In which a policewoman in Long Branch, NJ responds to a call from residents complaining about “an old scruffy man acting suspiciously” — and winds up booking Bob Dylan on a stroll before his concert.
Favorite part: Even after he gave his name, she didn’t know who he was. Those kids today.
An actor friend from New York was in town Monday night, so another theatre friend and I joined her for drinks. I proposed the Dresden Room, a favorite old haunt of mine, because it’s classic Hollywood, because neither of them had been there before, and because I thought the one friend might enjoy saying she’d had a drink where they shot so much of “Swingers” and so many other movies. Plus, I just like the joint. I only wish Marty and Elayne had been on that night, but they don’t play Mondays. (The guys who do Monday nights were pretty good, but completely lacked the wonderful kitsch and showmanship brought to the Dresden Room by Marty and Elayne for 31 years now).
Anyway, we had some drinks and a very nice time. My friend who’s local I get to see all the time, but the other one I get to see only once a year. Thoroughly enjoying myself, when the tab came, I decided just to pick it up. The drinks, plus tax and tip, ran $53.
Late this afternoon I had a drinks meeting at a lounge in Burbank. This was a business meeting, and also a friend meeting (as in, my one companion said, “Why do we always have to wait for business to socialize?” Precisely.). I ordered some appetizers, and then we ordered more appetizers, and we each had some drinks, all of it, it turned out, at happy hour prices. And it was a pretty happy hour — the end of a day successful in many ways (a good prognosis for my friend in the hospital who got released; a good bill of health on my dog, recovering from surgery; financially a good day; and more) that I was now celebrating while having this meeting, in preparation for something I’m starting in two weeks. That project is through my company, so I rightly figured I’d be picking up the tab. When I turned away, it turned out that one of my companions had already asked for the check and slipped the server his credit card. So he picked it all up. I watched as he signed it. The total: $53.
While I don’t believe in karma per se, I do believe that when you do something nice for no good reason, the next time someone does something nice for you, you tend to notice it better. And, hey, the coincidence of the dollar amount was certainly eye-catching.
Here’s something nice I’m going to do for you. Here’s Marty and Elayne. Next time you’re in town, you should check them out.
More about this later. Just not quite ready yet.
Well, to me anyway, that album would be “The Tenement Year” by Pere Ubu.
I was listening to this disc yesterday yet again and marveling over how beautifully it comes together, the squeaks and squonks of this offbeat band coalescing into an propulsive pop masterpiece that pulls into close rivalry with the best of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks as idiosyncratic wordplay crashes against thunderous guitar and drums and musical textures that absolutely thrill and soar.
Then I happily found this encomium from a kindred spirit, celebrating the album’s 25th anniversary. Had it been 25 years? Yes, it had.
I highly recommend you read that remembrance, above, and then watch this video. If this doesn’t fill you with joy and wonder, we’re not on the same wavelength. Listen to those twin drum sets consorting and jousting with each other, to the tasty guitar fills, to the unexpected synthesizer sine waves that somehow buoy the oddball poetry of the words. It’s all deeply, deeply satisfying. And, as one friend said after I emailed him the link yesterday, “Good video, good song, and great dance moves.” Yes!
Here’s Part Two of that interview with the curator of the David Bowie Is show in London. (And Part One is still available here.)
Two notions I find especially interesting here:
First, the idea that David Bowie is someone we project onto: “The truth is, when you get Bowie fans in a room they have absolutely nothing in common.” That may be true — but isn’t the same true of other major groups from that time, like the Rolling Stones? We now live in an era of niches; we used to live in an era of mass markets. So perhaps Geoffrey Marsh hasn’t recognized this changing dynamic and is projecting onto his exhibit what he wants to see.
Second, I’m intrigued by the idea that Bowie’s 10-year “disappearing act” was actually performance art, and Bowie trying to play Marcel Duchamp. But, again, that sounds like someone in the visual arts telling us that it’s all about visual artists — so, more projection.
My further thoughts about these two points: I think all artists are what we project onto them; and I doubt that even David Bowie could tell you with surety why he took off 10 years. He just did.
