Category Archives: Music

America (Never Been)

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I’m a fan of Car Seat Headrest. I have been for a couple of years.

When Mark was out on his final walk, I emailed him about the band during October, early in his trip:

Hi Mark,

Did you think the story about Yo La Tengo and the Mets was funny? I did and got such a laugh reading it last night.

Mom and I have been reading at night, and not watching much TV. Can’t say I miss it at all.

Last night, was reading, while also listening to some Car Seat Headrest from their show they did at KEXP in 2014, I think.

They have so many great songs. Will Toledo is one of those prolific songwriters who got his start making music in his bedroom and releasing it on Bandcamp at first.

The song “America” made me think of your trip. Will’s writing from the perspective of seeing the country from life on the road, most likely in a tour van. The first line goes,.

“You can drive across the whole thing in four days…if you want it,” which again is the time when you’re driving. Still, there’s this sense of America being out there if you really want to see it, which you are doing on foot, literally!

Anyways that’s some of my “wisdom” or at least thoughts, this morning.

Nearly four weeks meat and dairy-free. God, I feel so good physically and my mind seems clearer. Really enjoying Michael Greger’s How Not To Die. Reading about eggs and chicken and the risk of salmonella in the chapter, “How Not To Die from Infections” last night was like a jolt—chicken and eggs exponentially increase your risk of salmonella, which is a serious infection that can kill you. He also talks about plants and how they boost your immunity. Great stuff!!

Mom says you are speaking at a school? That’s awesome!

Well, godspeed to you today as you journey forward.

Love you!

-Dad

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Musical Fruit

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There was a bus trip to Jay in 1978, to an away football game. We’d smuggled a cassette recorder and a bulky, homemade speaker aboard. Once we rolled out of the parking lot, we hit play and began blasting Robin Trower Live and Fresh by Raspberries (no definite article, either) on the ride up. Me and my friends were the only ones who appreciated the tunes. But man, oh man, did we love Raspberries (Trower was pretty good, too).

The Raspberries were a 1970s thing.

 

Too Rolling Stoned.

It wasn’t our fault that most of LHS has no taste in early 70s rock, or for that matter, something other than the AOR schlock that got played to death on the radio at the time. I was always happy getting a steady diet of the kind of power pop that Eric Carmen and the boys put out from 1970 to 1975. Raspberries weren’t obscure by any means: they had hits—but like so many bands from that era (think Big Star’s #1 Record,) their record company never quite got the marketing and distribution ironed-out. Continue reading →

Ambition

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Sufjan Stevens once set out to record 50 albums about all 50 U.S. states, at least he made an announcement about his intent. According to an interview, this was all a “promotional gimmick,” a joke of sorts, and one he didn’t have any inclination of completing. He did finish two of them.

The first time I heard about Stevens’ ambitious proposal was from Mark. Stevens may have been the genesis of his own ambitious plan to publish “50 books in 50 weeks” project. He actually completed his.

Project success, or not, I still like Stevens as an artist. I think Illinois (2005) is one of my favorite discs in my collection. “Casimir Pulaski Day” is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. It’s even sadder, now.

From the Bible of the music world I live in, Pitchfork, Stevens’ music is described this way, from a review of his latest records, “Carrie & Lowell” (the names of his mother and stepdad),

Stevens has always written personally, weaving his life story into larger narratives, but here his autobiography, front and center, is itself the grand history. The songs explore childhood, family, grief, depression, loneliness, faith, rebirth in direct and unflinching language that matches the scaled-back instrumentation. There are Biblical references, and references to mythology, but most it is squarely Stevens and his family.

Maybe the reason I like his music is because it’s about life.

Oh, and Pitchfork gave it a 9.3 (on a scale of 10). Others like narratives drawn from life, too.

Who Taught You To Live Like That?

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When I was typing out the title to this post, I accidentally pecked out “who taught you to lie like that.” I had to chuckle because I was thinking that very thing this morning while ruminating about a certain president who resembles a Cheeto, and the prevaricators who carry his water.

But I don’t want to write about him (today).

