The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Twelve

On the Twelfth Day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Twelve Weird Couplings

Eleven Months of Dipshits

Ten (plus) Buffalo wins
Nine Joyous Moments
Eight Hot (or Lukewarm) Takes

Seven Books For Reading

Six Footie Jerseys

Five musicians from San Antonio known as the Sir Douglas Quintet

A four-part Japanese life strategy (as told by our man in the OBX)

Three 80's Baseball Sports Looks

Too Many Entries,

and a Cameo That Will Go Down in History

Greetings to all the gheorghies on this New Year’s Eve, one that is dreary, muggy, and rainy here in southeastern Virginia. How perfectly apropos for a year that began with promise and ended with resignation.

My Day 12 last time around included this at the end: 

“I have tickets to They Might Be Giants in DC with Rob and The Black Crowes in Va Beach unless they implode again. Seeing the Hoodoo Gurus down here in November. Beyond that: Cold War Kids, The Allman Betts Band, Southern Culture On the Skids, Sturgill Simpson, The Revivalists, Waxing Poetics, The Lumineers, . . . join me, gheorghies?”

Well, I didn’t see any of those shows, for one obvious reason. Nor did I see The Revivalists, Violent Femmes and X, Wilco and Sleater-Kinney, The Black Keys, and Patton Oswalt -- all of which I had tickets purchased to see. 

I did catch the Drive-By Truckers and Carbon Leaf on back-to-back nights in DC and Leesburg alongside several gheorghies. Terrific shows they were, made more glorious now by the finality of such endeavors.

For the first handful of Gheorghemases, I would reserve Day 12 exclusively for appreciations. While 2020 doesn’t seem to have made itself a strong candidate for such a list, there are a number of hidden treasures within the past 366 that stand out. Indeed, lamenting this shabby year in review and yet uncovering some real greatness is something of a paradox.

To that end, here are a dozen weird couplings for 2020…

Live Music vs. The Absence Of
If you’d have told me a year ago that my Concerts Attended number would go from 29 last year to 6 this year… and that the latter half of those shows would be masked and distanced and a bit stressful, I’d have told you it would utterly and completely suck. And I would have been right. 

But there were some unforeseen bright spots. Rhett Miller, the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, took to doing one-hour shows from his basement every week and then several times a week. The format was “pay what you want," though if you tip the most of the show, you get a request at the following one.

Which I did.

In the absence of live music, I'll take this.

Lockdown Laziness vs. Confined Creativity
As much as I should have utilized all the days and nights of lockdown to get a hundred home projects done and do something special... I didn't. There was much lounging. 

That said, I also pined for the lost days of packed venues enough to finish a project I’d been mulling for a while:

Want to see a cool gift? The QR code plays the song, the song is represented by the waves on a cool wooden plaque. My woman is a hip, hip, hip lady.

Punk vs. Mainstream Rock, Product Placement Version

I was amused and impressed when I saw The Clash Chuck Taylors.

Then I saw the Led Zeppelin pinball machine(s). Check this shit out.

Eric Clapton and Van Morrison vs. Eric Clapton and Van Morrison

When I was in high school (just a few years ago), classic rock reigned supreme, and Clapton Is God was a generally accepted principle. Eddie Van Halen was the new regime, but Slowhand was the man all the young dudes loved.  Meanwhile, Van the Man was the ladies' choice but unisexually appreciated. He may not be listed in Steven Hyden's Five-Album Test article, but a lot of folks would suggest that Astral Weeks/Moondance/His Band and the Street Choir/Tupelo Honey/Saint Dominic's Preview certainly qualify. To wit, 88% of every mixtape made for a girl in the 1980's contained "Crazy Love," "Brown-Eyed Girl," or "Tupelo Honey"... and they all contained "Wonderful Tonight."

That was then, this is now. Through the years, I learned about how Van Morrison was something of an insufferable prick with a massive ego. And within the last year I listened to the Spotify podcast on The Clash (narrated brilliantly by Chuck D) and heard about Eric Clapton's 1976 rant on a Birmingham. England stage about "keeping Britain white" and what-not. Real vulgarian type of stuff.  Yuck.

Fast forward to 2020. Van Morrison's creative content dried up years ago, but he has rediscovered his muse in the form of anti-masking songs. He has four now.  The most recent is a collaboration with Clapton called "Stand and Deliver." The afore-linked article about it begins with a great line: "Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, both age 75 and therefore at 220 times the risk of death from COVID-19 compared to people 18 to 29, have released a blues-rock track raging against public health codes." 

Oh, well. On the plus side, they will get some fresh ink written about them when we issue the next version of GTB's Top 20 Douches in Rock and Roll.

"Stand and Deliver" vs. "Stand and Deliver"
You decide.  I know which song Dick Turpin would prefer.

Gone from Home vs. Never Gone from the Heart

On a personal note, my first-born fled the nest this year. She's at the University of South Carolina, and COVID struck a few weeks after she got there. It unnerved me rather significantly. And then she got better. And made tons of friends, despite the state of things. And went to an SEC football game. And hosted her Dad for a weekend, where he got awfully jealous. And then she got a 4.0. 

And like rob mentioned, the lockdown downtime I got with her before she left was unforeseen and exactly what the doctor ordered before her departure. 

Love vs. Hate, Beatles Style

I mentioned Steven Hyden earlier. He's one of my favorite music writers and has been for some time. I think I first read him at Grantland.  I like his tastes, his style, his consistent output.

