Patti Smith @ 930 Club

I saw Patti Smith live at the 930 Club last Friday night. For years, when I lived in Manhattan, I wanted to see one of her legendary New Year's Eve stands at the Bowery Ballroom (where I finally saw David Byrne, another New York icon from the same era, back in 2001).

It was a cold, rainy night but my hour long wait outside the 930 was worth it - I was front row for the woman who heavily influenced Bono and Michael Stipe, among many others, with her punk poetry and uninhibited performances. Last time I had nearly as much fun spelling out a word in front of a crowd (G! L! O! R! I! A!) was....gosh, when I was a finalist in the fifth grade bee, I suppose.

I first became aware of her music probably through U2's cover of "Dancing Barefoot," which floored me. It led me to her work and I was equally enamoured.

Here's a series of podcasts hosted by Patti Smith about Bob Dylan.

G...L...O...R...I...A....G!L!O!R!I!A!



Here's the Patti Smith Group (as they were sometimes billed) with "Because the Night" in '78 or so:



This is Patti with Sarah McLachlan at what looks like the Grammys being feted by Jeff "the Dude" Bridges:


Patti Smith co-wrote "Because The Night" with Bruce Springsteen. I was fortunate to see not one but two performances of Springsteen's amazing duet with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe on the 2004 Vote for Change Tour:



Finally, let's go into 2008 with the epic and hopeful "People Have the Power" at Patti's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction from last year:


"People have the power...
The power to dream
The power to rule
to wrestle the world from fools...

"It's decreed the people rule
I believe everything we dream
can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth's revolution
We have the power
People have the power..."

"We call it Voight-Kampff for short"

Dear Santa,

Thank you for the five disc limited edition suitcase of Blade Runner! I can't wait to check out the nine hours or so of supplemental features. (No, really!) And thank you for In-laws cool enough and genuinely interested enough to sit through all of the special edition DVD of Metropolis with me this past weekend! Seriously, did you build them in your workshop or what? They rock!

Anyway, thanks very much for a memorable holiday. Oh, one last thing. To determine whether you're real or not, I have to ask you a few things. They're just questions, Santa. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. You're in a desert walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden, you look down and see a tortoise...

Hope You Guess My Name

Earlier this month, I went to the Torpedo Factory's holiday party. The history and mission of that facility is fascinating. It's inspiring to walk by it nearly everyday.

I've been to a couple of these Factory events before. All the artists (well, all who want to sell something) spruce up their stalls with food and drink. A band usually plays downstairs on the first floor.

This year, interestingly enough, the band appeared to be some young twentysomethings who perched themselves on one of the second floor walkways. I heard them shuffling through Tom Petty's "Breakdown" when I arrived. I was surprised, as I expected non-descript jazz, honestly.

I tacitly approved their choice and walked through various exhibits, turning back to look at the band every so often. One thing I noticed (and heard) was the bassist hadn't shown up yet (the keyboardist was covering with his left hand).

After a few other songs, I heard the beginning of The Rolling Stones' immortal "Sympathy for the Devil". It's classic rock, yes, but among the Stones' honor guard warhouses, this one still sounds thrilling everytime you hear Charlie Watt's initial drum patter and Jagger's taunting "yow's!"



I walked back by to watch the band up close. I noticed the singer and guitarist had lyric sheets in front of him. I nodded along to the music, mouthing the words, noting the crawl of meandering guests throughout the three levels of the Factory. Very nice, I thought.

Then they got to this line: "Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate" This kid pronounced it not like "Pilot" but rather "Puh-la-tee" .

Maybe he works out a lot to his girlfriend's fitness DVD collection, okay, but has he never gone to Sunday School?!? Where was a Hells Angel when you needed Keith Richards to order an immediate beatdown?




Like the Stones and their fans at Altamont, the late, great Hunter Thompson also had an unfortunate experience with rogue biker gangs and their decadent culture. However, Raoul Duke definitely knew how to pronounce all the lyrics in "Sympathy for the Devil"!! From the first chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"One toke? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio...slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with a tape recorder turned all the way up on 'Sympathy for the Devil.' That was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And to maintain our rhythm on the road."

I think the Stones probably asked too much for the rights to SftD for its inclusion in Terry Gilliam's 1998 film adapation of HST's novel. Otherwise, the song surely would've been snaking through the following scene. Regardless, imagine the kid singer I saw as Tobey Maguire's clueless hitchhiker. I sure did. Being ferociously schooled in the desert by Dr. Gonzo is an apt punishment.

"Christmas Bells, those Christmas Bells..."

