best song, the best performance, I’ve ever heard Morissette do. This was July of 2020, just the right mood during that first Covid summer. Sadly, NBC has taken the original video down. Here’s a taste of it.

It was a perfect performance: a poignant song, a new record, eight years since the last and a full family in her orbit. This is the Alanis Morissette my stream of consciousness is most interested in now, not the 24-year-old from “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” but the confident, multitasking woman at a new kind of peak of her powers. That’s the one worth re-listening to.

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17
Apr 23

Four days until spring

The cats demanded to be at the top of the post. The cats know, I’m sure, that they’re the most popular thing going on here. And so Phoebe was happy to pose with a little playful sass.

(And if you think that’s cute, just wait until you see her next photo here. I took it tonight. It’s the most adorable thing in kitty world.)

Poseidon, meantime, is practicing his impersonation of a statue … while we bounce his bouncy ball all around the house.

I’m about half convinced he only plays to make us play, so he can stare at us. Anyway, the cats are doing just great, thanks for asking, and they’re happy with the extra sun and warmer temperatures they’re experiencing lately.

I had a nice 30-mile ride this weekend. It was hard, in that it didn’t feel easy. But it was the sort of hard that made the overall time a bit faster. The sort that made the legs hurt, that made me a little bit delirious, apparently. This was the best picture.

The Yankee said I must be riding well, because I dropped her twice, and she said she was riding hard. Then again, she caught me, twice, while I fought through the teensiest headwind. So she is riding well, which spells trouble for me in keeping up with her the rest of the year.

Anyway, that was a part of the weekend’s exercise, and not at all the part that makes for sore muscles today. Something in that area between the bicep and the forearm — what’s that called, the elbow? — is protesting mightily today. I am in that phase of a new ache and/or pain where I am still learning the motions that hurt, so if you see me moving slowly to starboard, that’s why.

One of the trees outside the building has reached full bloom, the full I’ll-miss-this-when-they’re-gone stage. The blooms are funny things. You can spend all winter looking at sticks pointing this way and that, waiting. One day you see those little bulbs, those hopeful signals of the future. And then you see the blooms — or the buds if you’re really slow and careful — a few at first, and then the entire symphony.

Just in time for you get used to the inevitability, the persistence of those beautiful colors, it all turns green. Then there’s that day or two required to get used to seeing all of that bright, bright green again.

It’d be nice to have trees that bloomed at different times, is all. And if I had a field carefully arranged with all of them on display in a way that always shows color. I wonder what that would look like. I imagine a gentle incline and spiraling trees, and mounds and mounds of upkeep. That’d really aggravate the arm.

Meanwhile, back over in the Re-Listening project, where I’m enjoying all of my old CDs in the order of acquisition, we are now in January (or February) of 1999. I remember being excited about this, I remember looking forward to playing this for friends, and having some of these songs appear on the radio. It was my second live double-album, which just wasn’t something that came out a lot by then.

It was Dave Matthews fourth album, but this wasn’t the Dave Matthews Band, it was Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, in the first of their third album, and before Reynolds formally joined DMB. (Everybody caught up in all of that?)

Anyway, Live at Luther College at number two debuted on the Billboard Hot 200 in February, Silkk the Shocker kept it out of the top spot, with Brittney Spears climbing fast. Despite all of that, it stayed on the chart for 51 weeks.

This was recorded in 1996, so by the time fans had this disc in their hands in 1999 six or seven of the new songs were comfortable, familiar, hits. But there was still some new stuff to explore.

I liked this one right away, it’s a jam band experiment of acoustic guitar jazz masquerading as a pop tune deep cut.

And the other song that blew our minds, the one I played for everyone, was this one.

That’s what a virtuoso sounds like. I don’t know anything about anything about playing a guitar, but I put this on a lot, and for a long time, wondering what it must have looked like. Clearly, there’s a loop machine in there, but there’s still a lot of mastery to observe.

Fortunately, decades later, Tim Reynolds is still playing with the form, and people started recording it on their phones.

I saw Dave Matthews Band later that summer, the last time I caught them live — just before all of the tickets got outrageous. They have 5 North American dates coming up this summer, and I’m sure they’ll be great shows full of the truly devoted. Reynolds will be at those shows according to his website. Matthews and Reynolds, meanwhile, released two more live double discs, in 2007 and 2010. I had no idea about that until just now, but there should be one or two more DMB CDs coming up in the Re-Listening project. But we have to get through a few more fillers this week.

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11
Apr 23

Anybody have some chips? Or peanuts? Or a burrito?

