Flip Nasty Reunite!

The band Flip Nasty played together in various configurations from about 1988 to 2000. They recently reunited for a live show and now the recording of that show has been made available.

Stream/buy/download the concert at bandcamp and get 9 bonus songs not on other streaming platforms!

It’s so great to hear these three guys together again after so many years! Cody on drums with Johns Speranza (guitar) and Fried (bass) made this an immediate purchase and listen for me. (What is it about bands with two guys named John?)

Like The Smiths or The Beatles, Flip Nasty is one of those special groups that is greater than the sum of its parts; three unique instrumental voices that blend and rise to make something with its own personality. That collective identity is definitely brought back to life at this reunion concert.

They also create fresh arrangements and stretch out improvisationally, so it’s not purely a nostalgia trip. They’ve always done this - no live version sounds quite like the original studio version, or even particularly like any other live version.

The starting point for new Flip fans is probably still the Songs You Hate studio compilation, but I dare say this latest concert is also essential listening, especially for those of us who have been die hard fans since their ‘90s cassettes Guitool and River Dreams and, of course, the legendary Checkmate Exemplathon concert. Enjoy!

A 1995 Conversation about Trip Shakespeare's Volt

I talked to this dude one time at a GUH show who was, like, the booker for that venue and I told him how much I was into Trip Shakespeare's latest album, Volt. He laughed a bitter laugh and said he was at the sessions for that album trying to help them pull it together and that "they should have called it 'Floundering'!"

I guess those sessions were fraught, and indeed the band immediately went on a hiatus that never ended, but that's not what I took away from that conversation. What I took away from that conversation was that that dude was a douchebag. He was less interested in what that album meant to me and more interested in showing me what a totally superior music industry insider he was.

Did I then go on and tell him about the hours I spent in practice rooms emulating the Trip version of "The Ballad of El Goodo"?

Did I tell him how, on multiple recordings of my own, I imitated John Munson's enthusiastic "Let's go!" that kicks off "Dead Set on Destruction"?

Did I tell him how just hearing the 3-4-5 bass walkup that starts album closer "Helpless" took me back to the final song of the final Trip show I saw on December 15, 1992 and, more importantly, made me feel like all my intense young adult emotions were manageable and surviveable?

Nope. Did we play at his venue again? Also nope.

The point is, don't be that guy. Maybe he wasn't even usually that guy (but I'm pretty sure he was) and he was just triggered into a trauma dump by memories of those sessions. I fully understand how tempting it is to be that superior guy, but no one will actually be impressed and people will just not tell you things.

Also, Volt is an amazing album and you should totally check it out. I'm about to listen to it right now! Hooray!

Help Fund Schools Across Minnesota

Let me strongly encourage you, especially if you live in Minnesota, to write a letter like this to your representatives. I wrote to my state senator, my state representative, and the governor. You can cut and paste from my letter below, replacing the parts in ALL CAPS with your own personal experience.

Here is where you can find contact information for your state representative and state senator: https://www.gis.lcc.mn.gov/iMaps/districts/

Here is how to contact the governor: https://mn.gov/governor/contact/

Here is the template for your letter to them:

Hello ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE,

I want to strongly encourage you to fully fund the gap between what schools have been mandated to do and what they have been given the funding to do. This gap is sometimes called “cross subsidy costs”. Schools have been mandated to, for example, provide special education to children with disabilities from birth to age 21, but they often have to use General Fund dollars to cover the costs of that.

INCLUDE HERE THE WAYS INADEQUATELY FUNDED SCHOOLS IN YOUR DISTRICT HAVE IMPACTED YOU. FOR EXAMPLE, I WROTE ABOUT HOW BUSING HAS BEEN SLASHED.

Funding the cross subsidy costs would put money back into the General Fund and allow YOUR DISTRICT HERE and other districts across Minnesota to GET BETTER IN SOME WAY. LIKE I SAID, FOR ME IT WAS ABOUT BUSING.

Please use some of our 17.6 billion dollar surplus to cover the unfunded mandate of the cross subsidy costs. I hope that with Democrats in control of the legislature and the governorship that it will be a top priority and it will get done. I don’t know why it seems to have died last year but please get it done soon. Please let me know the status of this issue as it evolves.

Thank you for all your work. I have always voted for you and always will. I look forward to hearing from you.

YOUR NAME AND EMAIL GO HERE

p.s. I used this article in researching this issue:
https://www.house.mn.gov/SessionDaily/Story/17074

Tell 'em Memphis Evans sent ya.

