College

Scotty’s Lament

The Connells – Scotty’s Lament

Tonight I am taking my twelve-year-old daughter to her first concert (we have decided not to count the time we took her to see The Wiggles when she was almost three nor the time when she was six and staying with my sister who took her along to see Steel Pulse at an outdoor show, since she doesn’t remember either one). Another one of my sisters took her son to The Who for his first concert and friends have taken their kids with them to all manner of shows.

Before having kids, if I thought about it in the abstract, I imagined that I would influence my children’s tastes in music and they would be the coolest kids in school. For a while when they were very young, this was not far off the mark. I drove the car and controlled the stereo. I picked out the DVDs they watched and picked ones with soundtracks I liked (did you know there’s a surprising number of Ramones songs in Scooby-Doo movies?). But once they started taking the bus to school and hanging around with their peers, my music became something your parents listened to and not what they wanted to hear. I tried to bridge the gap for a while, making them CDs with songs I liked that got radio airplay, but currently there’s not a lot of crossover.

So tonight’s concert is my daughter’s favorite and I’m just accompanying her because she’s too young to go unsupervised. I am going to try hard not to embarrass her because I remember the one and only time I had a parent with me at a show.

I was in college in the Philadelphia suburbs and while I went to concerts in the city as often as I could, the last train left 30th St. Station right around midnight. If you missed it, you had to take an infrequent subway out through a rough neighborhood to the high speed line, which ran until 2am but only about once an hour. Most of the shows I went to were in theaters or sports stadiums because shows at clubs were always going to end after the last train. Every once in a while I could convince a friend with a car to come along but it was tough and the whole needing an ID or being 21 thing didn’t help.

This one time though, it just so happened that my dad was in Philadelphia for business and was staying at a hotel just two blocks from the Chestnut Cabaret. I had planned to meet up with a friend and her boyfriend to see The Connells there and now my dad was going to want to visit with me. I hemmed and hawed but finally decided to turn the situation to my advantage. His hotel room had two double beds so I figured we could hang out in the evening, have dinner, then I’d go to the show with my friends, stay overnight at the hotel with my dad, then we could do breakfast in the morning before his conference started. I didn’t expect him to say that he would want to come along. I tried to talk him out of it but it was just a club show, no seats, I don’t think I had bothered to get tickets in advance, so I couldn’t see how I could refuse to let him join us.

So dad and I went to see The Connells. He stayed at a table on the side with my friend’s boyfriend while the two of us hit the floor. He didn’t last all that long before the combination of age and business travel convinced him that he ought to head back to the hotel. I made my way to the hotel after the show and we spent the next morning hanging out before I headed back to campus.

What’s so embarrassing about that? It wasn’t at the show, it was the years afterward that I had to endure my dad bringing it up. The same exact sentences. “Remember that time we went to see, what was that band, oh yeah, The Con-nells (he always pronounced it as if it were two separate words)? And you two were down on the floor, I could only make out your heads bopping around from time to time so I left. Do you still go to see The Connells?” I am not kidding, for years, like ten, this same conversation took place every single time I spoke to him. Every.Time. If he was visiting and another person was around he would never miss the opportunity to regale them with the story about the time we went to a concert together. If I happened to tell him I was going to a concert he would immediately ask if I was going to see The Connells. (For the record, I saw them three times over the years, not the hundred and ten you would think if you listened to my dad.)

I spoke to my dad last weekend and mentioned that I was taking my daughter to a concert tonight. It’s been 25 years since that show so he doesn’t still remember the name of the band we saw but he started in, “Oh, I remember you used to go to concerts all the time.” I quickly changed the subject. Lesson learned. I will let my daughter be the one to remind me, if she wants to, about the time we went to a concert together.

Go

Valley Lodge – Go

I have a number (4) of old bikes and I will not part with any of them. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a good place to store them so they’re mostly sitting in our basement, which is far from an ideal solution. About a month ago I decided to haul one of them out of there and bring it out into the light of day to clean it up. I thought that went pretty well so I took it out for a test spin and felt all wobbly and very unsteady. I moved the seat down a tiny bit and that helped a little but it bothered me that I wasn’t able to get right back in the saddle as if 20-odd years hadn’t passed since I was last riding it regularly.

bike

My old red Univega

This bike and I have a lot of history. I got it the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college (coincidentally, the bike it replaced was a five speed version of the green Schwinn being ridden in this video by the guy with the mustache) and during the next three years, we were inseparable. I rode it all over the back roads of the Philadelphia suburbs in college. I rode it in two team triathlons, both times being the only female rider. This was the bike I rode when I was a bike messenger in Philadelphia during the summer of 1988.

