TV Review: Vanished

vanished tv

Originally written on August 22, 2006. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show. I don’t think I watched another episode and it was cancelled not very long after. – Mat

Fox has been hyping their new mystery series Vanished for weeks. Hoping for something like 24 meets The Fugitive I stopped watching Italian maestro Dario Argento’s slasher epic Deep Red to watch.

The first episode of any series is difficult, double for an ongoing mystery series where presumably each episode will lead in the next without any loose ends being tied up until much, much later. With all of that introduction of characters and establishment of plot, it’s hard to really get into the meat of the show at first and create enough suspense to keep everyone tuned in next week.

By the midway point of the first episode of Vanished, I was ready to write the show-off and was missing my Italian blood bath.

We are quickly introduced to Senator Jeffrey Collins (John Allen Nelson), his wife Sara (Joanne Kelly), and son Max (John Patrick Amedori) before Sara gets a phone call and just like that, disappears. Just as fast an investigation is brought down and the poor Senator’s wife is suspected of being kidnapped.

FBI agent Graham Kelton (Gale Harold) is running the show and is, of course, as brash as he is awesome. He’s introduced with a flashback of doing some type of ransom cash handoff for a small boy. A sniper shoots the bad guy but not before the boy is blown to bits by the bomb planted on his body. This is supposed to give Agent Kelton a dark, somber side and an attitude that says ‘let me do it my way’ because he didn’t actually want the sniper there, and without the sniper, the boy would have been in one piece, not a thousand.

The problem, midway, was that we’d been introduced to the characters and the core problem, but I didn’t actually care about any of them. The show rests upon the fate of Sara Collins, yet we only actually see her for about 10 seconds, not long enough to develop any emotional attachment to her. The senator and his family are more developed, but in an attempt to make everything more mysterious (and presumably to add more plot twists later on) they don’t come off as too sympathetic. The agent’s back story was just kind of dumb, and there are so many obnoxious but genius crime fighters on TV these days that it’s hard to notice one more.

Ah, but in the back half of the episode, things got more interesting. It seems young Sara was previously kidnapped 12 years ago but the media coverage was covered up. She also apparently had another name as some stranger in a bar tells us after seeing her picture on the television.

The past is even more mysterious as Agent Kelton uncovers the body of a woman who was also kidnapped at the same time as Sara. Her body had been frozen since then and has now been thawing in the house registered to a man who happens to own the same type of gun that shot the waiter who told Sara about her disappearing phone call.

And the body has a card on it bearing the number 9:29. The number nine was also tattooed, post-mortem, on the waiter’s hand.

That’s suspense and has me interested in next week’s show.

While not exactly 24 meets The Fugitive, it’s more like a poor man’s Lost meets Matlock, it has enough juice to make me want to turn in next week. Unless Blockbuster sends me Dario Argento’s Suspira, then all bets are off.

Dirty Dozen Brass Band – What’s Going On

what's going on

Originally written on August 22, 2006.

It’s been a year since Hurricane Katrina blew away much of the Gulf Coast and pummeled New Orleans. There is still much work to do in the city to bring it back to its once renowned glory. To help benefit the clean-up effort, New Orleans’s own Dirty Dozen Brass Band has released a song-for-song covering of Marvin Gaye’s classic album What’s Going On.

It is more of a reimagining than a straight cover version for they have added in fatter beats punctuated by brass horns and brought in a number of guest stars including Chuck D, Ivan Neville, and G. Love.

My perceptions of this album changed during the course of the numerous listens I gave it in order to write this review. In fact, I wrote a totally different review before giving the album one last spin and deciding my initial thoughts were completely wrong.

That’s an interesting side thought, actually, how perceptions of something can change over time. I’ve been writing reviews for about 18 months and periodically I’ll go through my files and check in on what I thought of a piece. Generally, I agree with what I thought back then, but sometimes I’ll totally disagree with myself.

Case in point I wrote a review of the zombie spoof, Shaun of the Dead and I was rather unexcited about the whole thing. I didn’t give it a big jeer, but neither was I particularly enthused. Watching it again, recently, I found myself wondering how I could not have been bowled over by the hilarity within that film.

So many things can affect our consumption of an artwork, and then our own critique of that work, that a review – something set in stone for the ages – is an odd thing. Does Ebert ever go back and admit he’s wrong, I wonder.

For What’s Going On, I initially dismissed large parts of it as having hip-hop and rap roots. I am too old, too white, and too from Oklahoma to ever really get rap music, and it wasn’t pleasing to my ears to have rapping over one of the classics. In my mind’s eye, all of the songs had some kind of rapping going on over what was actually pretty good back-up music.

Listening to the album again, I realized that only the first and last songs actually had rap artists laying down rhymes over the music. The rest of the album is either instrumental, or has guest artists actually singing along. Some of the beats are deep and fat, and certainly there are hip-hop influences throughout, but very little actual rapping. I suspect the bookended rapping caused me to believe there was more on the album than there actually is.

