I’ve been sharing video this week from the Toad the Wet Sprocket, Gin Blossoms, Barenaked Ladies show we saw last Friday night. As I mentioned here, this is making up for a 2020 show. We bought these tickets in 2019. It was supposed to happen again in 2021, but, finally, here wer were last Friday.
I’d never seen Toad the Wet Sprocket, somehow, but always wanted to. Gin Blossoms I hadn’t seen since college. BNL we saw in 2018, and last week was the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen them.
And then they came out for a one-song encore, an ensemble of all three bands, Something of a supergroup covering The Supergroup. There are 18 platinum, nine gold and one diamond records and something like 30 million total sales and 20 top 10 singles between them. I bet the Wilbury step-brothers would approve of this.
It came as a surprise to me how much I enjoyed that, how happy that song would sound, how happy it’d make me feel.
We left the venue saying it was a great show, saying it was all worth the wait.
A few more clips from last week’s Barenaked Ladies show to pad out the week. Why not? After all, you don’t hear enough bass solos these days.
That led to this. It was never released as a single, never had a video, and “If I had $1,000,000” hit 13 on the Canadian and UK charts and made it into the US Top 40 and, of course, is a live show staple.
Also, my mother-in-law quotes it to me now, which is the best part.
BNL does rap covers and medleys and they come off as ad libbed, but this has been done before. No one puts “Just A Friend” and “Coincidence” together on a whim.
And they closed the show with a few covers. Devo is always a popular choice.
And then there’s Led Zeppelin. It is 53 years old and still rocks.
Whole Lotta Love was off II, their second album, which Led Zeppelin recorded on tour. It went platinum 12 times. That song was about Jimmy Page’s instrumentation and legendary bluesman Willie Dixon‘s lyrics. (He sued. They settled.) And now, 53 years later, bands with four-decade pedigrees of their own, are still covering their efforts.
I wonder if they had any sense of the staying power of this stuff at the time. Page was 25 at the time they recorded Whole Lotta Love, Robert Plant was 21; John Bonham and John Paul Jones were in between. They closed every concert with that for four years. Now, BNL does, too.
Well, except for the encore, which you’ll see tomorrow.
My lovely bride told me I shouldn’t put this into the world, but the forecast was for 107 degrees, and we didn’t hit that mark. So I taunted the weather. She said the weather would make me regret it. She’s really thinking of everyone else. Like I want it to be 107 degrees.
This was plenty. I’m not as young as I used to be.
More music from last Friday’s show! Here are a few clips from Barenaked Ladies, who were the headliners.
“It’s All Been Done” hit number one in Canada and landed in the top 10 in the US.
BNL’s live show comes with a lot of comedy and a bit of ad libbing and the occasional freestyle moment.
The song about pinching is a big hit.
There are also singalongs in a BNL show.
Here’s a newer tune. “Man Made Lake” was on last year’s Detour
There are classics, of course, and covers, too. We’ll get to some of those tomorrow.
No one is going to talk about this enough, but Wout van Aert had the most amazing ride in the Tour de France today. It was on the cobbles. He’d captured the yellow leader’s jersey, and was a favorite for stage five. And then it all went wrong. And then it went sideways and bananas. And then Wout van Aert showed his mettle.
He crashed once and narrowly avoided crashing into a team car. After he recovered from all of that, his team had the worst day imaginable and he had to drop back to save them. It seemed a sacrifice of the yellow jersey. But Wout is the strongest rider in the best field in the world. Here are the highlights.
So after his crash, and a near-crash, and animating the race, and giving that up to save his team’s two overall contenders, Wout van Aert still managed to narrowly hang on to the maillot jaune. He’ll give it up in the next day or two, and people won’t really appreciate his ride today as they should, but it was epic.
The setup is this … and this is similar to something that I explained here last week, but also different.
We ride bikes through a nearby neighborhood and the other end of that neighborhood ends with a T-intersection. We turn right, which is immediately into a little hill. It’d be fine if you just rode over it, but it’s just stiff enough to be unpleasant from a complete stop — as in an intersection. So when we go that way, which is often, I jump on up ahead so I can be the Stop or Go signal for my lovely bride. If the timing works out, she can just take the right turn and keep up a little momentum. And somewhere just after that hill I can catch back up to her because I have no momentum. But just after that hill we take another turn and work through another neighborhood, and there’s a particular road there where I had one good day and now I try to hit it with zeal every time. I am three seconds off the Strava segment leader. It’s a short sprint and I’m sure I’m only on the leaderboard because no one really rides that road, or rides it hard, anyway.
But now I do, because of that one good day, and so I attacked it again yesterday. I have come to realize that my average time is only three or four seconds off my best time on that segment. It’s short, and that, of course, means that even my fastest time wasn’t that fast there, but nevertheless. We get to that right hand turn and I do what I can for about 35 seconds.