I’m sure it’s nostalgia, or maybe a mid-life crisis, but I want to get the old red bike back into regular riding condition. I took it out yesterday for only the second time since cleaning it up. I fired up my old biking tape (transferred to my iPod) and headed out. Being out riding again felt great. I decided to swing past the bike shop while I was out because it definitely needs more work still and I wanted to know if it was actually worth it to pursue that before I spend any money on it.

I don’t have bike shorts anymore, I couldn’t find my old (really old, pre-clipless pedal Detto Pietros) biking shoes, so I wasn’t surprised by the amused looks I got when I rolled into the bike shop in my running gear on a 27-year-old bike whose handlebar tape was tied at the end to keep it from unraveling more. I told them I was thinking about maybe putting a different style of handlebar on it or something because it really wasn’t all that comfortable but maybe it actually isn’t the right size for me, or it’s not worth it because it’s too old, etc. A young guy working behind the counter came forward and said maybe it just needed to be adjusted a little and why didn’t I bring it outside and ride around in the parking lot so he could see how it fit me.

Maybe he was just humoring me but he seemed to think my bike was charmingly old school, not just old. He thought the cloth handlebar tape was really cool. He did describe my old toe clips as death pedals and he thought the tires probably need to be replaced. He suggested lifting the handlebars up a tiny bit and tilting them slightly to take the pressure off my wrists. While he did that he wrapped the cloth around the handlebars again and put caps on the end and sealed it with tape. He inched the saddle back up, added air to the tires and had me ride around again. It did feel better. It felt springy and like it really appreciated having someone treat it right. The young guy waved me off to enjoy my ride home, which I did.

I was trying to come up with the right song for this entry and something said to me, try Valley Lodge. I recently went to a reading and book signing by Dave Hill (he’s the guy in the biking cap, I have a really great one of those too from 1987) but he didn’t mention that they’d made a video for a song off their new album Use Your Weapons, riding old bikes and old school cycling gear. It’s the perfect video for this. I highly recommend his book Tasteful Nudes too.

9-9

R.E.M. – 9-9 (live at the 9:30 Club, 3/18/83)

Raise your hand if you remember the old 9:30 Club at 930 F St. N.W. in Washington, D.C. I lived in DC from 1991-1994 and I spent many, many nights there. I loved that dark, smelly hole in the wall. I’ve been to the new 9:30 Club at least once, maybe twice, and in many respects it’s a better club, but it will never take the place of the old club in my heart. The list of bands I saw play there is long and varied but when I tried to find a video from any of those shows to use here, I struck out. I contemplated using any one of the videos from inside the club I did find just to illustrate a point but I went with this version of  9-9 instead since today is 9-9 and it was recorded there, just audio only.

The point I wanted to make was about the ubiquity of cell phone cameras at shows these days. Back in June I went to see the Joy Formidable at a club and there were more people filming the show than there were dancing. When the person most likely to try and get a pit going is the 45-year-old mother of two kids (that’s me) and not the dozens of 20-something-year-old guys, you’re doing it wrong. I suppose to each their own and maybe they’ll enjoy their crappy cell phone videos with people singing along loudly and off key, but I’d rather dance.

Now, I’m not a Luddite and I have been known to grab a quick picture at most of the shows I’ve been to since getting a smart phone. Usually in between songs and just a still, not video, and mostly because I don’t want to be trying to get some great video when I could be dancing or paying attention and just being in the moment. But of all the annoying concert behaviors out there, I find the constant filming to be far less intrusive* than the drunken bros hollering stupid comments or the amount of talking taking place when the band, that we’ve all paid money to come see, is playing. Those drive me much more crazy than someone watching the show through a 4″ screen instead of the real life thing in front of them. I just feel like those people are missing out.