So, my review changed and was updated to reflect the new reality.

Covering a well-known song, less an entire album, is a difficult task for any artist. If you stay too close to the original then critics will say it is frivolous and redundant. If you completely rearrange the song making it your own then fans will cry sacrilege and call out for the Inquisition. An artist must ride that line, staying close to what made the original a classic while still maintaining their own uniqueness in the song.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band manages to find sublime methods of doing this. Often the horns will blow out the lines normally sung, and in the case of the titular track, Chuck D raps his own lyrics, while the musicians stay on track with the melody.

The title track is where I previously spent a lot of negative energy knocking the album. “What’s Going On” is a classic, beautiful piece of music. You can’t not like that song. In this reimagined version, Chuck D gets his rap on and throws down some hard political lines dissing the aftermath of Katrina and the US government’s response to it.

It’s not that I’m against political statements in art, or even specific words towards specific situations, it’s just that Marvin Gaye created a song that is universal. Though he was speaking about the Vietnam War and the political, racist environment of his time, his lyrics maintain a resonance today. His statement speaks out against our current situation and will continue to speak to generations to come. I’m not sure Chuck D’s words will hold up as well.

However, what the Dirty Dozen Brass Band lay down behind the rhymes shakes me inside and out. Like their name implies they hit some brassy, dirty beats with a little Dixieland thing thrown in for fun. They aren’t afraid to lay down deep, heavy beats either, and I’m not afraid to like them.

I can see myself cranking this disk at full volume and shaking my middle-aged-white-boy arse all night long (or at least until 10:30 which is still past my bedtime.) What’s Going On won’t make you throw out your original copy, but it stands enough on its own to find itself in party rotation or anytime you just want to groove.

Bootleg Country: Jimmy Cliff – Towson, MD (12/17/01)

Before I begin talking about Jimmy Cliff I must first admit I know none to very little about reggae music. Sure, I’ve got Bob Marley’s greatest hits package, Legend, and do dig it from time to time. That live version of “No Woman No Cry” is a marvel to hear. I’ve got a couple of other Marley bootlegs that are also quite awesome. But other than those, I’m pretty useless when it comes to Jamaican music.

This is most probably because of the sheer crappiness of the non-Marley reggae music I’ve heard. Anytime I’ve heard reggae music being played on the radio or some city festival somewhere it’s all heard like generic, worthless garbage. It all has the same monotonous, rhythmic beat that makes everyone in the near vicinity move up and down like ducks on a pond. It’s just inane and annoying.

I realize that’s not particularly fair to reggae music. It would be like writing off pop music after listening to nothing but Top 40 radio, or 70’s rock from the Classic Rock stations that play the same four Led Zeppelin songs over and over again.

I only happen to have this Jimmy Cliff bootleg due to Nick Hornby’s book, High Fidelity (or maybe it was the movie) where the main character notes he would like Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” played at his funeral. I quickly found a copy of the song and came to realize he was right – that is one danged fine song to go out on.

From the single, I put myself on a bootleg vine for this very recording.

12/17/01
Recher Theatre
Towson, MD

Coming into this bootleg I thought “Many Rivers to Cross” was the only song I knew of Jimmy Cliff, he quickly finds fault in that belief, running through a stream of familiar songs. I have multiple recordings from a series of shows in the early 90s with Jerry Garcia and David Grisman playing “Sitting in Limbo.” I dug the song enough to include it on a Christmastime mix tape for my wife, and never even knew who wrote it. Cliff shows me who is the master of that song and performs it beautifully.

Later he rises up for “Many Rivers to Cross” and brings it to the people on a hymn. It lifts and praises this beast called man as we journey to our final destinations. He then tears through a version of “The Harder They Come” that leaps and roars across the land. Coming but three months after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers there is both a somber and angry political tone attached to many of the songs. His song “Terror,” written specifically about those attacks, speaks out against both the acts of terror by Osama Bin Laden and the retribution from the USA. Terror, he says, comes from every side, and must end for there to be peace.

With other songs he finds hope. With “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” he sees the beauty in all people. Covering Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” he seems to point to a brighter future for us all.

And with that, I think I’ll go back to the record bin and find some more reggae music. For if this is the sound of Jamaica I need to do some exploring.

Set List:
Samba Reggae
Sitting in Limbo
You Can Get It If You Really Want
The World Is Yours
Many Rivers To Cross
Terror
No Problems, Only Solutions
Wonderful World, Beautiful People
I Want, I Do, I Get
The Harder They Come
I Can See Clearly Now
War in Jerusalem
Black Magic
Vietnam

Poison – 20th Anniversary Remasters

poison remasters

Originally written on August 15, 2006.

Slide into your leather pants. Strap on your stiletto boots. Fray your hair out with 12 gallons of hair spray. That’s right boys, it’s hair metal time.

