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27
Mar 25

Music and a book

We have plenty to catch up on, and we must do it before I forget all about it. It’s easy to do that when there’s constantly so much to add. Constantly so much. You can’t even imagine how many things have accumulated since I began typing this.

From time-to-time I have to remind myself to read things for fun. And there’s just … so much. The work material, which is interesting. Daily news, when it isn’t doomscrolling. And some of that turns into work stuff, in a variety of ways. Every day, it seems, there’s a new thing that will be an example in one class or another. And then there are the, no kidding, 200+ books sitting here waiting for me. (I just counted. I should be reading.)

So, let us make the smallest of dents. A few days ago, as we traveled to and from Chicago, I read The Great Rescue. It’s about the USS Leviathan, seized from its German master when the U.S. joined World War I, the liner turned into a transport shipping, moving doughboys back and forth from New York to the U.K. The book was released to coincide with the American centennial anniversary of the war. I bought a digital copy of it in 2020, and finally opened the thing.

This vessel was a luxury liner sailing under the Germany flag, christened as SS Vaterland. She was opulent, massive and fast. She first sailed in 1914, a three-funnel beauty built as the largest passenger ship in the world, meant to move 4,050 passengers, and some of them in the grandest style. The Vaterland had only made a few trips before her fate was forever changed. It was docked on the Hudson when the United States declared war. After a time, it was taken over and repurposed. As the Leviathan, the vessel made 10 round trips, carrying over 119,000 people over there, before the armistice in 1918. Nine westward crossings in the year after the war ended brought the survivors home.

Is there video of this legendary boat? Of course! It’s only 100 years old.

It was also crowded as a troop ship. And the passengers needed to eat.

As for the book itself, it’s a popular history read, and it moves well. Reading about World War I from this distance is interesting distance because, on one hand, we have things like those videos, but not a lot of the popular histories always want to go too deep on the human subjects. The Great War was so broad in scope that the best histories are observed at the division level. This one, despite the distance and the large sample size, we get a little bit of time with the captains, men named Joseph W. Oman, Henry F. Bryan, who commanded seven of the voyages, and William W. Phelps, who was in command when the armistice was signed. (She was in Liverpool at the time.) But not Edward H. Durrell. He was the last military captain of the Leviathan. He shows up in the index, but not in the text. John Pershing and his staff went over on an early voyage.

You can’t tell the American story of World War I without mentioning him, so the book veers away from the vessel now and again to talk about him, his war, and meeting the woman who would eventually become his wife. Douglas MacArthur came home on the Leviathan after the war ended, American readers know that name, so some of his combat exploits are included.

We meet Royal Johnson, who was a young congressman and briefly a soldier before he was wounded and knocked out of the war. You meet Freddie Stowers. He gets a nice treatment, but there’s apparently a fair amount we don’t know about his early life. Only in the epilogue do you learn that he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. You meet the writer Irvin Cobb, who covered the war and probably had his exploits downplayed. And you also met Elizabeth Weaver, a nurse that went over to Europe and returned on the Leviathan. She plays a minimal role in the book, but it’s a second woman, one supposes.

Reading about World War I from this distance is also interesting distance because, on the other hand, it is so often short on those individual tales. And this is the case here, too. The book moves swiftly, and it probably does well to have the cutaways from the voyages to the short vignettes of these people’s stories. What’s the alternative? Writing about yet another day at sea? More smelly, cramped holds? A possible periscope sighting, again?

The other big character in the book was the influenza outbreak, and it comes up, but it feels like maybe it was tacked on as an afterthought, or cut down for some reason or another.

“The curtain was coming down on the wartime career of the Leviathan. It happened quietly, with none of the fanfare and news flashes that had accompanied the seizure of the ship in April 1917. The last entries in the log were made on October 29 as the vessel was tied to her moorings at Pier 4. Totally ignoring or missing the quiet end to her naval career, the New York papers devoted their front pages that day to the ongoing Senate fight over the peace treaty, a looming national coal strike, and how the prohibition amendment would be enforced when it went into effect in January. There was no mention of the Leviathan.”