Newly Available Evan Johnson Material

Put this on streaming in a separate window and then come back here and read about it:

https://ellida.bandcamp.com/album/walk-in-the-sun

This is a project that I am just thrilled about. In 2003, my musician friend Evan Johnson made a sprawling 5 disc anthology of the music he had created before he started playing his singer/songwriter material with Karl and I in the mid '90s. I found the discs fascinating, personal, and alternately driving and poignant, like the best instrumental music is.

The CDs he gave me were ripped rather haphazardly from stereo mixes on Digital Audio Tapes and the sound quality was poor. There were dozens of pieces but no titles. Banding of the tracks was left to an automatic machine that was bad at it. I made this kinda insane, definitely compulsive website chronicling these third generation recordings:

http://memphisevans.com/EvanJohnson/EJA/index.html

The DATs the stereo mixes had been on were lost or reused. The pieces had originally been recorded on a high speed, analog cassette four track, but Evan’s Tascam Porta Two HS had stopped working years before so there was no way to remix or re-transfer these wonderful pieces to the digital realm.

But I left an eBay search notification in place for the phrase "High Speed Tascam Porta Two".

In July 2019 a functional machine showed up on eBay and I won it and started the work of transferring and remixing the first 23 four track tapes. (More were found during a recent move.) I think they sound amazing now and it’s been thrilling to recover these wonderful pieces and hear them as they were originally recorded. They are very clean and bright but still have the warmth of analog tape.

This is the second of what I hope will be many albums from this treasure trove of Evan's compositions. (A long lost live album of the singer/songwriter material came out last year.)

Enjoy!

Those Were Different Times

I remember in about 1992 a young woman I knew at college used a name that was very close to her own to get a ton of free music from one of those exploitive record clubs. She really turned the tables on them.

Our school had small post office boxes in the same building as the cafeteria. The people who sorted the mail just put the CDs with the fake (but close) name she used into her box. Maybe they figured the sender had gotten it slightly wrong by accident.

She got all the "free" stuff, of course, just like everyone those record clubs scammed back then. But then she just kept ordering whatever she wanted but never paid. Someone (I?) asked her what she thought would happen when she got caught. She said what could they do? It wasn't her. It was someone whose name was admittedly really close, but it wasn't her. Her plan was to claim total ignorance.

I admired her bravery but worried about her getting caught. I wish I knew what happened but I don't because we lost touch after what a therapist might call "ruptures" in that friendship group. I hope she got away completely clean. I hope she still enjoys her 2 CD set of Sand in the Vaseline by Talking Heads and dozens of others. I think about her every time I see that album on the shelf.

I didn't quite nail the ending there. Sorry. What a bore.

Merit Ranking the 15 R.E.M. Studio Albums

15. Accelerate

Can't really hear it. Might be great. Victim of the loudness war. Probably is great, as I like how some of the songs sound on the Live at the Olympia in Dublin album.

I woke up and it was only 4:08 a.m. Dreamed I was peeing like you do and just managed to stop myself.

14. Collapse Into Now

Again, brick wall mastering just crushes any life that might be there on this album. I feel like with this and Accelerate, if I somehow got a hold of the Pro Tools session and audio files, I myself could mix great versions of these. That whole loudness war thing is just sad. See also Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full and New. Ruined. And, as is sometimes the case with R.E.M., the track they cut from the album is the best one - We All Go Back To Where We Belong.

Shuffled into the bathroom and back, laid back down.

13. Monster

I love What's The Frequency, Kenneth?, Strange Currencies, Let Me In and others, but Crush With Eyeliner, King Of Comedy, and their plodding, too hip ilk make this album a bit of a slog for me.

Knew from painful experience that I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep.

12. Out Of Time

Again, their choices for the songs for the album vs. the single b-sides hurt this album the most of any in their catalog. I still love it, but I miss Fretless so much. Fretless!!!

Several paths occurred to me, including but not limited to a) a blog post about the top ten writer/artist collaborations in comics, b) internet chatting with a representative at apple about my next computer, and c) just lying in bed awake.

11. New Adventures in Hi-Fi

I hated this when it came out. I found the sound off-putting and the words overly hip and self-aggrandizing, but now that's like one of those feelings you can remember having but you can't remember why on earth you had it. I really dig this and my only quibble with the song choice is the siren version of Leave instead of the gorgeous atmospheric version they later released on In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003.

Nope. This is what I did instead of any of that.

10. Around the Sun

This album is often criticized as their nadir, sometimes by the band themselves. I don't get that. I love the little details ("When I saw you at the street fair, you called out my name" - Can't you just see that scene and feel the feelings?) and even the stuff that seemed so cloyingly specific to the politics of the time (Final Straw) has slipped into a more general artistic expression at this late date.