Hair metal, or glam metal as many like to call it, arose in the late 1970s but became the dominant form of rock music in the 1980s. Equal parts heavy metal and glam rock, hair metal ruled my school for many a year.

Mötley Crüe has been cited as the world’s first hair metal band, and certainly, they brought it to the masses. With the Crüe reaching sales in the millions many bands soon followed with wild hair, more make-up than a cheap hooker, and plenty of loud cock rock. Oh, and let’s not forget the power ballads.

Ah, power ballads, the way for the tough, ultra-manly boy bands to show their sensitive side (for what better way to get some nookie than show your feminine side – besides the mascara I mean)? I recently made a hair metal mix tape and was kind of shocked to find that the vast majority of it was made up of power ballads.

Here are the big rockers, with the three neck guitars, the heavy riffs, the super-powered machismo, and the songs that I remember are the slow, sappy ones like “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn,” “Home Sweet Home” and “Heaven.” Mary Louise Parker, what the crap is up with that?

My favorite hair metal band has always been, and will always be, Poison. They didn’t have the cops of Mötley Crüe or the longevity of Bon Jovi, but they sure beat the spiked boots off of Warrant.

With the 20th anniversary of their first record, Look What the Cat Dragged In, Poison have re-released their first three albums (Look What the Cat Dragged In, Open Up and Say…Ahh!, Flesh and Blood) in souped-up remastered versions with bonus tracks.

If that doesn’t make you want to tease your hair and put on heavy mascara, I don’t know what will.

The disks all sound great; this is Poison sharper and more glammed up than you’ve ever heard before.

1986’s Look What the Cat Dragged in fell in the middle of the hair metal glory days. Everywhere you turned it was nothing but heavy metal and big hair. Poison maximized everything that was right about the genre. The guitars were loud, the drums were pounding, the lyrics were juvenile, and the music was all metal all the time.

You really can’t blame young men in metal bands for singing about what they want. With songs like “I Want Action” and “Talk Dirty to Me” Poison left little to the imagination in terms of what they wanted, and how they wanted it.

With their first album, they immediately established their mastery of the genre with balls-out rock followed by a big power ballad du jour.

The bonus songs on the disk include two 7” singles of “I Want Action” and “I Won’t Forget You” which, honestly, I can’t tell the difference between this and the regular album cuts. There is also an electrified, hair metal cover of Jim Croce’s “Don’t Mess Around with Jim.”

In the 20 years that have passed between the release of Look What the Cat Dragged In and Open Up and Say…Ahh! the differences in those two albums have blurred significantly. I’ve been a fan of Poison since their first beats hit the Top 40, but I really can’t remember hearing Open Up and Say…Ahh! for the first time.

I remember quite fondly the heavy rotation of “Nothing But a Good Time” on MTV with its slave-to-the-grind restaurant dishwater beginning, but in my memory “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” and “Mama Don’t Dance” were already big hits, and they were not released until afterward.

This is it for me. This is the cream of hair metal. Give me Open Up and Say…Ah! Along with Dr. Feelgood and you can put me on a deserted big hair island forever.

“Nothing But a Good Time” is cock rock at its finest. It’s sing-along party music and there ain’t anything wrong with that. “Every Rose” is the greatest power ballad ever written, period. I mean, Brett Michaels has it tattooed on his arm, and he’d never do anything stupid.

In 9th grade, a long-haired student pulled out his acoustic guitar and lipped-synched himself a performance of “Nothing But A Good Time” for drama class that left us all teary-eyed. You can’t do that with “When the Children Cry.”

The disk’s bonus tracks include a previously unreleased track “Living for the Minute” and an interview with Brett Michaels.

When Flesh and Bone came out in 1990 I wrote it off pretty quickly. It seemed to me like a couple of hit singles thrown in with a lot of lousy filler material. I wondered if the band wasn’t falling back on its hit-making formula for a few numbers and then just throwing together any old crap to fill out the album.

Listening to it again I can’t believe how wrong I was. This is a band at its most mature. They have grown as songwriters and musicians. The music here is more than just cock rock, it’s infused with the blues and incorporates a range of styles and musicianship.

I can see why I didn’t like it to begin with, for it is quite different from their previous outings. And different is no good to a 14-year-old boy who wants to rock.

Sure the cock does peek its head out to rock here and there and especially on the hit single “Unskinny Bop,” but they also play with odd experimentation, (“Strange Days of Uncle Jack”), bluesy acoustic instrumentals, (“Swamp Juice (Soul-O”)), and Eagle-esque harmonies, (“Let It Play”).

Together it makes for their best album to date and a movement away from the shallow depth of hair metal and into something, if not exactly deep then a more mature musical entity.

The extra tracks include a blazing instrumental, “God Save the Queen” and an acoustic take of “Something To Believe In” with a few different lyrics.

With the re-release of their first three disks, Poison is giving their fans a better sound than they’ve ever had before, and a pristine example of why they were the kings of hair metal to those who’ve never heard them before.

