... For What Ails You

The Perfect Girl - The Cure (mp3)
Last Dance - The Cure (mp3)

One of my two best friends from childhood, one of the most awkward* and intelligent guys I’ve ever known, attended a very small private school in Chattanooga. He was the valedictorian in a class of 14 people. In his valedictory address, at least three times he used Latin phrases and made repeated references and subreferences to literary and pop culture history that soared past at least 80 percent of his dumbfounded audience.

The summer before his junior year, Scott attended, of all things, a national 4-H student conference in Washington, D.C. Scott never acted like this was a strange thing for him to do, but all the adults who found out seemed perplexed by it. They knew 4-H for its agricultural roots, but apparently the organization has been working for decades to broaden its scope.

At this conference, Scott fell in love. As with any love yearnings from a nerdy comic book-reading, Rush-listening social misfit, these feelings went mostly unrequited, but matters are always made worse for us when there’s the slightest hint of possibility that lingers, like the smell of licorice. Like most nerdy social misfits, Scott’s clear harmlessness made him a quick and trusted sidekick for the lass in question: Tangie was her name.

Tangie introduced Scott to Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, a then-newly-released double album by The Cure. Tangie danced with Scott at the end-of-conference party to the haunting and catchy “Just Like Heaven.” Scott returned home utterly smitten and possessing a copy of that wild Cure ride.

The first 20 or so times I was forced to listen to the Cure’s 1987 extravaganza (one could not be friends with Scott post-Tangie and not listen to this album constantly in his presence), I was at best apathetic and at worst a little uncomfortable. The dude couldn’t sing very well. There were all these weird shoe-gazey moments that weren’t the guitar-raged solos I’d grown up thinking of as acceptable. The lyrics were just plain odd. It was one thing to get used to REM, but The Cure was another degree of separation from my pop radio roots.

That fall, in that rare stretch of time when my school and our sister school shared students in the afternoons, I took a German class with a sophomore named Susan. She was in all ways your prototypical 1987 Goth Girl. Dyed black hair. Super-heavy mascara. Blood-shaded lipstick. Funky earrings. Dour visage. Her version of a smile was my version of a frown. People couldn’t ever seem to tell when I was expressing sadness, and she was the exact opposite.

Her favorite bands were fairly predictable. Siouxie & the Banshees. Bauhaus. Depeche Mode. Sisters of Mercy. She wore their black concert shirts over her school uniform constantly.

The Cure was our compromise. We weren’t friends, and we hardly spoke -- one helluva compromise, I know -- but I’ve always been eager to find connections to the people around me, and here was this very strange and self-isolating girl who loved a band with which I had just become familiar, and it gave me more reason to pay attention to Robert Smith and his brood of brooders.

The Cure weren’t goth. Robert Smith dressed and caked himself up like one, but his music is and always was a teen-angsty chip off the indie-pop block. Goth was about being miserable and alone. The Cure was about being miserable and alone... but in a more collective sense. They were like the cool kid that chose to hang with the sullen kids in black. I’ve been there, man. I know. But it gets better. And trust me, you don’t have to become one of them either.

I would never say The Cure were one of my favorite bands anymore than I would say being 15 was one of my life’s favorite years. The connection between the two is not merely on my own life’s timeline, but rather in the subject matter and mood of the music, the confusion of self, the desperate wanting that often feels like physical pain, the need to know there’s someone out there with whom, eventually, just maybe, you might connect... but probably not. Because life sucks a lot.**

(Favorite Cure song: "Fascination Street") 


* -- I say he was awkward in the same way I'd call myself "one of the dorkiest guys I've ever met," which is to say with love and deep kinship.

** -- That's not ME. That's THEM!

AMERICAN SONGS: "Willin'"

Little Feat--"Willin'(live)" (mp3)

A truly great American song should have a sense of rebelliousness. It should convey a sense of mystery, leaving questions unanswered. It should nail down the details, the names and the places, of this sprawling land.

"Willin’," written by Lowell George of Little Feat, possesses all of these qualities. Written by George around 1970, the song has been recorded by, among a host of others, Seatrain, Linda Rondstadt, and Steve Earle. Beyond that, it has most certainly remained a staple of folksingers and guitarists in performance, with its descending chord G-D-Em-C (starting on the 7th fret) opening signature and the layered harmonies of its chorus, especially on the "Weed, whites, and wine" section.

