Veterans Day Parade 2007

Son #1, far left on the drums, playing in the annual Elk Grove Veterans Day Parade with the Pleasant Grove High School Marching Band.














World War II Veteran, later in the parade.

Belated Happy Veterans Day!

Punk, or Disco?

An interesting post that poses an interesting question - has punk or disco had the more lasting impact on music and pop culture?

My contribution to the discussion can be found in the comments, but there's one thing I want to add, in response to the notion (early in the post) that by the mid-seventies, pop music had become corporate, safe and bland. There is some truth to that, but there was also some great music being made during that period. A couple of months ago I made a tape to listen to in the car of music released in 1975, which included songs from the following albums:

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan
Tonight's the Night, Neil Young
Siren, Roxy Music
Horses, Patti Smith
Katy Lied, Steely Dan
Young Americans, David Bowie
Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin

Certainly, a lot of those artists had been around for a while, but that's not a bad list - and that wasn't even all of it. The moral of the story is that even in the worst of times, there's some pretty darn good stuff waiting to be found.

Mad Enough To Change My Template

I really hate how I feel after games like tonight's Cal-USC game. In the 47 years of my life, I've watched literally thousands of sporting events, and have been blessed to see teams like the Joe Montana 49ers, the Will Clark Giants, the Barry Bonds Giants, and the Ken Stabler Raiders in action. But the "damn it, I just want to find the nearest USC fan and put their f*&#ing head through the window" type of loss is the stuff that always stays with you.

So what do I do? Change my blog template. Maybe that will change their luck. And I think this one might be easier to read. Whatever...I think I'll change every year or so, and it's been almost a year since I went to the "blue look."

Classic

A classic conversation between siblings.

I Want To Break Things

Man, if there was ever a night that was tailor-made for a Cal win over USC, this was it.

But it was not to be...a great performance by Justin Forsett, by far his best of the year, was negated by another terrible performance from Nate Longshore. Obviously the Bears' season turned with his injury in the Oregon game, because Longshore hasn't been the same since.

So the throwback 1975 uniforms (see above), to honor the late Joe Roth, went to waste. And Cal will look back on this season as a waste - what could have been.

Event-izing the Weekend

I'm afraid the effort to event-ize my life (for full details, see here) may get off to a slow start this weekend, because truth be told I'm looking forward to doing as little as possible.

The only things on the docket thus far:

- haircut, Saturday morning.

- Cal-USC game, Saturday evening. This is bound to be an aggravating experience, as USC appears to have pulled themselves out of their doldrums just in time to play us. But hope springs eternal!

- the big ticket item of the weekend is the Elk Grove Veterans Day Parade, in which son #1 will be marching as part of the drum line for the Pleasant Grove High School marching band.

Not much, but a start. Finding suitable events is proving harder than expected.

Something I'm Going to Get On Right Away

This week, the Fox network explained why episodes of the new season of 24 will be held until the writer's strike is over:

"This was a show that three years ago was showing some signs of wear from a ratings point of view, until we came up with a strategy to event-ize the show," Fox scheduling chief Preston Beckman says of the series' shift to mid-season back in 2005. "It would be a disservice to the show and to the audience to run eight episodes and just go, 'Okay, let's stop the clock.'"

Thank you, Mr. Beckman. Due solely to your creative vocabulary, I now have a new purpose: to event-ize my life. I'm working on a strategy as we speak, and updates will be posted here on a regular basis. Anyone with ideas, feel free to share them.

It's Coming...

The Vinyl Collection

In addition to owning somewhere between 1000 and 1200 CDs, I have around 1000 vinyl records in my collection. Today begins a regular feature, somewhat obviously titled “The Vinyl Collection," where I put the spotlight on a couple of those albums. For the purposes of this feature, I’ll focus solely on those albums that I own only on vinyl, and not on CD. I’ll also skip most of the easy, obvious choices – stuff like Abbey Road, Willie & the Poor Boys, Purple Rain, Thriller – in favor of less popular and more obscure titles. And before writing something about these albums, I’m actually going to force myself to listen to them, which in some cases may be quite a chore. I’m starting at the beginning of the alphabet, but reserve the right to skip around if something catches my eye.