Because I saw a merit ranking of R.E.M. albums the other day and because I thought they got it wrong, I did this.

9. Up

Daysleeper and At My Most Beautiful both rank with anything they've ever done and the sound of this initial release from what I think of as R.3.M. (the trio version, after drummer Bill Berry left) has grown warmer and more accessible over time.

Someone on the internet got something wrong and I have to correct it. The endless cesspool that our culture and our very lives have become. And I'm going to fix it? Jesus help me.

8. Reveal

Very much of a piece with Up, I give this one a slight edge because I find it more coherent. Imitation of Life is one of those great pop singles with surprising depth that they seem to generate effortlessly. Reveal also has my favorite artwork of any of the R.3.M. releases.

But really - Around the Sun does not deserve the titanic level of dismissive crap thrown at it.

7. Reckoning

The jangly second album. I might've dropped it behind Reveal and Up but I've lived with and played these songs for so many years now - Rockville, So. Central Rain, and Pretty Persuasion have all appeared in setlists for my various bands - I had to have it in the top half.

I wrote out (from memory) the first word of each album title, cut the paper up, shuffled, and set them down above and below one another as they came out of my hand.

6. Document

The hits, the cohesive sound and mood, the raw power, the depth. A lot of multi-platinum albums don't deserve the attention and represent a triumph of some marketing team catching a transitory zeitgeist then later everybody's like remember when we thought that was cool? This is one of those that stands up and earns it.

I was actually kind of proud of that. I even knew the years they came out, except I had New Adventures in '95 instead of '96.

5. Green

The Wrong Child is one of the most extraordinary songs ever created. What other song has so effectively embodied and portrayed that feeling of childhood awkwardness? The wordplay on the whole album is fun and evocative, like in the song Get Up - do dreams "complicate" or "compliment" your life? Why not both? So much love.

This would have been a reasonable, even cool thing for a twenty-two year old to do, although someone currently that age would probably do it about Arcade Fire or some shit I don't know fuck-all about and never will because who the fuck cares?

4. Lifes Rich Pageant

What must it have been like to have such confidence in one's band? This album blasts away at everything bad and dumb and venal and replaces it with strength, feeling, and compassion. Typical staying power as I can listen to this and continue to discover new things.

I can admit that at forty-four I am not that interested in actively seeking out new bands, just enjoying the experience of listening to albums whose feelings and meanings have morphed and changed as I have.

3. Murmur

The debut full-length retains a beautiful, mysterious fuzziness even after 33 years. (Can it really have been that long?) Perfect Circle, Moral Kiosk, We Walk…None of these songs sounded like anything that had gone before. The bravery that must have taken. Your heart knows what "Heaven assumes shoulders high in the wind" and "So much more attractive inside the moral kiosk" mean. The music goes straight to your inner self.

Has what I want and what I need and what I get from music fundamentally changed? Now that would be a great thought experiment/blog post.

2. Fables of the Reconstruction

Controversial even within the band itself, Fables is the love it or hate it, difficult third album. Obviously I love it. The band is taking risks, adding horns and strings, zipping from funk to rock to punk and making it all their own. Driver 8 is right up there too, but I've played Wendell Gee more times than any other R.E.M. song and even wrote a sequel.

Is it really 6:30 now? Shiiiiiiiit. Maybe I can still get a few hours of sleep in. It is Saturday after all.

1. Automatic for the People

What can you say? Everybody Hurts literally saved the lives of the kind of beautiful, wonderful, artistic people who paradoxically are the ones who seem to tend to kill themselves. (But doctor, I AM Pagliacci!) Man On The Moon, Try Not To Breathe, Find The River. The sounds are rich and varied, the singing and playing are everything a person could want from a rock band.

Nope. Gonna need coffee again today looks like.

The White Album Problem

George Martin, the Beatles' producer, believed their eponymous 1968 double album with the famous white cover should have been edited down to a single album.

"I really didn't think that a lot of the songs were worthy of release, and I told them so. I said 'I don't want a double-album. I think you ought to cut out some of these, concentrate on the really good ones and have yourself a really super album. Let's whittle them down to 14 or 16 titles and concentrate on those.'"

-quoted in The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn, p. 163.

Seems insane, right? Especially if, as I have, you've listened to the album dozens of times and enjoyed it more every time. The White Album feels like something handed down to mankind by gods. I once wrote a song about a lone alien discovering it after his people had destroyed every other remnant of human civilization. The album makes him wish maybe they hadn't done that.

But let's go back to that time, September 1968, before it was finished, when they were deciding to make it two records, against the advice of their producer.

