Dear Mr. Pavement*

So, I'm on Third Man's mailing list and I get an email Friday saying that Jack White is the cover for the new Mojo and did I want to buy the Collector's edition "[a]vailable exclusively at Third Man London, Third Man Nashville, Third Man Cass Corridor, and online at ThirdManStore.com on March 15th"?

Well, actually, no, I don't. I'll get the plebe version in a couple months, whenever it's traversed the pond via the Covid-slow international mail, thanks. But I'll definitely be looking forward to it!

And then I read through the email and below the blurb for Mojo, and the blurb for Jack's new single with Q-Tip(?), I learned that Third Man has a quarterly magazine themselves, called Maggot Brain. And that sounded cool to me. I still mourn the print version of Spin to which I subscribed for many years. I tried Rolling Stone for a year or two once Spin went out, but let's face it, they've been kind of lame since the '80's (which is why I started reading Spin in the first place). And I do subscribe to Mojo, and they're great, but always being 45 days behind current with them is a little weird, seeing gig ads for shows at the O2 Manchester I could never attend but also are already over is always a little sad for me.

I could maybe subscribe to this Maggot Brain thing! And be current, reading gig ads for shows I also couldn't attend, but *haven't* already happened! So I click through for that, but immediately get waylaid when I start reading about the interview the mag did with Pavement in advance of their reunion tour.

What's this? Pavement dates? So for a second I get excited, and I leave the Maggot Brain page and head over to https://pavementband.com/#tour and sure enough, US tour starting in September.

But my cautious excitement was dashed as I read through the dates, as once again, Pavement is not coming to South Florida, or even Central Florida.

And I sighed.

Because Pavement not coming to South Florida is a long tradition with me. And, you know, with them.

It's funny, 'cause at the bottom of the page, it actually had a link for "Request a Show," and I was like, "OK, I will," and I even had an inchoate letter written up in my head, went something like this:

Dear Mr. Pavement:

Read with the usual disappointment your reunion tour US tour dates, because once again you've decided not to come to South Florida. Living here all my life, I've long since known that being at the geographical and cultural ass-end of America means that I'm often not going to have he opportunity to see my favorite bands play in town. Not like in Austin, or Atlanta, there's a window you have to squeeze yourelf through, here, I understand. It's got to be the band you know, of course, and before they break up, of course, or maybe during their one-off reunion, and during a tour where it's practical for the band to travel the 700 miles. Like some bands end their tours in Miami, and just begin their vacations here the next day. Think Sonic Youth did that one time. Or I saw High on Fire this other time, Pike and the rest of 'em were departing on some Metal Cruise the next day. So, such a long drive, it's gotta make sense, I get it. Not every tour is gonna work out right.

But with Pavement, it has *never* worked out, to the point where I wonder whether y'all just have something personal against South Florida. I've followed you, basically your entire mid-major career. It's true I wasn't a fan of the band when you were on Drag City, but you weren't doing national tours then anyway. But I read the glowing review in Spin for Slanted, and bought the Matador CD right away. Liked it so much I wrote you, commending your vision. Spiral Stairs even wrote back to me! So I'm right with you from your breakout. Should count for something, right? And since I got that short note, I've been keeping my eyes peeled for a date I could check out.

But never; not then, and not, sadly, disappointingly, not now.

Maybe you'd reconsider? Other bands, do, evidently. Hell, Godspeed You! Black Emperor is coming to Florida for the first time ever next month. You should do the same in October.

(Signed) rastro etc.

It would have been a good letter. But when I clicked the "Request a Show" link,it just gave me the Bandsintown page and you couldn't personalize your request.

Just as well, I suppose, as it puts me in mind of the time I wrote Sweep the Leg Johnny asking them to play Churchill's, and instead, they cancelled their tour. Or the time I *couldn't* talk Parquet Courts out of watching the Super Bowl and playing Churchill's instead.

______________
* Extra credit if you caught the "Young Ones" reference.

Rick Wakeman at the Amaturo Theater, March 11, 2022

After a cancellation due to Covid that actually worked out quite well, thank you, the Missus and I attended the Rick Wakeman show along his 'Even Grumpier Old Rock Star' US tour at the Amaturo Theater in beautiful downtown Ft Lauderdale last night.

If it was not a long show by anyone's imagination, I did have loads of fun. Rick had a Steinway piano off to stage right, a microphone in the middle, and a Korg to the left. He'd hop in his bright white sneakers (you can seem 'em in the photo!) between the three positions depending on whether he wanted to play something acoustic, tell a ribald story, or play something electric. Highlights for me on the Steinway were the first number after the intermission, which was a medley of the two Catherines on Six Wives (the Aragon one, and the Howard one) and "Merlin the Magician," from Myths and Legends," betcha guessed.