Here's the World's Greatest...well, from my Peanuts gang to yours, Merry Christmas!

"It was Christmas Eve, babe...in the drunk tank"

My other favorite holiday song. I know a few things about Christmases in New York City. I even survived a Shane MacGowan concert in 1999...



RIP Kirsty MacColl...

The Thin White Christmas Special

"I'm David Bowie. I live down the road..."

This is probably my favorite version of my favorite holiday song:

I'm lovin' it

Several years ago, I had an unusual friend. We used to hang out a lot. He came home with me for the holidays a couple of times. That's a photo of him at my family's Christmas dinner back in 1998.

He was generally very fun and gregarious, but he probably shouldn't drink. Whenever that happened, he'd usually end up wanting to play something he called good touch/bad touch. "Hey, touch me anywhere," he'd slur. "It's all good!" He also liked to show up naked whether or not he'd been boozing. Pretty awkward, as you might imagine.

We eventually drifted apart, as friends often do. Grimace, I hope you're doing okay out there, wherever you are. Take care, pal.

Long Live the Punk Cabaret

Next week, just after Christmas, I'll be spending a couple of memorable nights with these two women respectively. (Really, my wife is okay with this kind of thing...)

One of them, I'd go all the way to Germany to meet. Fortunately, she's coming to DC! The other one I'll finally be dancin' barefoot with after trying to for the past decade or so.

Any guesses as to who they are? Keep reading...

Status Update

I know my blog's header has been screwed up for the past few days. Blogger made an ill-advised global change to how images are upsized in the page layout that has just about everyone in an uproar. Seriously, the help boards are crazed.

I'm working on it. Thanks for your patience!

Let's put a smile on that face!

In our continuing celebration of Chicago, here's a great new trailer for the highest profile release next year shot on location in Gotham...I mean, Windy City. The film crew demolished an actual, entire building and closed off streets to flip a real tractor trailer.

"Step in my rocket and don't be late..."

He's gotten quite a bad rap over the years, yes, and maybe some or all of it is deserved. What's love got to do with it, though? Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Ike Turner still brought a lot of good music into the world. He died today at age 76.



(That girl sure looks like Bettie Page, doesn't she?) Fast cars and chicks! Sign me up for this devil music!

Dog is my co-pilot

Could this be William Wegman's American Gothic? Or could it one of the most random things ever we found in a church basement right after we were pronounced lucky dog and wife?

It's probably better if you never know.

Valhalla, I am coming!

Unless you've been living somewhere over on lite FM, you likely know that the mighty Led Zeppelin reunited tonight in London. The early reviews thus far have been uniformly strong, and there's speculation they might tour. Would I go? Of course I would go. I'm hopeful to see Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, at least, sometime in 2008.

I'm glad reviews indicate they're not trying to rock out like they're thirty years younger than they actually are. They wisely have decided to emphasize the blues foundation buttressing their earlier songs, especially. A more seasoned, textured approach to the material doesn't mean they can't also still get the led out when the song calls for it. I guess I'm just glad they didn't make asses of themselves pretending decades haven't gone by since they were the biggest band on the planet.


Zep guards their licensing legacy and image distribution ferociously. (There's nary a concert clip on YouTube.) There is, however, this moving and raw tribute to the power of the blues and the devastation that compels it. "When the Levee Breaks" is the epic closer of Led Zeppelin IV. Here's a montage set to Hurricane Katrina's havoc:




On a considerably lighter note, here's the incessant rocker "Immigrant Song" off of Led Zeppelin III. I made similar misinterpretations when I first heard this song:

Sailing to Byzantium

The Coen Brothers are back to form with a great adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's spare, violent meditation on morality and mortality No Country for Old Men.

I've thought Joel and Ethan have been off their game a little to a lot for the past several years. Even O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I eventually came around to (largely because of the music), is still too knowing and pretentious for its own good. This latest one, however, is a worthy successor and maybe even equal of similarly themed Fargo and Blood Simple. It's definitely their most mature film.

I'd read McCarthy's book, so I was eager to see the Coen Brothers' first literary adaptation. It's just about exactly like the novel, which is a good thing. The dialogue is lifted verbatim for long passages/scenes at a stretch. The film's end (which elicited several groans and snorts in my theater) is directly as it is on the book's last page. It's not a Hollywood ending, as the saying goes, but it's the right rumination to end a genre picture that turns out to be a thoughtful treatise on the measure of men. (McCarthy's title comes from a Yeats poem, by the way.)

It's kind of movie that will stay with you days after you see it and quite some time after that. I highly recommend it.

Why So Serious?