At first the filming really bothered me. But how many shows have I been to since this trend took off where I went online the next day to try and find videos of the show? Quite a few. And didn’t I just download the whole mp3 set from the Replacements first reunion show in Toronto and watch the videos people posted from there? You bet I did. I don’t want to be taking those videos myself, and lots of the ones you find are just awful and not worth watching because your own view was better, or the person holding the camera is shouting and singing and ugh. But I do so love having some live footage to be able to go back to if it’s done well.

Which is where the old 9:30 Club comes in. If you want to see some footage from inside the old 9:30 Club, just look up any live video of the mid-80s DC hardcore bands like Minor Threat, and you’ll find some. Most of the old footage you find will be taken from the video camera that someone used to operate up on top of this pole in the middle of the floor. There were these pillars placed in really inconvenient spots, architecturally holding up the building no doubt but when you were in the mosh pit, you had to be mindful of where they were. Some employee would get hoisted up into the crow’s nest spot on the top of that pole with a video camera and shoot the whole show. I’ve heard conflicting reports of what became of those tapes. One was that they just had it on closed circuit as it played what was happening on stage to small tv sets in the back bar and downstairs and there weren’t tapes of every show. The other was that they all burned in a fire at a house where they’d been stored after the club moved up to V St. Either way, the ones that made it to YouTube are rare, rare videos, and a real treasure. I always thought that would have been a cool second job but in reality the poor person up there was probably close to passing out every night as smoking was still allowed and it was easily 100 degrees or more at that height on some nights.

Here’s what I would love to see become the norm at clubs and concert halls. People could take a couple of pictures here and there, sure. But if the club could film it, from some unobstructed spot like they did at the old 9:30 Club, then make that available somehow, maybe people would go back to enjoying the show in person. I don’t know how you could work it out so no one is short changing the bands**, and I’d like for it to still be something special, that you were really there and not just watching the video of it. I have a fair number of old bootleg audio tapes from shows back in the day. Some I acquired just because they were offered to me but the ones I really loved were the ones of shows I’d been to. And if there were video from a couple of those shows? I would give a lot of things for video clips from a handful of those shows. A whole lot.

* I’m on the short side and I like to get as close to the front in a GA setting as possible so I can see the band and not just some big guy’s back. For the most part, I haven’t had my view obstructed by hundreds of cameras held aloft just because I’ve put myself where that’s not much of a problem. If I ran a club, I’d want a sloped floor so that the short girls can still see farther back (the TLA in Philadelphia is like this as it was a movie theater before – I saw movies there in college – and when they ripped out the seats to turn it into a club, they kept the sloped floor). Ideally I’d relegate people who insist on filming to the sides, maybe up on a slightly raised floor, out of the way of the people who really want to dance/watch/listen. And people who take pictures of themselves with their friends and the stage in the background? They are just losers.

** One thought was maybe it could be made available after the tour ended so as to not give the whole thing away or give people a reason to not pay to see the show in person. For me any video is never going to be as good as being there and even when I’ve seen a stream of a concert while it’s taking place (like Coachella, 12-12-12, etc.), it’s not even close to the experience of seeing it live. That said, this exists and it’s so freaking incredible.

New Town Velocity

Johnny Marr – New Town Velocity

Every once in a while the “recommended for you” videos that show up on YouTube if I’m logged in are actually very welcome suggestions. This was the one I was presented with yesterday and I’ve listened to it a lot already.

I’m sure I heard it earlier this year when Johnny Marr’s album The Messenger came out but I didn’t have the time then to really listen to it. There’s something about this track, more so than the previous singles, that has a very distinct Johnny Marr sound to it. And I am a sucker for that Johnny Marr signature guitar.

I think sometimes it may be too easy to hang the influence the Smiths had on me, and many other people, on Morrissey’s contribution to the band. It’s true, I can speak or write entirely in Smiths quotes* off the top of my head and I know I’m not the only one of my friends who can do that. Rob Sheffield wrote nearly a whole chapter of his book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran in Smiths quotes and paraphrases. We may all be spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg but it’s Johnny’s guitar that instantly hooks us with those first four notes on “Ask.” “Oscillate Wildly” had as much yearning to it as the other songs without any lyrics at all. The Smiths were as great as they were because it was both the music and lyrics coming together at the perfect time.