His stories--almost always funny--were primarilly in either of two camps; either something mildly off-color from his Mega-Rockstar days, or something mildly off-color about the depradations of being old. He also told an actually poignant (though also off-color) story about his friendships with Keith Emerson and Jon Lord, that I'll probably remember most.

The best on the Korg was probably "Jane Seymour," you know the pipe organ one, and man, was I impressed by how much his little skinny keyboard sounded so goddamned much like some massive unit built into the nave end of a 600-year old Anglican church. As I was listening, I was pretty sure that was a perfect segue for Grumpy Rick to talk about the transmogrifying effects of our modern technology, but no, he didn't mention it afterward, though I noted that there was a credit in the tour book for the guy who programmed the pipe organ routine.

The other electric highlight was a Beatles medley he did toward the end, an interpretative medley in which he got to flash his classically-trained ear and chops with "Help!" as if it were written by Saint-Saens, and "Eleanor Rigby" as if it were by Prokofiev. I liked the Revolver cover better, but Melanie enjoyed the soundtrack tune better. Either way, it was an impressive flash, in, really, a show full of them. No capes, no smoke machines, and certainly no costumed knights on ice, but Mr. Wakeman's ten flexibile digits, 72 years old though they may be, still work quite well.

The song that he sent us off with was a dazzling "Life on Mars," on which he originally played of course, and it sort of circled round to the Emerson and Lord story. Enjoy and appreciate your artists while they're still around, is what I read from the encore choice--and I was left then with an appreciation that I'd attended, on a couple different levels.

Dream 3/6/22

Last night, I dreamed about Lady Bolshevik, a cross-dressing punk rock quartet who fought for the televised Marxist Revolution by playing for free, Hawkwind-style, outside gigs and festivals along The Clash's Sandinista! world tour.

Think red flowing gowns, high-heels, fake bandoleros and berets. The Asian bassplayer, weirdly, had a Steinberger, the lead singer, a long blonde Mohawk like that guy from The Plasmatics. Clicking stateside more on the West Coast, they made the cover of Slash, and John Belushi once mentioned 'em in an interview, but they disappeared once Strummer and the boys came off the road, with nary a tour EP to show for the experience.

Much, much later, it was revealed that 'Weird Al" Yankovic had been a member, though not the leader.

File under: Dreams

The Thing About Godspeed

My Plans for the evening of April 28 . . .. . . would now be to catch the Godspeed You! Black Emperor show at the Beacham Theatre in historical downtown Orlando.

Tickets purchased just now.

However, I've yet to buy all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling, the semi-legendary home-recorded cassette from 1993, released today on their bandcamp page.

And here is where following a radical left post-rock band can get tricky. Says here on the bandcamp page that "all proceeds from sales going to the CJPME's campaign to provide medical oxygen to the Gaza Strip," and that's exactly the kind of thing this band would do, and y'know, who could be against medical oxygen?

Except, turns out this CJPME isn't just colecting oxygen bottles for the Gaza Strip--they also deny Hamas is a terrorist organization, like Canada (and the US and the EU, etc) correctly maintain, and are advocates of BDS, which I've long since made the decision is a movement for anti-semitic tools who don't even care if people think they're anti-semitic.

So: instead of buying this hairy amp drooling thing, I'm looking to bootleg it. I mean, hey, it might not even be good!

But I'll still be driving to Orlando in April. Ah, the contradiction that is me!

CCSCS

After a certain amount of hemming and hawing, copied from my Tumblr. . . . .

1. Think of a cover song.

2. Assign a number, 1 - 10, as the estimated coolness score of the artist being covered.

3. Assign a number, 1 - 10, as the estimated coolness score of the artist doing the covering.

4. Add the two numbers to come up with a Combined Cover Song Coolness Score (CCSCS).

For example, you might take Dinosaur Jr's cover of Peter Frampton's "Show Me the Way."
Pulling numbers out of thin air^*, you assign J Mascis' band an 8 and, remembering Frampton was after all in Humble Pie, you give him a 3. You add 3 and 8 to get a CCSCS of 11.

Or, especially if you happened to be me, you might look in the direction of Allegaeon's cover of "Roundabout," and come up with a number north of 15.

5. Conjecture: Big Black's cover of Wire's "Heartbeat" has, to anyone who knows their shit, the highest CCSCS in history^†.

___________
^*yet with keen insight
^† Which of course doesn't make it the greatest song.

RIP Billy Conway

RIP Billy Conway, a drummer for Morphine the band.

Cancer got him, which I bet he thought was probably better than a heart attack live on stage, then dead on stage, like Sandman. I didn't envy Conway, having to live with that memory, and I don't envy him now after he fought but lost.

Anyway he was a good man I hear, and he was part of a genuinely unique band which I had the good fortune to coexist with while in awareness of.

The show in 1999 at The Carefree, off Like Swimming, that was me, and my girl, being lucky for a change.

Photo by Valerio Berdini