More Tom Waits

We're answering our first request here at 'Round Midnight! Pour another drink and get ready to mist up. Going out to our listeners/readers at LaLocaVista, here's Tom Waits performing "Tom Traubert's Blues":




And this one used to run through my head a lot on the subway in New York near the end of the last century. If you're old enough, you might remember Rod Stewart had a top hit in 1990 covering this song. Here's the original, better version of "Downtown Train" without the grit and heartbreak sanded away:

The Heart of Saturday Night

Let's celebrate a real 'Round Midnighter this weekend. The one and only Tom Waits is 58 years old today!

I first was aware of him when I listened to his extremely idiosyncratic version of Cole Porter's "It's All Right with Me" on the 1990 tribute "Red, Hot, and Blue". I picked up Raindogs in college and then my life was forever changed. Those myriad clangs and bizarre shouts with orchestral instrumentation sounded like a lot like the cacophony that's usually inside my head. His work from the early 80s on was more experimental, and that's where I jumped in. Later, I explored his earlier catalog from the 1970s.

If you put Sinatra, Kerouac, and, say, Cookie Monster into a blender with a lot of booze, turned it on and left the top off while it grinded, whatever ended up on the wall dripping down would probably be similar to the bouillabaisse cabaret comprising Waits' albums and concerts.

Seriously, Tom Waits is like good whiskey. An acquired taste, definitely, and a little goes a long way. Too much of either, and you usually end with a chaotic mess of regrets on at least a couple of different levels. (A few years ago, I burned a copy of Raindogs for a curious co-worker who wanted to check out what the fuss was all about. On his morning drive to our office, he made it through the first minute and a half of "Singapore" before ejecting the disc and giving me an earful when he arrived at work. "What in the hell was that, Mike?" he said. An acquired taste, as I said.)

Here's Waits somewhat uneasy and a little punchy on the Mike Douglas Show back in 1976. On the couch next to him is none other than Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize winner Marvin Hamlisch , whom I met in passing a few years back. (As accomplished as Hamlisch is, I just thought it was awesome to meet the guy who scored "Bananas," one of my favorite movies.)

On the cult favorite Fernwood 2 Nite, Waits fared a little better, as he is playing along with the satire here. And how cool is it to see Tom Waits and the great Fred Willard together? (More namedropping: I met Fred Willard in Canada last year at the Toronto Film Festival.)



Here's a short animated clip also from the 1970s..."The One That Got Away"



Here is he on Late Night with David Letterman in 1986 or so. He's much more comfortable now in the guest's chair, equally cryptic and vaudevillian. It helps that Dave is obviously a real fan, too.



A bizarre and hilarious appearance on the sadly defunct "Night Flight" circa 1991:



I was supposed to see Tom's old flame from the 70s Rickie Lee Jones last February at the 930 Club, but an ice storm unfortunately kept me from going. Here's her biggest hit about Tom and Rickie's good friend Chuck E. Weiss.



Finally, let's go out with Tom's performance (that's him on the keyboard stage right) in the all-star tribute to Roy Orbison - A Black and White Night. If I could way-back machine myself to any concert, this one would be on my shortlist, definitely. Look at that line-up. Wow! (Buy this DVD immediately if you don't already own it. It has my personal guarantee to amaze and beguile you.)

As he sings, you're innocent when you dream. Happy Birthday, Tom, and sweet dreams, folks...

Jazz Odyssey, Part 1: Sheets of Sound

I've decided to do a series of posts throughout the next few weeks and months about my favorite jazz musicians, performances, and recordings. What better place to begin than where it all started for me?

In 1960, John Coltrane recorded with his quartet an entire album of standards by Rogers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, and the Gershwins. I first heard Coltrane's landmark interpretation of "My Favorite Things" probably in the late 80s or early 90s. I had only a passing familiarity with The Sound of Music at the time, so I fortunately didn't know Julie Andrews' version initially. That's likely a good thing, given this biting lyric I first heard in 1994:

" 'My Favourite Things ' are playing
Again and again
But it's by Julie Andrews
And not by John Coltrane"
- Elvis Costello, "This is Hell"

(Maybe I just need to be liquored up and/or in the right crowd to enjoy her version. )

"My Favorite Things" was successful commercially and critically in its day. Gorgeous and hypnotic, hinting at the Eastern influences and direction Coltrane as well as many other jazz artists would take throughout that decade and beyond, this recording opened many ears. 30 or so years later, I was another lucky listener.

The Sacred and the Profane

One of the most iconic, resplendent buildings in DC turns 100 years old in 2007.