I’m hungry. Quite hungry, really. I was just thinking, yesterday, that I am due a don’t-eat-much phase, but it seems I’m going the other way. This is a deep, can’t-ignore-it hunger. Lunch didn’t touch it. All the snacks stored away in my office? Not a dent. It is a considered-second-lunch-at-4 p.m. hunger. (Pizza sounded sooooo good.) I dared not to stand too close to anyone wearing a microphone in the studio this evening, lest my tummy start chiming in. After dinner, still hungry. I didn’t even have a big workout today. Makes me wonder how I’ll feel after a bike ride tomorrow morning.

I met a guy from Hearst Television today. The broadcasting giant sent two recruiters to campus to meet students. They did one-on-ones with interested students, I told him I could tell him to hire some of the young men and women he met, right away. They also did an under-attended info session, too.

Turns out the guy was from Savannah. I told him my wife and I got engaged there, and that we got married there. He knows the place. Everyone there knows the place. He lives just up the road, he said. He told me about the owner of the place where we got married. I told him we were just there in December, did the bridge run. Told him we go every year, that we don’t even do the tourist stuff anymore, but just walk around and enjoy the pace of things. I asked him if he had a job for me there. He asked me if I wanted to be a news director. The guy that was the news director in their Savannah shop just moved. I say, who doesn’t want to be a news director?

I wonder how many people he meets every year. How relentlessly positive he is, because he was profoundly optimistic, and energetic. Good traits, I’m sure, for this type of recruiting.

He left with my card. But, most importantly, he left having met a lot of talented students. A few of them might wind up within their company. They’ve got almost three dozen stations to fill, after all.

Let’s dive into the Tuesday feature, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. I have so many open tabs this has become a regular thing. I’m not sure if we’re calling it that, or if we should. But it’s my site, so I can decide I guess … Anyway, here we are, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. Yeah, we’re not going to call it that. Anyway, I have a lot of open tabs, and not everything should be closed, lost and forgotten forever. Better to memorialize a few of those pages here.

Anyway, I got sucked in, last month, by the title of this post. There’s always something Buddhism can show you, seems like. How to bear your loneliness: Grounding wisdom from the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön:

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.

Same website, same general concept for me: of someone is writing about them, lichens and moss deserve at least a skim.Lichens and the meaning of life:

Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (public library).

Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:

The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.

Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.”

Now that we’ve thunk deep thoughts, let us enjoy the idea of a delicious pie.No-bake Lemon Icebox Pie:

My Southern sweet tooth can never resist an icebox pie — a class of pie that earns its namesake from simply chilling the pie layers, so there’s no baking involved. They’re wildly simple to assemble, and lightly sweet with a crisp graham cracker crust and the most stately pile of whipped cream on top. With fillings, the flavors are endless, from strawberry to coconut to chocolate. Lemon ranks at the very top for me — fresh lemon zest and juice in this pie contribute to its natural lemony flavor, with no artificial colors or extracts required.

And now I’m hungry again. I’ve been hungry all day.

Maybe I should distract myself with a hyperbolic headline. A leak at the bottom of the sea may be a harbinger of doom/a>:

The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”

Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.

So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.

I wonder if this is happening, in actuality, in other places and we just don’t know it yet.

Something we do know: how many tabs, 28, I still have open on my phone’s browser. That’s pretty decent progress. Still hungry, though.

With a quick dash of a video or two here, we’ll be caught up on the Re-Listening project. For just a moment. That’s the way it works. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I got them, in the car and writing something about them here. I live just 4.5 miles from work, but it is a 20-some-minute commute, somehow. These CDs, then, come and go pretty quickly.

We’re in late 1998 here, with a by-design one-hit wonder. New Radicals released this one record, fronted by the high-toned Gregg Alexander, but Alexander and his writing partner, Danielle Brisebois, ended the project before the second single was released. The album ” Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too” was topical, critical, and pulled from all sorts of influences to make a modern pop record. The record made it to 41 in the US, and landed in the top 20 on charts in Austria, Canada, and the UK. You might remember the top 40 hit single.

That’s an artist’s song.

In the liner notes to her 2004 compilation Artist’s Choice, the Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell praised “You Get What You Give” for “rising from the swamp of ‘McMusic’ like a flower of hope”. In 2006, Ice-T was asked on Late Night with Conan O’Brien about what he has heard, besides rap music, in the last few years that really grabbed him and his only reply was “You Get What You Give”. In a Time interview, U2 lead guitarist the Edge is quoted saying “You Get What You Give” is the song he is “most jealous of. I really would love to have written that.”

I always liked the album, but it’s starting to show it’s age.

The first track has, has always had, a terrific energy. And when it came on — even though I am playing all of these discs in order I’m not always sure which one is going to appear next — I was quite excited for the rest.

A bit later, this one isn’t bad. The bit about obscure bands is hale, hilarious, hipster:

The rest … today it just feels like it’s trying to find it’s voice, while trying to be a meta-album, while trying to channel Prince and, among others, Hall & Oates. The 1970s came back in 1997, basically.

New Radicals signed in 1997 and called it in the spring of 1999. Alexander went back to producing. Seems the touring was part of the problem. They went platinum along the way, though.

