brainsplotch

It's been three days since we saw Brandi Carlile at Meadow Brook Amphitheater and I had better get my thoughts down before I forget. This was our 11th Brandi show. (I mistakenly gave us credit for seeing her for the first time in 2009, when in fact it was 2010). So we've now seen her in three different states (Michigan, Illinois, and Colorado) and two different countries (the U.S, of course, and the U.K.). In January, L. will see her in THREE countries, when she attends the Girls Just Wanna festival in Mexico with a friend. She'll also be one up on me in total Brandi shows. That's a hard pill to swallow, but I'll survive. At this point, need I say that Brandi was amazing yet again? I have never seen her put on a show that was anything less than jaw-dropping. To think that I was at best skeptically curious when L. said in 2010, "I like this singer Brandi Carlile and want to see her in concert." From the moment Brandi opened her mouth and sang her first note...

Way back on December 22, 2022, I wrote a nostalgic post about becoming a full-blown Jimi Hendrix convert via the 1984 compilation, Kiss the Sky . I lamented jettisoning my cassette of the album decades ago. Well, guess what? I found the comp on CD at my local record shop and, after some wavering and hemming and hawing, I bought it. The icing on the cake is that it's what is known in CD collector geekitude as a "target CD," as in the design of the CD surface resembles a target. I can't tell you how exciting it was to pop that CD in my car's disc player and hear that Hendrix collection for the first time in at least 24 years (probably longer than that). It's not as if Kiss the Sky is that earth-shattering--with the exception of the live "I Don't Live Today," I have all of these songs on other albums--but listening to those songs in that order was like taking the Wayback Machine to 1987, when I was playing the hell out of t...

I said I was gonna write another "Seattle post" and, as usual, didn't get on that when I should have. So here's part two of this very loosely based on Seattle theme. In this case, it's the band Screaming Trees. I wrote about the Trees a few years ago when bassist Van Conner died. I have been on a Screaming Trees jag recently after finding a cache of their CDs at my favorite local record shop, Flat Back & Circular. The CDs in question ar the 1985-1989 SST Records anthology, and the two Epic Records albums I didn't already have, Uncle Anesthesia and Dust . It reaffirms my opinion that the Trees were among the most under-appreciated, underrated bands of the '90s "grunge" era. I know "underrated" is thrown around too often, but it is wholly appropriate here. If Mudhoney were the most Stooges-inspired garage punk of the Seattle grunge bands, then Screaming Trees were the most '60s psychedelia-inspired (not that all of their songs ca...

After a little trepidation based on its middling reviews, we went to the cinema to see Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . Perhaps due to my lowered expectations, or maybe because I'm just a pushover who goes to the movies WANTING to like what I've paid to see, or possibly because it actually IS a good movie, I ended up enjoying Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . (I will henceforth simply refer to it as Springsteen ). From what I gather, the main complaints about Springsteen  is that it doesn't have enough music and that it falls prey to rock biopic cliches. First, about the music: I don't agree with those criticisms. It has just enough music. The movie is, among other things, about Bruce's creation of the Nebraska album. He has finished the 1981  River tour and is renting a house in Colts Neck, NJ, getting inspiration from Flannery O'Connor, the Terence Malick movie  Badlands, reading   microfilm newspaper accounts of the real-life murders that ...

I attended one evening of one day of the annual Rockin' the Suburbs SuburbsFest. Having already blown through 96 or so hours of vacation time for Europe, I wasn't sure I'd have enough for two days, plus I need to save up for trips to Baltimore and Savannah. So even though the fest was in Michigan (or maybe because the fest was in Michigan) I only went for one day. I'm not sure why I feel the need to explain myself, but there it is. The one night I was there (Saturday night), it was pretty, pretty, pretty good (as Larry David might say). I saw several podcast friends, as well as the RTS "house band" Frank Muffin, the Stick Arounds (from Lansing), and an excellent young band from GR/west Michigan called Money Soup. When I say they're young, I mean it. I'm not sure any of them are over 21 years old. They play a funk/soul/jazz/pop hybrid and write their own material. I'm astounded at how good they are at such young ages. Their drummer, Lainey, is a pur...

July is, amazingly, almost over, so I'd better get a post in. It figures that after being so prolific during our European vacation, I'd go silent for almost the entire next month. I'm at that stage in which I can't believe there was a time that I spent 2 1/2 weeks in Europe. It now seems like a long time ago, even though it was only a month ago that we returned home. July has been marked by a lot of dog-sitting bookmarked by a podcast recording on July 3 (Book Bound podcast) and friends wedding on July 5--and a Tigers baseball game in Detroit with some other podcast friends (from Rockin' the Suburbs). This is also the month of Wet Leg and their excellent new album Moisturizer , which I was skeptical about but now absolutely adore. They have to be one of the most promising bands to appear in a long time. Moisturizer eclipses their first album. "CPR" is undoubtedly my "song of the summer." It's just so catchy, breezy, humorous, and fun.

