Indigo Girls « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Indigo Girls

There’s so much here it can’t be highlighted in the title

Today was the first day I haven’t broken a sweat while moving things in the new house. I’m sure this will not turn into a streak, for there is always something to move or adjust or clean or fix. But it seemed like a good thing to note. The getting settled was more low key.

I only have three giant boxes of books left to unpack, and I am savoring the anticipation for that experience.

Which is not to say that today was a day of pure comfort and ease and conditioned air. It was all of those things, but that’s not what I’m saying here. I also “exercised.” Went for a run. This was my first run since December 27th.

I know, I know! First swim in years and my first run in months, both in the same week, all while I have been lifting and carrying things around the house. This is crazy talk!

We were going to go do something called a “track workout.” Presumably this involves a track and running. We got to the place and, sure enough, there was a track. But no workout. The patch of grass inside the track oval is a soccer pitch and it is being used for a soccer tournament. No running allowed, for whatever reasons of practicality and safety. So the few hearty and hardcore runners who showed up anyway set out for a five mile run. That’s not what The Yankee had on her training schedule today and I’m certainly not up for a five-miler this week. So we went back to our lovely little neighborhood and ran around it.

And so I got sweaty. Also, this was a much faster pace than the last time I ran so, clearly, the goal for me should be to take six or seven months off between jogs.

While my lovely bride finished up her run, I watered the plants. Also, I remembered that I took this photograph an evening or two before and didn’t use it, so I’ll use it now.

That’s our new front porch sunset views. I’ll take it.

Let’s close some tabs. This is our return to the regular Tuesday feature that lets me memorialize a few tabs that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t otherwise managed. Most of these don’t deserve a bookmark, but it might be good to circle back to them one day, and so here I am.

A little while back I found myself slipping into a deeply nuanced conversation about who wrote the song, “Apache.” This could have become something really nerdy about what really constitutes a cover, but, thankfully, the conversation was diverted away from that. And thanks are due to the person who saw that train wreck happening and leapt in with some wry observation about the weather, inflation, bowling shoes or whatever it was. Anyway, the answer is Jerry Lordan, but then Bert Weedon, importantly, The Shadows, and then famously Jørgen Ingmann, followed, influentially, by the Incredible Bongo Band and then, of course the Sugarhill Gang (twice).

Many chefs, it turns out, could be a good theme today. Who killed Google Reader?:

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still look back fondly on the project. It was a small group that built the app not because it was a flashy product or a savvy career move — it was decidedly neither — but because they loved trying to find better ways to curate and share the web. They fought through corporate politics and endless red tape just to make the thing they wanted to use. They found a way to make the web better, and all they wanted to do was keep it alive.

[…]

For a while, the internet got away from what Google Reader was trying to build: everything moved into walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, governed by Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and others. But now, as that era ends and a new moment on the web is starting to take hold through Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, the things Reader wanted to be are beginning to come back. There are new ideas about how to consume lots of information; there’s a push toward content-centric networks rather than organizing everything around people. Most of all, users seem to want more control: more control over what they see, more knowledge about why they’re seeing it, and more ability to see the stuff they care about and get rid of the rest.

Google killed Reader before it had the chance to reach its full potential. But the folks who built it saw what it could be and still think it’s what the world needs. It was never just an RSS reader. “If they had invested in it,” says Bilotta, “if they had taken all those millions of dollars they used to build Google Plus and threw them into Reader, I think things would be quite different right now.”

The ending is a bit naive, but it does make you wonder how things would have worked if we’d stayed out of the walled gardens.

Speaking of social media and walls … New Jersey just made it a lot harder for police to snoop on social media:

(T)he Supreme Court of New Jersey decided Facebook Inc. v. State, which puts much-needed guardrails on police conduct in the state when it comes to law enforcement’s access to digital communications. Up until this decision, it was permissible for New Jersey police to obtain a Facebook user’s private messages in near real time with a mere probable-cause warrant. However, case law and state and federal statutes rightly recognize that real-time access to private communications demands heightened privacy protections. This type of search would generally be considered a wiretap and require the police to apply for a wiretap order. Wiretap orders require an enhanced showing, one beyond probable cause, to be granted.