The ship was decommissioned that day, a day the ship’s final log noted was “clear, slightly hazy, light SW airs.” It sat in New Jersey for a few years. By then, there were more ships than anyone needed. It was overhauled and refurbished and in 1923 United States Lines landed a deal to take five trans-Atlantic voyages a year, but it was expensive and it was Prohibition. In a decade as a post-war cruise liner it never turned a profit. And then came the Depression. The Leviathan was retired in 1936, sold, and scrapped in the 1940s.

Since we’re catching up, let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I’m probably 17 albums behind. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.

Anyway, I figured that since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” and I’ve only come to regret that it has taken forever, because I have a lot of music, and I don’t do this regularly. The idea was that I could pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.

So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998, because I got the CD books out of order. And, today, we’re in a bit of a greatest hits phase. First up, “Words & Music: John Mellencamp’s Greatest Hits,” a two-disc retrospective featuring at least one song from each of his studio albums released between 1978 and 2003, some 17 records.

These aren’t music reviews. They certainly aren’t music reviews of 21-year-old greatest hits, so this will be brief because I don’t have any good recollections attached to this. Besides, everyone has the same John Mellencamp memories, anyway, and that’s not a bad thing.

So, quickly. This is the first track on the first disc. It was an unreleased song, and it immediately tells you your favorite pop artist has entered a comfortable phase. It’s the strings, and the rhythm.

There was another new song on the second disc. And it reinforces the notion you got from the first one.

That’s probably a little cynical. I’m sympathetic to a problem had later in the 1980s Mellencamp. Everyone wanted him to make Jack and Diane over and over. No one wanted to see the guy grow or change as an artist or musician. I’m neither of those things, but I understood his complaint.

So let me share my favorite song from Johnny Cougar, from 1987.

Mellencamp had a bit of a reputation in Bloomington. And I almost met him once, just before we left. He was donating his papers to the university, and they had a big ceremony in our building. It was all very locked down for someone selling a man-of-the-people gimmick. Hilariously, while all the old university people were thrilled, none of the students even knew who he was.

Entertainment is a tough business like that.

Anyway, here’s your new favorite John Mellencamp song. Someone there played it for me, probably one of the family members or handlers was within earshot at the time.

He doesn’t have any tour dates on his site for this year, just now, but Mellencamp did more than two dozen shows last year. He still paints. He does VO work. Not bad for a guy in his early 70s.

If you like Mellencamp, and you can find it, there’s a good documentary-concert that was released about 15 years ago titled “John Mellencamp: Plain Spoken Live from The Chicago Theatre.” It’s worth checking out.

The next disc up was another greatest hits effort, and it’s not even their first compilation, but it was a good one for me. Def Leppard’s “Vault” covers the 1980-1995 range, and somewhere there in the 1980s was when I started finding my own music. MTV, don’t you know. They were there, I was there, it was bound to happen.

“Vault” was eventually certified five-times platinum in the U.S. It went platinum in four other countries and gold in four more. And that’s why you release greatest hits. Sometimes you make easy money on music already produced.

Which is not exactly fair. There was one new track.

It was a post-grunge era power ballad. There was a lot of that in 1995.

To promote the record, the band did shows on three continents in one day in Morocco, London and Vancouver. This put them in the Guinness Book of World Records, under the larger category of Things That Don’t Need To Be Records.

The rest of the tracks are off “Pyromania,” “Hysteria,” or “Adrenalize.” They all figure into the Re-Listening project, and this is already very long.

I’ve never seen Def Leppard live, and I’m surprisingly OK with that. They’re still touring, some 48 years into the band’s life now. I guess they’re the Stones, but with more intricate instrumentation. They’re playing all over North America this year.

Tomorrow, another book (I know!) and probably some more music.

Friday / memories / music / video — Comments Off
7
Mar 25

Re-Listening: One of these has a notorious Star Trek reference

Apropos of nothing, I just sneezed. Some sneezes you can feel coming from a long way away. Sometimes you can sense that a sneeze will be arrive tomorrow, at about 1:30. The lining of your nose gets that first tinge. “There’s something in here!” signals are sent to the brain. The brain fires off memos in triplicate to the body. “We’re going to do it!” Your eyes shut, the tongue moves to the roof of the mouth, and the muscles brace. Sometimes it happens in just a few seconds, or 25 minutes.

That’s not the sneeze I just experienced. This sneeze was a bit closer to the seeing-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes tinged with a bit of “What am I going to do after this, if my nose stays on my face and my organs stay in place?”

