I Hope I Have Electricity Too

With a nod to ‘Coma for recently citing two of my favorite movies of all time, if I am stuck on a deserted island with nothing but a TV and a DVD player and only ten DVDs, I believe I can get by with these. In no particular order:

1. River’s Edge – In the Nineties and pre-DVD days, I practically killed myself to get a VHS copy of this off eBay. Crispin Glover is a madman (in real life and on camera) – and was wonderful in the Back to the Future films – but he truly shines here in seriously disturbing and unnerving glory. Say what you will about Keanu Reeves, and yes, he’s played the same role a million times, but it suits him no better than in this film. The film is SUPPOSED to be disturbing and so are the characters. And to boot, it’s based on a true story. Side Trivia: Ione Skye Leitch, daughter of ’60s music icon Donovan, appears as Keanu’s love interest in the film, one of her first (Gas Food Lodging is another good one featuring her). She is also the ex-wife of Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys, and had a long-term live-in relationship with Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
2. Heathers – Quite possibly my fave film of all time ever. Yeah, it’s starting to look a little dated now but that only adds to its charm nowadays. And the setting is Westerburg (sic) High School – need I say more? There are so many fabulous tongue-in-cheek in-jokes in this movie – the Heathers, Betty & Veronica, millions more – it’s just beautiful. Back in the days when I actually used to go OUT to the movies, I saw this one about five times in the theater in the same month. Side Trivia: Kim Walker, who played Heather Duke (the first dead Heather) was dating Christian Slater at the time, but they broke up during filming of the movie. Walker later developed a brain tumor and died in 2001 at the age of 32.
3. Say Anything… – There have been few John Cusack movies I haven’t adored, but director Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… is THE one. I have referenced Lloyd Dobler on this blog so many times over the years (as well as other Cusack films), I have a separate John Cusack category on the blog. I would have a super hard time picking a favorite scene, but my favorite is probably when Lloyd confronts the guys sitting outside the Gas ‘N Sip. Lili Taylor does a marvelous turn as well in this flick, and her songs about Joe (especially the one – you know the one) always have me in fits of giggles on the floor while watching. Side Trivia: Ione Skye also appears in this one, as Lloyd’s love interest Diane. The Replacement’s “Within Your Reach” is also notably featured in this film, which of course is another of the million reasons I fell in love with it so hard.
4. Gremlins – I can’t even talk about how much I have always loved this movie without crying. I haven’t watched it in many, many years for the same reason. I first saw it while on summer vacation in a theater in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 1984. Side Trivia: Judge Reinhold & Phoebe Cates also appeared together in another fondly remembered for me film of the ’80s, Cameron Crowe’s (again) Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s not one of my very favorites and it’s certainly gotten dated, but it is still funny, especially if you grew up in the ’80s.
5. Less Than Zero – Another, to borrow a phrase, ’80s “the kids are NOT all right” film, and another I practically paid an arm and a leg for to get a VHS copy of back in the ’90s. This one is akin to a John Hughes movie gone all wrong. It’s got its problems and on the surface would appear to be really out there as far as the whole wealthy and disaffected youth thing, but it’s really not as implausible as one would think. The details of the scenes themselves may have been different, but mainly due to geographics – the base story existed all over the country at the time, including Nashville. Side Trivia: Oh, James Spader, how despicable you are in this film, but how I adore you anyway and have in every film you’ve ever been in.
6. Sid & Nancy – And thus begun the rest of my lifelong adoration of Gary Oldman as well. There are much better films he’s been in (and I love each and every one of them), but Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy was his first big role, and there was just no one else who could have been a more perfect Sid Vicious. It’s the most disturbing and disgusting and sickening love story and everything punk was, a beautiful film in all its ugliness and has one of the best soundtracks ever. My friend Jen used to do the best Chloe Webb doing Nancy (“SIIIIIIIIID!”) that would have me rolling in the floor. Side Trivia: Look for an extremely young Courtney Love in a few scenes as one of Nancy Spungen’s pals.
7. Drugstore Cowboy – I used to not think very highly of Matt Dillon as an actor until this one came out, and I became a fan of Gus Van Sant’s films on this one. Like many of my favorites, it’s disturbing and difficult to watch, but one of the greatest things about this film is that even though the story is pitiful and pathetic, Matt Dillon is SO funny in it. Under the surface of all the dirty drug addiction tale, this movie is hilarious. Also has an excellent soundtrack of gems from the time of the film’s setting, including The Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction”, Desmond Dekker’s “The Israelites”, Gary Lewis & the Playboys’ “Judy in Disguise”, and Hazel, KY/slash/Puryear, TN (my home county) native Jackie DeShannon’s “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is also pretty good though a little faulty; this one is better. Side Trivia: Matt Dillon’s first big film role as a young teen was in another big all-time favorite of mine that has become a cult classic of sorts, Over the Edge – another one that has gotten very ’70s dated over time but still well worth watching, plus then-not-so-known Cheap Trick is largely featured on the soundtrack. As a commenter on iMDB noted, Over the Edge was “a teen movie that gets it right”.
8. Dogs in Space – An Australian film you’ve probably never heard of and another disaffected youth mostly on drugs flick, but this time based in Melbourne’s post-punk scene of the late ’70s – and also based on more true stories, and starring – yes – the late Michael Hutchence of INXS. This film is such a favorite of mine I paid an extremely huge amount of money to get the VHS tape in the ’90s, and the last time I checked on DVD prices (which admittedly has been a few years now) it could be had for $200-350 – that price has probably gone down by now. Very much a “slice of life” flick and disturbing in places to watch, but it’s excellent and also has a soundtrack far beyond excellent – Iggy Pop, Nick Cave/Boys Next Door, Brian Eno, Gang of Four, and some more legends of the time as well as the fab tracks done by Hutchence and crew.  An iMDB commenter said, “This is for when you’re feeling like you need some company, but you don’t feel like venturing past your doorstep” – I agree.  Side Trivia: The real Sam Sejavka, who fronted Melbourne band The Ears in the late ’70s and is played by Hutchence in the film, appears in the movie twice and is addressed by Hutchence in the party scene as “Michael”.
9. Quandary: Real Genius or The Doors – I can’t help it, I do love me some Val Kilmer, and if I could take another dozen or so films I’d be taking all the Val Kilmer films as well as the entire John Hughes oeuvre with me. Real Genius is so freakin’ hilarious through and through and I defy anyone to disagree with me. Oliver Stone’s epic The Doors has got its problems but it mostly gets it right and dang, Kilmer did such a dead-on Jim Morrison it’s almost creepy, I can’t help it, I think his performance in this film was brilliant. This was another I saw probably eight times or more while it was still first-run in the theater. Probably in the end, The Doors would win out, but jeez, it’d be a tough call. Side Trivia: Kilmer did most of the singing in the film himself and even the surviving Doors (Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore) admitted they had a hard time telling the difference. So did I the first time I saw the film; I had no idea it wasn’t Jim Morrison’s vocals. On that basis alone, par excellence. Also look for a fairly large number of Doors associates and other scenesters of the time, including producer Paul Rothchild, Patricia Kennealy, singer Bonnie Bramlett, Eric Burdon of The Animals, and a Door himself – drummer John Densmore – in cameo appearances.
10. Another tough call – Birdy or Platoon? – My decades-long adoration of and obsession with Matthew Modine is only barely outweighed by John Cusack and only slightly precedes James Spader, and having to decide between these two films is awful, though Birdy would probably win out in the end. This also meant I had to toss out another huge Modine favorite and an underappreciated and hugely funny one that probably doesn’t appear on many favorites lists, Married to the Mob. All three are fabulous films for their own reasons. Side Trivia: Having now mentioned Birdy, I also have to mention two more that didn’t make the cut – Valley Girl and Raising Arizona, all featuring Modine’s Birdy co-star Nicolas Cage, also good. Valley Girl, which was really Cage’s big film break, is worth it for The Plimsouls on stage alone. Wow, I first saw that one at the drive-in in 1983.