[…]

While certainly a win for privacy advocates, this case reminds us of several important issues in the fight for privacy in the digital era. First, in an age in which increasingly personal information is shared via digital means, it is essential that real-time communications are afforded the highest level of protection from snooping eyes …

Moreover, it is clear that pre-internet statutes and case law that govern online activity are woefully inadequate for the realities of the digital era. Many of these laws and cases are based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1979 ruling in Smith v. Maryland, which created the third-party doctrine and held that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy for information voluntarily turned over to a third party.

That’s going to come up in a class this fall, I bet.

Finally, in Macon, Georgia, the minor league team has one of the best team names in sports, but only the second best team name in city history. The Macon Bacon shirts, however, are pretty great. (Also, their mascot is named Kevin and, while predictable, I was not ready for that degree of cheesy.)

Just four more Indigo Girls songs to go from The Ryman show, sadly. I’ve mostly just been sharing things I recorded in the order that they appeared on the band’s set list that night, but I’m jumping ahead a little to set up a big finish on Friday.

First, though, here’s “Galileo,” which was the Indigo Girls’ first song to break into the top ten on a music chart, the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, in this case. The success of this song helped “Rites of Passage,” their fourth studio album, go platinum. And ever since they released it in 1992, this song has been a fan favorite. There’s even a singalong portions.

It is one of those songs that, I think, doesn’t really belong to the performers anymore. The Indigo Girls have a few of those and (hint) we’ll have another one of those in this space tomorrow.

We have to get back into the Re-Listening project if, for no other reason, than because we are woefully behind. (Some time has elapsed and circumstances have compounded my investment into the Re-Listening project.) I think I’ll be doubling up and writing shorter bits about each album for a bit, just to try to get back on equal terms. But, for the uninitiated, the premise is simple. I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a lovely musical walk down memory lane. And, to share the fun, I’m writing a bit about it here. These aren’t music reviews, because who cares? They are a good way to pad out the page, to share the sounds and to bring up something that, perhaps, hasn’t come to mind in a while.

Kids, Widespread Panic was huge. The year is 1999 (I know, I know) but they’d been together for almost two decades by then, they’d had a concert film directed by Billy Bob Thornton, they’d been on H.O.R.D.E., they had five studio albums under their belts, they were network TV veterans and an absolutely legendary jam band already. And that’s when the regional icons got their first huge mainstream moment.

I don’t know why I have “‘Til the Medicine Takes.” Widespread wasn’t really my band. A lot of people I knew just raved and raved about them, which was probably enough for me to stay at arms length for a while. But I picked it up somehow — a giveaway, most likely, I never even had the liner notes — and put it in and this was the first song I heard.

I have three Widespread Panic memories. One, I was driving a friend and his girlfriend and her roommate somewhere and Widespread was on the radio, something from this album, on a deep cut station. His girlfriend launched into this diatribe about how she didn’t like Widespread Panic because they’d sold out. She’d put some thought and some force into this argument. The jam band from Athens was on the radio. They weren’t real, authentic, rockers, like this new band she was into, Train.

My friend, who was very much a jam band aficionado, who grew up two hours from where the band started their careers and who had probably had them as a soundtrack to most of his young life, almost broke up with her right there in my car.

Maybe that’s why he almost always insisted on driving.

Another is this. In May of 1999, just before this record was released, they were one of the Sunday night headline acts at Music Midtown. Back then it was a three-day event with six main stages and a handful of smaller venues dotting the middle of Atlanta. Just an incredible opportunity to see important bands, or check out new things. Being me, I studiously cross referenced every show and was intent on seeing the best possible act in each act of the three days of music. And the best act late on Sunday night. Your feet are hurting. You’re tired. You’re hungry. It’s May in Atlanta so anyone could be approaching their sell-by date. But this band came on proved the point about why you have to see them live.

The third is this. On Friday, June 23rd, when I loaded up my car and drove away from IU for the final time, this song came up, right on cue.

“‘Til the Medicine Takes” peaked at 68 on the Billboard 200 chart. And, yes, the CD version of “Dying Man” just rocks, but you need to see the band live. Soon to enter their fifth decade as a band, they’re still touring widely today. They play multiple shows at each venue they visit, because that’s how it is when you’re a touring monster. Later this month, three shows in Huntsville, Alabama, then three shows in Napa, California in August. Catch ’em if you can.