Mr. David Bowie is back in the news, with a new record after a 10-year hiatus (beating the break John Lennon took to bake bread and watch the wheels) and a fancy new museum retrospective.
Re the latter, here’s part one of an interview with the curator of that show, “David Bowie Is,” which opens Saturday in London to massive publicity and record (couldn’t resist the pun) ticket sales. (Thanks to Rich Roesberg for sending me that link.) The show runs through August 11, should you find yourself in London. (In fact, it will run through August 11, whether or not you’re in London. Which I will not be.)
Re the former, on the day of its release, the new Bowie CD, “The Next Day” was happily found on my kitchen table, having been shipped by Amazon and delivered by a competitor of the USPS. I like it very much, and find it full of surprises. One of the surprises: the prominence of saxophone, an instrument I’ve never much associated with Bowie’s work. Another: that it’s a rather stripped-down album, mostly straight-out mid-tempo rock music featuring vocals, guitars, and drums. That’s rather traditional, but in the Bowie oeuvre, I think of that as rather untraditional. In some ways, this sounds more akin to the two Tin Machine albums, when Bowie decided to try to be a regular bloke in a band with three other guys, but more palatable. I miss the odd textures and surprises, circa the work he did with Eno, or on “Scary Monsters” or “Outside” (which features the fantastic “Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” one of his best songs and one of his best-produced songs).
What I haven’t enjoyed in all the recent press coverage are the blithe claims that this album is a return to form for Bowie, the implication being that he’s been off-form. I wonder how many of these people have heard his last two albums, “Heathen” and “Reality.” “Heathen” had many of the fine qualities I’m missing from the current album — which, seemingly alone, Sasha-Frere Jones noted in The New Yorker, in praising that disk — and “Reality” was a truly, truly fine pop album. I like both of them a lot, and play them frequently, and they’ve lived in my wife’s CD rotation for more than a year. Moreover, we saw Bowie on his last tour — which may have, indeed, been his last tour, but we’ll see — and he was in fine form then, too. The songs sound good on record, and sounded great live. It’s easy for critics to paint the picture that after 10 years away Bowie has had a magnificent re-emergence, but the two disks he did before stepping away bear further listening. They don’t deserve the criticism.
p.s. I hate the cover art above. Deeply. Strenuously.
File this under “shoot me first”: Here’s your chance to see the band Yes perform not one, not two, but three of their incredibly tedious, wandering, and self-indulgent albums, all in one night. Their lead singer (replacement for Jon Anderson): the leader singer in a Yes tribute band. This will make for their second lead singer drafted form a Yes tribute band.
I saw this band last year (with the previous tribute-band-singer) and feared mightily for the health and well-being of drummer Alan White, who looked to be in serious need of immediate medical attention. I said to that to my friend, but she was more concerned about another member she felt “looks like he’s at death’s door.” I’m not saying they’re bad because they’re old — the Beach Boys are older, but they were terrific in concert last year — I’m saying they seemed sick. And bad. And boring.
Glad I saw The Beach Boys last year when I had the chance (and in one of the flat-out best shows I’ve ever seen), because now Brian Wilson is saying sail on, sailor, to the notion of the band ever getting together again. Wilson made the announcement last night while accepting a Grammy for the band’s work last year, announcing the end of reunions.
At one point, I would have been glad for that, because the thing touring the U.S. as “The Beach Boys Band” is in no way The Beach Boys — it’s Mike Love, Bruce Johnston, and some other guys, with nary a Wilson brother in site. (Let alone founding members Al Jardine or David Marks.) But last year’s tour, and the accompanying album of new music, were surprisingly strong. Now, though, there are no good vibrations left among the true Beach Boys. The 2012 outing will be their last, and That’s Why God Made the Radio will remain their career-capping recording. But don’t worry, baby, there’s a lot of great music still out there, and a fine legacy to look back on.
Surf’s up.
On Saturday night I took my friend Richard to see The Monkees (what’s left of them) at the Greek Amphitheatre.