There’s no metaphor here. Just the one sneeze, come and gone. Sometimes the nose needs a reboot. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a low-brain reaction to a sternutation.

I’m about 14 CDs behind in the Re-Listening project, so let’s make a small dent in that deficit. If anyone can remember back that far, the Re-Listening project is something I’m doing in the car. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.

I decided, since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” I thought, back when I did that sort of thing. “I can pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.” And I did that, until I kept forgetting to do it, at least, which is how I’m so far behind right now.

So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998. This was a record that wasn’t meant to be a success, but a 1996 single got a lot of airplay and a Grammy nomination. And then the record was certified gold the next summer. And that happened to Duncan Sheik who was used to playing small venues, and suddenly he was on much bigger stages, which was a surprise for everyone, especially the singer, who saw that one song stay on the charts for a year, after peaking at #16. It spent 55 weeks as a radio hit, which was one of the longer stays on the chart at the time.

But there was more to the debut record than just the one single. There were two other singles! And a lot of deep cuts. Probably I picked this up after the second single, “She Runs Away,” but I don’t recall for sure. It was almost 30 years ago … a sentence I find I am now saying a little too often.

Anyway, when I popped this into player, I was hooked by the second track. (It sounded great on big wooden speakers.)

Why did we ever move away from those large speakers, anyway? Everything sounded better. And nothing was re-compressed by an additional layer of digitization.

And, look, that first Sheik record was pure singer-songwriter pop. Except for the parts that weren’t. But he did like to incorporate his vocal range all over the place.

At various times, when I had to do such things, Sheik’s music was a good vocal warmup. Sing along on the way to the studio and all that.

There are 11 tracks on the record, I liked 10 of them, and eight of them still hold up. Sheik has released eight other studio albums and a live record, but none more commercially successful than his debut, which did hit number 80 on the Billboard 200. He’s probably OK with that. I got the impression from interviews that the unexpected success was a little overwhelming.

These days, he’s performing as a writer and composer on Broadway, where he’s won two Tony awards.

I’m sitting here looking at the next disc trying to decide how I have this false memory. The record was released in 1998, just another power pop, post-grunge alt record. And the overriding memory doesn’t fit that timeline. I went to high school, and once worked with a guy who was in a local band. I saw them play, just another group of kids who were inspired and he’d sing the big hit, but he did a cool vocal trick in one spot where he’d sing on top of the note in a key spot. It was just enough different that now, when I think of or hear the song, I hear it his way.

Only, I didn’t work at that place when the single was a single. I hadn’t worked there in probably two years. So how does that memory even work?

Beware of memories, I guess.

A few years later I got an out-of-the-blue email from a mutual friend and it turns out that that guy was going to go to jail for a while. He’d gotten drunk and climbed into his house through his bedroom window, only it wasn’t his window and it wasn’t his house. Extremely common name. No idea what became of him.

Anyway the band was Semisonic — and I mean that made the record, not the band of the guy I knew. “Closing Time” was the single everyone knew, of course, and it was a big hit, climbing to 11 on the US Radio Songs chart, four on the Pop chart, topped the Alternative Airplay chart, 13 on the Mainstream Airplay chart and so on.

But, and I realize I used this above, there was a lot more to “Feeling Strangely Fine” than the one single. The second single, from August of 1998, is a terrific little pop number which found its way into two top 40 charts. I always liked that it was a song about listening to a cassette. It was charming even to me, a slow music format adopter.

Then, as now, there was no way this piano — a keyboard, really — should pair up with that bass sound.

Whenever I picked this up, I don’t recall that either, I listened to it for a good long while. It got heavy rotation during the year of driving back and forth from Little Rock to Birmingham. This was a good late night, empty highway song.

I don’t know your feelings about this, obviously, but I think we all need a New Year’s Eve song. Here’s one now.

There’s one song another song on here that I’ve always liked, but I can’t listen to it, because the weird way the singer treats the chorus is too catchy. It’s just days and days of this, when you play it. You’ve been warned.

That was Semisonic’s second album. They produced two more studio records and a live album. And they’re still at it, touring the U.S. this summer with Toad the Wet Sprocket.