What could you possibly cut? Well, from sides one and two I guess you could cut some of the underwritten silliness - Wild Honey Pie and Why Don't We Do It In The Road. But I wouldn't. McCartney totally invests himself in those performances and he is at the peak of his powers. And Wild Honey Pie, silly as it is, beautifully sets up that weird, archival Spanish guitar flourish that kicks off Bungalow Bill. Similarly, Road is a very satisfying contrast with the next song - the lilting, gentle pop of I Will. Even if you cut these two songs, you've only cut 2:43.

From sides three and four? Obviously Revolution 9 would have fit more neatly on the experimental albums John and Yoko were doing at the time - Life With The Lions and Two Virgins. It tests a person's patience but I've heard it enough times now that I kind of enjoy it. Also, like Wild Honey Pie and Road, it perfectly sets up the song after it - the rising, gentle strings of Good Night.

Sidebar: I think I just realized that every classic album should have a song that challenges and tests you even if you've listened to it hundreds of times. Do I enjoy Sgt. Pepper less because of the lugubrious passages in "Within You Without You"? Do I enjoy Ziggy Stardust less because of "It Ain't Easy"? No, I think I enjoy them more. Revolver, for example, doesn't have a single song that tries my patience - I just unreservedly love the whole thing and guess what? I don't listen to it nearly so often as I do Pepper or The White Album.

End sidebar

I guess you could cut Revolution 1, since a superior version of that same song was released as a single. Maybe you could cut Helter Skelter, but then would we still have had Led Zeppelin's debut two months later? If you cut those three songs, you've cut 17:08.

If you make those cuts, you've still got about 70 minutes of material. We're still not at a single LP record. So then you have to make additional cuts. There's nothing from the remaining 25 songs unworthy of release, is there? Are there other songs you would cut from the White Album? Which ones and why? Tell me in the comments.

In fact, there were some really great songs from this era that were not released until years later and in different forms. McCartney's "Junk", Lennon's "Child of Nature" and Harrison's "Not Guilty" are all excellent songs. Would replacing Revolution 9 with these three songs have made the album stronger? Maybe, but it would not have made it any shorter.

So looking back from 47 years' distance, they got it right. The White Album is what it was destined to be: an hour and thirty-four minutes handed down by gods.

References consulted while writing:

The White Album 2009 remaster

The Beatles In Mono is the only way to get the White Album in mono on CD

The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn

How long can an LP record side be?

Maths Is Fun, 2.

One day Mitchell asked John, "Did you see those birds and dragons at Arlen's house yesterday?"

John answered in a language unlike anything Mitchell had ever heard. It sounded like his tongue was no longer shaped quite like a human tongue.

"Gdrrrahhhhrrrksszz. Mrrrdbdbdzziiieeealloyusskhrd."

Mitchell looked directly at the reader and said, "Something very strange is going on. If I see eight such events, I will surely lose my mind. I have already seen two - Arlen's house and John's speech - How many more could I see and not quite lose my mind?"

Correct answer (number and label) in the comments here at the blog gets the next quesion.

Maths Is Fun, 1.

Seventeen large birds are perched on the roof of Arlen's home. If nine dragons fly out of the sky and eat one bird each and Arlen wets his pants in fear and wonder, how many large birds will be left to smell the pee pee pants after the dragons vanish, leaving no answers as to their origin, purpose, or destination?

Correct answer (number and label) in the comments here at the blog gets the next quesion.

Update: 2. is now.

Apocalypse: Has It Always Been Just Around The Corner?

Climate change, which is now irreversible, will render huge swaths of the Earth uninhabitable.

Ebola or some such virus will painfully kill some very large percentage of the human race.

Innocent children are enduring life in poverty, squalor, and cruelty, only to die young and in pain.

Fox news.

We will all be facially and retinally recognized by the computer, relegating anonimity and privacy to the realms of memory.

Gaza, Israel, Hamas.

The very wealthy will continue to get richer until the economic divide is such that the majority, who are now the new peasants, revolt.

Nukes continue to trickle down to countries and NGOs who will use them irresponsibly.

You get the idea. Is it reasonable to be more frightened for the future than ever before in human history, or has it always been thus? Have there always been people saying, "We only have about ten or twenty years left; then our whole way of life will just be swept away."?

The Onion: News Before It Happens, Part 5

In April of 2002, The Onion published this article:

Mideast Peace Process Derailed, Burned To Ground, Shoveled Over With Dirt

Only 12 years and 3 secretary of states later, the lamestream media caught on:

Kerry: It’s ‘Reality-Check Time’ For Peace Process

The Onion is America's finest news source for being #1 in news. Previous four examples:

Part 4: Iraq
Part 3: The Economy
Part 2: Also Iraq
Part 1: Bush II, U2, The Brewers

Some of the links to the "real" news are dead, as it turns out. None of The Onion's links have died, which just means they are better at that too.