God, that was awful to try to choose ten and I still didn’t really succeed. Here are a few more – runners-up, I suppose – that didn’t make the final cut:

1. Edward Scissorhands – I love this movie in all its goofy glory so much it makes me cry and it killed me to leave it off the list. In retrospect, I might have to swap one of the above for it. Side Trivia: Speaking of Tim Burton, there’s also Beetlejuice, of course.
2. Pretty much all of the John Hughes Brat Pack-era movies (which you likely knew was coming) and Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire – It’d be a hard call, but St. Elmo’s Fire would be the first cut ‘cos it’s almost too cheesy. Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink, I love but could live without. The Breakfast Club is, well, The Breakfast Club, but it’s not my very favorite. It’d come down to a tremendously agonizing tug of war between Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and I honestly don’t know which would win. Ferris would probably win, though. Even though – Side Trivia: John Cusack makes his second film appearance in a small part as one of the geeks in Sixteen Candles.
3. Ciao! Manhattan – As much as I adore this, which is not so much a real film per se but more of a collection of some of the few remaining pieces of film footage of Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick, as well as many other Factory scenesters, I just can’t justify it being one of the ten. Still, it’d be hard. Side Trivia: I hear the DVD, which I still don’t own, has loads of extra footage and modern commentary by some of the actors from what was supposed to have been the original film, and I’m dying to see it.
4. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains – Unless you had The Movie Channel or HBO in the early ’80s, you probably don’t know this film; it’s been out of print and unavailable for decades. I had a taped copy for years and the tape finally broke seven or eight years ago. This was one of Diane Lane’s earliest films and also features a very young Laura Dern. It’s an excellent film and, along with the aforementioned Over the Edge, is as responsible for my musical obsessions/addictions as any piece of recorded music is. I was pleasantly shocked and surprised to see co-star Ray Winstone’s name for the first time in years when he turned up in the multi-award winning Nil By Mouth in 1997. The good news is that after years of fans pleading, I got word the other day via MySpace that the film is finally going to be released on DVD and, in fact, the very next day got a notification from Amazon that the DVD was now available for pre-ordering. Side Trivia: Former Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook, and former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, appear as the other members of the band in the movie led by Winstone.
5. Pretty much every Kevin Smith and David Lynch film ever made – I can’t decide. I can’t, I can’t. Though I guess Dogma and Blue Velvet. Or maybe Chasing Amy and Eraserhead. Or… I can’t decide. Don’t make me.

God, that was painful. And it would really suck if there was no electricity on that island.

A Big Zone Breakthrough in Technology

Hoo boy, yeah, we’re really getting up to date and into this century here now, you bet. How, you say? Why, take a look down that left sidebar. No, further down. Yeah, there.

You can now subscribe to The Lynnster Zone via e-mail. (Or you can use this handy dandy link in the previous sentence.) Are you excited now? Yes, I’m being sarcastic.  So now, for those of you who don’t want to, nor know how to, nor care to learn how to subscribe by feed, you can have me delivered straight to your e-mail box.  Aces.