A couple of weeks ago he posted on Uproxx, his current home, with a piece called The Best Beatles Songs, Ranked. Whew, there's a big and bold idea. I do like that he says up front that such lists are inherently stupid. As Neko Case said, "Ranking lists do NOT represent music or art. That’s some sports bullshit." I said during Gheorghemas three years ago that I dropped good/better/best/bad/worse/worst because "there's just shit you like and shit you don't." But... it's always fun to hear other people's favorites.

Hyden's list is a highly enjoyable, informative read, and he personalizes it quite a bit. There are selections obviously and far less so, and like I sometimes do in such challenging music lists, he totally cheated. (See his #2.) It's worth the time it takes, and you should definitely have the Beatles songs at your fingertips if you read it. You'll want to play one or two you haven't dug up in a while.

One weird thing is that the word "hate" appears in this piece eight times. Mostly in the context of which Beatles hated which songs, or each other. Seems like this labour of love list would dispense with the hate a bit more.

Fran Healy vs. Fran Healy

(also titled "12 is a lot of anything")

Fran Healy was a light-hitting catcher in the 1970's, most memorably for me as a member of the 1977 New York Yankees I bandwagonly cheered for as a kid. My grandmother got his autograph for me when she jumped onto the dugout in Lauderdale that spring, a story I mentioned in the GTB comments recently. In the early 2000's, I got the Extra Innings baseball package to watch and chronicle every miserable game the wretched Mets played, and Fran Healy added color commentary to many of those games. He was light fare, as silly and ineffectual as the team was.  This was my favorite exchange between Healy and the all-timer past his time Ralph Kiner in 2005 after a home run. Fran: He got all of that, he knew it, and he was Cadillacking around the bases.

Ralph: Well, you know what they say about Cadillacs . . . home run hitters drive Cadillacs.

F: I tell you, Ralph Kiner coined that phrase many years ago, and kids in the Little Leagues from that moment on said, “Bunt? Forget bunting, I’m going for the long ball.”

R: That’s where that expression came from – he Cadillacked around the bases.

F: Did it come from that?

R: I doubt that.

They don't call them the best color men in baseball for nothin’.

And then there's Fran Healy. The frontman for the band Travis.  I dig their stuff, it's Britpop, fairly mellow, like the Scottish Connells. (There's a musical connection 'twixt the two bands, actually.) You may have heard "Why Does It Rain on Me," "Turn," "Writing to Reach You," "Side," but here they are singing "Sing" at Live 8 some 15 years ago.

Release vs. Resurrection
Last year I assured you that the debut album by Les Coole and The Cukes would come out in 2020. It didn't.  No excuses, what with all the downtime. I did get a few songs done, as Rob linked to last Gmas post.  I am extremely disappointed to confess that my dream of an album release simply did not happen.

And yet, something I was dead sure did not happen, something glorious and profound, did occur. From the ashes, Penny Baker and Les Coole (and original ORF Rocker DJ Bombay) rejoined the on-air crew at WODU for ORF Rock after an 18-month hiatus that by all accounts was permanent. Same lovable co-hosts; same punk, alt, and Elvis bent; same technical difficulties. But we are back on! I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. 

Wednesdays at 7pm, starting back up in a few weeks. Give us a listen.  Here was one of our shows from a few weeks ago. In it, we play a Les Coole and The Cukes song, so there's that solace.

Strychnine vs. Arsenic

So, 2020 was a disaster by any measure. I don't need to recap it. (But if you need that, go watch Netflix's Death to 2020 for some fun.)

But if you could replay the year and not have any of the disease, death, destruction, lockdown, worry, fear, and angst that COVID caused... but Donald Trump were re-elected... would you?  Lots good did actually happen in 2020. Some things rather momentous.

Downward Trending vs. A New Hope

Gheorghe: The Blog, through the years, based on the Number of Posts:

2003: 14

2004: 129

2005: 219

2006: 103 (wtf??)

2007: 192

2008: 373

2009: 394

2010: 402 (!!!)

2011: 365 (perfect)

2012: 307

2013: 338

2014: 289

2015: 265

2016: 235

2017: 212

2018: 216

2019: 193

2020: 258

Hallelujah. Long Live Gheorghe.

Hard Drive vs. Spotify

I grew up with cassettes. Buying them, making them, popping them into the car stereo as soon as I got in, repair-splicing them when they'd break, and collecting as many as I could. When I was in college I switched to CD's. And how. What you can see in one of the Les Coole Studios shots above is a fraction of the 2000+ discs I collected at some stupid price (although Columbia House and BMG were good to me) in the 90's and beyond.

About 14 or 15 years ago, I ripped most of those to mp3. iPods and iTunes made it relatively simple (though still time-consuming), and the portability was amazing. I compiled a hard drive with 37,000 songs on it, and it was a treasure. On this day 12 years ago I related the saga of accidentally wiping said hard drive (back when it had just 22k tunes) and having to pay handsomely for its recovery. I filled my friends' iPods and hard drives for them. It was gratifying.

Of course, of course that technology went by the wayside. Firstly because that's what technology does, secondly because as soon as I and my completist self feel like I've got it all, it goes away and renders my collection obsolete. Natch. 

Spotify and other streaming services came along and eliminated the novelty of me having an album or a song that people couldn't find and hadn't heard in ages. Oh well. The truth, however, is that it's an amazing development (if one that squeezes artists out of nearly all royalties) and very useful. I have shared music over the medium with several of you. Zman and I have a collaborative playlist and share rare/new stuff. I dig it.

There are still some songs that aren't on Spotify, some that never will be, that I carry in my own collection. That's a post for another day. For now, though, here's my annual best-of-the-year list.

While you peruse and listen to it, keep this in mind. I love you, gheorghies. You people are the finest in all the land, by some margin. Happy New Year.