Category: Music that doesn’t suck

From soup to nuts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Our Chinese pistache is not quite in “Last Leaf” mode, but it’s getting there.

I fight off the snow
I fight off the hail
Nothing makes me go
I’m like some vestigial tail
I’ll be here through eternity
If you want to know how long
If they cut down this tree
I’ll show up in a song

Not a lot of snow or hail to fight off in these parts lately.

Christmas brought a record high temperature — 65°, eclipsing the old mark set in 1955(!) — and it wasn’t even The Duck! City’s first record high this month.

Herself and I went out for a little pre-feast hike in the Sandia foothills with a couple hundred of our closest friends, their extended families, and their dogs. Only saw two cyclists in just under five miles, and their rigs didn’t look new to me, so, maybe not a festive holiday season for the local IBDs.

The good news is, we’re delivering the teachings of Jeebus to the Nigerians in the usual explosive fashion. So, at least the Military-Industrial Complex is ticking along nicely, if only in terms of supplying shiny objects to the news media, since it’s a little late to carpet-bomb the Epstein files.

The bad news is … well, not all that bad. I couldn’t locate any crosscut beef shanks for my beef vegetable soup, so I had to call an audible and run with another recipe that proved to be not quite as good as our favorite, which is from a “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook with a 1981 copyright. After a week’s worth of chile-infused dishes I was striving for mild, and overachieved for a change.

However, Herself’s cornbread was superb, as was her salad, and thanks to exchanges with neighbors and colleagues we had an extensive menu of possibilities for dessert.

With the second season of “Fallout” finally available, we’d thought to revisit season one, since we’d forgotten what all the fuss was about. Alas, our Amazon Subprime Video membership is not ad-free, and the viewing experience was peppered at random with multiple sales pitches for depression meds, Range Rovers, and other shit that we don’t want, don’t need, and/or can’t afford, some of them running more than two minutes at a stretch.

Which was really a stretch. So this morning we decided to bring capitalism to its knees by signing up for the ad-free tier, then binge-watching both seasons before finally canceling the service entirely.

¡Venceremos! You’re welcome, comrades. Just crawl out through the fallout, baby.

R.I.P., Joe Ely

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 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.