No, really, I was updating some stuff at FeedBurner (like those poor little subscription chicklets down in the left sidebar that half of them were pitifully old) & while there I just happened to wander in the “E-mail Subscriptions” section and looked around and went, huh, wonder why I never bothered to set that up before. No, I don’t know either.

There’s something else new too, down there in the right sidebar. No, further down. More. Yeah, right there.

Yes, even though I have had my OLD music pages that haven’t been touched in at least two or three years in a little link group down there, for whatever moronic reason I had never bothered to do the same with my CURRENT pages I manage nowadays practically every day. So, probably not too exciting unless you’re a diehard music fan and/or Aussie music fan – or if you’re just interested in seeing what ELSE I spend my voluminous amounts of free time on (*cough*) besides this blog (*choke*) – but well, now they’re there.

I probably did something else new here tonight but whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t terribly important.

I am a busy little bee this week doing some real work plus another project plus determined to get some to-do’s off my list that have been sitting there waiting to be done forEVER – things that if I will just get them DONE they will be super low maintenance from there on out – so back to the salt mines I go. Ciao.

Dumb and Dumber – AKA Major Record Companies & the RIAA

First things first – Happy New Year, blogosphere!

So I was over catching up at Music City Bloggers this afternoon, when this post about now even more RIAA/record company-related lunacy and related issues got my blood pressure up. I was in the process of commenting over there when I realized that (in my usual long rambling fashion when ranting and raving with a bug up my you know what) I had gone on several paragraphs too long for a mere and appropriate comment. Thus, today I blog.

I am sooo glad this post appeared at MCB today because, a few weeks ago, there was a similar post on this same basic topic that I meant to comment on then and forgot to get back to. Then it got way down in the queue of posts, so I just let that thought go for the moment. Now I’m back and raring to chew on it ’til it’s a bloody, ugly, and messy unidentifiable pulp.

And yes, I meant that description to be as nasty and ugly and violent as it sounds.

I was just saying to someone last night, in fact, that I just do NOT understand why the record companies and the RIAA don’t understand that – over now all these many years these battles have been going on – they have not only COMPLETELY alienated but TOTALLY pissed off their largest and most profitable customer base to the point where most of us will NEVER buy another CD or similar media ever under any circumstances.

In 99% of most cases, I will simply do without rather than put another cent into record company pockets. There is, for the most part, just not anything I need enough that bad any longer… and whatever I will spend in the future is mere pennies compared to what I have spent on recorded music in the past.

I am not your “average music buyer”. I am your hardcore music JUNKIE who – up until all this RIAA battle crap started now years ago – spent probably on average of 95% of my disposable income on, commercially produced and sold, first vinyl records, then 8-tracks and cassette tapes, then CDs.

Yes, you read that right. Probably 95% on average. But just in case that figure is an overestimation, I know I can say, without a doubt, most certainly over 85%.

I have been buying records since I was three years old, walking around to the corner store from my family’s downtown store with a relative and picking out and purchasing those three 45 RPM records myself. My collection of storebought music – especially if you include the vinyl I eventually decided to part with – is HUGE. That’s nearly 39 years of buying commercial produced music in literal DROVES – again, averaging probably 95%, at least 85% of my disposable income, up until very recent years when it has drastically decreased because of this RIAA/record company BS and the ridiculous cost.

In addition, my father was also a pretty hardcore music junkie with a vast and huge collection – maybe not so much as me, but yes, exceptionally large – so put us together and that’s two consumers who spent, absolutely and most certainly, thousands and thousands of dollars on recorded music starting in probably about 1953-54-55-ish. So for the sake of argument let’s just say there’s 50 YEARS of extraordinary amounts of disposable income spent on recorded music there.

Then cometh the RIAA and its gestapo tactics and other pain in the neck policies and procedures and just general irritation and annoyance, as well as ever skyrocketing prices (I won’t get into DVD and VHS in this discussion, but I have a pretty large collection there too and talk about cost… ugh).

The result?

I have not purchased a commercially produced CD for myself in over two years. In fact, the number I have purchased in the last FIVE YEARS probably less than TEN.

The ONLY CDs I have purchased in that past five years or so were requested Christmas or birthday gifts for family, and that number is also probably less than ten, definitely less than 15… and more often than not, purchased on the secondhand/used market.

In the past, I used to buy more CDs (or tapes or LPs) in a YEAR than the average person probably does in a LIFETIME.

I now go out of my way to not have to purchase another commercially produced CD ever.

That’s sad, folks. That’s really sad. I’m sure record company profits look pretty pitiful as well and have for a while now.

They’ve done it to themselves.

I have a lot of love for some independent and not-major labels who have bent over backwards to try to do right by consumers and make up for what the majors and the RIAA have done. I’m not talking about those wonderful folks, many of whom I have at least a direct and remote acquaintance with some of their staff.

But at this point, and after all the increasingly horrifying tactics executed over the last several years, every major record label in the world that has fought alongside the RIAA deserves nothing less to go bankrupt and disappear. The RIAA deserves to be eradicated and in the future be nothing more than a past memory much like the Hays Code is to film.

Couple all this with the fact that in the last couple of years I have discovered that some of my storebought and paid for, commercially produced CDs are disintegrating (when they told us back in the ’80s that oh, CDs will last forever and it’s just nearly impossible to destroy them)… I’m done with buying music in the “old traditional way” unless (A) the record companies and RIAA stop being such idiots and a*holes and (B) the price becomes something REASONABLE again.

