Fresh Friday Music, Nostalgia Style

Good morning, gheorghies. Good morning, lescoolies. No, that wasn't your browser on the blink again.

More good music to throw your way for a weekend. My friend Ned and his video design chum worked some real magic on a tune that conjures up old images for me.

I've highlighted my old growin-up buddy Ned Henry 'round these parts here before. In March of last year, his dad passed at age 95, a couple of years after his mom had left us unexpectedly. His folks -- Bucky and Barbara -- were truly amazing... 15-20 years older than most of my friends' folks, they were grandparently, congenial, hospitable, in on every joke, and always quick to whip up a mean breakfast when I woke up on their couch with a hangover at age 17. They seemed never to age, and my memories of them in their 80's and 90's conjure nearly identical images of them in their 50's and 60's when they lovingly took care of "The Whit."

In 2016, five of us from the old gang took Ned's mom, a William and Mary alum from way back, to a Jimmy Buffett (Ned's fave) show in a limo. Say what you will about Buffett, but that experience -- especially now knowing what lay in store soon thereafter, is a memory we all will continue to treasure.  Especially because COVID stole our good buddy Bill a few years later. 

At the show, I offered to hoist Mrs. B up onto my shoulders so she could see, but I was shot down. I mean, you can see how diminutive she was!

Plastic cup chalices...

She frequently chugged around town in a baby blue 1965 Mustang with a big smile. You saw her coming a long way away, and that was probably for the best, safety-wise. 

Anyway, this year Ned and his siblings took on the job of finally going through the old house and his folks' belongings. Unenviable a task for reasons of sadness as well as burden; when I asked Ned how long his family had lived there, he pondered, "Since the Kennedy administration... maybe Eisenhower." Whew. It just sold last month... God bless the new owners and the work ahead of them.

Just before the house went on the market, I woke up one June morning to a belated flurry of texts from Ned and his little brother, both back in town to sift through Henry trash and treasures, imploring me to come meet them out in the old neighborhood. They had been boozing on gin and tonics and blaring the Violent Femmes. They texted that flare sometime after midnight. Somewhat surprisingly, I was already sacked out and caught it on the flip side. 

But that didn't stop me from listening to them wax nostalgic and a bit plaintive the next morning, and right thereafter, I sat down and scratched out some lyrics to a song I then offered up if he had any interest. To his amazing credit, as soon as he got back to New Orleans he had figured out the music and was laying down the track. He tweaked my words just a touch and made me feel really good about the thought. He's a great dude. 

Ned released the track a few weeks ago and had a Crescent City cohort expertly compile a video with footage from the old neighborhood, Ned's NOLA home, and some photos of the old days. At the 1:46 and 2:54 marks you can see a few long-lost pics of a big galoot with his whole life ahead of him...

Anyway, if you feel like it, check out Ned, old Unit 11 (the Mustang), and our collaboration in this here music video.

Les Coole and The Cukes: a Two-fer Tuesday

With recent homegrown, in-GTB music being posted from Dave and zdaughter, Les Coole gets a little FOMO. Last week, he and The Cukes released a pair of songs, one new and one 15 years old.

The new one: virtual music collaborations are in increasing supply during the pandemic. Technology enabled this creation like nothing else could have. Three good friends of mine from high school, one of whom lives in New Orleans, contributed tracks of guitar, drums, bass, Hammond B3 organ, and  background vocals.

30-some years ago, the four of us used to go see shows at nearby Hampton Coliseum, a 10k-14k capacity arena opened just more than a half-century ago. Fast fact: The venue held its first event on December 1, 1969, the College of William and Mary vs. North Carolina State University in a college basketball game. The Virginia Squires also played some of their home games there. 

A laundry list of music's top stars have performed there, including Elvis, Springsteen, U2 (I remember my friends camping out for tickets to the Joshua Tree show; I wasn't that cool), and the Stones, whose 1981 show was recorded and released as Still Life and in full form here. Mick got a few local grins when he followed the show's opener of "Under My Thumb" (a great version) with:

Hey, welcome, Virginia. Welcome, Hampton. And welcome to everyone watching it on TV. Hope you're having a good time there drinkin' a few beers, smokin' a few joints at home wit' you, allll right.

Dave and I saw The Cult in Hampton in 1990 or so. FOGTB Lecky reached down to grab a tambourine that singer Ian Astbury brilliantly threw into the crowd down in front. He came up with a couple of fingers barely attached. But it was a good show otherwise. 

