Rally Round the G:TB Family: The Belated Rock Hall Noms

This one slipped past me in February, not sure why. I'm usually far more prompt about all things Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No matter . . . the induction announcement is in a couple of weeks, so there's still time. For me to tell you about it, for you to vote.

The following nominees were announced as the pool of candidates for Rock Hall inclusion this year:

• Beck
  
• Pat Benatar
• Kate Bush
• Devo
• Duran Duran
• Eminem
• Eurythmics
• Judas Priest
• Fela Kuti
• MC5
• New York Dolls
• Dolly Parton
• Rage Against the Machine
• Lionel Richie
• Carly Simon
• A Tribe Called Quest
• Dionne Warwick

Whom do you like?

I'll tell you whom the Hall doesn't like: The MC5. This is their sixth (6th) nomination. And I doubt they get in now, unless the RnRHoF opens a side door for them. Early influence or something.

Dolly Parton is the talk of the lot. She graciously bowed out of her nomination, saying she didn't feel she'd earned the right to be in this HoF and that she didn't want to split votes. And then the Hall said sorry, but we're still including you. Way to go, people.

If I were picking, here's my ballot.

• Beck
• Pat Benatar
• Devo
• Duran Duran
• Eminem
• Judas Priest
• Rage Against the Machine
• A Tribe Called Quest

But I don't get a vote . . . wait a minute, I do! So do you! Every day! Go here and cast a ballot once daily.

Below are my predictions. I had last year's class pegged for the most part, but I don't have as good a bead this go-around. Why's that, you ask?

• Dolly Parton may well get the nod, anyway. Stupid.
• This pool has very little ethnic diversity, so Dionne Warwick and Lionel Richie's chances improve. They're both solid picks, but (a) it seems like Diana Ross would get in first, even though she sucks and the Hall is still pissed she blew them off when the Supremes were inducted in '88 (though that wasn't the worst performance that night) and (b) Richie minus his killer Commodores work is slightly thin. But you never know.
• This pool has very little gender diversity, so Warwick's and Pat Benatar's chances improve. I love Pat Benatar, and she's hit for hit with Mellencamp, who got in 15 years ago. (Including what tune they both recorded for a hit? Answers below.) Anyway, women are finally starting to get their due in the Hall, and that helps her. But you never know.
• Rage has a super thin catalog, but they were a force to be reckoned with, once upon a time. Oh, and Tom Morello is on the nominating committee. Interesting.
• Eminem is a lock. Would the Hall dare usher in two hip-hop acts? They did last year . . . sort of. Jay-Z was inducted, as was LL . . . through the side door: The Award for Musical Excellence shall be given to artists, musicians, songwriters and producers whose originality and influence creating music have had a dramatic impact on music. G:TB readers know how I feel about that bullshit. So maybe Tribe gets in. Front door, please. We shall see, Z.
• My locks include the aforementioned Slim Shady plus Beck, and Duran Duran, surprisingly. They have the catalog, the staying power, the fan base, and the hair. Rob agrees with me.

Ultimately, I'm guessing, but here goes:

Go vote! 

The Twelve Days of Gheorgemas: Day Four

On the fourth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me 

Four Random Thoughts
Three Punk Rock Playlists 
Two Digits Throughout History 
And the debut of Mac McFis-ty

I get to follow Clarence's opuses (opi?). Sweet. No way my effort comes across as half-assed after his anthology of punk. But let's plow ahead, shall we? I have four random thoughts I want to share. Some are long, some are profound, some are sophomoric. You get the drill by this point. This is TR you're reading, after all.

Thought 1: 2016 was a year of ups and downs, but was also a year that brought me three weeks of bliss. 

2016 was the first calendar year in a long, long time for my wife and I that we did not have to deal with a parent that was severely ill or passed away. Our family is now, sadly, much much smaller and it's still heartbreaking to acknowledge that. 2016 was also a year with one big suckfest of a job loss for me. It was an odd, protracted affair with a company slowly and visibly combusting in front of me, where I needed to formally be fired to extract the maximum amount of nickels from my employer. So yeah, that kinda sucked.