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10
Jul 23

“What really makes it new is the fact that we are here”

Tomorrow I’ll put four more big plastic bins in the basement because this weekend I prepared two fo them for storage. Also this weekend, and today, I emptied six more bins of books. Tonight I finished placing them on their shelves. First, all of the Gloms are now back in order in their bookcase. (One of the bins of Gloms got dropped when we were moving things into the house. It, of course, was the bin with the 120-year-old books. They seemed to do OK, the ancient books, but that was a stressful moment.)
The Gloms are going to pop back up in a photo capacity in the not-too-distant future.

After that, there also two other bookcases, filled with dozens of books I’ve yet to read. Last night I organized them into two stacks. On my grandfather’s bookcase, right next to my desk, are the books I’ll read first. There are about fifth books placed there, and perhaps about the same amount on the other bookshelf in the far corner.

Tomorrow I’ll set up the audio equipment. After that, it’s just reducing clutter, and then making plans for how I’ll actually use the space.

Anyway, most of the house settling is coming together. I’ve got two other bookcases to fill downstairs, and there are some odds and ends to figure out, but soon we’ll be on the way to trying to figure out where to hang things.

Which is good, because talking about how you’re unpacking for days on end might be the most boring thing on the web, am I right? So, starting tomorrow, back to the other riveting things I usually talk about here.

Here’s the important part. The most delicate things have been removed from balled up newspaper.

First one, then the other.

Phoebe and Poseidon are ridiculous, and they’re doing well. Quite settled, I’d say.

We had a nice little bike ride this weekend, which allows me to use the new bike banner once again. It was a lovely pedal through farmland and close to the lower basin of the Delaware River estuary.

We rode by crops ready to be pulled from the vine, cornstalks ready to soar and over a bit of the marshy river itself.

On this particular route, I think we only passed one church, watching over the fields and the people and the carefully planted trees.

It wasn’t a hard ride, but it was not without its challenges. It wasn’t especially fast, and at one point everything hurt. I am, I reminded myself, recovering from a move, Also, despite my lovely bride’s best efforts, I still got us off to a later-than-desired start, so the sun was ready to bake us in the last few miles. But the scenery was nice, and the company was wonderful.

I’m ready for the next ride, and maybe after a few more I’ll be ready for them to be a bit faster.

We took some time out for gymnastics. Tthe former All-American still has the Focus Face and the fingers and toes do what a gymnast’s fingers and toes do. I doubt she’s even aware of them, but it always amuses me.

She stuck the landing, several times.

Today, there were laps.

I swam some laps as well. I’m easing back into this, having now my second lap swim in just under eight silly years. In a few more pool sessions I’ll be up to a respectable warmup distance.

Also, I really need my shoulder to stop spasming. This is a Memorial Day weekend thing, followed by the stress-of-a-move thing. But, hey, I can still carry things. First, heavy boxes, then books by the armload and finally, when that got old, moving entire bins of heavy books. I’m sure that has in no way contributed to this running issue.

Yes, I am going to get one more week of videos out of the concert we saw last month at The Ryman. I recorded it, you get to hear it. “Shame on You” was a 1997 single from the “Shaming of the Sun” record. Love that album, love this song, love the banjo.

There’s a reference to the year 1694 in the song, fit in as rhetorical rebuttal. Not a lot seemed to happen in colonial America in 1694, but it doesn’t make the point any less valid, but the migration was underway. These sorts of things happen slowly, until you one day look around and everything is different, and new challenges and realities are emerging. I suspect that’s what was happening in the 1970s and 1980s and early 1990s when David Zeiger released his documentary, “Displaced In The New South” which has a theme that inspired the song.

The opening line of the documentary is the title of the post. I suppose it has always been that way, as well.

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26
Jun 23

We’re moving

Here’s the thing. This has been in the works for a while — and we’ll get into that later this week, I’m sure. Talks have been going on even longer. None of this is a surprise. And, happily, our new employer is paying for our packers.