Though no one would claim that Little Feat was ever a country music band, the song itself is about as country as it gets, or should get.

Perhaps you know the opening lines:

I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty don't ya know, and I'm still, willin'
Out on the road late at night,
Seen my pretty Alice in every head light
Alice, Dallas Alice

An ironic paean to the life of a truck driver for whom the lure of the road is stronger than any attachments or petty moralities, the song captures the costs of choosing to stay on the move instead of settling down--battling the weather in all its forms, only occasional visits with a lover, drug and alcohol use to get through the long miles and hours.

I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin'

In addition to a complex melody, the lyrical qualities of these classic songs also stand out. In "Willin'," the alliterative use of unusual Native American names for cities and towns not only sets the song in the wilder area of the country, the Southwest, but also, like the best poetry, the use of strange and interesting words adds to the aural pleasure of the song. A listener can't help but sing along with the chorus, waiting for the chance to say try these words on his or her tongue. In doing so, he or she becomes complicit with the narrator, sharing the social taboos and shortcuts that the life requires. Also the powerful verbs associated with the weather--"warped," "driven," "baked," "kicked," and "robbed"--enhance the struggle, even the battle, suggested by the trucker's lifestyle.

Now I smuggled some smokes and folks from Mexico
Baked by the sun, every time I go to Mexico, and I'm still

I've been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in, but I'm still on my feet and I'm still... willin'

It's kind of fun to think of this 40-year-old song in the context of today's crazy America. Would Joe Hit Country Music Maker refuse to record the song because it references drug use, irresponsible driving, support for illegal immigrants, blatant breaking of the laws of interstate commerce? Or would he see that this is the kind of rebel who has always ridden our roads and that, like all other kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" situations, this little song captures the realities of what it takes to transport goods from one end of the country to the other.

If you thought truckdriving was more like B.J. and the Bear, think again.

And I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin "

Willin'" walks an interesting tightrope. While it clearly romanticizes the life of a truck driver, it does so using only the potential negatives of this lifestyle, as if to say, not everybody could do what I'm doing, but it has to be done, and I'm willing to do it, and if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it my way, and screw you, if you don't like it. More a testament than an explanation, it does not expect you to understand the why of what he does, but it shows you the what in brief, but powerful, detail.

This live version of "Willin'" comes from Little Feat's Waiting For Columbus, one of the great live albums, available in a deluxe edition for a cheap price at eMusic.com

Pianoless Man

The Load Out - Jackson Browne (mp3)
Fred Jones (Part II) - Ben Folds (mp3)

I quit piano in the spring of seventh grade.

It was cutting into time I thought was essential to my becoming an athletic success. Would that I were being sarcastic.

In the final two piano competitions I entered, I received “superior” ratings at both. Dunno what that meant exactly, but my teacher and parents acted like I was months away from Carnegie Hall.

“You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life,” my father told me when I said I was really really quitting. He’d told me this twice before, because I’d wanted to quit twice before, and his words had made me afraid to quit. Not because I thought I would regret it --  what 12-year-old worries about potential future regrets? -- but because I was so afraid of disappointing or angering my father.

My teacher insisted on classical music. There I am spending nights and ceaseless hours with my two best friends listening to Synchronicity and Grace Under Pressure and Jump. I’m watching hours of MTV (well, it's usually playing in the background while we’re enmeshed in one role-playing game or another). Nothing about Beethoven or Brahms correlated in my peanut brain with the music I loved, or I might have been more motivated to stick with the lessons. That she never even tried to connect those two worlds or even saw a reason to try is a fatal flaw I put on her. Pre-adolescents can’t predict regrets, and we can’t necessarily connect 200-year-old music with David Lee Roth without a little help.

Is it the job of a teacher or the job of a student to connect their passions and interests to the lessons at hand? Discuss.

I don’t regret quitting piano, but I regret never making a connection between my interests and my learning. It didn’t connect with the Thompson Twins, and I didn’t connect with Billy Joel.

When I hear Patty Griffin’s piano-centered songs, when Ben Folds shuffles into my earphones, when my Keane collection lands in the mix, nothing about those songs pull me into memories of my piano-playing childhood.

If I had remotely enjoyed Joe Jackson or Bruce Hornsby, maybe... but no. “Lonely Boy” and “I Don’t Like Mondays” were two of the 45s I played until they practically disintegrated, both plentiful with piano, but I doubt I ever really made the connection that the instrument I was learning was the same thing they used to make that music.

