Category: Music that doesn’t suck

R.I.P., Joe Ely

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
I can’t remember the first time I heard this one.

Joe Ely has driven off from Taos, headed west, because of course he was. He was 78.

Pneumonia, Lewy body dementia, and Parkinson’s did for him, according to The New York Times. It took all three to finally drag the old troubadour off the road.

He was always going places: riding a motorcycle through the halls of his high school; hitching and riding the rails around Texas and the Southwest; covering the earth like a spilt can of Sherwin-Williams. In the photo on his website he’s behind the wheel of a convertible. In London, he joined a touring Shakespearean troupe.

As Mother Times noted:

He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next. He loved it all, especially the hours spent driving from gig to gig on the open road, and above all the vast empty stretches of highway out West. “There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,” Mr. Ely told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. 

Now and again Ely would hook up with two of his old high-school pals from Lubbock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, performing as The Flatlanders. That on-and-off gig lasted from 1972 until the mid-2000s. He opened for the Clash, becoming friends with Joe Strummer, and wrangled llamas for the Ringling Bros. circus.

Jaysis H., what a life. Other people got famous. Joe Ely lived. Somebody give this boy a ride to heaven.

R.I.P., Steve Cropper

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Damme if Steve “The Colonel” Cropper wasn’t in my ear from day one.

Booker T. & the MGs. Sam & Dave. Otis Redding. Leon Russell. John Lennon. Wilson Pickett. Levon Helm.

And, of course, the Blues Brothers, with his teenage bandmate Donald “Duck” Dunn, “Blue” Lou Marini, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Tom “Triple Scale” Scott, Tom “Bones” Malone, Steve Jordan, and all the rest of ’em, including John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, who could actually play (drums and harp) when they weren’t busy being funny.

Man. The Pearly Gates Bar & Grill has one hell of a house band.

One big pile, no arrests

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Plenty of room on the Group W bench. Slide over, litterbug.

The dump is closed, all the wrong people are in cuffs, and there ain’t enough SNAP in the EBT for turkey but there’s a big ol’ ham living large in the White House.

Oh, well. We can still sing. Sing loud. You know the words.

Cold as ICE

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
“‘Join ICE?’ That’s a joke, son!”

Herself, who spends more time on the social medias than Your Humble Narrator, tipped me to this fella this morning.

Jesse Welles makes good use of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where followers compare the 32-year-old from Arkansas to Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. He tours like a fiend, from Austin to Boston, Berlin to Brisbane, and recently popped up on Stephen Colbert’s show, which is where Herself caught his act.

NPR calls him “one of the most visible examples of a new generation of digital-savvy artists bringing folk traditions to a modern medium. … So far, his music has addressed the war in Gaza, the Epstein list and the Trump administration’s claims that Tylenol is linked to autism.”

Well, sir. That covers a lot of waterfront, doesn’t it? Rants you can rock to, and roll with. Give him a listen.

One bodhisattva for Katmandu, please

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Buddha don’t need no Rand McNally, yo.

The body may be at rest, but the mind wanders as it will.

Two songs have been getting heavy play on my cranial jukebox: “Katmandu,” by Bob Seger, and “Bodhisattva,” from Steely Dan.

The first, from 1975, ostensibly about salvation via relocation, is actually what Seger described as “an exasperated song” written near the end of a decade-long stretch “where I was going nowhere fast. …  I still had some of that defeatist mentality and you can hear it in there.”

The second is a 1973 critique of cookie-cutter spiritualism and its related divestiture of worldly goods that co-writer Donald Fagen once summarized as: “Lure of East. Hubris of hippies. Quick fix.”

Thomas McGuane was scouting that territory even earlier, in his 1971 novel “The Bushwhacked Piano,” in which the peripatetic Nick Payne’s father tells his wayward son: “I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. … My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure.”

That these musical and literary ingredients are suddenly bubbling to the top of my consciousness, such as it is, may be a consequence of having just finished McGuane’s latest story collection, “A Wooded Shore,” in which a selection of the damned find themselves adrift in various fashions and locations, Dante’s Sea of Excrement being among the hot spots. “I’m a realist, you see,” says that particular voyager.

“Sure rings a bell these days,” as McGuane told The New York Times. On the mark as usual, Tommy me boyo.

Mr. Jones and me.

Or perhaps it’s that I’m rocking a streak of vivid dreams about bicycling in outlandish circumstances, perhaps as a reaction to getting myself locked into a small selection of predictable 20-milers, your basic hamster-wheel loops, for no good reason that I can think of beyond sloth and convenience. An assist from Rand McNally is not required for this sort of tour de meh. Trying to break the chain I recently took two rarely ridden bikes on short outings, one of them involving a few miles of singletrack I hadn’t ridden since January. I dabbed frequently and shamelessly.

I suppose it could just be that fall is upon us, and with it our local elections and the fabled “fall back,” slated for Sunday, Nov. 2. Oh, good, an extra hour of nightmares.

When swimming the Sea of Excrement, I recommend the backstroke.