Category: Music that doesn’t suck

Another Saga unwritten

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
My Soma Saga touring bike (rim-brake edition).

Well, the good news is, I won’t need fenders and a rain jacket for the ride downtown to collect my Subie from the shop.

The better news is, it is raining.

Reincarnation (the shop, not my hope for higher rebirth) just texted to say the old bucket of bolts is still deep into its semiannual wellness check and won’t be ready to come home until tomorrow.

It should go without saying that I had just pulled a fendered Soma Saga off its hook, aired up the tires, and lubed the chain.

But no matter. That needed doing anyway. And I got a couple hours of saddle time in this morning when it was still windless, cool, and dry, noodling home from the shop on the fenderless Soma Double Cross.

Besides, I may need the Saga tomorrow. The weather wizards are calling for a 70 percent chance of rain.

FIngers crossed.

Rain, dawg

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Take it to “The Bridge,” Sonny.

When it rains, it pours, as the fella says.

I bet a lot of backyard ’Burque barbecues wound up in the kitchen yesterday. The rain started in midafternoon, laid about a half inch on us in four hours, then took five for the holiday.

When I stumbled out of bed this morning at stupid-thirty our weather gizmo reported (drum roll, please) another half inch overnight. No wonder I slept so well. Rain is a fine thing for sleeping. Also for farms, forests, and other living things, as long as they’re not sleeping rough in an arroyo.

Any morning you wake up on the right side of a damp lawn is a good one.

Sonny Rollins didn’t make it to Tuesday. But he left his mark in a big way before heading west yesterday at the age of 95. The giant of the tenor sax had such a commitment to the music that he put his career on hold before it really took hold, because he wasn’t satisfied with his sound.

In 1959 he stepped away from the clubs and the studio and just played, often come nightfall at the Williamsburg Bridge near his place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And he stayed gone for two years.

“A lot of people couldn’t comprehend why I would stop playing,” he told DownBeat magazine in 2001. “But I learned something. It was necessary for me to do to have the kind of confidence I need to play music like this.”

His comeback album was called “The Bridge.”

Sonny would slip away once more, that time for a spiritual pilgrimage, but he came back and kept reaching, hoping to grasp. A Saxophone Colossus indeed.

Tom Waits: Desert Oracle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Not Tom Waits. Or Ken Layne, for that matter.

My man Ken Layne says in his latest episode of “Desert Oracle Radio” that he got the idea for his podcast from (wait for it) Tom Waits.

Somehow this fails to surprise me. Mr. Waits casts a wide loop. Wasn’t that long ago that people thought he was Leon Redbone. Turns out he was Ken Layne. Frank Zappa was Leon Redbone.

Not really.

Here’s Ken Layne:

One of the initial inspirations for this radio show was a Tom Waits interview I read in an alt-weekly newspaper three decades ago.

So Tom Waits has these bits that he’s doing for the press tour so the reporters aren’t too annoying. They can’t keep up because he’s just rolling out these little stories, tall tales, routines. And one of them went something like this. He says, and I’m quoting incorrectly for memory:

‘Oh, I’ve got a radio show now, out in the desert, in a little desert town, it’s called ‘Strange and Unusual Facts.’ And then he’d say some oddball factoid about lemurs or the height of Big Ben or how many legs a centipede has, which is variable, turns out. Then, Tom Waits tells the music writer for the alt-weekly, ‘It’s a small station and the signal doesn’t get far, but people are enjoying the show, and, in fact, a number of people are moving to this desert town just to hear it.’

That always sort of stuck with me. Because somewhere up ahead would be this radio show in the little desert town of Joshua Tree.

And you know what? I’ve had a number of people tell me in person, to my face, that they moved here because of this radio show.

So, Tom, if you’re out there tonight, thanks for the idea.

I’ve taken a few ideas from Tom Waits myself, not all of them good. Never went with the soul patch, though. That was Frank Zappa. Or was it Leon Redbone?