So much for keeping the site updated! I spent most of
January in Minneapolis and have been working crazy hours during
and since. I hit the local record stores while there and
my stack of unlistened to vinyl is growing each week. One
of these days I'll get a post of the records I've
bought/listened to over the last year or so, including this
year's Record Store Day picks.
While in Minneapolis, I had tickets to see Morrissey but he
cancelled a night or two before the show. Oh well.
He's a bit of a knucklehead but that tends to add fuel to his
songs. I did get to see Tony Bennett live and you expect
him to have an amazing voice - and he does. I need to look
at some concert calendars and get some spring/summer outdoor
concerts lined up.
Wonder if Bowie will tour his
new record? There's been some talk of that
possibility. I saw him as a teenager - September 6th, 1987
on the
Glass Spider Tour. Peter Frampton was his lead
guitarist on that tour and also of note was that the show was
choreographed by
Toni Basil (of "Oh Mickey" one-hit-wonder fame - but check
out her resume). She performed
throughout the show. Bowie sold out two nights at the Dean
Smith Center in Chapel Hill, NC. It was one of my first
concerts and a great show. It's safe to say that
I'll never again have the opportunity to attend a concert with a
stage made to look like a giant glass spider (what are the
odds?).
Aladdin Sane era song "Time"
performed on the Glass Spider Tour.......or "Bowie decends from
giant glass spider":
Hope everyone is having a great 2013.
The Year So Far (Part II)..... Tuesday, December 11th, 2012
I had meant to get the webpage updated by now but good
grief.....I've taken so many photos this year that it always
seems a bit too much to go through them all, pick out the
presentable ones, and then do the work needed to post them on
the site. I bought a new photo software program that should
help with automating the resizing of batches of photos
(vs. the manual effort of doing one photo at a time).
Hopefully this will help me keep things a bit more caught up.
We'll see.
Here are a few photos from May. I went to Holden Beach and,
as usual, made a few road trips. Several of the pics
are taken at Myrtle Beach.
The Gay Dolphin gift shop has
been around forever and hasn't changed a bit from when I was a
kid.
Peaches Corner has also been around since way before
I was born. It's been remodeled but their hotdogs still
taste the way I remember them as a kid. The
SkyWheel is new. It's the second tallest ferris wheel
in North America. On the drive, I had just gone through a
pretty substantial storm that had cleared off on the way and
then I got on
the SkyWheel. They let folks on, one cab at a time and I
ended up at the very top and just sat there for quite a long
time (15 or 20 minutes maybe?). The thought occurred to me,
"uh.....what if that storm I went through on the drive here were
to hit with the high winds"?
In early June I went to New York City for a work-related
conference and squeezed in a few days of personal time before
the conference began. It had been a long, long time since
I was last in NYC. The June trip was great and I did alot
while there (along with my manager, Chris, who flew in on my
third day there a day before the conference began). I stayed at
the downtown Mariott, next to where the Twin Towers stood, and
had a 25th floor room with a great view of the Hudson. I could see Ellis Island from the hotel window
though a building blocked the view of the Statue of Liberty.
When I was a teenager there were ads in
music magazines for a New York City record store called The Record Runner.
They specialized in imported records that were not easily
available in the U.S. I think I ordered from them once or
twice. More often than not, I
made lists of the records I would like to have ordered. On
the first day in NYC, I thought it made sense to make a trek to
see the place. A pretty quick subway ride from Rector St.
Station to Christopher St. Station in the West Village and a
couple of blocks south and there I am. I had to hit the buzzer
and I was let in. I struck up a conversation with the owner,
John, who gave me a great run down of the store's
history. I saw Bob Dylan's Freewheelin' Dylan album and I
knew the cover photo was taken somewhere in the village but I
wasn't sure where. I asked John and he smiled, pointing to
the door and said, "right outside my door!". How cool is
that?.