Right now my alternative means of acquiring music are perfectly legal. If the record companies and RIAA push it some more to make that impossible or just a more major freakin’ hassle too – I, again, will likely just choose to do without.

Sadder still that – not as a career but as a hobby of sorts and labor of love – in the past 15 years, I have probably been one of the fairly major independent supporters and mouthpieces for the alt/indie community in both the U.S. and (more especially) Australia, especially in certain circles; and as the Internet has grown, my influence has grown as well. Yeah, I should have made a real career out of it at some point probably, but didn’t.

Nonetheless, I have helped sell PLENTY of those CDs, records, and tapes over the years for many of those greedy companies simply as a major supporter and a fan of various and sundry artists, and a supporter of modern music in general.

Heck, I LITERALLY sold those CDs, records, and tapes for a time. I’m (surprise, surprise) a former record store employee myself, after all. You saw Empire Records or High Fidelity? I lived it (unfortunately without the hotness that is John Cusack, but that’s another blog post…).

Again, take heed, RIAA & record labels: I am not just Jane Average Music Buyer, but it’s bad enough you’ve angered and alienated the Jane and Joe Averages of the music consumer world. If a completely addicted, hardcore music junkie like myself hasn’t bought a CD for their personal use in two years, and few for three years before that – you people have got a problem that, at this point, you probably CANNOT really make that much better by attempting to do anything MORE about it.

But you certainly might be able to staunch the flow by simply STOPPING the current and ongoing utter madness.

From my viewpoint, the wound’s fatal; the illness is terminal. The RIAA and record companies have simply gone too far, and there’s a rare music consumer who’s going to forget about it in the rest of their lifetime of potential music buying. Even the most remote and not very active consumer who doesn’t think much about the music they buy and how and where they buy it – I guarantee you they are still thinking, when considering a purchase, about the insane cost of music these days and could they possibly get what they want by some other means than what the RIAA and record companies think – and are more and more often insisting – they should.

There are now, literally, TWO bands in the entire WORLD that might have future major label releases that I will support with my dollars in major corporate pocket if I must. There’s two more that could, but probably won’t. That’s four bands in the WHOLE WORLD.

Additionally, I will continue to support my favorite indie and small label artists however I have to. Hopefully by means that are music consumer-friendly (and most of them are) and not major label gestapo-like.

Even so, I suspect that – unless things in the corporate music biz change drastically – five years from now, I’ll be telling you I still haven’t bothered to purchase and spend any more of my disposable income on any major label, commercially produced recorded music. If at all, the number will probably equal exactly one. Yep, one CD.

There’s plenty of stuff I never got around to replacing on CD (or buying for the first time) over 39 years of music buying. Some box sets. Some special remastered CD reissues with all the bells and whistles and extra goodies. Extending my collection of some of the “biggies”, like the Stones, Zeppelin, etc.

But nowadays, I don’t care. Thanks to the RIAA and its cohorts within the major label industry, I no longer care one bit about that stuff I never got around to buying. Be nice to have, but I don’t need it that bad for what the industry has put this entire country – the entire world - through in the last decade.

And unless things change drastically – and I mean drastically - I don’t think I’m likely to ever start caring again. And I feel certain there’s lots more like me out there, as well as many, many more millions of Joe and Jane Average Music Consumers out there who are leaning in that direction these days as well, if not already there.

Ain’t that a shame?

ADDENDUM:  Don Coyote & I are kinda on the same wavelength this week, it would appear.

Swooping In

So I’ve been busy on some projects I have been trying to pull together and complete forever now, thanks to my well-known Aussie rock fetish, and I guess you could say Phase 1 & 2 are up to speed now, Phase 3 is about to get done, and then onto Phase 4 one of these days when I have some free time that I never have anymore.

Anyway, I’ve been busy here and here, and finally got the only existing video footage of The Monarchs up on both MySpace and YouTube, and those of you who pop over here occasionally from the Pen and that general sector who haven’t already heard about the videos will certainly want to check those out.

Otherwise, I am so exhausted right now, and have had so little sleep in the past week and a half (not because of this stuff tho), that I have absolutely nothing else to blog about unless you wanna hear me yawn, so ’til later, folks…

Go Ahead & Sigh, It’s One of THOSE Posts

WARNING:  Total Music Geek post ahead.  I mean, this is a realllllly major one, so you know, many of you are welcome to skip it if you really wanna.

It’s a freakin’ holy grail week!  Not only do I have live, never-seen-before Monarchs video IN MY HAND (thank you from the bottom of my little blonde heart, Muzz!) – which hopefully I will find time to convert and pop on the MySpace profile and YouTube within the next couple of days (as well as put a finish on and unveil the new website)…

But I just found a studio-quality MP3 of something I have not had on anything but CASSETTE in over 20 YEARS!!  It can’t even be found on CD anywhere!  I would tell you what it is, but 99.99% of you (even the music geeks) would have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about anyway.  But YAY!

Thus whittles down the long list I have been carrying around since 1986 of nearly impossible to find, out of print stuff to, like… maybe two things now?

Listen, I could have won $40 million in the lottery today and wouldn’t be any happier.

OK, yes, I know I’m whacked.  But who cares, I’m happy!

Meeting Old New Friends & Once Upon a Time

Woo!  I finally got the opportunity today to meet yet another person I’ve “known” online for somewhere around 13-15 years, another of the Hoodoo Gurus faithful (and ‘Mats fan, she’s a Replacements fan too) from way back when in the original early days of the congregation of fans around the world online.  Nese is from Texas and had trekked up here for the weekend for the big Webb Wilder shindig in Knoxville and was coming thru here on the way back, so I met her downtown at the Hard Rock on Beale Street and we had a fine afternoon lunching and visiting… and what awesome weather, couldn’t have picked a better day.  And naturally, she is awesome.  So woohoo!