For the Grateful Dead, Hampton Coliseum was a regular tour stop. 21 times, including two shows in 1989 appearing as The Warlocks owing to Hampton's weariness of "Shakedown Street," the traveling Deadhead bazaar and its lovably (to some) grubby, narcotic-bringing, trash-leaving inhabitants. I attended the first night of this stand, which was eventually given the box set treatment.

That group of friends saw more than our fair share of Dead shows there in high school, among many other offerings. Two Novembers ago, I went back to the Coliseum for Dead and Company show that brought back all the feels, including the neighborly pass-along ones.

Phish picked up where the Dead left off at Hampton Coliseum. "The mothership" was a mainstay, sometimes for a trio of shows at a time, and in 1999, the six-disc Hampton Comes Alive was released.  Other than that, the venue had been dormant in recent years, at least relative to its heyday in the 70's and 80's. Plenty of Disney Princesses on Ice and such. I did see a terrific Pearl Jam show a few years ago.

I used to travel past the Coliseum twice a night when grad school class was in person. One night a song idea struck me, and by the time I got home, most of the words were written, via voice to text. For months to come, I dabbled in Les Coole Studios on my third floor, sketching out a song structure thanks to the aforementioned NOLA-dwelling friend Ned. Tracks would be exchanged on Dropbox, and here's the result.

The Coliseum

The Coliseum / Lay in ruins
Wasn’t nothin' / Nothin' doin
So many Dead / So long ago
The sun had set / On the old live show
Around the bend / A moonlight drive
Lights are up / She comes alive

CHORUS
Recount the times we came to see ‘em
Playing in The Coliseum
History like a museum
Hear it at The Coliseum

Gladiators / They don’t fight
But sloshy moshers / They just might
No emperors / On golden thrones
But skeletons / They shake their bones
The ghosts they fly / The boss, the king
The edge, the stones / They let Phil sing

CHORUS

BRIDGE
Tonight in old Virginia / I’m the evening Squire
So run with me and can’t you see / the Scarlet in the Fire?

All the shows / And all the showmen
Ancient now / But we’re still roamin’
So pack a bag / And hop a train
Or hitch a ride / Back home again
50 points / Of colored light
The mothership / She flies tonight

CHORUS

Song 2: Just One More

15 years ago, Ned and I exchanged some song ideas about the end of the summer here at the beach. I wrote a whole lot of lyrics. Ned roughed out a scratch track for guitar with a drum track behind it. I found myself in the Crescent City for work, and I spent an afternoon in his home studio laying the vocals down. And left town.

Around the holidays, a CD appeared in many of our friends' mailboxes. Ned had fleshed out the recording with a couple of his friends adding bass and a whopped of a harmonica track. The Last Resort was the makeshift name of the band we'd had in high school, and that name was attached to this song, called "Just One More." Les Coole and The Cukes have absorbed it, and it gets a formal release 15 years after its creation.

483 words, including "panoply" in 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Yeah, it's a lot. I'm happy that we immortalized our old friend Bill, who died in October 2019 from the flu, which just had to be COVID. And happy that it gets a new light of day.

Enjoy... and keep making music.

Upside of Lockdown

Good morning, gheorghies. How about some new music for you to get your Saturday rolling?

First couple of tracks from the upcoming Les Coole and The Cukes album, Upside of Lockdown.

Les Coole & The Cukes · Love Gone By

Les Coole & The Cukes · Over the Lines

Home Is Where the Studio Is

In between your binge-watching completism and maybe working on your novel, you've probably watched some musicians of varying celebrity record and/or play stuff live.

For the masses, the Stones did so in a grandly publicized manner.



For Rob, we have some Crowded House.



For kicks, here's a high school classmate of mine (also a Monroe Dormitory resident at the same time as Dave, Rob, Hightower, and several other Pi Lams) having fun.



And for me and only me, here's this. The video and sound quality are terrible all because of me. I was caught slightly off-guard by the timing.


Keep the creative light in this dark time!

This Is Not An Album Review

There's a school of thought that music, and any form of artistic expression like it, should be unencumbered from linear measurement. It is simply one person's or one group of persons' creative output.  As I have said here and elsewhere for years, art is art, and as such there can be no universal good or bad; there's just shit you like and shit you don't.

Singer extraordinaire Neko Case feels a bit like this when it comes to the categorization of music:

There's a contrary school of thought -- the Econ class, if you will -- that would insist that the moment said art is placed for sale into the capitalist economy, valuation becomes necessary, and with that categorization, rankings, and good/bad assessments follow.