Ultimately, nothing about my own musical piano journey could have conceivably led me into an alternate future where I became Ben Folds and Ben Folds ended up some random NTAC blogger who just really really loved music.

I regret that I never connected all the dots, that I never quite found a way to marry, in my own hobbies and my own life, my love of music and my love of writing into anything symbiotic.

Fortunately, I’ve in most ways been a better cheerleader than one to earn the spotlight. (So what I mean is, cheerleading not as team sport but as something extant to support and encourage other teams.)

Regret requires, it seems to me, the ability to see an alternate reality, some better-seeming version of events that with one slight change in wind direction feels so real you can envision every moment of it. Fortunately (I think), I have never seen a version of events, an alteration of decision-making, that results in my being a successful and happy career musician, much less a rock star.

Sorry Dad. On this one you were wrong. But maybe one day, in the sweet by and by, we’ll get a chance to continue dueling our pianos.

My First Guitar, Pt. 2

Grateful Dead--"Dark Hollow (live)" (mp3)

I have often been intrigued by how people's musical behaviors mutate as they age. Some abandon the rock that they listened to when they were young in favor of something that is safer and more sanitary, like country. Some move with a greater awareness of musical sophistication toward jazz or even classical. Or they do so with pretension.

Some never were rock 'n rollers, they were pop music listeners, so they continue to listen to whatever is the popular music of the day. Most alarming to me, some people simply stop listening to music, or only have it as something playing quietly in the background, as if the entire concept of music was a childish fancy that serves no adult purpose other than window dressing.

Me, I'm pretty much the way I've always been, and then some. I listen to what I did when I was sixteen; I listen to some of what sixteen-year-olds are listening to now, and quite a bit of what came in between.

I attribute that to playing the guitar. When you play, you don't abandon what you once did. You add to it. If you are a casual player like I am, you rarely pick up the guitar with the intention of playing a particular song. Instead, you just kind of start noodling around and see where it takes you, based on the chord you start or where your fingers settle on the frets.

So, you might end up playing "Willin'" or "Dark Hollow," songs you've been playing since college, or you might find yourself trying to figure out "Hey, Yeah" because you've been listening to Outkast in the car with your daughter. You might play the "Mexican Hat Dance," because three year olds at your house like to dance to it. You might get a music book that pushes you in a new or more complicated direction.

I've never really moved on; I've tried to take it all with me. If my sense of music was a house, I would be one of those hoarders who had been holding onto everything. You never really know what you might find among the dusty albums, the rows of CDs, and now the wealth of songs carelessly and haphazardly stored on an external hard drive. Or in my head.

Or, believe it or not, in my guitar. I think there is nothing surprising about the idea that Neil Young has Hank Williams' guitar and that the guitar has its own history and ghosts and that, when composing, certain kinds of songs will come out of it, but others will only develop on a different guitar. I have no doubt that even my own Yamaha guitar carries its years well, knows where it's been and what's been played on it.

I can tell you that, at least, it's been coast-to-coast twice, has been as far south as Florida, as far north as New Hampshire and Washington.

In case you can't tell, my first guitar is my current guitar and probably my last guitar.

And here's the funny thing: now, my cheap starter guitar is a "vintage"guitar, by virtue of its 35 (and counting) years, by virtue of it surviving all of those years, despite the knocks, scrapes, and scratches, intact. I've seen other 1975 Yamaha FG-160's listed on the Internet for upwards of $560. I've seen its now-mellow tone compared to a Martin in its depth and complexity. It is, for those who realized that a new guitar with no miles on it is inferior, desirable.

Yes, music remains extremely important to me, and the key to that is knowing that I can create, at least in some superficial fashion, much of that music on my first guitar.

My First Guitar, Pt. 1

Tony Rice--"Me and My Guitar" (mp3)

My first guitar was a Yahama FG-160. It was not an expensive guitar; I received it for my 18th birthday, but not on my birthday. I had to go to the store to pick it out. My mother went with me. Neither of us knew much of anything about guitars, but we entered the store with the specs of a guitar that a friend of mine said would be a good starter guitar. And that was the FG-160. It cost, I think, $126.

I thought I would get a left-handed guitar, me being left-handed. But the woman behind the counter said, "Oh, no, you're going to learn to play the guitar the right way."