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10
Apr 23

75 miles later

Happy Monday from the cats. Phoebe is enjoying the sun. We’ve had our share of clear skies the last few days and they’re both taking full advantage. A sun-warmed furry cat sits in her own realm of indulgence.

Poseidon also wishes you a Happy Monday. And he would like you to know that, for all of the times I tell him I outwit him because I am bigger and smarter, he is now taller than me. Way, way taller than me.

He’ll rub it in for days.

So the cats are doing great, thanks.

We went out for a bike ride this weekend. Twice, actually. Two of my three weekend rides, were outside.

These were rides two and three outdoors this year. Still low enough to count, and a late start owing to a combination of weather, my schedule(s) and my lovely bride working her way back into riding outside. These were her second and third rides on the road since her horrific crash last September.

So rare and novel, it still feels like going outside is getting away with something.

I remember, just after her surgery at the end of September, after a week of zero sleep for either of us, the surgeon came out to tell me she did well. He taught me a new word and said they’d send for me when I could go back to sit with her. While I waited, I called my mother-in-law, giving the good news, trying to reassure, being chipper. I called my mom, too. Both of them, being thoughtful moms, asked me how I was doing. I told her mom I was great: all systems go, taking care of your daughter, looking forward to seeing you soon. To my mother, I heard myself, a bit more candidly, say that, after a week of worry and sympathetic grimacing and no sleep and a fair amount of stress that “I could really use a bike ride.” Seemed selfish then, and in retrospect. My mom took the ‘You have to take care of yourself too,’ approach, which was welcome.

That was on September 29th of last year. I spent the next two weeks and change hovering over the convalescing patient. Three-and-a-half weeks after her crash I got on my bike again — riding part of the same route she’d been on — which wasn’t spooky at all. Between the rest of October and November, recovery, catching up on stuff and so on, I got in four more road rides before the weather turned. (I looked that up on the app and I am surprised the count was that high.)

Last month, on a picturesque weekend day, she wanted to ride outside. We pedaled around the neighborhood for a few minutes, going slowly, averaging just 10 miles per hour. A tentative toe in tepid water.

Saturday, after months of rehab — her ribs and shoulder blade are much better and her collarbone is finally starting to heal six months later — she decided to try riding on asphalt again. I can speak to this firsthand. As much as the physical, it’s a mental progression from riding on a trainer to dealing with wind and noise and cars and bumps. It takes a while to feel like yourself, and some more time after that to approach comfortable. She’s right on schedule, which is to say her schedule.

So Saturday, after I’d already spun out 33 miles on the trainer, we went out for a rambling 17-mile ride around the neighborhood. This is odd, because she always knows where she’s riding, but it was great, because there’s something magically freeing about riding aimlessly. No timers, no zones, no watts, just a bike ride.

Then, yesterday, another beautiful afternoon, we rode the winery route, doing four circuits of the 6.6 mile lap. It’s a quiet set of roads, loosely rectangular, with the interstate running alongside. It’s a good place to stretch out your legs. I asked her, after the first lap, how she was doing. She knew I was asking how it felt and how comfortable she was. She said she was doing OK. There weren’t a lot of cars around to bother us, just as we’d hoped, so she could concentrate on all of the rest of it. So she was concentrating on how her legs were feeling. She was frustrated, feeling sluggish, despite riding on her trainer all winter.

Reaching for an explanation, I said “You rode yesterday. And you know it’s always a little different, going from the trainer to the road. Plus this wind is everywhere.”

There’s a windmill at the top end of that route, and I watched it go around and around each time we went by. We were in a cross-head-cross-wind all the way around.

Then, for a few moments on the second lap, she found her legs. Her form straightened out, her legs took on the familiar form, the one that tells me I have to chase. And so I did, setting a two-lap PR for my efforts.

And now my legs are a bit tired.

I am now three CDs behind on the Re-Listening project. We’ve just worked our way through a stretch of really good jazz, and this next little bit is a comparative step down. An embarrassing step down, perhaps. Let’s just grin and get it over with it.

These guys got discovered in Australia at 15. Their five studio albums have moved more than 10 million units over the years. Their second record got a lot of play on MTV and alt radio, and Neon Ballroom is their third release, at the ripe old age of … 19. It topped the chart in Australia, where it went platinum three times. It also went to number one on the UK rock and metal chart. It climbed all the way to the 50th slot on the Billboard Hot 200 here, and is certified gold. It is one of those efforts that defines a little slice of 1999.

Also, and again, they were 19.

The very pointy tip of the millennial angst spear, we just didn’t think about them in marketing terms at the time.

I’m not sure I ever listened to this much, for whatever reason. A lot of it still feels new, even if it is a little dated two decades later.