Here's a few photos (you can see the owner, John - cool guy,
reflected in the window of the 1st pic in the 2nd row below,
taken while we were talking outside):
1962
2012
I ended up walking back to the downtown area. Grabbed a bite to
eat to take back to the hotel, got a little rest and
then took the subway to Times Square in time to take one of the
last bus tours of the day. The tour was on one of those
red double decker buses. It started raining just as everyone
was boarding and so everyone had to wear plastic smocks. We all
looked pretty silly. I took a few photos with my cell phone:
Here are some more photos from the
trip using my regular camera. The Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan
Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Central Park, Times
Square, 9/11
memorial and the Empire State Building (awesome!) are all
represented:
Suzanne Vega released an album a few years ago called
Beauty &
Crime in which the songs are all about (or set in) New York City
in some way. I'm
adding "New York Is A Woman" from that album to the player above
since it suits this update. Great album and the closer of the
album contains my favorite 9/11 related song called
"Anniversary" (if you'd like to hear Anniversary, click
here).
While on the runway at LaGuardia for the ride back home, who's
plane did I taxi by? Here are some clues (taken with my cell phone):
Hopefully, in the next week or so, I can wrap up the rest of the year in a Part III
update.
I hope everyone is doing well.
Road Trip! Sunday July 15th, 2012
So Friday night (into Saturday
morning) while I was working on updating the site a bit, I
started making a mental list of bands I'd like to see live in
the next year or two. I didn't rank them in any particular
priority and the first artist that I looked up the touring
schedule for was
Neko Case. Turned out that she was playing in Raleigh
Saturday night. Raleigh is only an hour and a half or so
from Winston-Salem so there was no excuse not to go.
Neko's long-time backup singer,
Kelly Hogan, has a new album out with an impressive roster
of players (Booker T. Jones and James Gadson). Most of the
songs on the album were written for Hogan by songwriting
heavyweights like Vic Chestnutt (RIP), Robyn Hitchcock, M. Ward,
Jon Langford, Andrew Bird - just to name a few. She played
double duty by playing an opening set and also playing in Nekos
set.
Neko Case and band came out sometime after 9pm and played a
great show. It was hot and humid and a lot of between song
banter was over the heat. Neko is known for her quick wit
and the spontanious banter was a lot of fun. She's got a
great command of her voice and her band was excellent.
They played three new songs, two of which I particularly
enjoyed. For any Hunger Games fans, her song "Nothing to
Remember" is featured on the soundtrack.
The Year So Far (Part I)..... Saturday July 14th, 2012....late
night......
Hello all. As usual, the site is
long overdue for an update.
I spent most of January in
Minneapolis for work. The Residence Inn became home away
from home for three weeks and Target became my local grocery
store. It doesn't hurt that Target is headquarted in
Minneapolis and the Target a block away from the hotel is their
flagship store with two levels. Sadly, the Hard Rock Cafe
in Minneapolis, mentioned in prior blogs, closed down back in
the fall of 2011. When looking for some good food in
downtown Minneapolis, you can't go wrong with the 8th Street
Grill or Pizza Lucé.
One
Saturday I made my way to The
Foshay Tower. The Foshay Tower was completed in 1929 and is
modeled after the Washington Monument. It was the tallest
building in Minneapolis until 1972. The Foshay has an
interesting history (check out it's Wikipedia page here
for more info) and I decided to tour the small museum on the
upper levels and to take pictures from the observation deck. It
was around 6 degrees that morning when I headed out and I was
the only person visiting the museum/observation deck. I pulled
the door open, walked through to the somewhat icy deck, heard
the door shut behind me and
thought, "uh......what if I just got locked out up here?". Just a
bit of paranoia. I walked around for a bit and took some pictures.
An interesting side note for any fellow Winston-Salem'ers;
the Foshay is being looked at as a
case study for potentially converting the downtown
R.J.
Reynolds Tobacco Co. building into a hotel. The R.J.
Reynolds building was the prototype that the Empire State
Building was based on and built by the same architecture firm.
In a future update, I'll post some pictures taken in June from
the Empire State Building. It's an incredible building.