Dark Water (2005)

dark watert

In certain places around the world wide web, there are debates raging about the Hollywood craze of remaking films, especially those of the horror variety, and more specifically the Asian horror variety. For years those crazy Asians have been making twisted, bloody, and freaking scary horror films. Recently Hollywood has realized there is a market for such a thing and has been remaking them ad nauseam.

Scanning the Internet Movie Database you’ll come across all kinds of debates on such a thing, most of them beginning with:

“Why are Americans so dumb?”
Or
“American movies suck, all they do is remake other better movies. Can’t they think of anything original?”

Or my favorite

“Can’t Americans read? Why can’t they just read subtitles and stop remaking perfectly good non-English cinema?”

The fact is Hollywood has been remaking films almost as long as they’ve been making them. The third funniest movie ever made (His Girl Friday) was a remake of an earlier film, The Front Page, and it was released in 1940!

Do the majorities of Americans watch foreign language films? No, probably not. Do the majority of the French, German, and Japanese people watch non-dubbed, foreign-language films? I suspect not. It doesn’t seem that unusual for people to want to watch what is essentially a passive medium, passively.

Hollywood remakes films, and specifically Asian horror films because there is money in it. Let’s face it, if The Ring was a total bomb we wouldn’t have seen The Grudge or Dark Water. But it made a bundle and so more Asian horror remakes came. And they’ll continue to come until they stop making money.

For my money ($14.95 a month for 2 movies at a time via Blockbuster) they can keep on remaking J-Horror. Even when they are less interesting than the original (which is most of the time) they are still generally entertaining.

Dark Water, the American remake of a Japanese film of the same name starring Jennifer Connely is about 3/4th of a good movie. I haven’t managed to catch the original, so I came into the remake fresh, which probably helped me to like it more. Watching a remake when you’ve seen the original is a bit like watching a film when you’ve read the book. You always want the current bit to act more like the images in your head.

So, by not knowing anything about the original I could take on the remake without any preconceived ideas. Turns out it’s not a bad film at all – lots of good imagery, some good acting by great actors, and a rather unconvincing plot.

Jennifer Connely plays Dahlia a soon-to-be recently bitterly divorced mother. Dahlia and her young daughter move into a run-down high-rise apartment that has constant leaks.

Water permeates this picture. It is everywhere. In the constant rain, in sinks and baths, running down the walls and spilling over into the floor. It’s as if the water is a living thing and it wants to be the star of the show.

The real stars include a bloody good cast including John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, and Pete Postlethwaite. Connelly, who can usually hold her own, is completely outdone by her supporting characters. Both Reilly and Postlethwaite turn creepy, simmering, unhinged performances as the manager and caretaker of the apartment. Tim Roth takes a good guy role as a divorce lawyer with a heart of gold.

The direction draws out the suspense and creepiness very well. The apartment is filmed in dim light, with lots of scary shadows overcoming everyone. There is a real sense of dread throughout as we wrangle over the drama of Dahlia’s impending divorce, struggle with her child who seems to be going crazy and an apartment that just might be haunted.

As with many films of this type, Dark Water can’t sustain its premise for the entire length of the film. About the ¾ mark, many of the supernatural activities are oversimplified, and the ending is less than satisfying.

But up until the end, it is a pretty good flick. Not bad for a remake.

The Goonies (1985)

the goonies movie poster

Editors Note: I apparently wrote a review of this movie, then immediately went back and wrote a second one. Posted both of them. My guess is that the second part was unintentional – that I wrote the first one, but didn’t like the draft yet accidentally posted it. Then the next day went to rewrite it, probably couldn’t find it in my drafts and wrote a new one from scratch. Or something like that. Yesterday I reposted the old one without realizing this one existed. I guess I make bonehead moves over and over again. I think it is fascinating to compare the two as I used some of the same language, but also changed quite a bit.

Come back with me to a time of innocence and fun. Let’s all go back to my childhood when movies were watched for entertainment. When I didn’t have to dissect hidden meanings and write about the symbolism or depth of a film. When I wasn’t a critic, but an audience member. Jump into my DeLorean and set the date for the 1980s.

It is a time when you could count on jokes about getting kicked in the nads, plot lines weren’t important, and you could always count on a good action figure to play with after the end credits. There was always a musical montage, you knew not to feed the mysterious animals after midnight, and a red Ferrari was your ride when you cut class.

Simple tasks such as fixing breakfast, or opening a gate became immensely difficult by using everyday items as complex machinery. If you were good, you could incorporate a ball (preferably bowling). It was a time when a small boy named Jonathan Ke Quan ruled the world.

I suppose I must admit that there were some very serious films made in the 1980s, but I was a child then and I didn’t see any of those films until much later. For me, it was a time of action, adventure, and plenty of buttered popcorn.