Backtracking to London... We had a whirlwind stay in London. Our one full day, we walked across Hyde Park to the Victoria & Albert Museum and spent almost the entire afternoon there. It was the one major museum we didn't make it to in 2023, so it was thrilling to get there this time around. The collection of artwork and sculpture there is astounding, and one can almost feel the presence of ghosts from the Victorian era in the old building, which also still bears the visible scars of the blitz during the Battle of Britain. I wore my Brandi Carlile t-shirt and we bumped into some American Brandi fans at the V&A who were in London primarily for the concert. These fans invited us to a pre-show get-together at the Gloucester Arms. (We considered it, but didn't end up going). After we finished at the V&A, we walked back across Hyde Park to our hotel, charged up our phones a bit, grabbed dinner in the Aubaine Restaurant adjoining the hotel, then trekked back across Hyde Pa...

It all started in about 1986 or 1987 when I leafed through a friend's copy of a Rolling Stone history of rock 'n' roll (I can't remember the exact title or edition). There was a group photo of five or six scowling young guys in front of either a crumbling stone chimney or large boulders, half of the guys were white and two (or three--if it was the Da Capo era) were Black. The accompanying caption identified these guys as a band called "Love."  Around this same time, I flipped through a book called The Doors: The Illustrated History, which includes a promotional Q&A with the four Doors, they type of fluff that was common in that era and that bands likely hated having to do. One of the questions was something like, "What are your goals?" Jim Morrison's answer was essentially, "To be as big as Love." I had to find out more about this band called Love. A year or two later, I found myself at Jocundry's Books (R.I.P.) and on the shel...

On Tuesday, April 29, we saw Johnny Echols perform with the band Baby Lemonade (doing double duty as both themselves and the band Love) at Bell's Eccentric Cafe in Kalamazoo. (Because Lansing apparently isn't allowed to have cool shows like this--we have to drive an hour-and-a-half elsewhere. But I digress). I never saw Arthur Lee perform in his various 1990s/2000s tours and shows, so when I saw that Johnny Echols was venturing on a tour with Baby Lemonade--and that one of the stops was in Kalamazoo--I knew I absolutely had to go, or I might regret it for the rest of my life. A day before the show, I saw a Facebook post about the Echols tour from a "virtual friend" (writer Dan Epstein) who is "real life" friends with Baby Lemonade's guitarist Mike Randle. I mentioned in the post that I'd be at the Kalamazoo show and Mike replied that I should seek him out at the show and say "hello." I wasn't sure what the logistics of that would be, bu...

I followed through with my plan to play Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home on the way to work--another Bob album I hadn't listened to in a long time. I just hadn't been in a Dylan mood for a while. I can't explain it--it's just the way it goes with my music listening habits. Outside of Blonde On Blonde and Self Portrait (I picked it up cheap and had to see if it is as bad as its reputation--I don't think it is, but it's still not that good), my Dylan albums have been idle. That said, Bob Dylan is and will always be an artist I enjoy, for the most part. (There are some albums and periods of his career that don't interest me much, such as the "born again" phase, most of the '80s (except Infidels , Empire Burlesque , and Oh Mercy ) and the stuff he's done since Love and Theft . (I think the post- Love and Theft era indifference has more to do with me than it does Bob. It sounds like some of that stuff might be worth...

I started Boxing Day by popping in The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in the car CD player. As a follow-up, I finished listening to the album on the way home from work, and took a little detour through the neighborhood near our house just to get the whole 50+ minute album in before pulling in the garage. (With the exception of his debut album, Dylan's records from 1963-1966 are all quite long).  Back to Freewheelin ', I hadn't listened to it in quite some time. I'm not that into Dylan's acoustic era. I prefer when he went electric and rock in early 1965 and beyond. That said, I was pleasantly surprised at how varied Freewheelin ' is. Sure, it has the deep protest songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and "Oxford Town," but it also has love (or love-adjacent) songs like "Girl From the North Country," the gentle yet bitter "Don't Think Twice, It...

I am currently reading Alex Van Halen's memoir Brothers , so I have VAN HALEN on the brain right now. And guess who released an album in the year of our lord 1984? And not only released an album that year, but actually named it 1984 ? Yep, that would be Van Halen. How do I approach writing about an album that sold over ten million copies, peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts, and produced a massive #1 single in "Jump"? I'll just start off with a personal approach. It's impossible to over estimate what a big deal Van Halen was in the early and mid 1980s, especially if one attended a small town Midwestern high school like I did. VH was voted favorite band by my 1986 senior class. (I voted for U2). If all or most of the kids in my school liked something, I was naturally skeptical, and Van Halen seemed a bit dim and dumb. A lot of flash with no substance. I mean, U2 was an "important" and "serious" band. They'd played at Live Aid an...

Former Replacements guitarist Bob "Slim" Dunlap died on December 18 after many years of ill health. Though Slim didn't join the Replacements (aka the 'Mats) until 1987, this seems the perfect time to write about the band's 1984 album Let It Be , and thus continue with this little series on 1984 long players. Let's rewind to that magical year of 1986, the year I have rhapsodized about so often in this blog. I don't remember exactly how this happened, but sometime in autumn '86, Ron P.--an older guy who lived on my dorm floor--let me borrow his vinyl copy of Let It Be . I assume this has to do with the R.E.M. factor. Ron may have thought that Let It Be was similar enough to R.E.M. that I'd like it, and maybe it also had to do with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck being guest guitarist on the opening track, "I Will Dare." (All roads lead back to R.E.M.). Allow me to digress for a moment and say a retrospective "thank you" to all the peop...