I do both of those things each time we go out this way, now. And yesterday, just like last week, The Yankee passed me about a mile later. Last time I was taking a sip of water and she rode away from me. This time, she just put in one little turn of speed … and it took 10 miles for me to catch her again.
So here’s a photo from our Monday morning bike ride.
Did you know the Gin Blossoms had a Grammy nomination in 1997? Did you know they lost to the Beatles?
Had you forgotten that the Beatles were somehow still releasing music three decades after the band broke up? There’s been good money in nostalgia since the invention of surviving media, I think.
Anyway, this was that song for the Gin Blossoms. They were the feature act in a show with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies, a concert we caught last Friday night.
That record sold five million copies and stayed on the charts for three years. And all the old fans — we weren’t the youngest people there, but we might have been close? — still sing along.
Jesse Valenzuela remains the band’s true weapon. Here’s his standard solo on the Doug Hopkins hit.
Robin Wilson makes a joke
This one was an initial release on the Empire Records soundtrack in 1995.
Anyway, “Til I Hear It from You” was re-released as a single the next year. Billboard hailed it as “the closest thing to a perfect pop song to hit radio in recent memory.”
The soundtrack, by the way, is holding up better than the movie.
It’s a coming-of-age movie and most of those don’t age well after the desired audience ages. No one was interested in Gen X at the time anyway, so that film was destined to flop, which it did. (It doesn’t hurt that it isn’t any good.) It does have a minor following for two lines of dialog but is otherwise not as good as the soundtrack, which was fronted by that Gin Blossoms tune. At Variety, Ken Eisner famously wrote Empire Records was “a soundtrack in search of a movie,”
Anyway, that song was number one in Canada, and in the top 10 on virtually every American chart. It is frozen in amber.
Happy Fourth. I hope you have big plans that involve a barbecue, but not chemical burns, being outdoors, but not sunburns, and good times, but not … too good a time?
The juxtaposition-for-dramatic-and-ironic-contrast device ran empty on me there, apologies.
Not much to our Fourth. The city didn’t host a fireworks show this year. Not sure why. It can’t be too pandemic related, though, since they returned to their parade tradition this morning. (Last year they had a reverse parade and people apparently drove their cars around parked floats. You do what you can.)
The next small town up the road is hosting fireworks, and there are a few large church displays. Someone at one of the lakes is doing fireworks. It’s out there if you want it, plus a parade. There’s also a neighborhood parade, and we rode our bikes through that route just after they concluded this morning. We rode very fast, but did not catch them. That would have been amusing.
Perhaps our neighbor, who has wowed us all with pyrotechnic displays that surely equal a mortgage payment the last two years, will hurl flaming sulfur and blackpowder into the sky this evening.
Let’s check in on the cats, who would be fine with fewer things exploding within earshot.
Phoebe was enjoying a late afternoon in the sun on the dining room table that she is not supposed to be on.
But she’s so cute, and she doesn’t care about your rules, so what are you going to do?
You get her back by putting a taco toy on her head. That’s what you do.
Poseidon was playing … under … the tunnel?
At least he wasn’t on something he’s not supposed to be on. For a change. (Alert the media!)
And alert them because he’s ready for his closeup.
I mentioned we saw a rock ‘n’ roll show on Friday night. I’m going to stretch this out all week, so settle in. Here are a few clips from Toad the Wet Sprocket.
“All I Want” is a song about the fleeting feeling of epiphany. It comes and it goes, but when it goes, it goes very quickly. Yes, it’s a nostalgia-adjacent song that’s sang nostalgically. Peak Gen X irony, I’ll grant you.
A few years later, this song was released. And, pretty quickly Toad the Wet Sprocket found themselves at that point where they say “This song is a hit! … but it’s just not as big as your last one.”
I wonder, if they had any sense they’d be doing this 30-plus years later, if they would have stayed away from the Monty Python reference.
Tomorrow, I’ll share a Gin Blossoms clip, because Friday night had a distinct mid-90s feel to it.
We were also in Nashville for part of the weekend. Our friends Sally Ann and Spencer finally held their wedding reception. (They did a private wedding during peak Covid and Saturday they finally brought all of their people together. They had a party worth waiting for. We all got dressed up and had a fine time. Because we were in Nashville, I had barbecue for lunch Saturday and Sunday. Because we were returning to Bloomington, we brought enough barbecue back for two dinners.
We had one of those dinners tonight.
Most importantly, our friends had a lovely time, and they deserved it. It was nice to be a small part of their festivities. They hired a photographer for the evening, and I didn’t even pull my phone out of my pocket for any pictures. You don’t have to take my word for it, though.