Those guys went through some stuff, sadly unsurprising, perhaps, considering the attention they earned so young. They released two more records in the next seven years. After some on-again, off-again the guys split up for good in 2011.

And then there’s Sugar Ray, which was a station giveaway. I never listened to this thing. It was … not for me when I got it, and I was glad it was a freebie. That the three singles got nearly maximum plays across 1999 didn’t help.

Though this track did feature KRS-One.

And they covered a Steve Miller classic.

I’d entirely forgotten that track was on here until I played this disc the other day. As I said, I never listened to this.

Up next in the Re-Listening project, something I actually purchased, and enjoyed!

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6
Apr 23

Some days peak early

Eaaaarly this morning there was a car chase in Los Angeles, where it was still late in the evening. All of the local television stations put their helicopters in the air. The want was for a stolen car, suspect armed and dangerous. The driver stayed on the surface streets, stayed within an eight-block-or-so radius.

Car chases come with a set of truisms. The person involved isn’t making their best choices. And they are all amazing drivers, until they aren’t. Sometimes, these things are amazing advertisements for the durability of cars. And they can be oddly, voyeuristically entertaining, until they sometimes become terrifying. Which is why all of those media sorts were orbiting this guy.

The driver paused, and two people emerged. The passengers skittering away under the police chopper’s big light. They ran spike strips out in front of the car, those big metal set ups that are designed to be driven over, top puncture the tires of the stolen car, and then an officer yanks them away so that the tires of his colleagues’ cruisers are unscathed. To do this, you have to know where the driver is going, the road has to be open, and you’ve got to get there with the gear before the driver, and get him to actually drive over the giant metal spike strips. Sometimes the driver is wise to this, and swerves around them, but, also, see the first truism above.

This guy got spike strips at least three times, which meant he was utterly predictable, and that he couldn’t figure this out. See, again, the first truism.

The first two people who got out of the car, one of them was apprehended right away. The other a short time later, as the chase continued. After a time, the driver paused and another person exited the car. That person gave themselves up quickly as the driver sped on. More laps, more helicopters, more cruisers, more spike strips.

When the tires flatten, you can still drive. The car is noisy, and difficult to control. Now the driver is fishtailing. The driver can’t hold a straight line, because he’s lost three tires. And, eventually, the wasted rubber of the tires gives away, and the car, still going, but slower, has even less control, because the car is down to the rims.

And this guy was going Back to the Future.

Finally, he stopped. And, as is often the case, the stop seemed both delayed and abrupt. It was entirely unsurprising and, like so many of these things, anticlimactic.

The ones that have a climactic ending really, really make you question why you’re watching.

Why I watch is because of these poor news anchors and the interactions with the long-suffering helicopter reporters, how loose and rigid they are with their language and ideals, how there is seldom any followup, even if they’ve ginned up any given chase into something compelling, and how they prove, like me, to be poor play-by-play commentators.

Whoever was on the desk of the station I was watching tonight had a great way of rephrasing, without at all reframing, what had just been said by her colleagues not 45 seconds earlier. The whole thing is parody not beyond satire.

So there I was — watching this not good driver, make not-the-best choices, as the driver and a fifth person were taken into custody — wondering why I was watching this eaaaarly this morning while it was still late in the evening in Los Angeles.

I’ll watch the next one too.

Ron Burgundy knew what he was doing.

More music, because that’s the theme around here as we labor to catch up on the Re-Listening project. It’s every CD I own, in the order in which I picked them up. These aren’t reviews, anything but!

Imagine, in your early post-adolescence, discovering Keb’ Mo’. Invite some friends over, you put on “Just Like You”, his third album, for which he won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album — an honor he’s won twice more, and been nominated for seven times, total — and you are suddenly musically erudite. (From jazz to contemporary blues within one page of this book of CDs!)

He released this in the summer of 1994. I got my copy in … let’s say the end of 1998 or the very beginning of 1999. Someone gave this to me, or it was a work freebie, or something like that. I don’t have the liner notes, never did. But I have that drum and that harmonica, starting off a whole record. Musically erudite, I tell you.

Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, two people who shape all of modern blues-pop if you ask me, appear on the title track. You can’t do better than that for supporting vocals.

This record just cracked the U.S. Billboard 200 in 1997, staying on that chart for just one week.

Is there a Robert Johnson cover? There is a Robert Johnson cover.

How the man that influenced everything ever done in blues (and most of rock ‘n’ roll post-1961) did it.

Also in 1997, Keb’ Mo’ portrayed Robert Johnson in a documentary.

Never mind that Johnson died at 27 and Keb’ Mo’ was 45 or 46 at the time. Keb’ Mo’ has 19 records out there now, with all of those Grammy awards, and he’s still touring at 71. He has two shows next week in Australia, and then begins a 25-date U.S. tour later this month.

And we are now just two (much less musically erudite) CDs behind on the Re-Listening project.