One of my favorite movies from the time is The Goonies. It’s a perfect movie of the 80s, what with the high adventure, the pirate gold, a steaming heap full of Jonathan Ke Quan, and bloody mother f’ing Sloth. Nothing beats Sloth.

Watching it again I am amused by the fact that the Goonies aren’t explained in any way. There is no background to how the club was formed or what even a Goony (or is the singular Goonie?) is exactly. And they don’t have to. As a kid I didn’t need a back story, they were the Goonies and that’s all I needed to know. I wanted to be a Goony, and I had many a pretend adventure going after the rich stuff.

The plot – O’ the glories of the plot – concerns an entire neighborhood that is about to be turned into a golf course. It seems the golf course people have managed to evict every single person in the neighborhood at the same time due to a lack of funds. For if only one family could come up with the extra funds then they could tell the golfers to buzz off.

Never mind that the neighborhood seems to be made up of middle-class suburbanites or that none of them can manage to pay this mysterious amount of money (mortgage?). How a pile of jewels manages to take care of everything isn’t exactly explained either.

But that’s getting caught up in the plot, and that’s never the point with a good 80’s flick. The Goonies – a group of misfit teens (and I mean that in the totally 80’s kind of way, and not the post-Columbine psychotic meaning of the term) – find a treasure map leading to pirate booty. They have many an adventure finding the treasure and are followed by the Fratelli crime family. Of course, the Goonies find the treasure and save the neighborhood, but like so many things in life, it’s the journey that really counts.

Along the way, we are treated to glorious action, romance, comedy, and of course, a moral involving teamwork and acceptance – even acceptance of a grotesque-looking monster man dubbed Sloth.

Sloth – the greatest of all 80’s characters – is a deformed giant and a member of the Fratelli family. The chubby Goony – kindly named in 80s cinematic glory as Chunk – is captured and thrown in with Sloth. We are all petrified as to what this hideous creature is going to do, only to find a moral in the monster with a heart of gold.

Critics will scoff at the The Goonies plot holes, cheesy effects, and overall silliness. But if you’ll step back a moment in time with me you might find a wonderful slice of nostalgia, and a little bit of fun in a movie meant to do nothing more than entertain.

Random Shuffle: (08/08/06) – Neil Young, Wilco, George Jones, U2, & The Grateful Dead

“Rockin in the Free World” – Neil Young
From Freedom

The first time I ever heard this song was on an MTV awards show – I assume the VMAs, but I really don’t remember. It was an amazing performance with Pearl Jam as the backup band. It was really quite incredible watching the grandfather of grunge jamming like it was the rapture along with up-and-comers Pearl Jam (this was the early 90s so PJ was still fairly young as a band). It was, and is, one of my favorite all-time live television performances (Editor’s Note: You can watch that performance here.)

Eddie Vedder sang the verse about the addict mother putting her kid away to get a hit. The kid, as the song says will “never go to school/never get to fall in love/never get to be cool.” At the time I felt those lyrics were staunchly pro-abortion perhaps because the rest of the lyrics have a liberal tint and Eddie is quite outspoken on his pro-choice views. Over time I have come to feel that it isn’t as pro-abortion as it is a condemnation of a country that can allow its poor and downtrodden to live in such a way that they’d abandon their children.

This is not in any way meant as a means to debate the abortion issue. Believe me, I never intend to get political here. It’s just when I hear this song I always think of that performance and Eddie singing those lyrics so passionately.

This is a less fiery, acoustic version. I’ve heard Mr. Young perform this song acoustically much more than electric, which seems strange to me since it works so much better wired up.

Neil gives it his best shot, and the audience obviously digs it, out-blasting Neil on the final chorus.

“Pot Kettle Black” – Wilco
From Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Have I mentioned I completely adore this entire album? For ages and ages, I had heard about the album and the whole back story about their record label dropping the band because YHF wasn’t commercial enough.

Ultimately I didn’t actually listen to the album until several years later – last year to be precise. I got a copy of the album and listened to it pretty extensively while on a train through the north of France. Turns out YHF is the perfect album to listen to while on a train in France. Watching the picturesque landscape roll by as Jeff Tweedy and company gently rock is just about as perfect as it gets.

This is a great mid-tempo number that conjures up images of rolling hills, tiny towns with their high church towers, and lots of gorgeous French trees.

“White Lightning” – George Jones
From Super Hits

After listening to countless youngsters with their super-loud car stereos roll by, an old roommate, and good friend proclaimed that he too was going to buy a souped-up stereo, but instead of whatever hip-hop record that was currently a hit, he was going to play some George Jones. He never did buy that stereo, but the idea always brings a smile to my lips.

I know this ode to bootleg liquor because of an East Tennessee band Robinella and the CC String Band. They have a great version on their first album. Robinella’s beautiful, country-changed voice is much more appealing than old Georges, and I love George Jones. Maybe it is George’s rather embarrassing drunkenness over the past few years that makes me prefer this song sung by another. It’s kind of like listening to “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton, knowing he doesn’t play the song anymore since he’s drug-free.