I listened to Morrissey’s first couple of solo albums and went to see him on I guess it was the Kill Uncle tour (since I never got the chance to see the Smiths live), but it wasn’t the same. It was missing Johnny Marr. And let’s be honest, Morrissey is nearly a caricature of himself at this point. While Morrissey spent the past year cancelling show after show, Johnny Marr’s been showing up at festivals and elsewhere and just rocking without any of the drama. Morrissey may be the last of the famous international playboys, but he’d probably be completely unknown to most people if Johnny Marr hadn’t knocked on his door.

* By now you’ve all seen this, and it may seem to belie the point I’m trying to make here but it’s just so great. http://thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com/   [edited 9/18/13 to say, I knew it wouldn’t be allowed to stand. They’ve been ordered to take it down.]

Shut Up

Savages – Shut Up

There have been a lot of shows I have wanted to catch this year that I just couldn’t pull off but this is one I’m really regretting not making. They played their east coast dates right on the heels of the Feelies show and I had just been on vacation prior to that so I was short on time and money. They’re coming back in September but playing larger places, like the widely disparaged Terminal 5 in New York. I might have to do it as a birthday present to myself though because this kicks some serious ass.

A friend was trying to coax me into going down to Philadelphia the other night to see New Order with her. It was pretty tempting. I went so far as to investigate the cheap bus lines and the train but the whole package was going to run into more money than I felt a responsible mother of two ought to be blowing. Back when I was in my 20s and had no one but myself to worry about I would have made the trip and lived on ramen noodles for a week if that’s what it took. I perfected the art of cheap travel in college when someone clued me into the fact that you could hop the local commuter trains from our campus outside of Philadelphia all the way up to New Haven. All that was missing was a local option between Wilmington, DE and Baltimore, and from New Haven to Providence, and you could have (inconveniently and slowly) made your whole way from Boston to DC on the local trains.

I miss that, believe it or not. It wasn’t comfortable, it sometimes involved sprinting up and down stairs to get from one track to another and unless it was an express, you made a lot of stops. But it was a fraction of the cost and you could decide to do it very last minute. There isn’t much spontaneity in my life these days and every now and then I get a little nostalgic for a less complicated time when the biggest consideration was which train I was going to catch.

Away

The Feelies – Away

A week and a half ago I went to the last-ever Feelies show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. It was a show that was a long time coming but so, so worth it. I wrote it up for Caught in the Carousel so please hop over there to read it. In that article I mention this video, which was filmed at Maxwell’s many years ago. Enjoy!

Alex Chilton

The Replacements – Alex Chilton

Late last night the news broke that The Replacements (well, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson at least) are doing three reunion shows at Riot Fest in Toronto, Chicago, and Denver. Earlier this past spring they released Songs for Slim, a benefit album to raise money for former Replacements guitarist Slim Dunlap, who had suffered a stroke. Both of these news items were cause for a lot of excitement amongst ‘Mats fans since the band broke up 22 years ago.

I am a big Replacements fan. I even like All Shook Down, their last album which is basically a Paul Westerberg solo affair. It’s not my favorite (Let it Be is, which I wrote about for Still in Rotation on Midlife Mixtape), but I’ll pop it in the CD player now and then. But it’s the mid-80s albums I like best, when they had enough experience under their belts to write some of the greatest songs ever, yet still had enough piss and vinegar to write songs like Gary’s Got a Boner and make a video like the one above.

I saw the Replacements twice back when I was in college and I have always been pretty happy to have those shows in my concert catalog. I didn’t give a lot of thought to the idea of a reunion since they constantly seemed on the verge of self-destruction anyway. I counted myself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to have been able to witness the sloppy glory that one of their live shows could be. So would I go now to a reunion show? Hell yes, I would. I can’t imagine they’d get up to the same antics but I’d be there for the songs, and to see Paul and Tommy play together again.

The three appearances announced yesterday are nowhere near me so I’m still imagining that I won’t get to see them play live again and those shows in 1987 and 89 are going to be it for me. I’m good with that. Maybe if I’d never had the chance to see them earlier I’d be scoping out plane tickets about now. Instead I’ll watch from a distance and no doubt there will be articles posted and videos to watch.