From San Pedro, California, we now travel across the continental United States, fly over the Atlantic Ocean, and make a stop in Basildon, England. The next album in my yearlong looks at '84 releases is from the pride of Basildon: Depeche Mode, and their 1984 LP, Some Great Reward . Depeche Mode were among a crop of "synthesizer bands" that emerged, mainly from the UK, in the early '80s. This includes Human League, Tears For Fears, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), Talk Talk, and Yazoo (to name a few). I'm sure scholarly works have been wriiten discussing this phenomenon, so I won't delve into that here, and in any case, I'm not educated enough in the subject to take a stab at it. Of all the so-called "synth bands" of the '80s, Depeche Mode is the one that has evolved, thrived, and soldiered on to the present day. They have released consistently good-to-great material every other year or so since 1981, and have not taken decade-long bre...

Last night, I finally got around to watching Yacht Rock: a Dockumentary (and, yes, the misspelling in documentary was intentional. Pretty punny, eh!). I'd heard good buzz about the documentary, so I had it on the short list of movies to watch. However, I don't have a lot of love or nostalgia for yacht rock. It was like musical wallpaper when I was a kid. It was everywhere. It was ubiquitous. I can hear Christopher Cross's "Sailing" or the Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes" without picturing myself driving with my mom in our 1975 Plymouth Valiant, on our way to a dentist appointment or a shopping excursion (or both on the same day). So, though I don't necessarily hate this music, I don't particularly enjoy it, either.  It's perfectly pleasant if bland aural wallpaper. That said, I enjoyed watching this film and hearing the perspectives of the musicians who created what we now call yacht rock (but was simply "top 40 radio" ba...

 Last night, I finally finished reading Now You're One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross. A few days ago, in my Minutemen post, I talked about how that band had its own world. I'd say it's a similar situation with Redd Kross (coincidentally, another Los Angeles-based band). Just as the Minutemen were primarily the vision of two extremely close friends (who could be classified as "brothers from another mother") in D. Boon and Mike Watt, Redd Kross are the vision of two actual brothers (Jeff and Steven McDonald). Jeff and Steven were obsessed with music from an early age. In 1970, When Jeff was seven years old and Steven only three years old, they pooled their money to buy a copy of the Beatles' "White Album." Their musical precociousness was off the charts throughout their youth. While other kids in the '70s were obsessed with say, Star Wars , baseball cards, or comic books, Jeff and Steven were obsessed with the Beatles, David Bowie, T. ...

"We don't write songs, we write rivers"--Mike Watt Minutemen bassist Watt nails it with this quote, and who--outside of his bandmate/soulmate D. Boon--would know better. This band from San Pedro, California never wrote conventional songs. Their songs are like brief journal entries put to music. Sometimes they are more like disjointed thoughts put to music. And sometimes, the instrumental interplay between Mike Watt's active and bouncing bass, D. Boon's jagged guitar stabs and beat poet-like vocals, and George Hurley's jazzy, syncopated drumming are enough to make the lyrics inconsequential. As Watt said in the above quote, the Minutemen's songs are best described as rivers: they start from a little trickle, twist and turn in unexpected directions before spilling out into a larger body of water. Then they start all over again, only to take a completely different direction. The Minutemen created their own little world with their own private language, and the...

"Oy, Wanker, Bloke, Telly"  This is a descriptive term, for a certain strand of Britpop, that I recently heard podcaster Yasi Salek use on the most recent episode of Bandsplain (about the band Blur--who, coincidentally, I love). It made me laugh out loud, because this is just the sort of British pop music I tend to gravitate towards. It's the sort of music that wears its Britishness proudly on its Union Jacked sleeve. While the subject of this post, The Smiths, aren't of the 1990s Britpop movement, the music they made in the 1980s certainly helped pave the way. Now, let's take the time machine back to that magical year of 1986 that I have discussed so much in this blog: Sometime during the first week of college freshman year, a particularly outgoing floormate--I can't remember exactly who this was--knocked on my door and introduced himself. (The irony of me forgetting who this kid was is not lost on me. I think it might have been Bob D., but I'm just guess...

It was all because of a girl I met... That's how I became a U2 fan. To be clear, that's how I learned about the very existence of U2. In the summer of 1985, almost a full year after The Unforgettable Fire 's release, I attended a summer camp at Olivet College. This camp was patterned after Boys or Girls State, but was sort of a low-rent version of that. We were supposed to learn about how the legislative and executive branches of government ran by participating in mock campaigns and elections--or at least I think. I really don't remember much of anything we did at this camp, but I do remember this particular girl. She liked me, I liked her (probably because she liked me) and the most memorable parts of this summer camp were the evening dances in the Olivet cafeteria, hanging out with this girl (I'll call her "Janine"--not her real name), and her telling me about this band called U2 that her college-age brother hipped her to. When the camp ended--which had ...