Ah, it’s a good song, and George does a good job of making it fun and silly. But a smooth female voice will always win with me.

“New Year’s Day” – U2
From War

Does Epic Rock get better than this? From the thundering bass to the Edge’s screaming guitars to the haunting, mysteriously political lyrics this song single-handedly solidifies U2 as a great rock band, never mind their dozen or so other great songs. It also makes me forgive them for their excesses and rather suckiness of the last several albums.

One New Year’s Eve my brother swore up and down that VH1 would surely play this song as the clock struck 12. They didn’t, but we sat staring at the TV hoping to hear the song and prove him right. The clock kept ticking and we wondered if they had played it an hour earlier for Eastern time, or would play it later for Mountain and Pacific. I’ll never forget the awkwardness of not only wanting to hear a great song but to prove my brother right. He was so sure they would play it that I felt bad for him when they didn’t.

Funny how songs evoke such memories.

“Brown Eyed Woman” – Grateful Dead
From Dicks Picks 7

During my months in Abilene, TX a liquor store used this song in the background for their commercials on David Gans’ Grateful Dead Hour.

One of Robert Hunter’s great western lyrics. He has this amazing ability to represent the mythos of the old west, while still hitting on contemporary themes. This is a pretty straight-up live version, which is to say it’s rather great.

Bootleg Country: Lyle Lovett – Minneapolis, MN (01/27/92)

I really had planned on a Lyle Lovett Bootleg Review before I knew that I’d be seeing and reviewing him for an actually attended live concert.

Lyle Lovett is, perhaps, best known for his short-lived marriage to superstar Julia Roberts. When they wed many folks were asking, “How could she marry him?” but to partially quote marketing material from Say Anything, to know Lyle Lovett is to love him.

Recently while trying to compose a list of my all-time favorite bands, I kept coming back to Lyle. He isn’t a poet like Dylan or a pop craftsman like Lennon/McCartney but he definitely has something that elevates him above just about everyone else. To me anyway.

His lyrics have a way of being both hilarious and poignant at the same time. In-person, he has a dry, rye delivery that makes even the most mundane of stories beautifully humorous.

His style has changed a lot over the years from straight-ahead Nashville country to Texas swing to the more folkie-alt.country stylings of today. He’s a bit like Willie Nelson in his ability to write songs that hold true to whoever is singing them.

01/27/92
Guthrie Theater
Minneapolis, MN

This is one of my favorite all-time bootlegs. The sound is absolutely perfect. It makes me feel like Lyle is in my living room, playing for my friends. The music is lovely, and Lyle chats it up as if he is at a family reunion instead of in front of a paying audience.

He is playing with a scaled-down version of his Large Band. The horns have been nixed, the backup singers are gone, and all that’s left is Lyle on acoustic guitar, then we have drums, acoustic bass, and cello. Similar to Nirvana on Unplugged, this spare style highlights Lyle’s beautiful songwriting ability.

It was recorded a few months before the release of Joshua, Judges, Ruth so all the material here is more than a decade old. Yet it still sounds vital and refreshing. It helps that much of what is played is new material, so classic songs like “Church” and “The Last Time” are revitalized with an audience laughing for the first time at the jokes.

In fact, “The Last Time” is a great example of lyrics that provoke both a sense of humor and depth. It starts out with,

“I went to a funeral
Lord it made me happy
Seeing all those people
I ain’t seen
Since the last time
Somebody died.”

Immediately, there is the ironic humor of being happy going to a funeral and yet the understanding of truth lying behind how we often don’t see those we love unless something serious happens.

If I have a complaint on this disk at all, it is that during “You Can’t Resist It” he allows his musicians time to solo, spoiling an otherwise wonderful song. I’m all for good soloing, but there is only so much cello-bongo soloing I can take. But this is but a few minutes of two disks full of nearly perfect music.

The sound here is pristine. I don’t have any conclusive source material, but it’s as close to sitting on stage as you’re going to get with a bootleg.

You can download the show here.

Concert Review – Lyle Lovett: St. Louis, MO (07/28/06)

For many a month, my father and I were planning a vacation to the Glacier National Park in Montana and parts of Canada. Being the generous, family-loving man that he is, my father invited my two siblings. As with all plans that involve numerous people, hammering out the details proved quite difficult.

Timing was the hitch. The sister and her husband reside most of the year in Shanghai, China, visiting the States for a few weeks out of the year. This summer they were already planning a multi-state trek to visit friends, and family and tour with Pearl Jam for several weeks. Finding time for me and the Glacier was proving problematic.

In the end, they canceled for fear of total exhaustion. The father figure then canceled because he chose not to miss seeing his daughter for the tall trees and the bald eagles. I canceled because father had planned to pay.

My anniversary plans were ruined because I had planned on using the Glacier trip as the anniversary present. For what wife wouldn’t love to celebrate four years of marriage with a 7-day 2,000-mile road trip with her in-laws? With the trip canceled, I had to actually come up with a real plan.

