2018 Nominees

Anyone who knows me well knows what I’m on about today regarding the Rock Hall nominees, announced today.

1) Still no Mothers?

2) Sister Rosetta AND The Meters! Cool!

Your 2018 nominees:

  • Bon Jovi
  • Kate Bush
  • The Cars
  • Depeche Mode
  • Dire Straits
  • Eurythmics
  • J. Geils Band
  • Judas Priest
  • LL Cool J
  • MC5
  • The Meters
  • Moody Blues
  • Radiohead
  • Rage Against the Machine
  • Rufus featuring Chaka Khan
  • Nina Simone
  • Sister Rosetta Tharpe
  • Link Wray
  • The Zombies

Tom Petty

When Tom Petty started being heard, it seemed clear that the old guard was behind us and the new kids had taken over.

Clapton, Beatles, Stones, all the old guys, it seemed, they stayed behind, fueled by their own gravitas and maintained their own club. Prince, Madonna, MJ, those guys, they maintained their own sphere. It was a reasonable doctrine, two hemispheres easily discerned. And the doors were closed.

Tom Petty somehow began later but dug his feet in with those old guys and eventually grabbed a big fistful of that gravitas for himself and became just as ubiquitous and therefore sometimes regrettably forgettable as a Keith Richards guitar riff. I don’t know if it’s because he was a Wilbury or because he was Tom Fucking Petty. But he wasn’t one of these new kids. Tom Petty was always right at home with the classics even though he was an MTV fixture. More a contemporary to Stevie Nicks than to Tiffany. More a generous talent than most who ever performed.

We got lucky when Tom Petty found us. What a voice, what a story teller, what a time.

Get Used To It

On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman murdered 20 children and six faculty at an elementary school in Connecticut. This was after he had murdered his own mother.

All that was proposed at the federal level to answer to this heinous crime was to make background checks more universal in scope. And they couldn’t even manage to do that.

Let’s review once again (copy pasta’d from the wiki):

Charlotte Bacon, 6
Daniel Barden, 7
Olivia Engel, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Dylan Hockley, 6
Madeleine Hsu, 6
Catherine Hubbard, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Jesse Lewis, 6
Ana Márquez-Greene, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Emilie Parker, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Noah Pozner, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Allison Wyatt, 6

That’s 20 babies. Slaughtered. And Congress didn’t do anything.

Since then, there have been at least 1,518 mass shootings, with at least 1,715 people killed and 6,089 wounded.

Muddy the waters all you like with defenses of the Second Amendment and paranoid proclamations of government raids on their way to confiscate your trusty huntin’ rifle. But the problem is clear. Guns are too easy to procure in the United States.

Until Congress can buck its way up from the amazon position the NRA has it in currently and act upon that problem, even in the most modest of ways, get used to waking up to stories like what we woke up to on Monday.

That shit is here to stay.

Salad Shooter

Some time a long long time ago, I apparently said to my long-time best buddy Geoffrey that I thought “Doolittle” by The Pixies was a good musical effort and he might want to check it out. What he thought I said was that he should become a mouth-foaming Pixies fan and should learn ever word and inflection of every lyric and scream and burping yelp Black Francis ever uttered.

So sometime at the start of this year, I mentioned to my buddy that The Pixies would be playing in Buffalo. Before I knew it, he was gonna fly up here and we were gonna go to the show.

So that was this weekend. What a cool time.

It was in jeopardy as about Tuesday I realized I had contracted the yech. Sore throat, snot, croupy voice, sinus aches. Weirdly, lots of sneezing, which I usually do not encounter with the yech. So there went two additional days of PTO. Glad I took them, though. Two days of mostly sleeping can do a lot, and I did not want to be feeble for said weekend.

Still wasn’t at my best Friday when I went to pick up fellow bandito. And it was raining. After a quick stop at home base, I determined that a run to Quimby’s was in order. Then a run to Record Archive. Followed by beers at Victoire. Despite the rain and my fatigue, I managed to show my good friend some of the best of our fair city. Then there were birthday celebrations at Farm Gonfalon. Etcetera. Blah.

Sunday morning we shuffled on off to Buffalo.

The Wyndham Garden is highly recommended, though for some reason, when you ask the staff “where is a good place to go have lunch and watch football,” the first word out of their mouth is not “Tully’s.” Duh.

That was a nice football day. Charlotte won. Buffalo won. Tully’s fed us and filled us with beer. Thank you, Megan.

After some recuperation time, we headed out for the show. When we arrived, the openers were on. And, frankly, I think Sunflower Bean is quite a discovery.

Is this an ’80s throwback? Sort of. These kids are great live, though. If you get to see Sunflower Bean, do.

And The Pixies? Sublime, of course. By which I mean they were good, not that they played ska-core music.