As much as I do stand by my take above, I also look at it simply like this: Most people lack the time, interest, and requisite years of comparative exposure to dig in on any piece of art (I mean rock and/or roll music for the purposes of this post) and do better to refer to someone else's recommendations.  Reviews, rankings, and lists -- including the Les Coole year-end playlists, can be viewed as having someone else do the legwork for you busy, hard-working folks.  It's the way a novice listener will learn that even though Exile on Main Street and Black and Blue are separated by just four years, there's a vast difference in lasting quality between the two records, so they should proceed directly to the former.

It's an inherently fallible concept, leaving it to some other person to gauge how much you'll like a song or an album. Read reviews of Sandinista! in 1980 or Paul's Boutique in 1989. (Or Exile in 1972, amazingly enough. Lester Bangs called it "the worst studio album the Stones have ever made.") People get it wrong, especially critics with bloated egos. 

But music reviews with numerical scoring designations have their place. Always have.

I myself gravitate to amalgams like metacritic.com, aggregates of prominent reviews from around the world.  That way a one-off pan from some cranky critic only affects the overall score a tiny bit (mean, median, and mode, but not range), whereas if that one critic wrote for your go-to ragsheet, you might miss Social Distortion and go after 12 Inches of Snow.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that I haven't -- if ever, it hasn't been often -- seen such unanimity on that site for any album.

Wow. 

• The New York Times (100) - a bold, cathartic, challenging masterpiece.
• Pitchfork (100) - Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it. 
• Paste (97) - Fiona Apple is Mesmerizing Beyond Belief on Fetch the Bolt Cutters; the singer’s brilliant fifth album is eerily clairvoyant and brash in the most extraordinary way
• Variety (96) - It may be way early to say it’s the most satisfying album of the year, but if there are any more to come along this good, 2020 is not going to feel like such a waste of time after all.
• Boston Globe (90) - sense of awe giving it a defiant energy. ... A thrill ride.
• The AV Club (100) - a zenith of liberation and experimentation
• Consequence of Sound (100) - an Untethered Masterpiece
• The Guardian (100) - a glorious eruption
• Glide Magazine (100) - triumphant; the album exudes freedom, it exudes breaking constraints, it exudes Fiona Apple, and it might just be the album that we look back on when we think back to this COVID-19 era.
• The Line of Best Fit (100) - Albums like this feel important because they unflinchingly capture the smorgasbord of life.  On the other hand… releases like this don’t happen often, so why squander the moment? Fuck it. Fetch the bolt cutters. This feels special.
• Exclaim (100) - The scope of Fetch the Bolt Cutters' meaning, its infinite feeling, will likely take years to fully absorb. An album like this doesn't come often, and an artist like Apple will never come again

Dig in here for more, and for links to the actual reviews.

Here's my thought on it, after listening to it 4 or 5 times since Friday. Nearly every review says something similar, but in more flowery, SAT (RIP) terms:

Fiona Apple recorded this in her house, and she incorporates some unorthodox instrumentation (whacking kitchen utensils as percussion) and sounds (dogs barking and washing machines washing) into a mix of her enviably pretty vocals, her piano/keyboard, and a few other instruments. The lyrics, issued in lovely song, aggressive chant, or spoken word, are Fiona Apple-style rebellious and resentful, angry and not only not taking your shit any more, but calling you on the carpet.  The poetry is as impressive as her otherworldly voice. The music is decidedly not studio-grade -- in a mostly great, D.I.Y. way, which is what the fuss seems to be mostly about. Tom Waits in the 80's sort of stuff.  Ultimately, I like but don't love it. I am drawn to hookier melodies than she offers. I do appreciate its style and merit; I just don't know how much I'll come back to it in the years to come.

Not a review. Just another Dear Diary moment from Les Coole and/or Whitney.

Fetch the Bottle Opener.

Homemade Music and Small Humans

Technology.  Pretty cool in lots of ways we've documented in this space before.  And many more.

Family bands. Used to be .0001% chance of stardom, 50% chance of playing in your local church, 90% of an abusive parent ruining everything and sending the kids spiraling into therapy.

These days, it's much easier.  You've seen some or all of these, but they make me smile.  And yes, I've lost my edge.

Adorable.  Shown here before. Sue me.

...amusing

...most amazing

...and something from your favorite GTBer's family

Make music, people.  It's easy.