And that was that. Who was I to argue? I like to suggest that that is the reason why I am not Jimi Hendrix. Well, one of the reasons, anyway.

To want to learn to play guitar at age 18 requires a somewhat unusual mindset. At least, for me it did. I think most of us have the idea that even by age 18, if you want to start something that is brand new, it is almost already too late. And I was coming to it with almost no background. And I was coming to it inspired by my friends who played, but with the realization that they had already been playing for many years and that I would remain hopelessly behind.

No one in my family had a single musical bone in them. We had a Wurlitzer organ for many years growing up, and we were forced to take lessons for one or two of those years, but the combination of an old woman teacher who smelled like Lestoil and my parents' desire to try to get us to play for company, especially to fill the awkward silences in the dining room when both sets of grandparents were visiting effectively killed my career as an organist. Oh yeah, and the songs I was taught to play, songs that were at least obscure to me so that I never had any idea what they were supposed to sound like.

So you would think that it was rock and roll that made me want to learn to play the guitar. After all, I had an impressive record collection, a pretty good stereo, and a basement that other family members rarely entered and all the time in the world to play records and listen to FM radio. I went to dozens of concerts. But it wasn't. It was bluegrass. It was fingerpicking.

I had a friend named Bob who had gotten fairly proficient at both of those styles. In this, as in all things, he was an expert salesman, or, perhaps better put, he had a gift for making what he did and what he had seem magical and very desirable. This was never more true (and never more safe) than where the guitar was concerned. After his lessons, he would show me the songs that he had learned, the songs that he was working on.

By that time, his parents had bought him a Martin, and he took meticulous care of it. But when he would take it out and play "The Boy Kissed The Girl (While Playing The Guitar" or "Billy In The Lowground," favorites of fingerpicking and flatpicking, respectively, I thought I had never heard anything more beautiful. The fingerpicking was syncopated, the flatpicking nailed down the chord changes like a machine gun.

Bob then became my teacher, the only guitar teacher I ever had. He taught me strings, chords, and keys, tablature and note-for-note transcription. He offered me light versions of the things that he was learning. Some of the earliest songs I mastered included Neil Young's "The Needle and the Damage Done" and the aforementioned "Billy In The Lowground."

When you are 18 and learning your first chords and first songs, when you get a little taste of how chords fit together to make songs work, there is a simultaneous awakening: you suddenly understand what once seemed to be a mystery, but at the same time, you become aware of the difference between what you can do and what players who really know what they are doing can do. It is both illuminating and awe-inspiring.

Good Day Sunshine!

Hello!  Woohoo, it's Friday!!

Here are some great pictures I took of the sunset, sunrise and Downtown Miami Skyline yesterday and today.  By the way, the building that's lit up purple is called the Freedom Tower.  Hopefully soon I will get a good camera and my pictures will look crisper! 

Have a great weekend!

I thought the sky looked amazing yesterday as I was driving home from work!

This was the sunset yesterday!

The Freedom Tower gorgeously lit up in Downtown Miami
I've never seen them light it up like this!

 

This is the view from our balcony up Biscayne Boulevard..... there's the Freedom Tower (and the American Airlines Arena to the far right)

 

This is today's sun rising in the sky over downtown....

 

(All images in this post are my own personal images)

Welcome To Rocktober

Lou Reed--"Vicious (live)" (mp3)

Today is the first day of October. Today is the first day of Rocktober.

From the Urban Dictionary:

Rocktober--An informal celebration of rock music taking place every year in the month of October. It may apply to any genre of rock and roll, however it is most often connected to the 'classic rock' genre. A typical Rocktober fan may be described as a beer-drinking, mulleted and/or older rock aficionado.

That's right, Bottom of the Glass is devoting the entire month of October to posts about music. After all, when we started, we started because of the music. And because we like to mix things up, we're going to freshen ourselves up with a return to the music.

Over the next 31 days, you'll be seeing posts about the best 5 American songs of all time, about concert experiences, about trends, about lost and found musical items, about our most embarassing musical favorites. You'll get a couple of shots at our favorite Halloween-related party mixes. We might even have a Rocktoberfest party, even though it's really the wrong month.

Oh, and you'll want to have a listen. We know many, perhaps most, perhaps all, of our readers do not listen to the music that we link to our blogposts. Too busy? Too jaded? Too unimpressed by our choices? Who knows? But it's time to turn your computer speakers on again.

What did you think your ears were for, anyway? Listening to your boss?