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memories / music / video / weekend — Comments Off
15
Feb 15

Guster

Here are a few clips from the Friday night rock ‘n’ roll concert with Guster in Atlanta.

They do not play Airport Song anymore. Haven’t done it in years, despite the people throwing ping pong balls. A friend saw their show in Birmingham and sent me the set list. I kept asking about Airport, but he just glossed over it, ignoring my question. So, I convinced myself, it must be a surprise in the encore or something, but no.

This seems a bit odd. Airport Song was their first break into the mainstream, if you will. And 99X in Atlanta (then WNNX, now WWWQ) basically willed that song into being a hit. I’m sure it got a lot of play elsewhere, the single climbed to #35 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart. I listened to a lot of 99X streaming over the web when I was in my internship in 1998. That song played a lot. The Clinton scandal, 99X and learning more and more about Photoshop were among the basic highlights of the year. Hearing intern jokes at work, listening to that compressed-but-streaming over RealPlayer ping pong game (and a ton of Harvey Danger) while studying pixels took up some time.

The video, as all videos must be in retrospect, was weird and underwhelming:

I have four or five Guster albums on my phone, they come up a lot when I’m running. And yet, still, I was surprised by how easy it is to forget how much you enjoy some people’s live shows. Adam talked in between songs about how the fans have stayed with the group as they have gone from a three-piece acoustic based group to this slightly more trippy electronica thing they’re doing now. And he also said they’ve been noticing that for a long time their audiences stayed the same age, young, but, lately, the audiences were now their age again. So maybe a lot of people are figuring that out.

Anyway, good show, great fun, go see ’em.

adventures / music / video / weekend — Comments Off
14
Feb 15

Kishi Bashi

Last night we were at The Tabernacle in Atlanta to cash in on my Christmas present. The Yankee got us tickets to see Guster play. I fell in with the band on their second album almost 20 years ago. Her god-sisters are also Guster fans, probably from college too, but, somehow, my wife never caught onto the band.

She knows about three of their singles with something more than a passing familiarity, but she may be converted after this, her first show. It was my first Guster show in years — you can forget how much you enjoy a specific band if you don’t see them often, I realized.

It was my introduction to this guy, Kishi Bashi:

He’s doing a one-man show, looping vocals, beat boxing and his violin and running it through a sample-loop device at his feet. This just works better to see it. Here’s a sample:

Each song takes a bit to build up because he has to build the layers — and how you keep that in your mind must be a fairly impressive feat, I’d think. Some of these are very pre-determined, but he’s also just experimenting, as well. It is all very happy — there’s a song serenading a particularly tasty cut of steak — and it probably helps that we were surrounded by Kishi Bashi fans. It occurs to me that if the guy isn’t from the future his art is a bit futuristic. Who needs a band anymore if you can make a full sound right there on stage, all by yourself?

He’s playing, with his full band, on the Letterman show next week, by the way. Go see Kishi Bashi.

Also last night, of course, was the featured act: Guster.

I’ll have a few clips from them tomorrow.

adventures / family / music / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
24
Dec 14

Hark! And joy!

family / history / memories / Monday / music / photo / video — 1 Comment
22
Dec 14

Back in Polaroid time

My grandmother dug through the furniture and who knows where else she keeps it all, but she produced three albums and four boxes of photos tonight. I started her down this path by asking about a CD someone brought over several years ago that traced my grandfather’s family back to his grandfather through photographs.

It was essentially half an hour of people I didn’t know, mysterious black-and-white shots of people my grandmother knew as adults and then the later, questionable, hair and clothing styles of those later adults.

So we watched the disc and she named people and guessed at others. And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the back of the house. I was staring at pictures of my grandparents looking into a camera two decades younger than I am now. My wife was taking pictures of me from three decades ago. Suddenly we all felt so young, and so old. And it was all interesting and weird, except to see those that are gone, now, and to count them all up in your head.

I want to hear these stories and one day I want to ask a lot of questions about them, for posterity’s sake. Some of that information should continue on, somewhere, but I’m not sure if there’s much of an appetite for it. So it should be me that does it, then. And then my grandmother says “They’re all gone now, except for those two girls,” it breaks your heart a little to ask her to think about it.