My next stop that morning was a record store that I had been
told about (thanks Brad!) called the
Electric Fetus. The Electric Fetus
also has a very colorful
history
and has been witness to some funny exploits. So from the
Foshay, I walk to the Electric Fetus, go inside and find a
spacious
record store with a great selection of vinyl (new, used, etc.) -
and lots of patrons browsing through the records. It reminded
me of what it was like being in record stores when I was a
teenager. It was a "I'm with my people" moment.
February and March were mostly playing catch up at home after being away for most of
January. Record Store Day is the 2nd Saturday in April and
I had been looking foward to it and planning which vinyl
releases I wanted to score. I had friends over the Friday
night before "the" big day and watched movies with them until
around midnight. I went to sleep for a bit and got up
around 4:15 am.....got a shower and then headed out to my local
indie record store, arriving around 4:45 am or so. Nobody is
there. Weird. I would've thought there would be a
least a few other record nerds already starting to line up.
So I sit in the car, read a bit and it's 5:30am and still
nobody's there. Another hour passes and I can't understand
why no one else is there. I think to myself, "Record Store
Day...... April 21st......" and instantly feel like an idiot (I
know, not a big leap for me). It's April 14th. I had
been looking forward to record store day long enough that at
some point, instead of thinking about it in terms of a date, I
was thinking - "it's three weeks from now," then "it's two weeks
from now," etc. and got the timing wrong. Earshot in the AM hours of April
14th....NOT Record Store Day
So fast forward to the next week. This time, I was out the
door and at the store by 4 am. There was one other guy
there who had been there since midnight. I forget which
record he was there for, but it was one of the more obscure and
very, very rare ones and the store had 1 copy. He wasn't
taking any chances on someone else getting it. So we
talked records then the next guy showed up around 4:45 am.
By 5:30 am or so a sizeable line had formed. There were
even some women in the mix this time. The record a lot of
folks were really after was Phish's "Junta" 3xLP. I
believe the store had 6 copies. Around 7:30 am or so, the
good guys at Earshot began passing out numbers and I was #2.
At 8:00 am, they let the first 10 folks in and I was able to get
most of the records I was interested in. A Miles Davis
record got away from me, but other than that I did okay.
Various
Artists
Various Artists
"Pretty In Pink Soundtrack"
"Breakfast Club Soundtrack"
Format: 12" Pink Vinyl
Format:
12" White Vinyl
Label: A&M
Label: A&M
(2,000 pressed)
(2,000 pressed)
The Cure
Phish
"Entreat"
"Junta"
Format: 12" 180g Vinyl (2 X LP)
Format:
12" 180g Vinyl (3 X LP)
Label: Elektra
Label: JEMP Records
(5,000
pressed)
(5,000 pressed)
The Knack
Metallica
"Live in Los Angeles 1978"
"Beyond Magnetic"
Format: 10" Red & Yellow Splatter Vinyl LP
Format:
12" Silver (hardly! - looks grey) Vinyl
Label: Omnivore
Label: Warner Brothers
(1,500
pressed)
(5,000 pressed)
Little Richard
Jimmy Fallon
"Here's Little Richard"
"Tebowie"
Format: 12" Red Vinyl LP
Format: 7" Vinyl 45 single
Label: Specialty
Label: Warner Brothers
(1,500
pressed)
(3,000 pressed)
Beach House
Garbage
"Lazuli"
"Blood For Poppies"
Format: 7" Vinyl 45 single
Format: 7" White Vinyl 45 single
Label: Sub Pop
Label: Stun Volume
(2,400
pressed)
(1,900 pressed)
Lee Hazelwood
"The LHI Years: Singles,
Nudes & Backsides (1968 - 1971)"
Format: 12" Vinyl Lp (2 X LP)
Label: Light In The Attic
(2,000 #
pressed)
The next update(s) will be for May and June. I made
it to the coast for five or so days in May and then had a work
related trip to New York City in June that I combined with some
personal time. In the meantime,
check out a new song from Aimee Mann's upcoming album,
"Charmer":