That’s enough for now. The weekend is here!

memories / music / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
27
Feb 25

Go enjoy it again

I’ve got nothing much, and we’re woefully behind on the CDs, so guess what? If you don’t like this you should come over and do some grading for me so I can do something more fun, that’s what.

We are 13 albums behind in the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my CDs in the car, and in the order (more or less) in which I acquired them. More or less because all of them are in CD books. Remember those? And I recently discovered that I got two of the books out of order. None of this matters.

This is the second time I’ve written about Memory Dean in the Re-Listening project. The first time was in 2022, which was just at the beginning of this silly exercise. It hasn’t been a regular feature here, but it has been fun. Memory Dean, their independent album that they were selling out of the back of their trunk in 1993. The obscure “In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” album was half studio production and half live shows. And, in truth, was probably originally a cassette. I got it because a college buddy of mine knew the band, introduced me and gave me that one in the rare disc trade. Memory Dean is a group from Georgia, where my buddy was from, so he could get more copies. He liked a CD I had that really only had one good song on it, by a band that was local to me, a band who’s name I can’t even remember, so we swapped.

In 1997, “So Complicated” came out, their third release, their first as a full band, having added a rhythm section. And they were finally on a small, independent label, Capricorn Records, originally out of Macon, but by then a Warner Brothers imprint running in Nashville. Somewhere around that time I picked it up.

Here’s the title track, which, on the basis of this driving power, they released as a single.

That’s much different than what Memory Dean had sounded like for years in all the little venues across the Southland. It was too guys and two guitars and some good times and singalongs. And there’s some of that on “So Complicated,” too. The problem, for us, is that almost nothing from this album is online. Go figure.

But here’s a demo of track six, which probably should have been the lead off track for all that it signaled about this record.

Despite the new direction, there are some re-orchestrated versions of stuff that had been on their first two releases. “Ghost,” for instance, came out on their previous effort, and it’s in the classic format.

The only thing missing is the Bubba Riff.

Similarly, “Dying to Live” made it on here, too. And it’s a better title than anything else.

Their last release, according to Discogs, was 2001, which is about right. They still played, and then they played sporadically. From what I can tell it was probably special appearances or venues with historical or otherwise convenient ties. It looks like they haven’t played together since 2021. Shame, really. They had a good niche and a fanbase to go with it.

Then there’s this other, even better niche. I don’t recall when I got this, but it was probably in a bargain bin, and it was an absolute steal. When I got it, I probably thought something like “Everyone needs a little Otis.” My apologies for not clearly remembering my inner dialog from more than a quarter of a century ago. I’d like to distract you from that failing with Mr. Dock of the Bay himself.

That’s straight out of the Stax catalog, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This album comes to us from 1968, is still timeless and remains one of the best records ever pressed into any format. Otis Redding’s seventh studio album, and one of the many many posthumously released titles. The last stuff he laid down for this were recorded two days before the plane crash that killed him in December of 1967.

A lot of the tracks collected here some B-sides or things that, by now, are well known to us. “Glory of Love” was basically a standard, and it became a top 20 hit in 1968, four decades into its life here, but I did not know, until just this moment, that Redding had a video for this one, and it is almost 60 years old now. And, aside from a little problem of warbly tape degradation that was sneaking into this before it was digitized, I might prefer this version.

The guy just looks so effortlessly cool there, that even back then in what have to some of the earliest days of what we think of now as a music video, there’s just two shots. I assume the cutaway in the middle is to cover a lip syncing flub.

The Huckle-Buck came to us from Tin Pan Alley (and so I really am curious about the song selection here now) and this is what a crossover hit sounded like after it had crossed back and forth a few times since the 1940s.

Here’s the original, which topped the R&B charts for 14 weeks, if you want to get really historical. And if you hear rock ‘n’ roll here, from 1949, you’re not the only one.

Proving once again that I need someone to create the living breathing flow chart of music, what a site to see that would be. (Music history of the 20th century would be, probably, my fourth interesting area to study, if I could keep all of it straight in my head, or if someone developed that chart. I imagine it like a family tree.)

Speaking of sites to see, this song and the dance craze that came with it mainstreamed enough to make it onto The Honeymooners.

The Tin Pan Alley aspect of the song comes in with the lyrics, of course. Roy Milton sang it first, and he drove the song to the number five spot on the R&B charts.