I went to the Washington National Cathedral this past weekend. We attended the Advent Lessons and Carols service. I was excited to visit again for a number of reasons, one of which is I'm about to read Ken Follet's World Without End, the recent sequel to his historical novel The Pillars of the Earth.

Later that same day, I saw not the first but arguably the most memorable country music outlaw: David Allan Coe. He was at the State Theatre in Falls Church. Despite its being a cold, rainy night, the faithful as well as curious onlookers like myself turned out to see ole' DAC.

The former "Masked Rhinestone Cowboy", who once lived in a hearse and later in a cave, didn't surge onstage astride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, spewing volcanic obscenities at his fans. No, this time, he instead shambled on and launched into "Jack Daniels, if you please" to raucous hoots and hollers. Sound system was a little rough, but it was a kick to watch him perform Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," popularized by Johnny Cash, the latter whom Coe was friendly with in the 1970s.

Perpetuating his undeniable redneck pedigree, Coe has walked his talk for decades. Cartoonish and crude, he's nevertheless a talented songwriter and performer of country standards. And how many folks can claim they wrote the immortal "Take This Job and Shove It"? Exactly one. And if that ain't country, I'll kiss your ass.

[Update: I just read in the Washington Post that Coe apparently split the gig five minutes after I did . (I was in line behind the author of this review at the State's ticket window, by the way. We both showed up a little after eight o'clock.) Good thing I finally saw him live, cause I bet he's never in this town again. ]

And speaking of country, here's my old friend Early Cuyler, whom I used to swim around with back in my hell-raising days. Very blue collar, working class Cephalopod.

This Film Should Be Played Loud!

The 30th annual Kennedy Center Honors were held here this past weekend in The District of Columbia. How meaningful can these actually be? I like Steve Martin and Brian Wilson well enough, sure. They're both quite talented, but anytime people pay attention long enough to acknowledge Martin Scorsese's greatness is especially fine with me. I think it's cool he received his long overdue Oscar the same year I was married.

Here's a sequence from Scorsese's 1978 concert film The Last Waltz. The Band and The Staples Singers, ladies and gentlemen, plus an impromptu Basement Tapes moment backstage with Richard, Rick, and Robbie. It doesn't get much better than this, folks:



Across the Potomac River at the Kennedy Center, in front of those fuddy duddy DC power elite who fill up the expensive seats at these things, I hope they screened some footage from Scorsese's brutal, infamous 1990 classic. One of the greatest films of all time:

"Oh, what a world...what a world!"

So Missouri didn't work out last night. And I'm definitely not in Kansas, either.

I'm watching the first part of Sci-Fi Channel's new miniseries Tin Man. It's a fetishized, twisted adaptation of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Pretty much everybody knows the story better from the beloved 1939 movie with Ray Bolger and Rufus Wainwright as the Scarecrow and Dorothy.

There are elements that are almost too clever and cute for their own good in this 2007 version, but I'm enjoying an imaginative interpretation. And how can you not like the adorable Zooey Deschanel in anything? Okay, maybe you can dislike her, but you're frankly just a damn crank if you do.

I used to manage a science museum back in college. We had a planetarium that featured laser light shows. Consequently, I have some genuine affection and admiration for Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I spent many weekends in the early 90s in a projection booth watching rays of red and blue dance through an inevitable rising cloud of pot smoke with that music featured.

Many people know of the Dark Side of the Rainbow, but how many have actually tried it? Well, I did with a few friends ten years ago. We waited for the third roar of the MGM lion, then I started the CD.

Dude...

I recall being somewhat awed when, after her house has been upended and whirled through a tornado to the strains of the appropriately named "Great Gig in the Sky"...



...Dorothy walks out into Oz and the next, most famous track on the album is perfectly sequenced to introduce the color of money:



"Us and Them" is probably my favorite Pink Floyd song of all, so let's go out with that as Dorothy eases on down the road:

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

Both my father-in-law and mother-in-law were at University of Missouri. He picked up a law degree and she received a master's degree in political science. Most importantly, they met there and eventually got married.

For the first time in 47 years, Mizzou is ranked number one in college football. If they win against Oklahoma, they can play for the BCS national title. But that's a big 12 if. The Sooners already beat them earlier in the fall. The Tigers were leading that game going into the fourth quarter, however, so it should be close tonight.

Beating Kansas last week probably made Mizzou's season, given their nasty rivalry. I was too concerned with (and eventually mildly embittered over) the Commonwealth Cup last weekend to pay close attention. We all fight our own battles...

Gwen's dad and I will watch. Gwen and her mom, I dunno. They'll probably make fun of us with either this or this on in another room.