ABC, The Lexicon of Love (1982). The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records points out that this band “revolves around the talented Martin Fry, whose detailed notions of style include setting his own Bowiesque vocals in lustrous pop production laden with keyboards and strings, mostly to a supple techno-soul disco pulse.” I couldn’t have said it better myself, so why try? Essentially, this album boils down to three great songs, songs that I wouldn’t mind putting on a party mix or a tape to listen to in the car: “The Look of Love,” “Poison Arrow,” and “All of My Heart.” The rest is more of the same, but not as good. All of which leaves me with the impression that a little ABC goes a long way. I actually own one other album by the group, Beauty Stab, and remember thinking at the time that it was better than the (more popular) debut. Might come back to that one later.

Adverts, Crossing the Red Sea With the Adverts (1978). This one I picked up because Greil Marcus included it in the “Treasure Island” section of Stranded: Rock and Roll For A Desert Island. Marcus wrote of the album, “head-down, into-the-wind punk from a band with the humor and determination to make you think their album title wasn’t altogether a joke.” Trouser Press opines, “In its own way, Red Sea is the equal of the first Sex Pistols or Clash LP, a hasty statement that captures an exciting point in time.”

Whatever they were hearing, I’m missing. To me the record sounds like it could have come from any of a hundred other punk bands. I could see putting it on during a punk party (were we ever to host one), but it would be well behind the Pistols, Clash, Ramones, and many others.

Worth 1000 Words, Navy beats Notre Dame edition

Piling On The Irish

I didn't have a personal stake in the outcome one way or another, but it's hard to resist adding something to the fray on Notre Dame's historic loss to Navy. So here's my contribution:

Tyrone Willingham never lost to Navy.

Bob Davie never lost to Navy.

Gerry Faust never lost to Navy.

Taking History Into Their Own Hands

An enlightening exchange between Steven Rubio and the Baseball Hall of Fame, on the subject of Barry Bonds' record-breaking home run ball.

The Hall's key defense of displaying the ball with the asterisk intact:

In our opinion, the baseball speaks to many significant parallels between baseball and culture in 2007, some of which include: a representation of baseball fans’ sentiments about the home record, for a one-week period in September 2007; a symbol of the adversity Barry Bonds had to endure in passing Hank Aaron to become the all-time home run champion, and; the passion baseball fans have for baseball history, as evidenced by the popularity of the online poll, in which 10 million votes were cast during a one-week period.

By that line of thinking, had someone written the "N word" on Hank Aaron's 715th home run ball, it would have been just as acceptable.

Another Take on Eden

An alternative view of Long Road to Eden is provided by the always insightful and entertaining Shamus.

My favorite graf, where his observations of the boys in the band are spot on:

Don Henley remains a smart, edgy and somewhat insufferable schoolmarm, with plenty of invective and few answers. (Henley’s hypocritical contortions over selling this disc through Wal-Mart have amused The Shamus to no end. Henley is the only artist I’ve ever heckled in concert, because he wouldn’t shut up about Walden Woods and sing “The Boys Of Summer.” Oops, digressed again.) Anyway, Joe Walsh is still your weird Uncle Fritz in the corner fiddling with his whammy bar. Glenn Frey still is bulked up and slicked back, and still has one of the most beautiful, underrated tenor voices in rock and roll. And aren't you amazed at how Timothy B. Schmit keeps that long hair so lustrous after all these years?

Even though I don't agree that this is their best album (Hotel California stands head and shoulders above the rest, to this day), in a way I feel like we're saying the same things about the new album, albeit in a different way. The only thing I don't know that I buy is the Shamus' comment, But they’re also saying, “We’ve done all we can. Here’s what needs to be said. Now, you new groups, you carry on.” I'm just not sure that they're capable of that kind of humility.

Just Because...