Part of my interest was in seeing Mike Nesmith. I like his voice and I like his songs. I’d seen him once before, with the other Monkees, about 20 years ago when they played Universal Amphitheatre (no idea what that’s called now — and now it’s been covered, so it’s probably not called “Amphitheatre”) and Nesmith ran on to do two songs, to thunderous applause, before going back to everything else he’d rather be doing than playing with his former bandmates.
Part of my interest was ghoulish: seeing what they’re like without Davy Jones. (So shoot me. But hey — the Beach Boys in May were fantastic, minus two dead Wilson brothers. So I figured: who knows?)
So here’s how it was: Odd. Have you ever been to a funeral where the family didn’t seem to miss the deceased? This was like that. Advance publicity had it that there would be a “tribute” to Davy Jones. If by “tribute,” his surviving bandmates meant that occasionally a song of his would come on and they’d leave the stage while the band played along to the video, and that they’d draft a completely tone-deaf woman from the audience to sing his biggest hit (“Daydream Believer”) and that never once would they acknowledge his death or that they missed him, well, yeah, then there was a tribute. One could be excused for thinking that rather than being absent due to death, Davy had just failed to catch a cab in time.
There were oddities in the audience, too. Richard and I had the smack-dab last seats in the audience, Row D on the benches, way in the back, just slightly north of Mexico. We had these because if I was going purely for reasons of morbid curiosity, then I wasn’t paying more than 10 bucks a ticket. This low-low ticket price (less than the cost of some six packs) meant, though, that some people felt they could show up, drink heavily and behave themselves like they were at a drive-in movie in the 1970s. In front of us were two families — two sets of middle-aged parents, one with one girl of about 10 and the other with a girl of about 14 and another of about 10. Both sets of parents were drunk. I mean, smashed. Obliterated. Like I haven’t been since I was… 24 at the most. Like you don’t get if you’re past 24, unless you’re Mickey Rourke. The guy in front of me, an English guy looking like an older, poorer, stubbled Phil Collins with a goatee and cheap eyewear, stumbled his way up to his seat, then later tottered way way way down the steps to get more of whatever they were drinking (something clear in a clear glass bottle — like moonshine), falling down on his way down, then repeated the effect later, then of course fell whammo into a whole section of the audience both those times and when he was trying to leave. The mother was in a similar state and kept trying to engage me in conversation until my frozen stare got her to direct her attentions to my friend instead. But the most appalling thing was the spectacle of how they treated their daughters. The guy sat to the right of her and throughout much of the show leaned in on her, caressing her long golden hair, whispering in her ear, hugging her close to him, and bestowing all sorts of attention and favor; the mother did the same, from behind. The daughter basked in all this attention and played it for all it was worth. The other daughter, younger, brunette, to the left of the chosen one, got nothing. She sat there abjectly ignored. It’s nice that Mom and Dad got smashing drunk and showed everyone how they really feel about each of their kids.
All of that was far more camaraderie than there was on stage. The song list was carefully parsed out: First a Mike song, then a Mickey song, then a Peter song. (At least, before they ran out of Peter songs.) The first Peter song was truly wack-a-doodle, “Your Auntie Grizelda,” which was embarrassing in 1967 and has become even moreso as the millennium turned. The kindest thing one can say about it is that Peter Tork’s singing isn’t as bad as his dancing — and, yes, he did an odd skipping shuffle during the song. If I could somehow wipe this memory from my brain I would, except I like to think there are things to be learned from the embarrassing public displays of others. Here are two:
I enjoyed many of the songs, and indeed, the concert overall. It was great to hear the Mike Nesmith songs played live this once; I doubt there’ll be another opportunity, and even if there is, it isn’t one I’ll be taking. Mike shone when singing and playing his songs; Micky is in good vocal form and really delivered his; and Peter Tork was there. But the band never played like a band — which is fitting, because in some ways, put together by chance as they were, they never really were one.
Here’s Brian Wilson’s response to Mike Love, also printed in the Los Angeles Times, which must be loving this little controversy. Take a good look at the guys in the photo above. I don’t think we’re going to see them all together soon — and maybe never.