Happy Valentine's Day

"There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be"

-Krishna to Arjuna in the Baghavad-Gita, quoted in the George Harrison albums Somewhere in England and Brainwashed

"That was me!"

-Paul McCartney

Is it important to be a cohesive person from one decade to the next?

If so, why?

What makes you the same person now that you were five years after you were born?

…that you were five years ago?

…ten years ago?

…ten years from now?

…a hundred years from now?

…ten years before you were born?

What is the same?      What have you always had?

What is different?  What will you always have?

What defines you?       What have you always been?

What will you always be?

No Matter What

NameMemoriesThoughtsBeliefsActions

StuffLovesFamilyFriends

NationStateJobHobbiesBodySoulGod

Who are yOu?

Don't Draw Conclusions About A Person Simply From Reading A New York Times Article About Them. Read Something They Wrote Themselves.

This was an interesting article, shared without comment by a musician friend.

Defining and Demanding a Musician’s Fair Shake in the Internet Age

Now I am a songwriter and musician (please imagine Star Jones parody voice), but oddly enough my main initial reaction to David Lowery, the protagonist of this article, went something like this: Boo-freaking-hoo.

In 2012 he only made $440 in songwriter royalties from his 1985 debut album while back in 2002 he had made $1,147. To suggest that, thus, the system is broken, struck me as ridiculous. I was all set to blog about how writing a song has zero inherent monetary value. It's the promoters - the people who mesmerize journalists and other strangers into believing your song has value - who really earn the money. You made deals with multi-national corporations to record, release, and promote your music to the point where it gets a million plays on Pandora and now those corporations aren't giving you enough money? Again I thought, boo-freaking-hoo. You're actually impossibly lucky to have gotten as far as you have. Get some perspective. Get a real job.

The music business is the system by which the vast number of people who would not inherently care about music (hereafter referred to as Z for Zombies) are all but forced to care about music by people who forcefully shove that music down their throats (hereafter referred to as F for Feeders). The F can not create the product and thus require people who care deeply about music and create it themselves (hereafter referred to as B for Brains). Sometimes a young, naive, excited B, full of love for their craft (think 1962 Bob Dylan), makes a deal with a hardworking, highly skilled F (think Albert Grossman), to get their music to Z. Later B is sad to learn that F expected to receive money for getting B the attention of Z. "It's all because of my genius that Z loves me!" thinks B, deluded. B sues F, etc.

However!

Then I read David Lowery's original blog post and most of the indignant wind went out of my sails like Roseanne Roseannadanna.

My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!

Now I get it. Songwriters can't negotiate a rate with Pandora. The government sets that rate. That is unfair. Agreed. Nevermind.

Am I even going to post this? What would be the point? I guess the point would be don't draw conclusions about a person simply from reading a New York Times article about them. Read something they wrote themselves.

Which I knew already, having been myself the subject of 3 (three!) newspaper articles, all mildly or wildly inaccurate, over my twenty-four years in (actually mostly out) of the music business. Anyway, I woke up an hour early today with no hope of going back to sleep, thus blog post. Enjoy. Could have written a song, I guess, but what would be the point? I don't have an F and wish to avoid the attentions of Z.

Modern Things. Bah!

I recently watched this video.

It's fine, right? No problem. It does the job it's supposed to do, which is keep a baby's attention and teach them some signs. For me personally, though, after about as many seconds as I am years old, I started trying to figure out whether the sound of the waves synced up with the actual waves because it doesn't seem like that pristine audio could possibly have been recorded on a windy beach. The rigid, repetitive, perfect sameness of the whole thing started driving me nuts. See what I mean?

Now I'm no audio engineer, but I am pretty sure she's lip syncing. She's doing it really well, which made me think there was probably a click track playing over speakers with the vocal when they shot the video at the beach. So what a baby is actually watching is a person lip syncing to a click track, probably some keyboards, and the vocal, all pre-recorded. An impossible illusion.

Later on, in post-production, my guess is they took out the sounds of everything except the vocal. Then they added in some quiet background waves. Well, fine, we just want the best end product, right? Just using modern tools. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Except that everything new is like this now. Everything is this digitally enhanced illusion of perfection. Long before this particular video was even over, I started thinking what it would look like if it had been taped for Sesame Street in 1974.