I gotta say it was awfully weird hanging out downtown though.  Once upon a time I spent a significant amount of spare time in downtown Memphis, especially hanging around Beale and the riverfront on the nicer weekends, and the last several years I am almost never down there.  So much has changed… and I don’t know that I’d really say for the better.  To me it looks kind of just dressed up to look prettier.

My love-hate relationship with this town continues.  Strange, I don’t even really remember when I used to just love it, though I know once upon a time I did.

My New Best Friend at LAX & Other Los Angeles Tales

Well, now that come to find out I’ve been shamed out of my self-imposed temporary blogging exile (laughing), I guess I gotta write something. There is just so much of nothing going on here right now and, no pun or blonde jokes intended, but my mind is pretty much a blank lately. So keep your expectations low and we’ll all be satisfied, I reckon.

There’ve been a couple of things on the back burner for a while now, including my last-minute-planned trip to L.A. in March, when the Hoodoo Gurus were doing their mini-tour through the US. Now that I think about it, there isn’t that much to tell about the trip, but here were a few of the more interesting things (besides the obvious, which was the concert and which was fantastic as I knew it would be):

• The Phoenix airport is very nice and very pretty, and there appear to be a lot of nice shops and restaurants in it. However, I would not really know because it is WAY too spread out with no quick way to get anywhere, and judging from the conversations around me on the flight to Memphis from Phoenix, apparently most connecting flights that land there are scheduled to give the passenger no more than 30 minutes and, in most cases, 20 or 10 to get to the gate for the connecting flight, and apparently hardly any connecting flights are scheduled with gates in the same terminal. I have never had to bust my ass so much in an airport (and coming through both ways) in my life – I had a limited window of time to get to L.A. that night, and not only was our flight late leaving Memphis, but my connecting flight’s gate could not have possibly been any further from the gate where I arrived, and the door was closing as I hit the gate and barely made it on. Not quite as bad, but almost the same situation, going back to Memphis the next morning. However, I think I was one of the lucky ones on the flight out – most of the people around me on the plane had ten minutes or less to make their connecting flight, so likely they didn’t make it.
• Got off the plane at LAX, start walking toward the front door of the terminal and who is walking right towards me, then past me, but actor Sean Penn. Someone later asked me did he look like he wanted to punch someone, but no – he just looked hurried and a bit stressed like most everyone else in the airport terminal – hope he wasn’t having to go to Phoenix! And this makes the second time in my life I have seen an Oscar winner at LAX (the first being actress Sissy Spacek on my trip out there way back in 1979).
• I can’t say enough good about the Super Shuttle from LAX. As stated, I had a VERY limited time window that trip and one major bout of delay with flight or shuttle service could have wrecked my entire trip. Instead, I actually made it to the restaurant where I was meeting friends for dinner before the show a half hour before they got there. Yay for the Super Shuttle.
• Also a big thumbs up for Canter’s Deli on Fairfax, which was where I met up with my old friend Jimm, who was still living in Australia when I last saw him about a decade ago, and his lovely wife Wendie, who I was meeting for the first time. We had a great dinner and a wonderful time visiting and my only regret is that I couldn’t try everything on the menu, which all looked fabulous, but the menu itself could take you more than an hour to read because there are SO many wonderful things on the menu. Hooray for the most excellent Philly sandwich there, though. Yum.
• A great big giant thumbs down for the security people at the El Rey Theatre. Their overzealousness was completely unnecessary, given the act involved, but I’ve since learned from some of the locals that the security there is well known for being asses for no real good reason. Thanks, security jerks, for a great big black mark on a trip I had flown thousands of miles for and to spend a whole 13.5 hours in your fair city. Except for the one female security person who was the one who checked my bag and ID and did indeed see I had come all the way from Memphis and was the only one not acting like a total shit after the show. Yep, I did indeed see and enjoy the show but their behavior post-show was despicable (even towards the band’s own crew!!!). Partially my fault for having made these trip plans at what was the very last minute, but the security behavior in general just left a lot to be desired. I know certain members of the band brought the behavior to their management’s attention and I intend to do the same. Anyway…
• I spent the night, basically, in LAX because there just wasn’t any point in getting a hotel room when I was going to be in L.A. so short of a time – the show was not over until around midnight and I was gonna have to be on a plane back to Memphis (and go thru security and all that) at 6:30 a.m. It was very much NOT comfortable and all and I nearly froze to death, but I survived it… other than the fact I would have liked to have smacked a certain smartass airport security person in the mouth that morning, but I didn’t want to go to jail, so I didn’t. Note to LAX management: Mark your airport security areas where you want people to line up and to go CLEARLY. Because next time, after I have slept five hours in your airport and am not quite awake, and I’m the second person to go thru security and therefore there are no lines with people lined up like cattle going in whatever direction or the other, and some smartass on your security staff decides to holler out, “What, have you never been in an airport before?” rather than pointing out the direction I need to go or something else possibly, oh, helpful? I’m smacking her in the mouth next time. Just sayin’.

So that’s pretty much the basics of that trip. It was fun and I’m glad I went, but I don’t think I’ll ever do something crazy like that, going all the way to L.A. and spending a whole 13.5 hours there before flying back, again. I was exhausted for two weeks or more after. Of course, I’d been in Chicago for barely two days just days before that, so that probably didn’t help.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll catch up on one of the 541 memes I’ve been tagged for, who knows. We’ll see. Hope everyone had a good 4th!

Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three Posts – The Beginning

Get a cup of coffee or your beverage of choice and prepare to sit a spell. We’re going to be a while here.

I pulled an all-nighter Thursday night working and had an hour or two to kill before starting the Friday workday, so I indulged a bit in a fave activity of hunting YouTube for music stuff I remember from the past but hadn’t seen in a while, or at least stuff from the same time period.

I started collecting some links and then, when I was finished, I looked at it all and just kinda went whoa. Completely accidentally, I had somehow managed to basically assemble all the pieces of the puzzle – or at least the major ones – of my lifelong addiction to music, which began as a very young child.

There are, of course, thousands of other associated pieces I haven’t collected here; virtually everything I have ever listened to helped to formulate my musical tastes and feed the addiction as an adult, certainly. One of my most beloved genres today, as an older adult, is Australian garage rock of the late Seventies and Eighties – but in the U.S., you didn’t hear or see most of that stuff back then, and I wasn’t introduced to a lot of it until the big boom of the Internet, years after the fact. But a lot of that old Aussie stuff was heavily influenced by both British and American punk rock, old British Invasion and American surf music, and the Motor City Sound in Detroit, so in a way, it was sort of all related to what I grew up with anyway.

But all these YouTube videos I have collected here in this and the next two posts – yeah, these are pretty much the very most major pieces that created the foundation of my music junkieness (and my own musicianship, occasionally) as a young adult through today.

In the final and third post, I have collected stuff I either witnessed on original broadcast or is from the same specific time period. The ones in this post and the next one, I obviously did not see at the time they were aired because as far as most of them are concerned, I wasn’t born yet (with the exception of the Raiders, in which case I might have just been born).

And most of this first group is way before my time, but it’s important I include them. I have often said that my biggest musical influence of all was my father, who was also sort of a music junkie in his time when rock & roll was still brand new. It was stuff from his collection I heard the most before I started making my own decisions about music (at three years old, heh). My dad had a tremendous stack of 45 RPM records and LPs and was a musician himself, as was my uncle, and my dad’s first cousin was a DJ on local radio for many years, and my mom’s a music fan as well.

I get it from all of them, but it was my father and I who were most alike in music junkieness of sorts. I just took it to the next level and eventually became way more deeply immersed in the addiction than he ever was. (And some might say far more out of control, given the amount of recorded music I have amassed and things I’ll do to see my favorites play live, like take off to L.A. or Chicago at the last minute.) ;)

Must start this off with The Man himself, Mr. Chuck Berry – blurry video, but this is my favorite. We had the original Chess CD in that stack of 45s, and it probably got played in my record player a decade and a half later as much as it did when my dad was a teenager (UPDATE 10/2009 – unfortunately, like many, this video got pulled from YouTube and the only replacement I found is just a sound recording with a single photo. Hopefully will be able to replace it with something better later if found).

My dad played piano as well as being a drummer, and monopolized the family piano as a teenager, learning how to play every single thing Little Richard ever did.

And I can’t very well write about my father and his monopolizing of the piano without a hat tip to Jerry Lee Lewis. I think we had every single he ever put out on the original Sun label in the Sixties on 45 AND a few 78s (!) as well. (I sold most on eBay a few years ago for a fair amount.)

Now, both my parents were Elvis fans, especially having both grown up in West Tennessee. In fact, my dad was such an Elvis fan and did such a good Elvis, he was picked to do Elvis in a high school musical presentation and was apparently legend for it ever after; last year, when I was having dinner with my dad’s cousin and his girlfriend (both of whom graduated with my father) and talking about that, the girlfriend leaned over the table towards me and said, “Oh, your dad WAS Elvis.” Dad’s cousin decried the fact that he had to sing “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel Someday”, while my father got to be Elvis. Hee.

So Elvis was king, but somehow I missed the Elvis fan gene. See above on associated pieces of the puzzle of influences; certainly that’s an influence, and certainly Elvis influenced many of my later influences. I just always liked Jerry Lee better. And my dad could do a pretty good Jerry Lee, too.

My parents were both in college in Memphis in the early Sixties and frequently went out to see live music, so they got to see a lot of the Stax and similar legends perform live back in the day. So a little bit of that appreciation of Memphis soul rubbed off on me too (and is probably the only reason I still have any love left at all for this city I live in and city of my birth).

I give you the masters, Booker T. & The MGs, featuring the awesome guitar of Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, who can still often be found playing around here and down in the Tunica casinos today. If they look familiar to you for some other reason, it’s probably because you saw them in The Blues Brothers movie with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd years later.

And another personal favorite and this song will always mean Memphis to me as well as the previous one – Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn are featured in this video as well with Sam & Dave:

You may find it curious I have included these next two videos in this post. My aunts were teenagers when I was born and huge Beatles and Monkees fans – and later, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, etc. – so I get a lot of that from them and yeah, The Beatles are definitely a big influence for me, but I’m not including them in these posts because in truth, there are other groups from the same time that were really a more major influence on me. And goodness knows I love me some Monkees.

Anyway, we have more or less now established that my then-teenage aunts were boy crazy schoolgirls with mad crushes on various teen idols. Probably the only other band that they crushed on as much back then as The Beatles and The Monkees was Paul Revere and The Raiders. You might not know that the legendary hit songwriting team Boyce & Hart originally wrote “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” for the Raiders, who recorded what in my opinion is a better version of the song – which, of course, later became a huge hit for The Monkees.