A little research found that Lyle Lovett would be doing a free concert in St. Louis. Praising myself for finding something quickly that would be on the way to my folks in Oklahoma, thrill the wife, and be cheap, I quickly booked a hotel room and let the wife in on my beautiful plans.

The concert was right on the river underneath the St. Louis Arch. A beautiful setting if there ever was one. After walking around downtown we debated on whether to branch out and see some of the gardens on the other side of the city, or stay close so that we might get a good seat. Knowing it was a free concert we expected the area to be pretty much packed.

Deciding to stay close we crept back to the motel for a nap. Afterward with nothing else to do we headed in the direction of the Arch. They had begun to set up a perimeter around the stage area so we ducked in quickly to not have our bags dug through and our camera discovered.

It was still a good three hours until Lyle was scheduled to perform. We found some shade (which lowered the temperature to a moderate 95 degrees) and tried to enjoy ourselves.

We sped up time by ordering too-expensive and too-hot pizza, hastily made lemonade with the sugar still undissolved at the bottom, and making laps past the merchandise booths and kiddie playground. Finally, we buckled down and found a seat on the arch steps. The heat was excruciating. The wait was intolerable.

After two hours the time neared. The Large Band minus Lyle performed a rousing version of “She Makes Me Feel Good.” Without Lyle’s lead, but with the backup singers’ punctuations, the song took on a jazzy, New Orleans-style improv.

Too quickly the performers left and the sound check was over. Then the rains came.

Two hours standing in the freaking heat and we’re going to get rained out. Many ran for cover, but I refused. No way was I going to lose my seat after getting fried like a worm on Sunday.

The rains let up and soon enough Lyle came out to play.

The show started softly with just Lyle with an acoustic guitar and a John Hagen on cello playing the tender ballad “Don’t Cry a Tear,” and then a cowboy song that I’d never heard before.

Slowly the rest of the band came out, adding new members after each song. The effect was quite dramatic as the number of performers increased and the music took on an increasingly bigger sound and feel.

The performers truly showcased Lyle’s different styles as a songwriter. The backup singers added a gospel feel, the horns brought in jazz and swing, and the mandolin player from the Chieftains brought old-style bluegrass along. Lyle was at home in all of these settings.

The between-song banter was priceless. As with many of his songs, Lyle has a dry, wry delivery that elevates everything that comes out of his mouth. At one point he decided, for whatever reason, that a portion of his audience was of the Lutheran faith. After discussing this idea for a bit he threw out this little nugget:

“Do you know why Lutherans are against pre-marital sex?
They think it will lead to dancing.”

Late in the set he introduced the entire band, then for his own introduction spoke, “I’m the guy who sits next to you,” which is the first line of the song “Here I Am” to which the band promptly joined in for a marvelous, souped-up rendition.

As is the way things go for my concert attending, the audience wasn’t always into what was happening onstage. There was quite of bit of rambling chit-chat going on when a middle-aged lady walking past noticed what must have been a long-lost friend. With a squeal usually reserved for pigs at a trough, she ran up the steps and hugged said friend and they both began to reminisce with great volume.

There was no attempt at moving someplace where their chatter might not annoy. In fact, the first lady kind of pushed the innocent fellow sitting nearby out of her way. The squealing and the loudness continued for two songs when Lady # 1 finally left.
Not but minutes later the young man sitting next to me received a phone call on his cellular and chatted through yet another song. Having seen that he can get away with loudness he began discussing the concert in progress with the lady next to him.

“That sounds like Scott Joplin on the piano.”

I know it is a free concert and all, but if you want to hang out and talk, go the freak somewhere else!

Moving closer to the front to get away from the chatter we found ourselves amongst more chatter, but at least the volume was loud enough to drown it out.

The Large Band cooked something hot that night. The backup singers, especially Francine Reed, have toured with Lyle for years and are well greased in his teenage. On songs like “(That’s Right) You’re Not From Texas” and “Church,” they swing and fly like a well-oiled locomotive.

As I complain about the audience I must also say many were quite enthusiastic as well. There was much white-boy country boogying going on and we all enjoyed Lyle allowing the audience to finish “Here I Am” by shouting “Make it a cheeseburger.”

The concert employed two people to sign for the hearing impaired. It was beautiful watching a kind-looking young lady perform what may have been the world’s greatest air cello performance during John Hagen’s extended solo.

The show ended without an encore and an apology from Lyle for not being able to play longer due to a city ordinance. The band left the stage to a beautiful, if short, fireworks display over the river.

Cost of a free concert:
$120 per night hotel
$3.00 per gallon of gasoline
$15 average cost of five meals dined out
$8.00 seat cushion to fend off wife’s fanny from hard Arch steps
$4.00 drinks at the concert
$300 in total.

It was worth every penny.