But you know what didn't suck? Getting lucky and landing a new gig as the old one smoldered away. By July 4th, I had inked a new contract. That left me three weeks of staycation time with the family. Since we had already committed to a family vacation in August, and since the kids were committed to camps, I just kinda hung out. I did a bunch of AM hot yoga, I chatted up the moms at the pool club during the day, I watched Zman's kids chillax in the baby pool of said club. I cranked Lionel Richie with my kids in the afternoon. The weather was mostly perfect during that stretch too. It made me long to not have to work, assuming the weather could perpetually be 80 degrees. Making lemons out of lemonade was a real joy in 2016.  And yes, I want to move to San Diego.

Thought 2: I found some great old and new tunes to dig into this year. I've said this here before, but there is no rhyme or reason to when I encounter new music. And by "new", I mean something I haven't listened to a lot yet.

Here's one example, from a YouTube mix I made to signify the decay of my old job. I cranked it almost every day for a few weeks in my office while strategizing about how to best pillage the supply closet for my personal gain. It comes from a nearly 20 year-old Dylan album that I own on CD, but I needed some real life experience to absorb the profundity of the song. This is a song that you almost have to be "olidish" to fully absorb:



Here's another one I may have referred to in a post before that gains poignancy as I age. While I like Bruce's original (even if he is a hack), the tragedy of The Band adds extra meaning to this tune. My wife and I had an epic night many years ago watching The Last Waltz, and she decided (very late in the night) that she loved Rick Danko. I was cool with that because, um, because he was no longer living.

We swore that night to name the first dog we would buy Danko. We have yet to buy a dog, and I might overrule her to name our first dog Dave Winfield. But The Band, and their bassist, remain epic. Everything dies baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.



And here's one last one because we all need to be lifted up after this death and layoff chatter. One of the closing bookends of my three weeks of glorious unemployment was a mid-week concert in Brooklyn. The wife and I went to see Broken Social Scene, the indie rock gods of the aughts who went their separate ways for many years.

The show was beyond tremendous and was the highlight of my 2016 concert experiences (although I'm crossing my fingers about the two Phish shows I'm hitting at MSG later this month).  The quality of this video is questionable, and it may mean little to you if you are not familiar with this eclectic Canadian musical collective, but it sums up the majesty of this band: 8-12 musicians on stage at any time, lots of harmonies, and a real sense of musical profundity, at least to me. As a somber book-end, this was one of two bands I listened to a lot in 2004, when my wife and I first encountered severe family health issues. It was the first time I really felt like a grown-up and listened to music as a grown-up. Fuck you, cancer.



Thought 3: Yes, I still think about my alter-ego's porn name. In Miami over Thanksgiving, one of my most vivid memories is of being at Hard Rock Stadium and hearing the PA announce the Dolphins' starting guard, Jermon Bushrod. My son who likes the Fins blindly cheered, as he did all the starters, but I stood up and started clapping, wondering why we haven't heard the Bushrod surname before in the annals of erotica. Way to go, Jermon.

Thought 4: I can't wait for my mid-life crisis to peak. 

This may only appeal to Mark, but I recently indulged in tattoo number two, after several years of apathy and sporadic consternation. This new ink is another result of my glorious three weeks of unemployment. The work was not done until October, but I laid the groundwork with the tattoo parlor (Bang Bang, which is headed by LeBron's personal tattoo guy!) in July. I'm now officially too old to give a fuck about my ink and any professional consequences. And I am already planning number three. Zero. Fucks. Given.

The enjoyment of bucking the traditional aging yuppie trend as a 40-something dude is quite enjoyable. While I still foresee a traditional mid-life crisis-type purchase on my horizon (looking at you, German convertible), I think there will be more bold, eclectic decisions. I told my wife that after our youngest goes to college, I want to sell as many of my possessions as I can, maintain a very modest home, and become a citizen of the world, traveling as much as physically possible. A 55 y/o man can take an ayahuasca journey in South America, right?