Susan's hair would be blowing around, her pitch would be wavering. She might crack up a little bit. You would hear the actual waves as they broke. She would be singing loud to be heard over the wind and those waves. It would be a real, one-of-a-kind, human performance. Factors beyond the control of the producers would have an impact on the final product. Watching her, you would think it was something you could do yourself. You would be right.

But back to 2013 (sigh). Every professional piece of video and audio that young people watch and hear now has this layer of digital illusion built in. They grow up in an acid bath of impossible, inhuman, auto-tuned perfection. And anything that hasn't been perfected by auto-tune is ridiculed. You're Star Wars Kid. You're William Hung. Ha Ha!

I wonder what cumulative impact this has on younger, more impressionable people than myself. Might they think, "Oh, I could never sing like that."? Because if they did think that, they would be right. But what if they stop trying?

Major League Baseball Puts A Gun In Its Own Mouth And Pulls The Trigger

So every year for the past eleven years I've gone with some of my friends on a baseball road trip. We've gone to Kansas City (7 times), Milwaukee (2 times), Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis (1 each). (Yes, some years there were two, Mathlete!) When the Twins' schedule was announced several months ago, I was excited to see where we would go this year.

We ain't goin' nowhere. There are zero three-game weekend serieses with the Twins on the road against those nearby teams. Because Houston was moved to the American League, putting 15 teams in each league, interleague play has to happen every day that all 30 teams play. The schedule this year sucks rocks. But don't take my word for it, listen to Twins manager Ron Gardenhire.

(From TwinsBaseball.com):

The Twins finish May with two games in Milwaukee, followed by two against the Brewers at home. Gardenhire was disappointed that the teams won't play three in each park like they used to.

"It's the first time, for me, that we have Milwaukee for two and we go there for two," he said. "We always played three and three. It's a big deal for our fans to go to Milwaukee, and for their fans to come here. It's a two-and-two during the week. That's always a big deal. Tons of Twins fans go to Milwaukee and pack that place, and just the same way when they come and pack our place.

"I thought that's what it was all about. The natural rival used to be the Brewers. That was always a pretty cool series, three over there and three at our place. Now it's two and two in the middle of the week. A lot of people will have to take off work."

Or just not go at all. For the first time since 2001. Stupid. Stupid baseball. Stupid Bud Selig. (Smart Ron Gardenhire.) The inevitable accumulation of wives, children, mortgages, and real jobs couldn't kill our enthusiasm and our determination to make this annual road trip. But now it's just - poof! - not even an option. You did it to yourself, baseball. Did you want me to stop attending your games? Does anybody really give a shit what league the hopeless Houston Astros are in? Thanks for the memories and change it the fuck back for next year. See you then.

Baseball Picks

In enjoying the first full page of Major League box scores yesterday, I noticed something strange. Mark Buehrle was not an opening day starter. Honestly I didn't even know what team he was on. Turns out he's on the Blue Jays and they had R.A. Dickey, the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner as their opening day starter. Fair enough. Certainly Buehrle will start the second game? Nope. That'll be Brandon Morrow, who had a good season last year.

Thus my prediction: With someone the caliber of Mark Buehrle as their third starter, the Toronto Blue Jays are my pick to win the increasingly and delightfully unstable AL East and the 2013 World Series. They will be the antiTwins, as the actual Twins have a fourth starter as their ace and thus can not even bring themselves to say the word "ace" in regard to any of their pitchers.

Fellow guitarists! Learn from my mistake!

When you are going to use a whammy bar in performance on, say, a Fender Stratocaster, you should use the following sequence of events to prepare:

1. Screw whammy bar into that hole near the bridge.

2. Tune your guitar.

If you do these things in the opposite order, your guitar (if it is like mine) will end up almost a half step flat just as you are supposed to start playing. Then you will be tuning up while the band runs through its first few songs. Has this ever happened to anyone else?

The things you can learn, even after 25 years of playing guitar.

---------------------------------

Memphis Evans is the composer of several pieces of serious music that explore the area between desireable and undesireable sounds.

I Pray For Rain

Just a micro-post, slightly too long for FB. I am getting The Box Tops' The Letter/Neon Rainbow album from Hennepin County Library's Freegal system for free at a rate of three tracks per week. I found the track "I Pray For Rain" to be one of Alex Chilton's best vocal performances ever. People using Freegal or people who like Big Star/Alex Chilton should check this out. That is all.

To log in through Hennepin County Library (requires a library card):
http://www.hclib.org/pub/search/LoginActionFreegal.cfm

Enter your barcode to enter the site.

Search for "The Letter/Neon Rainbow" using the "Album" search. Click on the album name when it appears. "I Pray For Rain" is track 12.

