Dang. It's been a long time.

As I've noted in the past (probably not here, but I have blogs you've never seen, y'know?), when I was a freshman in high school (somewhere back around the Pleistocene Era), I was assigned for one nine-weeks term, to write every day in a journal. When I started it, I wrote in it every day -- that lasted a couple of weeks. I sat down and did the week's worth of entries every Saturday after that, for at least three or four weeks. The day before the journal was due to be turned in, I did the remainder of the entries all in one evening. Nobody was the wiser.

The teacher of my freshman comp class confessed all she'd done was count the pages. She didn't read them, she just wanted to know that we'd done the exercise.

Web journals (this isn't, strictly, a blog -- I don't always link outside the entry, and I think that's the qualification) ain't any dogdamned different than my freshman comp assignment. There's nobody posting, commenting or grading me, so this goes on the back-back-back burner most of the time.

Since, by and large, this particular journal has been devoted to music I like, I'll relate a few anecdotes about the crazy perimenopausal music habits of someone who was born just a RCH after Kennedy died.

As of this date, I have 1,082 individual cuts in my 'big' ITunes library. I have a second, more focused pop directory that contains just shy of 400 songs. Once you get past the Todd Rundgren/Utopia and the Cheap Trick, most of the stuff I've paid for from ITunes rests in the pop directory. Largely, they're songs I remember hearing on the radio by people whose catalogs weren't ever worth buying -- some of them are one-hit wonders, some well-respected bands who only had a song or two that appealed to me.

In recent days, I've been fetishizing a song by a band from Detroit called 707. I was perfectly willing to pay for their lone hit song, I Could Be Good For You. In context, it's probably mostly a forgettable song, but it was 707's biggest hit. It's kind of like The Kings' Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide, I guess -- they were probably a killer band, but a combination of professional and promotional missteps, and the quasi-depression in the music biz in the era (the song was originally released on their eponymous first album in 1980) rendered them more or less a one-hit wonder. Oh, they actually had another semi-hit with a song called Megaforce, which sounds like some kind of jingoistic pro-military anthem that would have slid in handily in any soundtrack to any Tom (Xenu) Cruise movie from the era, and may have been, for all I know. It didn't hold a candle to I Could Be Good For You, I know that much.

Probably not, though, since a lot of soundtrack albums for jingoistic pro-military Tom Cruise movies are available on ITunes. I don't know where you can actually pay a nominal fee to download ICBGFY. You see, the first album is totally out of print. The re-release that was done somewhat later, which includes the first two albums, is not available on ITunes. I tried searching a couple of other download services, but no dice.

There's another song from that era, released in (I think) 1982, from a Chicago band called The Kind. The song was called I Got You. It was a great tune; a real power pop gem. I had the album, for a while -- it was called 'Pain And Pleasure,' and the song with that title was good, too -- but regrettably, I sold it in a leaner time, during my first marriage, when I was freakin' lucky to get the $2 I got for it (I'd only paid about $6 for it new, it was a cutout at some Midwestern record store or other). The Kind have, apparently, disappeared from anything even resembling the event horizon in pop/mainstream rock music.

Hey, do you suppose The Kind was a marijuana reference? I honestly don't know -- that wasn't one of the euphemisms we used for it back in the early '80s, where I come from, and though I ain't from Chi (and honestly wasn't much of a pothead), I am ostensibly from a Midwestern state. Who can say?

This bugs me. The songs by both these bands are as good as the ones from bands I was able to go to ITunes and download in thirty seconds, for less than $2. They're no more obscure than some of the other stuff I've booted down (legitimately) from ITunes.

Now, I was one of those 'tweener pop kidz who bought 45 RPM singles back in 'the day,' because I wasn't willing (and, as tight as money was in the early eighties, able) to pony up for an album by a band who might have got lucky with one single and everything else they did sucked bilge. On occasion I did pay for an album by a band that wasn't as good as the single (I'm looking at you, David Diamond -- The Kings didn't really ever surpass Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide), but for the most part, I got at least two good songs out of any album I bought at Camelot Music back then. Even Glass Moon managed to get both Smoker At 17 and their not too bad cover of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill out of their one (doubtless disappointing) chance at stardom.

There was another single that floated in my head for months. Snatches, I mean -- lyrics, or a riff, they'd come back to me when I was drinking or on the edge of sleep, but I could not remember for the life of me who had recorded the song. This one almost hurt, because I bailed out on the band after the album the song was on, and was never sufficiently attached to them to buy anything much but a used vinyl copy of the first album. That's why after trolling lyrics on Google for freakin' ever, in a Napa-induced fit of inspiration one night I finally managed to shovel up the fact that the song I was looking for was Back Where You Belong, and the band who'd performed it was, of all people, Foreigner. It was from 'Double Vision,' an album I didn't deign to buy mostly because I was so freaking sick of the title single within mere weeks of the album's release, I couldn't have imagined wanting to own it.

There you go -- one of my fetish tunes wound up being a quasi-single (I had the luck in the early '80s of having been within the broadcast range of one of those small-market Midwestern radio experiences of hearing one of the dying FM-rock radio genre's best stations ever in existence, which would play off-approval singles) from one of the best known albums by one of the most universally known bands of all time. My sig other had never heard the song. I downloaded it (for the nominal $1.99 ITunes usually charges), and played it for him, and it was completely new to him. The SO being a year older by the skin of your teeth, it wasn't purely timing. The song just didn't get the exposure it deserved.

