Mom

My mother would have turned 70 years old today. Spending the evening listening to one of her old albums.

Everybody Hurts

A few years ago, when we were leaving Philadelphia to return to Lawrence, I did something that still hurts today: I gave away almost the entirety of my CD collection, which I'd spent decades building. There was a rational reason for this -- we had very limited room in the "cube" that was going on the moving truck, and had to make a lot of snap decisions about what had to go and what we'd keep. 

I've spent the last couple of years buying albums I'd already bought 15 or 20 years ago, that I've missed.

This week, I got a package in the mail from eBay: REM's "Automatic for the People." I'm listening to it now. It remains beautiful and dirgelike, in the best way. Event the peppier songs, like "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" can't dent the overall effect of the album, which puts me in an almost-meditative state.

The killer track on the album, though, is "Everybody Hurts" -- a universal anthem if ever there was one. The video is killer, too.

Back when we made mixtapes, my roommate put that song on a mix he made for a relative who was grieving -- not to strong a word, I think -- a lost relationship. Too on the nose? I don't know. I don't think so. Everybody does hurt at some point or another, and Michael Stipe and company acknowledge that, but they also don't wallow in it -- the end of the song features and triumphant orchestral swell, a reminder that (often, hopefully) better days are ahead.

But it's ok to sit with the pain a bit, too, consoled by the fact you're not the only one who has ever felt these feelings. 

White Punks on Dope

 I'd never heard this song before this weekend. Now I love it.

Saturday morning vinyl: Isaac Hayes

 One of my favorite songs ever.

Listening to: Rebirth Brass Band

 

It's kind of embarrassing to admit now, but my first extended exposure to New Orleans-style brass band music came ... via a bunch of white guys from Madison, Wisconsin.

During my early days in Lawrence, I made friends with a guy named Joe -- a little older than I was, a lot more hip, and fun to hang around. One evening after work we went and got dinner, then walked around Massachusetts Street looking for something to do. We walked by the Jazzhaus, saw a group called the "Youngblood Brass Band" was playing, and decided why not? The cover charge was something like $3 -- maybe a little more, but not vastly more.

These were the aforementioned white guys from Madison, Wisconsin. The tuba player was particularly talented, using his giant horn to spin out turntable-style sounds while the snare drummer doubled as the band's MC. And what can I say? I'd heard brass band music before -- I'd gotten to see the Dirty Dozen brass band play maybe three songs a few years before, and I enjoyed it, and I should've appreciated what I was seeing more, but it didn't take then. The night I saw Youngblood, it took. 

A few days later, I was at a record store, chatting with a friend about how much I'd enjoyed the concert when a stranger approached. "If you think you like brass band music," try this out. He shoved a new CD copy of "Rebirth Brass Band: Live at the Maple Leaf" into my hands. Some meetings are serendipitous I guess. I bought the CD.

And then I was amazed. I probably kept the disc in my player for a month. The music was raw and energetic -- the recording was live, made in what sounded like a party. The songs went on forever. It was all new to me. I loved it.

I'm listening to them now, loving the music and feeling regrets. I always meant to get to New Orleans someday -- to hear them at the Maple Leaf, to hear Kermit Ruffins at Vaughn's. Saw Rebirth here in Lawrence a couple of years ago, and they were great, but they played at the Lied Center -- a big stage, the kind of place build like an opera house with balcony seats -- and that wasn't really their milieu. New Orleans is. I thought I'd get around to it sooner or later. But now I'm not sure there's going to be a later, at least as far as travel and live music are concerned. I hope there is. Until then, I have the recordings.

Listening to: An explanation

I'm going to make this an occasional series, I think, about whatever album I happen to be listening to when the mood strikes. I can't really write about music -- it's like dancing about math -- but I can describe how music intersected with my life and made me feel, so that's what I'll do. It's my blog! Would love to hear your own experiences with the artists I mention. 

Listening to: Sharon Jones

 

I never quite made my life match up to getting the full Sharon Jones experience.

My friend Josh Powers told me about her back in the mid-aughts, had been to a couple of her shows in Lawrence, Kansas and said they were amazing. I found my to to one of her albums and could not believe her albums had been made during this century.

When the time came that she visited Lawrence again, my wife and I got tickets. But Jo was pregnant, battling pretty severe morning sickness that lasted all day long. We made an attempt to go to and enjoy the show -- I remember Jones was wearing a skimpy dress, and worked the stage hard, shimmying and shaking all over the stage, and even then I knew I'd never have that much energy again -- but Jo was miserably ill, so we left after a half-dozen songs or so.

I remember being cranky that Amy Winehouse got famous using Jones' backup band.

There was one other opportunity to listen to Sharon Jones for me. It was Philly, 2011, and we were broke and barely employed. But Jones was playing a free show on Broad Street that spring -- it would've been a huge crowd, we probably would've been miserable. But as it happened, we didn't get to go. I was in the hospital, septic with infection and vomiting green bile. The next day I had a surgery that saved my life -- the first of three I would have that year. I've been broken since then. But I lived and got to see my son grow up.