Happy Gheorghemas, ladies and gents. Let me know if you have an ayahuasca hook-up.

Lionel Richie was the highlight of my month off between jobs!? Yes, yes it was.

The long lapse between my prior job, which formally ended on June 23, and my new job, which formally starts on July 25, is drawing to a close. While there was no big family event to mark the downtime, due to summer camps, travel soccer tournaments and other family obligations, there were (and still will be) some fun family events. Among them will be an impromptu visit to Yankee Stadium tonight to let my Oriole-loving 8 y/o see his team. Thanks to SeatGeek for helping me score field-level seats for $47/each (including fees!), but not for forcing me to navigate a byzantine labyrinth of app downloads and on-line transferring to make the actual tickets available in my iPhone.

It has been a fun month, one where I have worked out with fit mums at the local gym at 9 AM, taken my kids to the local pool club during the day, and qualmlessly imbibed whenever the mood struck. Yet there hadn't been a big moment to mark the extended time with the boys. That is, until last night.

I was taking the kids home from the pool club so I could grill for another family that was coming over (I have been getting plenty of mid-week grilling in, which has been fun). As they do every time they're in the car with me, my boys request SiriusXM channel stations. My 8 y/o has somehow decided he likes Channel 14 - The Blend. This station is AWFUL. It plays Sheeran, Beiber, Timberlake, Kelly Clarkson, One Direction and the like, interspersed with 80's pop hits from Madonna, Whitney Houston and Stevie Winwood (his bad hits). I want to tell my son I love him less when he requests the station, but I reluctantly don't. And now he's gotten the 6 y/o into the station as well, who generally likes anything the older one likes. So I get songs like the one below crammed into my ear hole often. Nobody puts TR in the corner.

I occasionally indulge my boys' requests, but I often tell them we won't play it b/c Dad doesn't like it. The compromise we tend to land on (mostly b/c of my wife) is Channel 18 - "Limited Edition", which you all know as the current home of Yacht Rock. I originally found the yacht rock movement amusing, but a tiny bit silly. But I have come around on it b/c the music is just so damn pleasant. It's easy breezy - you can play it loud or soft, and you can sing along to parts of many of the tunes. It evokes vague memories of my childhood, such as remembering listening to Christopher Cross' "Ride Like The Wind" in the back seat of my parents' cigarette smoke-filled Thunderbird. I did not realize until recently the song had a cameo from Michael McDonald. Of course it did.

(Random segue here: the ads for Yacht Rock that play on other stations are tre-fucking-mendous. The two I've heard are: "Music as soft and lustrous as Michael McDonald's beard" and "Music from back in the day when the only log-ins you needed was Kenny." Well done, sirs.)

But back to last night. After leaving the pool club, I again got a Blend request, but told them we would leave the car tuned to Yacht Rock. And as the car started, Lionel Richie's "All Night Long" came on. My kids immediately loved it. They asked me to turn it up and said it sounded like a Hawaiian song. I began cranking it with the windows down in my Volkswagen CC. The drive to our house is about 2 minutes, so I began meandering around my neighborhood at 6:15 PM with two happy boys in the back who were loving Lionel, jumbo jumbo, fiesta forever, the funky brass accompaniment, and the fact that we were gonna have a party all night long. Or at least until the song ended and we pulled our car back in the driveway. But it was a splendid 3:47 stretch amid a picture-perfect late summer afternoon - three dudes basking in the awesomeness of Lionel at the peak of his pop powers. And if you choose to play the video below, think of listening to it with the mindset of a young kid who's never heard it before. It's hard to dislike.

I'm sure I'll forget this happiness tonight at the ball game, as my kids enter into sugar-induced meltdowns, which hopefully won't result in one kid crying, another kid peeing all over his underwear, and a dad losing his iPhone. Actually, maybe I won't. Thanks, Lionel.