The Eagles Hold A White Elephant Sale

In a 1962 essay, film critic Manny Farber described what he had come to see as two distinct types of art: “White Elephant Art,” defined as “an expensive hunk of well-regulated area,” and “Termite Art,” which he outlined as something that “termite-like, feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” For the most part, Farber was applying the concepts to film; years later, Greil Marcus would apply them to rock music in a column for New West (later California) Magazine.

What prompted me last night to pull out the Farber book which includes “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” was the new album by the Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden. Because if there has ever been an album that could be described as “an expensive hunk of well-regulated area,” Eden is the one. In this instance, that’s not entirely a bad thing – in and of itself, it is a major accomplishment that nearly thirty years on, Frey, Henley, Walsh and Schmit were able to create a 2-CD set that sounds not just a little bit, but exactly like the Eagles, circa 1979. Assuming that folks are able to find their way to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy it, I expect that it will be an enormous hit.

On the one hand, that accomplishment should not be downplayed – the album sounds great (if this album were a floor, you could eat off of it); from the first strains of “How Long,” when the guitars click in and the harmonies soar, you think “Holy Sh--! Nothing has changed!” You’ve got your mid-tempo Henley chuggers, your bemused and sardonically amusing “can’t believe I ever got this lucky” Walsh tunes, and your “time for the girls to swoon” romantic songs with Schmit singing lead – they’re all there, all enjoyable. On the other hand, whether any of these songs will ever become anything more than background noise is hard to know.

Most of the political stuff comes on the second CD, where the band does stretch itself a bit. But listening to songs like “Long Road Out of Eden” and “Frail Grasp On the Big Picture,” I can’t help but wonder how they might have sounded with a little less sheen – the fact that every damn note is so perfect; everything is so pristine; just seems to sap the songs of their power.

In the end, I’m torn. By no means is this a bad album; it’s one that I’ll find room for in my CD changer for a while (and maybe longer than that). But in many ways, it also feels like a cowardly one. 35 years ago, Robert Christgau wrote of the band, “in the end the product is suave and synthetic – brilliant, but false.” You could probably say the same thing about much of Eden, and much of what Farber would call “White Elephant Art.”

Suddenly, It's Christmas

Making my biennial sojourn into Wal-Mart on Tuesday to buy the new Eagles album (more on that later), I noticed that their display of Christmas music was fully stocked and ready to go. I'm sure that in many other places within the cavernous regions of the store, the holiday decorations were just waiting to pounce on those Halloween costumes and boot them back into storage.

All of which brings to mind, as it always does this time of year, a song by the great Loudon Wainwright III: "Suddenly, It's Christmas," from his 1993 album Career Moves.

Suddenly it's Christmas,
Right after Hallowe'en.
Forget about Thanksgiving;
It's just a buffet in between.
There's lights and tinsel in the windows;
They're stocking up the shelves;
Santa's slaving at the North Pole
In his sweatshop full of elves.

There's got to be a build-up
To the day that Christ was born:
The halls are decked with pumpkins
And the ears of Indian corn.
Dragging through the falling leaves
In a one-horse open sleigh,
Suddenly it's Christmas,
Seven weeks before the day.

Suddenly it's Christmas,
The longest holiday.
When they say "Season's Greetings"
They mean just what they say:
It's a season, it's a marathon,
Retail eternity.
It's not over till it's over
And you throw away the tree.

Outside it's positively balmy,
In the air nary a nip;
Suddenly it's Christmas,
Unbuttoned and unzipped.
Yes, they're working overtime,
Santa's little runts;
Christmas comes but once a year
And goes on for two months.

Christmas carols in December
And November, too;
It's no wonder we're depressed
When the whole thing is through.
Finally it's January;
Let's sing "Auld Lang Syne";
But here comes another heartache,
Shaped like a Valentine.

Suddenly it's Christmas,
The longest holiday.
The season is upon us;
A pox, it won't go away.
It's a season, it's a marathon,
Retail eternity.
It's not over till it's over
And you throw away the tree.

No, it's not over till it's over
And you throw away the tree;
It's still not over till it's over
And you throw away the tree.