Frank Sinatra did it soon after and could only push it to 10.

But you wanted a blues standard, I heard you say? Otis Redding is your man. Here he’s got a post World War I vaudeville-style piece that has aged remarkably well, for now being more than a century old.

Remember, I said I got this because I figured everyone needed a little Otis Redding. But what you get out of this album is an education. There’s music from all over the country and spanning three or four decades of the best American art forms, 11 tracks in all, and 10 of them are spectacular. It closes with one of Redding’s own B-sides, a soul-infused blues track that probably is due a remaster, but only so you can study every integral part of the thing.

Wikipedia tells us that “Ole Man Trouble” helped Redding capture the growing white blues/soul market. No citation was needed. Every time this song, or anything on this album plays, I feel like there’s a new sense of discovery going on between my ears. It’s not an ole man trouble, but a young man’s appreciation.

It will never not surprise me to remember that he died before this record was released, and he was just 26 years old.

And that’s 1,200 words on music you weren’t expecting today, but if you made it this far I know you found something you enjoyed. Go enjoy it again.

cycling / Friday / music / video — Comments Off
31
Jan 25

Friday the 31st

The weekend is upon us. There is nothing but cold and gray and winter this weekend. All of that and whatever grim things come our way in the news. This is no way to start a Friday, but it is the right way to end January, begin February, and here we are.

I had a nice bike ride this evening, getting in 35 miles before it got too late in the day. I had two Strava PRs over the course of the ride, including the climb at the end of the thing. I messed around with the first mile or so of it, but then got serious and put in 20 seconds on my best time. I’m only four minutes off the fastest time.

The problem is that it was a short climb, just 2.33 miles. You can’t be four minutes behind the fast guy on a climb of that length. You’re almost halfway down the hill!

Hill is the right word. Right now I’d struggle to get over even virtual mountains.

OK, this is the last clip from last week’s concert. This was the finale in the encore, and “Satellite” is just such a cheery song to end a show on. It’s one of those that you can listen to a lot and find it might mean one of several different things. But it’s snappy. And everyone is happy. I have settled on it being a cheery song.

I didn’t notice it at the show, but I see it in the video here, the puppet that represents the Evil Producer is even dancing along in the back of the shot. If you can make an Evil Producer puppet dance, you’re doing something right.

The weekend is upon us. Too bad spring isn’t on the other side of it!

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30
Jan 25

I’m currently out of perfect similes

It has occurred to me that this week, and next, are the last calm weeks of the term for me. The material, of course, scales up, and the grading will too. From mid-February until May will be like a boat ride on choppy waters. You white-knuckle it at times, you wonder why you’ve agreed to this, but it gets you there, and you’re ultimately grateful for the trip, if only this boat would get to a dock, you to a car and, finally, back home.

It’s an imperfect simile, but it gets the point across, maybe. I could spend the rest of this time thinking of a better simile, but instead I’m using the time to try to get just a little bit ahead of things.

Today it was simple stuff. I started composing questions for some research I’m working on. I laid out clothes for next week’s classes. I fired off a message to some students in the online courses. I emailed back and forth with some people. Tomorrow, I’ll read a lot. Next week, I’ll try to stay ahead. After that, liftoff.

Here’s another video from the show last Friday. This is part of the encore. There’s a dumpster behind Guster. Once they were traveling from A to B on tour and got socked in to Western Pennsylvania. As a joke, they put some coordinates online and a few local fans showed up. They played in front of a dumpster. Occasionally they do it again, and now, they’ve incorporated it into their tour.

Here’s part of that original dumpster set. It was 2016.

I wonder if I would have gone out to stand in the cold and snow, just to see what they were going to do.

That was a Saturday. I didn’t write anything in the blog. We were all so much younger then, even though we felt old.

Thirty-one miles on the bike this evening. I’m ready to not be riding in the basement. Maybe in three or four weeks. But, for now, it’s all virtual. I go a long way, I wind up nowhere.

For some reason it looks like you ride over the ocean, but it’s a road in the game. A fictional land, where sometimes you ride fast, but you never go anywhere. It’s like being on the boat, ready for a trip you’ve been looking forward to taking, but the trip gets canceled.

It’s still an imperfect simile.