Oh, they talked a good game on the phone. Walked them through the house verbally, they estimated the boxes. The guy that was going to be leading the actual work wanted to do a visual check via Facetime. That turned into a drop in visit on Wednesday or so. He looked at everything, thought the people on the phone in the office were about right. Said he’d be here with his crew on Friday to whip all of our things into boxes in a few hours.

So, you see, while none of this is a surprise, we’ve spent a few months just hanging out, thinking, Maybe we should be doing something?

Nahhh, we’ve got packers.

And they were scheduled to come at about 4 p.m. on Friday.

I bet you can tell where this is going.

On Friday at the end of the day I loaded my car with the last of my things from my on-campus office. Said goodbye to … well, no one, really, but I got a nice Slack message … and drove to the house. My lovely bride’s car was the only one in the drive.

These guys are fast!

I pulled in the garage, slid out the boxes from my office and stacked them in the fledgling pile of stuff we’ve actually put in the garage and walked inside, expecting a forest of boxes. Columns of cardboard, a feat of fort-making.

And there’s my lovely bride, packing a box.

Where, I asked, are the packers?

She gave me the smile that isn’t a smile, but is a smile, but really isn’t. The packers hadn’t turned up.

And so I joined her. She’d already made a frantic dash out to pick up a few boxes from stores and then hit the U-Haul and bought every packing supply they had in stock, and we got to work.

There was some back and forth with the no-show packers. They weren’t coming until so and so. And then they didn’t come. And then they didn’t come on Saturday. After which, we started demanding our money back. And some of it has been refunded. The next call, because we have time for this nonsense right now, is going to go like this: All of my money back, right now. Otherwise, you’re going to have two media professionals who have an embarrassing, embarrassing, array of media contacts and two months with nothing better to do than talk about you.

(Update: They fully refunded the charge.)

So we packed all night Friday. We packed all day Saturday, until about 8 p.m., when there was a small going away party held in our honor with The Yankee’s triathlon team. We packed all day Sunday. At one point yesterday I was packing some particular box and got sidetracked to help with another packing chore, but was then sidetracked by still two more packing tasks. It was ridiculous. We have packed all day today. (I spent most of that time doing some real work in the garage.) We’ll be packing still tomorrow.

At times, it looks like we’ve made a dent and the spirits are high. Progress! At times you can stand in the same spot and see not the momentum, but all of the things still to do, and you can see how this will never be over. Despair.

At every moment there is something to trip on. Sometimes there is something to trip on, and then you land in something else to stumble over.

Fortunately, we’ve been alternating the emotions between us, so someone is always on an upswing and lifting the other along.

These rotten packers.

The movers, a different company, show up tomorrow morning.

Music is doing us a lot of good right now. There’s been a curious sort of traffic pattern throughout the house. For a while, for some reason, The Yankee will work on something upstairs and I will work on something downstairs. And then she moves downstairs and I drift upstairs. I can’t say it is effortless, because everything is a huge effort right now, but it’s an easy flow. And there’s always some song or another as we pack. And usually two. So here’s some more Indigo Girls from their recent show at The Ryman.

Now, sure, you think, The Ryman. The Mother Church of Country Music, and here’s an Americana band, a folk band, a rock band. And all of that is true. But this song features, from left to right, a fiddle, a mandolin, an acoustic guitar, a resonator and a banjo.

Also there are two Loretta Lynn references in “Second Time Around.” This more country than anything Nashville churns out these days.

I love that lyric about compromise.

Here’s what I find about compromise
Don’t do it if it hurts inside
Cause either way you’re screwed
And eventually you’ll find
That you may as well feel good
You may as well have some pride

This is one of those songs where I find myself thinking about the narrator versus the performer, because Amy Ray has an earlier line about how she doesn’t want to sing again, it has a catchy little meter, but is probably the farthest line possible from the performer. Throughout her career she has talked over and over and over about how she has to do these things, sing and play, like it’s in her and she has to get it out, because from the first time she ever played cover songs with Emily Saliers, when they were kids, that this was what she wanted to do, make these noises with her friend. And here we are 40 years later and there’s no way that woman won’t sing her soul out because it feels right. So it must, then, be the narrator. And anyway, that line about compromise is a good concept and maybe one that should be applied a little bit more.