And another opportunity to go see Sharon Jones live -- in what, I gather, was her element -- never presented itself before she died. 

Right now, I'm listening to her album, "Naturally," and ... I still can't believe it was made during this century.

Listening to: Lou Reed

I first really encountered Lou Reed in high school, about the time he released the "New York" album. A friend -- a Spanish exchange student -- lent me the cassette tape, so I took home and listened on my miniature boom box (known at the time, somewhat egregiously, as a "ghetto blaster" because we didn't quite realize how racist that was) and decided the album wasn't really for me. But Reed's use of the term "Statue of Bigotry" in the song "Dirty Boulevard" stuck in my head for years after.

(Actually, I didn't know it at the time, but my FIRST first encounter with Reed was the Honda scooter commercial in 1985 that used "Walk on the Wild Side," which is a really weird song for a commercial.) 

I gave Lou a second chance in the late 1990s, thanks to the BMG music club -- and discovered I really loved his 70s stuff. (For music snobs of a certain age, "best of" compilations are thought of as belonging to the newbs and amateurs. Guilty as charged, I suppose.) I heard songs like "Satellite of Love" and "Perfect Day" for the first time and was blown the hell away.

The CD got lost somewhere along the way. But a couple of years ago I found another "best of" collection featuring a lot of the same songs -- I mean, they really were his best songs -- on vinyl. I am listening to it now and I'm feeling kind of content.

My passion for U2's "Rattle and Hum"

The first album I was ever intimate with was U2's "Rattle and Hum."

By intimate, I don't mean "liked" or "loved." What I mean is this: The cassette tape was a constant presence in my stereo for the better part of a year in the late 1980s. I played it in the car, I played it in my room, I played it over and over and over again, singing along with — emulating — Bono's wails and snarls over and over again so much that even now, 30 years later, I can still perform much of the album if it suddenly appears on a sound system within earshot. Like Bono, I no longer hit the high notes quite so effortlessly, and the Gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" resonates now, in my forties, in ways it didn't when I was a teenager. But still.

It may seem odd that "Rattle and Hum" inspired this passion in me; it was U2's prior album, "The Joshua Tree," that launched the band into the pantheon of rock gods, and the follow-up live album — if I remember correctly — was judged a lesser effort. But you don't fully decide what music you find or finds you, especially in rural Kansas in the late 1980s, and the album's release in 1988 coincided with my sophomore year of high school. I was ready to be smitten with so much about life, and musically, "Rattle and Hum" immediately became what I loved most.

It's possible the competition wasn't really there. Again, I lived in rural Kansas during the pre-Internet age. It's possible I might've heard of bands like, say, the Pixies, and I remember a skater friend had a copy of an early Red Hot Chili Peppers, but my high school years were dominated by hair metal, Young MC, and this new guy named Garth Brooks. Later, I would envy friends who spent those same years listening to the Smiths. I'd never heard of them.

Next to "Cherry Pie," U2 seemed deep and authentic and they sang in overt ways about Christian concepts that, at the time, I'd only heard from Christian bands. At the time, too, Bono's perpetual smug righteousness - a trait he's carried forth into late middle-age - wore much better when he was in his 20s and I, a teen, was finding what I cared about. Yeah! Killing Martin Luther King Jr. was wrong! Apartheid is bad! Albert Goldman is an unethical book writer!

Some of the causes have aged better than others.

Two other good memories of the album: My senior year in college, taking a long road trip with my college band, and singing the album at the top of my lungs with Mike Yutzy. And a group of friends "borrowing" the college's digital projector to show the concert movie of the same name on the side of a dormitory.

I put the album on over the weekend for a short roadtrip — "Rattle ahd Hum's" running time being equivalent to about the length of a quick turnpike run between Emporia and Lawrence, Kansas. When "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" ended, my son offered a slow, sarcastic golf clap.

Punk.

I guess my passions won't be his, which is fine. I won't be 15 again, which is mostly good. But it was good to rediscover the album, to rediscover my Bono impression. I still haven't found what I'm looking for, either, but "Rattle and Hum" puts me a little closer to locating it.

Evening Walk: Venus

Walking in my neighborhood, after dark. It's not lit as well as my old Philadelphia city block — I probably need to buy reflective shoes or something. The app on my phone tells me I have 2,000 steps to go to make my daily goal, so I keep walking, keep walking, keep walking past my house and my path occasionally lit by the occasional street lamp.

Holst's "Venus: Bringer of Peace" is on my headphones. Above, through breaks in the clouds, I can see a star or two — the benefit of reduced light pollution. The darkness and the music go together; I feel like I'm creating or experiencing my own private segment of Walt Disney's "Fantasia" as I move through the neighborhood.

For a moment, the real world and the digital world playing in my head merge. Everything flows.

And then the music ends.