Set list:
Don’t Cry a Tear
Old Cowboys Sang??
This Traveling Around
Instrumental
I Will Rise Up
It Could Be All Downhill From Here
(That’s Right) You’re Not From Texas
I’ve Been to Memphis
The Last Time
Cute as a Bug
My Baby Don’t Tolerate
San Antonio Girl
That Old Train??
I Live in My Own Mind
Bottomland
Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down
Down the Old Plank Road
More Pretty Girls
If I Had a Boat
Give Back My Heart
Here I Am
What Do You Do
Sugar in My Bowl
Church
Cello Solo
I’m Going to Wait
Here I Am (Instrumental)

Random Shuffle: July 25, 2006 – Beat Farmers, Pearl Jam, Wilco, Bruce Hornsby & Jim Croce

“Happy Boy” – Beat Farmers
From Tales from the New West

A local radio station plays this song every Friday at 5 in the PM. It’s a great, zany way to begin the weekend. It is a short little ditty with odd little lyrics (about putting his dead dog in a drawer and forgetting about him). But it is full of bouncy beats and a chorus that goes something like “hubba hubba hubba”. For Friday rush hour traffic it is just about perfect.

There was a radio station in Oklahoma that used to play “Land of a 1,000 Dances” every Friday morning to get people prepared for the weekend. It seems strange that radio stations play the same song every week. You’d think we’d all get tired of it. Yet there is something sort of comforting about that routine. It is a full reminder that the weekend is here.

Of course, radio stations have been playing the same songs a lot more often than once a week for years now…

“Dissident” – Pearl Jam
From VS

Right around the time I bought Pearl Jam’s second album, I read an article that talked about listening to one album over and over for days and weeks. Something struck me about that concept and I began listening to VS over and over again. I both took great pleasure in listening to the album and fulfilled some secret yearning to love a piece of music so much that I couldn’t listen to anything else.

Listening to the song, and album, now I’m not sure why I couldn’t give it up. My friend Eric Berlin recently posted his top 5 favorite bands of all time and asked for everyone to release their own lists. It’s a difficult thing to do. Bands like Pearl Jam would have once topped that list. For a time in my life, I loved PJ immensely. But over the years I found other bands and let Pearl Jam slip into the background. Bands that I love right now like Wilco may, in ten years, slip away as well. So, how do you choose your all-time favorites?

“(Was I) In Your Dreams” – Wilco
From Being There

My wife put this song on the only mix tape she ever made me. It was long before we were married or even dating. It was while she was living in Canada – having a miserable time in the snow – and we had become good friends with a hint of romance simmering behind the scenes.

With every song, she included an appropriate lyric and commented on why she included it in the tape. For this song, she had to not so subtly remind me that she just liked the song and that she didn’t expect me to be dreaming of her. It was very typical of her strategy at the time to give me something that hinted at something more, but then immediately take it away.

It remains one of my least favorite Wilco tunes.

“The Way It Is” – Bruce Hornsby
From 10/09/97

Bruce Hornsby plays this song for nearly every concert he performs. Having been written nearly 20 years ago, that adds up to thousands of performances. You’d think he’d get tired of the song. Truth is, Bruce is such a cool guy he continues to play the song because he knows his fans love it. He understands that at each performance a percentage of the folks paying to see him are people who only know his hits. To make them, happy, and for them to get their money’s worth he always plays several of his big hits, and “The Way it Is” is the biggest.

To true fans eternal joy, and to not get too bored with the songs, he often changes the arrangement. I’ve heard it done slow, fast, and with weird rhythms. That and Bruce’s insatiable desire to improvise create a thousand different versions of the song for him to play.

This performance was actually with the Roanoke Symphony. For the most part, you wouldn’t know it on this song because Bruce rocks it out pretty much. He stretches it out for 8 minutes and keeps it completely interesting.

“Time in a Bottle” – Jim Croce
From Classic Hits

Another song that stirs the old memory cords. My first true love and I were really better friends than lovers. We came to know each other in what I’ll call pivotal moments in our lives. We were both teenagers and full of angst and lust and wonderment over what would happen to us in the future.

We were the best of friends for a long time until we decided to become more. Problem was we lived some hundred miles apart and finding the time for the physical ties that belong with something more was difficult. Truth being told I had also very limited experience with the somethings more and was too shy to do much in that regard. We did spend a great deal of time writing letters (was in the time before e-mail) and chatting on the phone. Letters involved much drawing of hearts in the margins and the quoting of poetry and lyrics.

My dear once wrote the lyrics to “Time in a Bottle” for me in the margins and I treasured them dearly.

During the summer past my senior year I broke up with the young lass. In a few weeks I was headed to college many a mile away and I knew our love would not see us through. Intending to make the transition easier I ended our short-lived fling. This was during a week of summer camp and for the talent competition she sang this song to me. It was a beautiful, lovely, weepy thing, and my last true memory of the girl. A treasure for a life time.