Yeah, sure, the Raiders were big teen idols of the Sixties, thanks in part to appearing on the TV show Where the Action Is every day after school hours, and being not only cute, but goofily humorous. They were also excellent, excellent musicians; in the liner notes of Raiders anthology CD The Essential Ride (an excellent compilation that really showcases how good they were throughout their career), Letterman show bass player Will Lee hat tips longtime Raider Phil Volk as his inspiration for learning how to play bass.

Anyway, yeah, my teenage aunts had various Raiders posters pinned to their walls in worship and all their records, alongside John, Paul, George, and Ringo and Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike, and god knows who all else.

But my dad had their first album – which, for me, that’s instant rock & roll cred right there. Practically from birth, I remember it playing in our home and playing often.

Point to note here – my dad didn’t buy a whole lot of “new” rock & roll in the Sixties. He bought later albums by the rock & rollers he grew up with like Elvis & Jerry Lee; both my parents were into folk & Dylan;  a handful of rock/pop like Creedence and Blood, Sweat & Tears;  but by the later part of the Sixties and thereafter, he pretty much stuck to country and latter-day albums of his favorites from the Fifties.

The fact that my father bought the first Raiders album when it came out (and quite possibly before his boy-crazy teenage sisters had even discovered them) is really rather stunning. I’m guessing that, as a drummer himself, he was somewhat drawn to Mike “Smitty” Smith’s drumming style, but I know there was something else beyond that for him to have picked that one album up, out of all the other thousands of rock records that came out that same year that he didn’t buy. Which makes me appreciate the Raiders even more – like I said, instant rock & roll cred for me right there.

Consequently, sharing the Raiders’ Essential Ride compilation with him on a long drive through Alabama and Mississippi in the early part of this decade was the last “musical moment” we shared together before he passed away, and really the only one we’d had in a very long time at that point.

To date, Paul Revere and The Raiders have yet to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It’s a downright shame.

These videos are both from 1966, so I was either born or almost at the time. This first video is really blurry and is also a lip-synched performance, but probably one of their earliest TV appearances and the song’s the only YouTube video I found from that first album (UPDATE 10/2009 – this video had been removed, but I was able to find a much better copy of the same performance):

This one’s a little later but is a better video and a live (or mostly live) performance (and be sure to check out the extremely young looking actor Michael Landon introducing them) (UPDATE 10/2009 - Well, like many, the video I referenced before has been removed and I couldn’t find another copy, but thanks to bassist Phil Volk’s son Brian, who uploaded this to YouTube, here they are on The Hollywood Palace show in late 1966. This is one of my favorite Raiders songs anyway, “The Great Airplane Strike”, so thanks, Brian, for uploading it!):

UPDATE 10/2009: I just found this video of a 1979 reunion show (which I remember watching when it was first on) with the original five Raiders – Mark Lindsay, Phil “Fang” Volk, Drake Levin, Mike “Smitty” Smith, and Paul Revere – which is just so much fun, I just had to include it. (RIP Drake & Smitty.)

Next post, I start coming into my own… stay tuned.

Arrrgh. Just Arrgh.

ARRRGH. I know everyone that still bothers to read here is tired of reading me griping. I’M tired of reading me griping. It’s probably going to last a little longer, though. All of this post-wreck car stuff and insurance stuff has turned my brain to mush, and I can just barely deal with blogging right now, I’m so whacked out. I just want to go stand somewhere and scream for about ten hours, and this is one of those times it would be nice to live more conveniently to Hooterville so I could go stand in Newscoma’s corn field or whatever the hell kind of field it is she has up there that’s so good for standing and screaming in, and I would do it.

It has really just been one thing after another over and over, and I’m tired of it. I was actually pretty satisfied – not only satisfied but very happy – with my insurance company until I learned yesterday that my rental car coverage is now over. I wouldn’t be so annoyed, except for the fact I asked at least twice, if not three times, about the timeframe of that. So now, not only have they left me hanging when I have plans for the weekend, but BECAUSE I had asked about the timeframe and thought they were covering that longer, guess what? I hadn’t really even seriously looked at replacement vehicles yet because we thought there was still plenty of time to do so! So now I’m stuck, in a major crunch, and pissed.

I think it’s all going to work out eventually but that just made things a much bigger pain than they already were, and it’s just been one thing after another and every little thing and I’m just, like, enough already. Tired of it. And there’s plenty of other things upsetting my little apple cart of life besides this car stuff right now, so I’m just really unhappy with a ton of stuff right now. But I will be SO glad when there is just SOME resolution, whatever it’s going to be, to this car junk. It was a tremendous headache I really didn’t need on top of all other frustrations with many other things right now.

And my brain really has turned to mush, even more so in the last couple of days that I have looked at ALL this new car stuff and used car stuff and more car stuff . Ugh. You know, all of my friends that ever moved to New York, the first thing they did just about was get rid of their cars. That would be SO nice. I thought car prices were getting a little ridiculous already back in the prehistoric times when I first started driving, but they’re just outrageous now. It’s insane. Necessary for the most part in this area (especially when you have responsibilities out of town), but insane.

I’m trying to look on the bright side of things if there is one, and I guess it stands to reason that I have had a car, and then two cars, neither of which I was very comfortable with driving out of town for various reasons for a few years now. So I don’t know that I’d go so far to say this was all a blessing in disguise, but there’s that. I just really wasn’t ready to start having to take on car payments again and late model car insurance and all that, but oh well, guess that decision got made for me.

