Category Archives: Music

Rattled by the Rush

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I try not to get too nostalgic for the past. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking of a time—back before Google, and their quest to turn our brains into a hunk of Swiss cheese. Was it a better time? I don’t know. There were certainly positives. Oh, I know—thou shalt not speak evil of any technology! And believe it or not, there was life and a social scene before Facebook—arguably a richer one.

A reminder of that time came the other morning, listening to WMBR’s “Boomerang” program, sliding back into some 90s post-punk that I know and love. Erik Morrison is a DJ who once a week (on Tuesday mornings) spends an hour time-traveling back to the days before MP3 players,iTunes, and nearly everyone who is under the age of 25, walking around with earbuds jammed in their ears, oblivious to the world around them. Track lists mattered and artists cared about things like the sequence of 10 or more songs, crafted to fit alongside each other on an album. Granted, we’d transitioned from tapes to CDs, but indie rock still meant independent of corporate control. Obviously, that’s long gone and we’re not in Kansas (or Columbia, Missouri) anymore. Continue reading →

Longer Days and a Longer View

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The days are getting longer. Some snow actually melted, and a patch of grass showed up over the weekend. Hooray!

The grass is back!

The grass is back!

My week’s off to a patchwork start. Some cool stuff in the works that will end up appearing under my byline in a week or two. Something else that I’ve been pushing for years (yes, years!!) will making an appearance later in 2015, too.

What I’m learning about most of the stuff in my life is that taking a longer view is required. That’s hard because it’s not in my nature and hasn’t always been my experience to wait on things.

And let me close with a bit of a non sequitur. Continue reading →

Music by Year

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Another 12 months have passed. I recapped my reading during that period on Tuesday with my list of books. As I mentioned in that post, 2014 was a decent year for me as a writer with a new book, and host of bylined articles for a variety of publications.

When I’m writing, I like to listen to music—not always—but more often than not. What I enjoy listening to remains eclectic. I’m not sure I could assign a category to all of it. However, I’ve stayed true to a musical genre that I first latched onto following leaving behind theological structures that weren’t working for me. This was back in 1984. Then, my radio oasis was a commercial station in Chicago, WXRT, that played a pretty wide selection of music and bands. I first heard Husker Dü on their station, along with fellow Minneapolis rockers, the Replacements. Their late-night Friday night program, “The Big Beat,” opened me up to all kinds of new music with dissident elements, including Billy Bragg. Continue reading →

Record Stores and Reinvention

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Long before I had aspirations to take my writing to the next level, I was merely a writer hiding his writing under a bushel. Back then, records and record stores kept me going. Actually, it was less about record stores, and more about the music that record stores carried.

In the late 1980s, I returned with my young family to the place where my roots were the deepest, which also happened to be close enough to the WBOR radio tower to pull-in its meager radio signal, which emanated out from Brunswick for a 15-20 mile radius, barely reaching Durham, where we were living with my in-laws. The signal was slightly stronger on the Lisbon Falls side of the river where we moved waiting for our house to be built, occupying the downtown side of a duplex at 16 ½ Oak Street, one of Marcel Doyon’s many rental properties in my former hometown. This connected me to late 1980s college rock and the likes of They Might Be Giants, Lois Maffeo, The Fall, and The Replacements. A few years later, I became deeply affected by something called alt-country and the band Uncle Tupelo, as well as a host of bands on the long defunct Faye Records label out of another college town, Columbia, Missouri.
Continue reading →

Losing Scott Miller

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I’m sure much of my prattling on about music and my own music listening history seems irrelevant to most of those that stumble across the JBE. I really don’t know why that is.

At Lisbon High School, my friends and I all had tastes that ran counter to the Molly Hatchett, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eddie Money, and Meatloaf that most of our classmates were listening to. At the time, this difference and separation was a badge of superiority that we wore prominently. Now, I realize that musical tastes, much like food, are subjective. Continue reading →

Dirty Little Secret

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For as long as Miss Mary and I have been married (32 years this summer!!), we’ve had a television-based guilty pleasure. Actually, we didn’t have a Tee Vee for our first four years of marriage.

Once we got one, we usually found a television drama that captured our attention once a week, often for several seasons. A few of the past ones were St. Elsewhere, Thirty Something, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. Continue reading →

Get Funky

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It’s been a long week; government shutdowns, training to begin my end-of-the-year moonlighting, projects being finalized—sometimes you just have to end the week with a little funk.

When my sister and I were coming up, we had this expression we’d break out on one another. We’d say, “funk is toe jam.”  We’d laugh. I don’t know where the hell this came from. I’m sure we heard some singer talking about it, or we read it in Rolling Stone, or some other social arbiter of the times. Continue reading →

Music in the House

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Readers of this blog know that I love music. My musical tastes are predicated on many things, various influences, but generally center around rock and roll and the subsequent tributaries that branch out from that originally subversive shoot.

I love live music, but like many of us as we get older, going out and seeing  live rock and singer/songwriters doesn’t happen a fraction as often as it did for me in my 20s, 30s, and even into my early 40s. While not unfamiliar with house concerts and the movement of some artists to adopt this vehicle for playing out and even touring, I had never been to one. That would all change on Tuesday night. Continue reading →

Music in my Life-Silkworm

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Silkworm: Michael Dahlquist, Tim Midgett, Andy Cohen.

Silkworm: Michael Dahlquist, Tim Midgett, Andy Cohen.

Back in the days before interwebs and free music downloads, people went out to venues and saw bands play. Sometimes these bands were obscure, hinting at danger and the unknown.

There was a place in Portland on outer Forest Avenue called Raoul’s Roadside Attraction. Some of you remember it, I know you do. You may have seen some big time artist, playing in a small, intimate setting, and like me, you might have gotten to talk to your music idol like I did, when I met Jorma Kaukonen; that was probably after my journey with God in some place called Hammond, which seemed more like a post-industrial hell, than heaven. Continue reading →

Music in My Car

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Mogwai, The Heartless Bastards, Kurt Vile, Jeff Buckley, Todd Rundgren.

Mogwai, The Heartless Bastards, Kurt Vile, Jeff Buckley, Todd Rundgren.

Music has always been a big part of the Jim Baumer Experience. Every blog I’ve ever maintained at least occasionally brushed up against music, especially music with a big beat, albeit, rock and roll.

The term rock and roll isn’t what it used to be. When the first electric guitars got plugged in and amplification changed modern music, rock was a rebel yell into the conservative abyss and a kick in the teeth to the status quo. Now? Not so much. Continue reading →