This album appears to have gone out of print in physical form, which is why I was getting it here in the first place.

The First 100 Albums That Occurred To Me, Roughly In The Order In Which They Occurred To Me

When I got out several pieces of paper and a pen to write down the 100 greatest albums of all time, these were the first 100 to occur to me.

The Beatles, Abbey Road

The Beatles, The Beatles (The White Album)

The Moody Blues, Seventh Sojourn

They Might Be Giants, Flood

They Might Be Giants, They Might Be Giants

Kirsty MacColl, Kite

The Beatles, Let It Be

The Beatles, Revolver

Scot Ninnemann, Moon June Spoon

Scot Ninnemann, Slight Change of Plans

Flip Nasty, Guitool

UFO Catcher, The Tale of a Sad And Lonely Boy Who Dreamed of Love

Kaptain Karl, Art Is A Lie, Baby

Kaptain Karl, The Chicago Tapes

Kaptain Karl, The Kepler Agenda

Jubilant Dogs, Abby

Prince, Purple Rain

Prince, Dirty Mind

Simon and Garfunkel, Bookends

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water

Ben Folds Five, Ben Folds Five

Ben Folds, Rocking the Suburbs

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks

Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy

Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind

Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home

Bob Dylan, Desire

Bob Dylan, "Love And Theft"

Bob Dylan, Live 1966

Lou Reed, Transformer

Lou Reed, Set the Twilight Reeling

The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico

The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground, Loaded

Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

Trip Shakespeare, Across the Universe

Trip Shakespeare, Lulu

Matt Wilson, Burnt White and Blue

The Beatles, Rubber Soul

Billy Bragg, Worker's Playtime

Billy Bragg, Don't Try This At Home

Joni Mitchell, Hejira

Joni Mitchell, Blue

Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark

Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin' Simon

Paul Simon, Graceland

Paul Simon, Paul Simon's Concert in Central Park

Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon

Paul SImon, Hearts and Bones

John Coltrane, Giant Steps

John Coltrane, Africa/Brass

John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard

Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um

Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Sarah McLachlan, Surfacing

Enya, Paint the Sky With Stars

Steve Miller Band, Greatest Hits 1974-1978

James Taylor, Greatest Hits

Gram Parsons, GP

Gram Parsons, Return of the Grevious Angel

The Minnesota Orchestra, The Complete Beethoven Symphonies

Les Miserables, Original Cast Recording

The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man

The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo

The Band, Music From Big Pink

The Band, The Band (The Brown Album)

Bob Dylan & The Band, The Basement Tapes

Paul McCartney (or whatever), Band on the Run

Billy Joel, The Stranger

Billy Joel, Turnstyles

Billy Joel, Cold Spring Harbor

Paul McCartney, Tug of War

Paul McCartney, Venus and Mars

Paul McCartney, Flowers in the Dirt

Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced?

Jimi Hendrix, Axis: Bold As Love

Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas

Elvis Presley, The King of Rock and Roll: The Complete '50s Masters

Elvis Presley, From Nashville To Memphis: The Essential '60s Masters I

Elvis Presley, Promised Land

Elvis Presley, From Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee

Elvis Presley, Memories: The 1968 Comeback Special

Elvis Presley, Elvis Country

Elvis Presley, Moody Blue

Elvis Presley, That's The Way It Is

Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run

Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town

The Kinks, The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society

John Lennon, Imagine

John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy

George Harrison, Brainwashed

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass

George Harrison, George Harrison

George Harrison, Could Nine

The Moody Blues, The Other Side of Life

"Weird Al" Yankovic, Dare To Be Stupid

"Weird Al" Yankovic, Alpocalypse

Lady Gaga, The Fame Monster

David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars

David Bowie, Hunky Dory

David Bowie, Low

David Bowie, Heathen

David Bowie, Reality

David Bowie, Station To Station

The Kinks, Muswell Hillbillies

Falco, Falco3

And I think that was 100.

Next time I sat down/stuff I thought of immediately afterwards:

John Hartford, Areo-Plane

Guster, Keep It Together

Guns -N- Roses, Appettite For Destruction

The Carpenters, 1969-1973

Big Star, #1 Record/Radio City

Big Star, Third/Sister Lovers

Evan Johnson, How Could I Know

Colin Spring, How I Came To Cry These Tears of Cool

Trip Shakespeare, Volt

Semisonic, Feeling Strangely Fine

Ted Hawkins, The Final Tour

I thought about looking over my CD collection and adding anything I forgot, then cutting up the pieces of paper and physically assembling the absolutely definitive list, in order. But I'm 41 not 14.