On the other hand, the two times that I’ve started to dig into this a little bit, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more real smile than when my grandmother is talking about her grandmother. It is worth it for that alone.

Anyway, some pictures.

That guy could straight up sing:

Stringbean, my grandmother said, always wore his pants like this. So he was fashion forward.

David Akeman and his wife were killed by burglars in their home in 1973. (One of their killers died in prison in 1973. The other was paroled just last month.)

But he could play that banjo, she insisted. No kidding. I picked this one because Porter Wagoner was my grandfather’s favorite, and Roger Miller shows up, he was one of my favorites:

If you hear the term clawhammer in a musical sense, this is the meaning. It is, now, considered the “old style” of banjo playing. (Earl Scruggs, who replaced Akeman in the great Bill Monroe band, is the pioneer of the “new” three-finger style.)

I don’t remember Akeman on Hee Haw reruns, but he was there. I’m sure we all laughed at his jokes, my grandparents and me, when the scarecrow was on camera. And now that entire show suddenly seems like a portal into a different time, my grandparents watching stars they’d grown up and were growing old with. Bright colors and bad puns beamed to their antennae, guest hosts and bad skits, all of the stuff in between hearing the songs they knew.

I’m even less certain why people collect head shots and autographs of politicians, but it makes the politicians happy. Once upon a time, at least, one of these was in a lot of homes in Alabama.

I wonder where my grandparents picked all of those up.

Here she is now. She figures she was about 18 or 19 in this picture.

“Let’s talk about this wallpaper,” I said.

“Let’s not,” she said.

She’s such a sweetheart.

history / memories / Monday / music / Samford / video — Comments Off
1
Dec 14

The Rushton Carillon

Today’s installment from college newspapers past has to do with one of the iconic images — and sounds — on the Samford campus.

The carillon was donated by Col. William Rushton, Jr. in honor of his family, or his father, Franklin Rushton, depending on which version you read. The Rushtons came south with William Rushton, Sr., in 1881, just after the end of Reconstruction, when Birmingham was only 10 years old. Senior became an ice magnate, a city alderman and put the first cement paving on the ground. His son, Franklin, ran the family ice company, was a chamber president and was a big part of getting World War II vets jobs in the community. Birmingham Ice & Cold Storage Co., meanwhile, was in operation for 92 years before closing up in 1973. Anyway, Franklin’s son Col. William Rushton, Jr., fought in World War I as a young man and rose through the ranks as a reservist after the war. He, like many of the prominent Samford men, was an insurance executive. If it was a regionally prominent organization in the 20th century, Rushton had a role in it. He died in 1987, but he had several years of listening to the beautiful carillon he helped place on campus.

The author of the above article is today a pediatric disease physician in Kentucky.

The campus official he references, Evan Zeiger, Sr., was an Auburn man. He came to Samford in 1956 and retired in 1984. He died just a few years ago. His son, a local neurosurgeon, died in a plane crash in the Gulf the next year.

I actually have a copy of the original notes for this next piece. The editor submitted a list of questions to the university president and he answered from on high, via an assistant’s typewriter. (This being a few years after he shut the journalism program down, a long and interesting tale for another day, which led to pieces like this proto-listicle.)

Bells about to be installed …

This was a standalone photo and, just to the right, you get a sense of the varying sizes of the bells, which allows for the different notes. The first 49 were cast in Holland and, together, weighed five tons. They were originally above one of the chapels. When Rushton came along they added 11 more bells and it all moved to the library, which is what is going on here:

Breaking news! Here are the library steeples, old and new! (Being located in the center of campus, no one ever had an opportunity to see them … )

Finally, the bells were put in above the library, the weather cooperated and the steeple work was completed, the clavier arrived and was put into place and Mr. Knight was ready to play.

Steve Knight, who has been doing this here for almost 40 years, has long been one of the most interesting people on campus:

I recorded a snippet in April of 2012. Here’s what it sounds like when you stand just under the bells:

Curiously, if you are in the library, you hardly here them at all. That’s by design.

I’ve never been up the ship’s ladder, as Knight called it, so I’ve never seen him perform. Seeing Knight actually play is a marvel, check out this feature piece one of our students produced:

The carillon is a wonderful feature on this beautiful campus. We’ll call it a day right there. Plenty to go around for tomorrow, be sure to stop back by when you can.