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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.
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 …
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.
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May 23
Happy (cold) start to May
On March 1st I wrote “The final trick of winter is upon us.” I know this, because I just looked it up. I was writing about the first blooms of the year then. It is, I maintain, a part of a cruel meteorological and botanical pattern.
And here we are, two months later, and the high was … 52 degrees. Honestly, that temperature felt like a sympathetic sop. It felt much colder. Gray throughout, and 40 mile per hour wind gusts.
May 1st. What a joke.
Enough grousing. Let’s get to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the Monday look at the cats. Phoebe, as I write this, is sleeping on a big, comfy blanket. But the other day, she was sitting in the morning sun. She seems to be willing me to take her toys out of that basket, but it looked artistic, to me.
Poseidon, as usual, is judging everything.
So the cats are doing great, but they, too, would like it to be a little warmer, even though they’re unburdened by their inability to read a calendar.
I saw this on a classroom white board. I don’t know what the purpose of the exercise was, or why the notes stayed on the board …
… but it is kind of fun to try to make sense of it all. Whatever it was, I was encouraged to see several variations of being supportive got listed.
Also, the colors tell some other story, I’m sure.
I had a ride Friday night, and then another on Saturday. Part of the Saturday ride was spent in virtual Scotland. This is a short, stiff stage called City and the Sgurr. Sgurr, I just learned, is Gaelic for “high sharp-pointed hill.” I believe it.
And then there was the fever dream that is part of the Neokyo course. What is that thing?
I could not bring myself to get in the saddle yesterday. The sofa was too comfortable, basically. But I did get in 27 miles this afternoon.
And since we just wrapped up another month, let’s check on the mileage chart. The purple line is what I’ve done.
That horizontal part marks the two weeks A.) we were out of town, and B.) I was fighting off a cold. So a light March — despite five consecutive days of pedaling — but I’m still ahead of all of my humble little projections.
This isn’t a lot of mileage, not really, but it’s a lot to me.
We return to the Re-Listening project, and we return to the summer of 1998. The Spice Girls became a foursome, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston started dating, Mulan was released, and so was Win 98. But I was listening to Shawn Mullins. “Soul’s Core,” a bit overwrought as a title, is the fourth studio album. (The title stems from a lyric which we’ll get to in a moment.) This is the one that had “Lullaby,” which you probably liked, until you didn’t. It made it to the top of the Adult Top 40 chart and peaked at ninth on the Modern Rock chart. Shimmer also cracked the top 30 on the Adult Top 40. The albums went platinum.
Here’s the lead-off track, with an entirely different instrumentation.
I used a live version of “Anchored in You” because I really wanted to use the live version of “Gulf of Mexico.” I wanted to see if he’s still singing it as Gu’f.
He does, in places.
There are two conditions where Shawn Mullins absolutely excels. One is in a big harmony, which will come up in a future installment of the Re-Listening project, and the other is when he’s just playing his guitar. The guy figured out the singer-songwriter thing and he’s sticking with it.
But that song is a good illustration of something said to me in passing once. I wish I could remember who it was, but it was obviously someone that I respected a bit. He found Shawn Mullins pretentious, and I found that deflating. And then I think about that lyric there, “I hear a voice from my soul’s core saying freedom’s just a metaphor you got nowhere to go … ” and I get it. There is a something there that’s a bit much. But we sometimes glaze over the awkward for the good. This one is really, really good, even if you don’t know the predictably tragic tale of Richard Brautigan.
He’s writing a lot of character studies, but he’s doing so without a larger thread. It’s both a shame and a relief.
Here’s a fun game to play with your friends. Ask them what musical characters they want to have sequels or updates on. They’re probably not going to understand, so make up something about Jack and Diane. Whatever happened to those two crazy kids? Shouldn’t we have another look in on them? Your friends will understand, and then Jack and Diane are disqualified from the game.
I want to know what became of this character. And, also, how in the world he was able to cram so much color in a three-minute song.
For a while, this CD was a vocal warm up. I would drive into the studio in the very, very dark pre-dawn hours and hum and sing along to a few of these songs. It was a good way to get the instrument working at 3:00 a.m., and, I always hoped, it would lower my voice just a tiny bit. You want your voice to sound authoritative in your first live hit at 4:30. That was the idea, any way.
If you’re now wondering what became of him, Shawn Mullins is another one of those guys who got his fame accidentally, who isn’t in it for stardom.
But, in 2018, to mark the 20th anniversary of his major label debut, he re-released the record with new musical arrangements. That was his most recent studio album. Mullins is doing some limited shows this summer. I’ve seen him a few times over the years. I once took a date to see his show in Atlanta. It was a good show, and everyone had a nice time, even if he wasn’t really her taste.