Point is, there’s a lot of time for your mind to wander while you’re trying to find the right angle to get all of these things to go in boxes. And why do I have this many things anyway?

The good news is that late last evening I got to the place where I am ready to shove it all into boxes, or study the insurance policy about fire. It was easy to get into that last bit of gallows humor when the tornado warnings fired up yesterday. This could solve a few problems at once!

Tomorrow, the movers.

If you ain’t go nothin’ good to say
Don’t say nothin’ at all

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22
Jun 23

Some boxes are emptier than others

Something amazing happened in my office today. It’s one of those grown up things that should never feel like a fun thing to the adolescent version of your inner monologue, but is immensely satisfying to the adult part of your conscious thinking.

Not everyone thinks as an adult, of course. Not everyone has an adolescent version of their inner monologue. We can all agree that 33,977 emails is a lot of emails. That’s so many emails the email program had to delete them in batches.

I wonder how long it took to accumulate those emails. A bit longer than it took to dispatch them and, even though they were all already in the trash folder, watching that number disappear felt pretty great. It was a good Thursday exercise. But why this Thursday?

Lyris Hung is here for your fiddle needs. She’s using a looper, or some such technology, to do a multitrack song all by herself. (She is the fourth artist I’ve seen do this live, and I’m sure that she could do whatever she wants with this, though this is a beautiful atmospheric piece. The second person I saw use this was also a violin player, Kishi Bashi in 2015, and his set was so incredible I was convinced he’d discovered the future of music. Maybe I’m not far off.)

Also, Hung transitions effortless into the opening strains of “The Wood Song,” and that’s never a bad thing, another classic track from the chronically misunderappreciated “Swamp Ophelia.” Critics are on a deadline and they listen to a song a few times, maybe, amidst whatever else they have going on. They bang out some copy and move on. Thing is, this song is going to be 30 years old next year. Still a huge a hit with the Indigo Girls’ fans.

Also, once again, The Ryman … an amazing place to watch a show. Each time I upload one of those videos I find myself wanting to go back.

Let’s spin a few more CDs so that we can find ourselves (temporarily) caught up in the Re-Listening project. You know the drill by now, dear regular reader. I am playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. Today we’re doing a double shot, because it is the same band on two consecutive discs. I must have had a few extra bucks in my hand at whatever point this was in 1999, because I probably did a little binge buying. This first one was a 1993 CD that I picked up to replace the old cassette version of Pearl Jam’s “Vs.”

This was their second studio album. Wikipedia tells me they scaled back the marketing, and yet still sold 950,000 copies in its first five days on sale, a record which apparently stood for five years. No idea who took that odd bit of trivia off their shoulders.

This album stood atop the Billboard 200 chart for five weeks and was certified seven-times platinum. So naturally, I needed the copy in a new format. Though they produced no videos (again, this was 1993), Pearl Jam had four singles chart from Vs. Three of them lodged themselves into the top three of the US Mainstream Rock chart, including this one.

(If you watch that with the closed captioning on YouTube tells you it begins with “pensive indie rock music.” That’s not where I give up, but perhaps it should have been.)

For some reason seven songs from this album have their own Wiki page, including “Rearviewmirror” which is a wholly underrated track. And it is great in the car, at any age, just so long as the wheels are turning reasonably fast.

Best song on the record, even if it’s a 20-minute pretentious put-up.

Which brings us to the “Yield” record, somehow. “Vs.” was second, “Yield” was fifth, and I got the ones in between later on, for whatever reason. That doesn’t make any sense, in retrospect, given how much I enjoyed Pearl Jam. But maybe I was starting to shuffle in another direction by this point. “Yield” came out in early 1998, debuting at number two on the Billboard 200. I picked it up somewhere in 1999. “Faithful” is OK, but things were changing to my ear.

Much was written and said about how the band changed their process when they produced this album, and how that helped form a more straightforward, accessible record. No longer the guys in flannel from Seattle, they were America’s rock band, by this point. I remember thinking this, though it is not accurate or at all fair to say, but they were as close a thing to The Doors as the ’90s would produce, and Roskilde was still a year or so away. So they’d mainstreamed the sound, which diluted the power a bit. All of the slower, quieter songs sounded like this for a time.