And the IRS just screwed me so much it was insane, and then other things going on too – I just really could beat my head on the desk right now. That is, if I didn’t already still have a knot on my head from the wreck. At least the remaining black eye is finally going away.

What DOESN’T seem to be going away is our new little visitor. Which, you know, when you already have a bunch of pets, you don’t really notice another mouth to feed, so big deal, even though I really wish his owners would turn up. But if they don’t, we’ll manage. He really is very sweet but he’s completely psycho. He’s even wearing Quincy out (which is kind of poetic justice) wrestling and banging around the house playing with Quince. And he’s so funny looking. He’ll certainly make for humorous blog fodder and photos if he’s gonna stick around.

He’s also probably going to have a slight name change if he sticks around. His name was Tokyo, but there’s a Hoodoo Gurus song called “Tojo”, and I had a cat for 16 years that was named after a Replacements song, so it’s only fitting that this one gets a Gurus name, really.

Oh, and Buster and Petey apparently tried to kill each other while I was gone overnight this weekend, but though Buster’s fur is a nice shade of faded blood right now, I can’t find a wound on either of them except for a small one on Petey. Petey has a tendency to hurt his mouth when he gets too rough so that’s probably where the blood came from, but I really didn’t need to be scared to death like that when I got home Sunday night. But they’re fine, as they always are. And I was glad to see no signs of Bruiser having gotten into it, since he so often ends up inadvertently in the middle when he had nothing to do with it. Buster is just mad at the world because he’s smaller than his brothers and apparently hates Petey because he’s the biggest, and he and Petey are constantly growling at each other. Bruiser growls too, sometimes, but he really doesn’t know what he’s growling about.

So there you go, my big lame update for the moment. I know there’s lots more extremely important stuff going on in the world this week but I’m not even going to begin to address all that, many more people already have and so much better than I would have anyway.

One thing that IS important is that there will be at least a few of us having lunch at the Mothership this Saturday around noonish – nothing formal or planned, I just know Hutch and K-Co and I will be there, and maybe Finn, and I dunno who else – but if you want to join us for some BBQ or crack-n-cheese, come on down. We’ll probably be there until Knuck kicks us out at two-ish.

Now excuse me while I go bang the uninjured back side of my head against the nearest wall for a while. ARRRGH.

Home, Home Again – But Not For Long

So I am home, but not for long. I am exhausted to the max, but in a good way. I should have just gone straight on to bed early last night, but didn’t. Now I’m up again, but that’s OK, I think (think) today is going to be a fairly easy day.

All and all, great trip. I met in person some wonderful folks I have “known” for a while and a few more, and we just had a great, great time. Other than the fact that I lost my MP3 player and some other stuff I can’t quite remember what was in the bag at O’Hare, and the fact that my foot is about to fall off, it’s all good. I almost broke my foot a few years ago but didn’t quite break it, and it has given me a ton of trouble ever since, and nowadays the other foot and ankle gives me a little trouble too because I don’t walk quite right anymore because of the bad one. Consequently, the bad foot and ankle have a habit of swelling up to Supersize with things like lots of walking in airports and stuff. I didn’t notice it until I was waiting in the St. Louis airport yesterday for my connecting flight, and then it was like, whoa! The other one was swollen too but the difference was between looking at an almost normal foot and ankle compared to a gargantuan deformed one. It really hasn’t bothered me that much (and has gone down a little), probably because when I am really tired, my feet always hurt anyway. I’ve felt better, but I’ll live.

The show, again, was fantastic and The Abbey is a pretty great place to see live music in Chicago. Other than that little idiot who made us leave the venue entirely too early and before everyone in the band had come out after the show.

I kinda hate now that I understand I could have met up with Tatiana for dinner or something Saturday night, dang it. But since it was such a last minute trip and was kind of a whirlwind one, I just wasn’t thinking much ahead of time other than all the must-do’s. Hopefully there might be a next time for Chicago later in the year, though.

But here’s the REAL scoop… remember I said I’m home, but not for long? Guess where I am going Wednesday? L.A.! Yep, I’m going to see the Hoodoo Gurus AGAIN on Wednesday night. It was another opportunity that turned up that I just couldn’t pass on, things with work are working out where I can go (and Thursday’s my day off anyway), so here I go again! It just so happens I have an old friend who is from Sydney but has been living in L.A. for several years now who also was going to the show, so hopefully things will work out there (‘cos lord knows I don’t have enough $$ left for cab fare at this point, but we’ll see).

This is going to be an even more whirlwind trip ‘cos I am actually going to be there barely 12 hours, but when the opportunity presented itself, I just couldn’t pass it up. And I never get to do stuff like this or go much of anywhere anyway, so this is cool. About ten years ago, the band was playing what was then intended to be one of their last dates in Australia, and almost all the American fans went down there for the show, the band and their manager threw a big barbecue for everyone who had come in from all over the world, and all this great stuff. I wasn’t able to go and was miserable. So all of this this week almost makes up for that. I’m thrilled, really; too tired to maybe show it right now, but I am.

So this week’s going to be a super hectic one (especially because I am going BACK out of town again for a very short trip on Saturday), and I’m probably going to just collapse next week when it’s all over with, but it’s all good. For a whole bunch of last minute stuff, it’s not turned out so bad (yet – knock on wood nothing happens like my plane is severely delayed Wednesday, god, that would be awful).

If you wanna see some pictures taken of the Chicago outing, click here. Someone needs to stop me from waving every time a camera’s out, I look like a big dork. And to shut my mouth. And I seriously was not drunk until the very end of the evening, heh.