Speaking of Alex Chilton, there’s a new movie coming out that I’ll try to catch when I’m down in New York at the beginning of July called Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me. The trailer looks great.

We Live As We Dream Alone

Gang of Four – We Live As We Dream Alone

I don’t know about you but it feels like the music press has spent the last two years reminding us of what albums are now 20 or 25 years old. Sometimes it seems impossible that so much time could have passed, other times it feels like, yeah, 20 years is probably about right. When I watch old clips on YouTube, it often looks like it was even longer ago (this one is *gulp* 30 years old). Poke around there for a while and if you’re looking for it, you’ll find some extraordinary things.

I bought myself a CD player as a college graduation present but I didn’t have any CDs yet so I also bought a receiver, turntable, and speakers. The CD player bit the dust a number of years ago but the turntable was just given a clean bill of health at a turntable clinic put on by my local record store. I sold off some of my records when I left college but I kept most of them and simply replicated my collection on CD as well. It’s funny because CDs were supposed to be indestructible but many of those now skip and one of them, the data just vanished from it completely. Luckily, I still have the records and they still play. Songs of the Free by Gang of Four is one of those treasured vinyl albums.

I remember reading that they were a big influence on bands I loved and they were in that movie, Urgh! A Music War which we got a copy of somehow. I loved digging around connecting the dots. In the pre-internet days, it took time and dedication and those were two things I had in abundance. The pay-off would probably seem small to most people—getting to see live footage of a band that had broken up—but to me it was like a secret code. Pay attention. It’s all there. Hey! Kids.

This is Not a Photograph

Mission of Burma – This is Not a Photograph

It seems only fitting to finish off this week with another Boston band, and an iconic one at that.

What an unbelievable week. There’s really nothing I can say that someone else hasn’t already said more eloquently. Let’s just hope the rest of the year doesn’t continue at that pace.

Book-ending the week on the positive side, I filed the taxes on Sunday (getting a small refund from both state and feds) and the state refund was deposited in my bank account today, just in time for Record Store Day. I walked down to my local record shop which is remarkably still there, and still a record store. Not records plus CDs, DVDs, posters, t-shirts, books, and all kinds of other stuff. It’s small and it’s for the vinyl lovers. Most of the newly issued records are usually too expensive for me so I tend to go digging in the bins for stuff I should have bought back in the day. Depending on what you’re looking for, there are still some real finds.

Today I found Signals, Calls, and Marches by Mission of Burma. It was in such beautiful shape I was sure it must be a reissue but I took it out and it only had the 1981 copyright on it. When I bought it the owner said, “Wow, Mission of Burma, you’re a real deep catalog gal.” I came home and looked it up on eBay, there was a reissue on Matador Records back in 2008, but the one I just bought is an original 1981 Ace of Hearts pressing, it even still has the funky lyrics sheet on some kind of textured paper where the words to all the songs are written in alphabetical order. It’s so cool. $12.95 well spent in my book.

Between the Wars

Billy Bragg – Between the Wars

The first person I thought of when I heard Margaret Thatcher had died overnight was Billy Bragg. There’s a short interview with him from a few years ago on Democracy Now that sums it up pretty quickly if you aren’t familiar with his early days.

I grew up in a left-leaning family and I spent my teenage years assuming most people came from the same basic positions we did. What a shocker when I got to college and discovered the campus was teeming with young Reaganites. Clueless ruled the day. We’re talking about people who didn’t even know what apartheid was let alone why they should be demonstrating against it. If I’d landed on a more liberal campus, chances are I would have continued to take it for granted that most people felt like I did and not really become someone who paid an awful lot of attention. Instead, because the political climate on campus, in the country and over in the UK, was squarely at odds with my positions, I became much more engaged.

It surely helped that the music I listened to was firmly in the anti-Reagan, anti-Thatcher camp. I credit those musicians with furthering my education and waking me up to causes and injustices I hadn’t given much thought to before. I got the newspaper delivered daily and spent a fair amount of time in the library, not doing coursework but looking up the background on issues that cropped up in their songs.

I recognize that people not that much younger than me are likely to not really know anything about Margaret Thatcher. They would have been too young to understand it all first hand and not enough time would have passed for it to be taught in school. Even college kids today, are events that happened 25 years ago something they will study? I wonder when my kids are older, what will the history books say?