And the intensity that is Eddie Vedder’s hallmark felt a little askew on this record. Except for “MFC.”

I doubt I listened to this one enough way back when to give it a real chance, but I don’t think my impressions have really changed much. Platinum in five countries, and an undeniable hit, but this was the last of Pearl Jam’s studio records that I bought. (Not counting picking up a few earlier discs.) And so we’ll let Yield’s hidden track, “Hummus,” play us out.

That’s it for today.

Tomorrow: Big news.

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21
Jun 23

Gather ye songs while ye may

We had a late lunch outdoors at Buffalouie’s, one of our favorite local joints. It’s the sort of place where the owner thinks of it all as a party, and he’s the host. He knows people. Knows their names, remembers their stories. He has the great gift of recall, such that, despite the thousands of people that come through his doors each year, he can make a mental reconnection even if you haven’t been in for a bite in a long, long time.

He has always been good to students, for he knows where he makes his money. And he’s always been helpful to the students I know, for he knows a little free marketing might be a good thing. And he’s just a decent sort. During the beginning of the pandemic he made lunches for some time for all of those little kids who were missing out on free lunches — an important part of many kids’ diets — because they weren’t in school. All of it together makes one loyal. And the food isn’t bad, either. Much better than the nostalgic dive a block away.

So we were sitting out under an umbrella on the sidewalk when the funniest, saddest, happened. Someone we know walked by, doing that thing where they stare intently at their phone so they don’t have to make eye contact, or engage with you. It was perfect.

Then I had a moment that reminded me of the early scene from “Dead Poet’s Society.”

Seize the day, boys …

Seize. The da — ahh, never mind, then.

We went to the lake to float on floats, which we did for an hour or two yesterday. And then the thunder came through. So we called it early. That just meant we got to dinner faster, takeout Japanese to celebrate another big day, and that was Tuesday. Today, the usual, which means you get more music.

Since we saw The Indigo Girls two weekends ago, and I have video, I’m sharing video. This is from 1992’s “Rites of Passage.” Oddly, this record gets dismissed by critics in the qualitative sense, but they all give it a lot of stars for quantitative purposes. No one knows what they are talking about. This is the fourth studio album from Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, and it included contributions from the likes of Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Michael Kamen, Kenny Aronoff, Benmont Tench, The Roches, Nollaig Ní Chathasaigh and more. Six or seven of the songs have become standards in their catalog, including “Joking.”

The record peaked at 21 on the Billboard charts and is certified platinum. Maybe no one knows what they are talking about, but fans know what they’re buying. This wasn’t released as a single, but there was a video. And aside from the clothes, some 31 years later everything is the same.

OK, the clothes and that TV set. But every shot they put in the TV is still with us today, too. The activism went mainstream, and time is still funny.

We continue along in the Re-Listening project, as well, with Keb’ Mo’s “Slow Down.” This is the thing where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. This record came out in August of 1998, but I picked this up in 1999. (Eventually, I promise, we’ll make it past Y2K.)

This is the second Keb’ Mo’ record I have, a few months ago we touched on “Just Like You” for the Re-Listening project. It’s good to have a few pieces from his catalog for hinting at some musical complexity. Variation is important. Here’s the thing, Keb’ Mo’ sounds so comfortable, so confident, so at peace with himself, that it doesn’t sound much like the blues.

Peoples Exhibit A, the opening track.

Now that’s a fine song. Good and fun. But is it the blues? He won his second Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album with this record, so I’m clearly wrong here, and that’s fine. This song is about that all-too-common phenomena many of us experience, the money going out before it can even come in. There’s a certain sadness,some blues, you might say, with the concept behind “Soon As I Get Paid,” but he’s just too joyous and the guitar is too comfortable.

There’s a lyric about not being able to afford the bar tab, Monday mornings, and the IRS, but it’s just happy listening, somehow. He’s got three Grammy awards for blues records, and has another a handful of nominations spread out across his 19 records. And, at 71, he’s still touring, crisscrossing the country several times between now and October. Hopefully he’s getting paid. But even if he’s not, you know what the tunes will sound like when he takes the stage.