I blogged about emotional intelligence the other day. Another topic that remains in heavy rotation in my thinking.

Canadian bands and artists have colored my musical palette for quite some time. I think it dates back to a trip to Montreal that our unit of three made back in the early 1990s. I ended up finding a cassette tape by The Tragically Hip (RIP Gord Downie). I became a fanboy from then on for their north-of-the-border take on classic rock.

I finally got to see “The Hip” play live at The State Theater. There were probably 500 people there on a hot August night in ’98 to see Canadian rock royalty perform. The show wasn’t heavily promoted. Mary and I learned about it when a plane flew over Old Orchard Beach pulling a streamer that said, “Tragically Hip at State Theater” that night. I said to her, “we should go.” And we did. It’s probably one of five shows we’ve attended together in our 35 years of marriage. What our pursuit of live music lacks in quantity, I think it more than makes up for in quality, though: Cheap Trick (with UFO opening), Dave Mason, The Grateful Dead, Lucinda Williams (The Bottle Rockets), and The Tragically Hip. Continue reading →

Grief in the Light

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While it’s okay to talk about trivial matters—food, beer, and what restaurants we like; songs and bands; maybe why Tom Brady is better than Ben Roethlisberger—some argue, we mustn’t discuss the weightier issues confronting us—like death and the attendant fall-out from grief and loss.

There was a tacit understanding when I was coming up that certain topics were notably off-limits in mixed company—the old adage, always refrain from “politics and religion.”

Apparently that’s not the case any longer. Political thoughts are offered with little regard to how well-framed and supported they are by logic or fact. Then, there is no shortage of those ready to offer (inflict?) prayers on your behalf (even if they never seem to be “answered”). So, the old taboos no longer apply—unless it’s talking about death and the subsequent way it affects the lives of those left behind. At least that’s how it seems to me, more than a year out from the event that changed the lives of Mary and me.

A few weeks ago, I heard a track on Jeffrey Davison’s Saturday morning “Shrunken Planet” program on WFMU. It was by a band listed on the playlist as Bipolar Explorer. Something about the song, “Lost Life,” was evocative and then Davison mentioned how the album where he pulled the cut from, was a reflection on the death of their singer, Summer Serafin.

The band has the requisite page on Bandcamp and they’re on Wikipedia. I found additional information about them and Summer. She was a beautiful and talented actress who died all-too-young. Her band mate and love of her life, Michael, has soldiered on, making music that recognizes how grief and loss leaves those who loved the person who is gone, forever affected (and afflicted). It’s about death and what follows for those left behind, yet, I don’t find the music of Bipolar Explorer morbid, or in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I ordered “Sometimes in Dreams,” and it is a haunting and profound exploration of lost love in musical form.

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Thoughts from the Blizzard

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Is being rigid and dogmatic a hedge against uncertainty and chaos? I think for some.

Society is awash with those convinced that they’re right. Like the guy in Sabattus. Another document fetishist—Constitution or Bible, it’s always the same—these guys (most of them are guys, white ones, too) are certain that some ancient document holds the key forward—or rather, backward.

I spent a little time this morning attempting to earn a shekel or two. Most apparently were like me—“working” from home. Oh, there were the hearty few, like Miss Mary, who went off into the white falling from the sky to visit some customers. She’s a trooper that girl.

By 11:00, I decided to call it “a day,” and hopped on my stationary bike to listen to a podcast. Unfortunately, the one I picked was annoying and I decided to go to my default, which is music.

Another March Northeaster in Maine.

Life isn’t predictable, nor is it ordered by some higher power. But, if you must tell yourself it is, please leave me out of your conversation.

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What Does It All Mean?

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Life now has a definitive before and after. What existed prior to tragedy is now gone—not in the sense that all of it’s disappeared entirely—but threads connecting me to that time have been forever altered.

If you are not familiar with passages through the dark, you probably won’t understand. That’s okay. All of us will at some point lose someone we love, though. All loss isn’t the same, either. Therese Rando posits that sudden, unanticipated death leaves those left behind traumatized due primarily from the psychological assault brought on by a death like Mark’s.

