Category: Music that doesn’t suck

Time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Happy 75th birthday to Tom Waits. The gravel swirling round in his pan always has a trace of gold in it.

Oh and the things you can’t remember 
Tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint 
In every dream

Closed on Thanksgiving

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

There’s a chain across this dump and a sign that says “Closed on Thanksgiving.”

The tears in your eyes notwithstanding, you’re gonna have to find another place to put the garbage.

Hope you have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Keep an eye out for Officer Obie. You know what to tell the shrink.

Bigger even than I had feared

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Some turds just won’t go down and stay down.

The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.

And now it’s the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, an unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush.

There was no such turd when Chet Pomeroy spoke the line in McGuane’s book. But there is in the podcast. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. I hope he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, as having conducted myself with some forethought “as a screaming misfit, a little on the laid-back side.”

Meanwhile, always flush at least twice. It’s a long way to Mar-a-Lago.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. Sly and The Family Stone come to you from their YouTube channel. From Freesound we get a dog whining, a power failure, an Internet outage, a garbage truck, and an elephant trumpeting. Judge Dredd issues his opinions via YouTube. All the other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Exceptin’ Alice. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Alice and Arlo, lifted from the latter’s Facebook page.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings just before Thanksgiving, but you can’t get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant is long gone, and now, so is Alice.

WBUR has a remembrance, and so does The New York Times. Arlo Guthrie, of course, weighed in as well, on Facebook.

Extra Special Bonus Fact: Did you know Alice was a Pelkey? Neither did I. I’ll consult the Counselor, see if he was aware that he was related to criminal and culinary royalty.

We’ll give a thought (and an ear) to Alice and Arlo on Thursday as we have another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.