Top Ten Most Inspiring Keyboard Moments

Number. Title - Artist - Keyboard Player - Album - Year

Description/Justification

10. One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces - Ben Folds Five - Whatever And Ever Amen - 1997

My reaction upon hearing this in 1997 was, "Hey! Someone is making great piano music in a way that no one else has since Billy Joel and Elton John started dramatically overproducing their records in the 1980s! Hallelujah! Must acquire everything by him."

9. Let It Be - The Beatles - Paul McCartney - Let It Be - 1970

I have basically fetishized every aspect of this entire performance. The way the left hand octaves interact rhythmically with the right hand block chords. The way the F chord has an e in it which goes down to a d that sounds like a mistake at first. The actual mistake on "Mother Mary" during verse three. The way the gospel riff happens exactly one and a half times total. This song provides the crossover with my top ten guitar solos list. Fascinating alternate version from the movie.

Shoot, I could make this whole list Beatles songs. I could ALMOST make the whole list from Let It Be. So let's give honorable mentions to Billy Preston, electric piano on One After 909 and Get Back and Paul again for The Long And Winding Road. Don't know who did the Moog solo on Because from Abbey Road. George Martin's double speed classical solo on In My Life, which was copied by me on Jubilant Dogs' Stratosphere.

8. Green-Eyed Lady - Sugarloaf - Jerry Corbetta - Sugarloaf - 1970

I love the snaky riff, but what grabbed me the most was the punchy, breathy SOUND of this thing. I'd never heard anything quite like it and I still haven't.

7. Hungry Heart - Bruce Springsteen - Danny Federici - The River - 1980

The solo, (1:39) in a different key from the whole rest of the song. Little grace notes sliding up to the main notes. Like the previous entry, the sound of this solo is awesome - part ice rink, part silent movie, all rock and roll. Listen on headphones. It's panned all the way across the stereo picture but isn't monolithic. The Phantom never sounded sweeter.

I can't believe I didn't put any Roy Bittan on the list. Let's just give honorable mention to his work with Springsteen (duh) but also Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell and Bob Seger. While I love his playing, I can't honestly say he's literally inspiring to me because, like Eddie Van Halen on guitar, his playing seems impossibly out of my reach.

6. Scenes From An Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel - Billy Joel - The Stranger - 1977

Mainly the part (2:48) where everything drops out except the rolling octave bass in the piano (I think, like me, Billy Joel listened to Let It Be a few dozen times or more) and then the right hand comes in, tumbling down the stairs a couple times but landing on its feet.

See also the fast piano intro and outro of Miami 2017. I have played them many, many times and never quite perfectly.

5. James - Billy Joel - Billy Joel - Turnstyles - 1976

The always groovy Fender Rhodes. The melodic and harmonic shifts you didn't expect but recognize as perfect. The little scales. I have played the intro approximately 95 percent of the times I have sat down at an electric piano.

I could make the whole list Billy Joel, too, of course. The gorgeous flow of "Summer, Highland Falls", the simply perfect intro triads of "She's Got A Way", the guitar-doubled arpeggios of "She's Always A Woman", and even the funky, electric live version of "Los Angelenos" from Songs In The Attic.

4. Philosophy - Ben Folds Five - Ben Folds - Ben Folds Five - 1995

So many little grace notes ripping up to the main melody notes. It's like Floyd Cramer times a thousand and speeded way up. It displays such a huge range of feelings, the piano basically sings this song and everything else is background.

3. Bennie & The Jets - Elton John - Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - 1973

The solo! The solo! (2:22) This also has a whole lot of little grace notes ripping up to the main notes, which I seem to love. Huh! Never thought about that quite so overtly before. Love the way it starts folky then builds to a honky tonk scream.

2. Streetlife Serenader - Billy Joel - Billy Joel - Streetlife Serenade - 1974

It's the long bridge passage in the middle (2:24) with just piano where a mournful, graceful melody plays then gives way to a cascading fountain of notes before the singer comes back in. I explicitly copied this idea on my song "Eddie Gee". Now that I think about it there are two such passages in just this one song! This is my favorite Billy Joel piano moment of all.

1. Still Crazy After All These Years - Paul Simon - Barry Beckett/Richard Tee - Still Crazy After All These Years/Simon & Garfunkel The Concert in Central Park/Paul Simon Concert in the Park - 1975/1981/1991

Not many people who study twelve-tone serialism come up with an evergreen top forty hit. Even fewer have it played on a silky, liquid Fender Rhodes electric piano. The 1991 live (skip to about 49:50) version has Richard Tee and Michael Brecker (both now jamming in another world) taking the song to the next level.