I continually run into people who don’t know my story. Why should they? It’s not like I’m hosting a reality TV program or anything. Of course, being the self-oriented people that we are, it’s easy to assume that everyone knows that my son was killed and expect them to acknowledge it. What’s interesting to me after slightly more than a year of acting out a common scene, is how people do react when they do find out. It runs the gamut from basically not acknowledging it (sort of like “oh,” and then moving on), offering some version of the platitude,” I’m sorry for your loss,” and then, there are those who engage with you in a human and empathetic fashion. This group is the smallest one. Continue reading →

Combat Rock

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It’s difficult sitting here in 2018 Trumpworld, recalling how another hated politician spawned a musical revolution. But back in 1975, when Great Britain’s longest-serving post-WWII prime minister took office, the fury of the then-nascent punk scene hadn’t yet been funneled her way. Punks’ anger and rage found an able target in Margaret Thatcher just two years later.

Thatcher climbed atop her conservative perch, two years prior to the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, the Sex Pistols’ punk “shot heard round” the music world. Britain would never be the same, as Thatcher (much like Reagan in America), turned her attention to dismantling much of the country’s social infrastructure. And Trump seems hellbent on scrapping what remains of America’s.

While the Sex Pistols received the lion’s share of attention from the media for their outlandish “manners,” sneering frontman, Johnny Rotten, and McClaren-esque media savvy (not to mention their shot across the bow, “God Save the Queen”), it was a group of working class twenty-somethings from Brixton who embraced an incendiary ethic of rage, channeled through punk sensibilities and three-minute song structures, that would later evolve and incorporate reggae, rap, dub, and funk, demonstrating that punk could be more than three chords structures, played at breakneck speed. Continue reading →

Fire, Then Fury

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Michael Wolff has made a career of skewering powerful people, newsmakers like Rupert Murdoch. That is his journalistic M.O. You can look it up. To expect anything different from him re: President Trump, is mistake number one in your thinking.

A profile of Wolff was written back in 2004 for New Republic. The writer, Michelle Cottle, wrote that he “is the quintessential New York creation, fixated on culture, stye, buzz, and money, money, money.” Perhaps better, Wolff might be a quintessential American creation of sorts, mirroring America’s obsession with flash, trash, and cultural detritus. A writer “willing to dish the dirt.” Of course, it’s dangerous to hold the mirror up to others—especially if the mirror reveals their idol/president/emperor is a cartoon cutout. It pisses them off, too. Say what you will about Mr. Wolff: he’s been laughing all the way to the bank for a while.

Since Wolff’s pretty well-known in what he does, the fact that the current handlers of Mr. Trump, and Trump himself, must have known that Wolff was going to write what he saw and what he thought he saw. And yet, they feign indignation. Didn’t something tip you off when he was playing a fly-on-the-wall, talking to a gaggle of inner-circle cronies? He spoke to Trump, too, for God’s sake!

Michael Wolff on the Trump White House.

That’s why for me, it rings incredibly disingenuous when ideological Kool-Aid-drinkers get indignant about Wolff’s book. Kind of lame, in my way of thinking. Continue reading →

Could You Be The One?

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Back when life was simpler and a lot less sad, I went out to see bands because I thought music might save my life. Music as a life saver? Please do tell.

Lot’s been written about Mark by me and others. In death, there is a tendency to enlarge one’s life, or attribute qualities to people in the dead person’s life that may or may not have been present. In Mark’s case, he was the real deal. I did my best as a dad and things turned out pretty well until last January.

In 1986, I was simply a father and husband with a three-year-old son. We were living on a dead-end street in Chesterton, Indiana.

Mark had a tricycle and was making a few friends in the neighborhood. I worked at a prison and Mary had just started working breakfast at Wendy’s prior to me heading off to the med room at Westville Correctional Facility.

Mark and dad playing in the snow [1986]

Things were looking up for our little family, trying to scrape together enough money to return to Maine. I also had aspirations of being something more than an hourly wage slave. It would take me another 15 years to recognize that the writing muse was calling. Unable to recognize its beckoning however, caused considerable frustration and angst in my mid-20s. Continue reading →