While a presidential proclamation
Is blasting out across the nation
And Mad Dog and his band of jerks
Are lighting off the fireworks
Oh, boy, hey hey, it’s a national holiday
It’s a national holiday. —Timbuk 3
Category: Music that doesn’t suck
Rain, dawg
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.
Arise, arise. …
Tom Waits: Desert Oracle
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?
That’s just the way it is
Bruce Hornsby is having a moment, and good for him.
Once you start looking beyond his only No. 1 hit, “The Way It Is,” you realize the guy has been playing in your background for years. Decades.
Hornsby has worked with almost everybody worth listening to. Leon Russell. Clannad. Bonnie Raitt. Bob Dylan. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The Grateful Dead.
He co-wrote “The End of the Innocence” with Don Henley and played on the track with Henley and Wayne Shorter.
That’s a tune with legs, and you can still hear them kicking ass 37 years later:
O beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They’re beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie
Some of Hornsby’s playmates appear on the new album, “Indigo Park,” due out April 3. Raitt, who sings on “Ecstatic,” told The New York Times that she treats herself to a live recording of her friend performing “Dreamland” before taking the stage each night.
“The guy is just still diving deep and improving and playing hours a day and stretching,” she said. “He’s the one musician I would have if I could only have one on a desert island.”
The new album came, as new ideas often do, when Hornsby had been hoping to take a break. Nope. The title song arrived first and dragged the others along to keep it company.
Hornsby told The Times that “Indigo Park” is something of a glance at the rear-view mirror.
“This is the first record where I’ve really dealt with looking back,” he said. “On a lyrical level, I’ve always been kind of pushing forward. But this time I thought, ‘OK, you’re 70, [expletive]’.’”
Sounds like he’s still moving forward to me. Don’t give up the driver’s license yet, Bruce. Try to make the ecstatic last.