It's a bitchin' tune. So is the 707 song, but regrettably, it ain't available at ITunes. Neither is I Got You. And no, I'm not mistaking the artist on The Kind tune for Split Enz -- this is an entirely different snipe of a tune.

I guess at some point I'll have to break down and start haunting used record stores (or CD, since the re-release of 707's first and second albums is post-compact-disc-era). I will manage to insert that song in my uber-pop directory, by hook or by crook.

The Kind -- well, I don't hold on hope much for that one. The album was the only one they did, and it's out of print, and they didn't have a ginormous hit with either that or Pain And Pleasure, so that would be a worthless crusade.

I'm big on useful crusades, but useless ones? Nah.

Did I miss a linguistic paradigm shift?

A couple of years ago, I mean.

At what point did the word 'cornhole' cease to mean jamming something up one's anus and start to mean a game where people toss beanbags at a piece of plywood?

You're driving along in the Midwest, and you know people are pretty freaking warped, it's never been any secret ... but you see a sign on the side of the road, it looks like black shoe polish on cardboard.

It says 'CORNHOLE GAMES' with an arrow pointing back some forsaken, weed-lined road.

Expedition Sailor turned to Fellow Traveler and said, "that would have gotten somebody arrested when we were in high school, advertising anal sex like that. What's the world coming to?"

Apparently, it's worse than that -- cornhole is now the name of some dim recreational activity. It's probably supposed to be a replacement for horseshoes, since most of the hicks I grew up around couldn't play horseshoes without managing to maim themselves somehow. You should have seen them with Jarts. A beanbag and a piece of plywood are much safer for those with tertiary syphilis, there's no question.

I can't help it, though -- every time I see 'CORNHOLE GAMES' I wonder which time Mom and Dad and Billy and Johnny drive back some road and find Mongo standing at the end with a handful of tenpenny nails and no pants.

Oh, yes -- that will be a 'CORNHOLE GAME' to end all cornhole games.

No meese this time.

But I'm just going to quasi free associate, since I'm not doing the ITunes random xnumber of songs. Just blowing.

I was heading in to do a couple of hours of work today -- I go in on Friday or Saturday during non-official office hours to pick up slack and do things like move files and do cleaning that I really hate to do in $35 chinos I ordered from Land's End, that sort of thing. While I was driving in, Sirius played the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend The Night Together. I know, I know -- there's a lot of shit hung off that one. Ed Sullivan asked them not to sing 'let's spend the night together' (the title of the freaking song, mind you), and to sing 'let's spend some time together,' which they sort of pretended to do, and whatever.

This isn't about the lyrics to the song, so much. It's about that break in the middle. That snarky and yet quasi-reverent middle eight from the song that is both paean and parody of the Beach Boys.

No, really -- listen to it! Tell me it ain't!

I laughed my ass off when I heard that, in the car. I'd heard the song about a million times, over the years, but I'd never noticed that the Stones had actually hip-checked Brian Wilson. What a riot.

Another song from roughly that era that, when I realized what was going on, I damned near had to pull the car over to laugh is Flo & Eddie's So Happy Together. Okay, it's actually the Turtles. Still, I'd heard the song a blue million times when I was a kid, on the radio, and the real mechanics of the song hadn't ever hit me until about a dozen years ago. I was driving home from work and had the classic rock station on, and they played the song.

Everybody thought Every Breath You Take, the Police song off 'Synchronicity,' was a stalker song. You'd have thought it was the first stalker song ever written. Well, shit -- Screamin' Jay Hawkins wrote what may well have been the first rock and roll stalker song with I Put A Spell On You, and Every Breath You Take doesn't really give that one a run for its money in any credible way. It's a midtempo pop song with fairly laid-back lyrics, and only the 'big picture' of the song really gives you a taste of what an obsessive, potentially dangerous set of lyrics it is.

The Turtles did that one one better, though, I hate to tell Gordon. Happy Together doesn't even sound all that much like a compulsive stalker love song until you really pay attention to the mechanics of what's going on with the music behind the lyrics. The choruses are nice and sunny, 'I can't see me lovin' nobody but you for all my life,' you know the drill. It's the minor-key, partly-cloudy verses that made me want to pull over and pound on the headliner of whichever Toyota I was driving at the time. Happy Together is a stalker tune, honey -- listen to what's happening in the music behind the lyrics. When you see the 'Imagine me and you -- I do. I think about you day and night' lyrics set against the troubled, diminished/minor chords, it all makes sense.

Well, that and the fact that Flo & Eddie worked with Frank Zappa, and therefore anything that seems to be unalloyed sentiment must, therefore, be considered suspect. Not that Frank and Gail didn't manage to make a marriage work around the road life for a very long time, but Zappa was not the kind of guy to get all mired down in sentiment.

I'm with that. Sometimes, the best relationships consist of laughing at the most puerlie expressions of the things you're feeling. Sometimes, the laughing is the best of it, and if you can laugh at just about anything, that means you can talk about just about anything, too.

I don't know. It just seems like taking anything too seriously is asking for it.

TAFN

Brief intermission from music posts. A moose bit my sister.

Pun sort of intended. While the expedition partner and I share many of the same musical experiences, our movie literacy is pretty divergent. I grew up so far out in the boondocks, it was a real production to go anywhere to see a first-run movie before I was about eleven years old. The first first-run movie I remember seeing, in fact, was 'Star Wars' in 1977.

The other half lived nearer to movie theaters, growing up in the burbs, so he saw more movies. Not necessarily better ones, mind you, but more.

Off and on, we both get the bug to expose each other to movies we remember, whether good or bad, from years ago. The first time I tried this was not a raging success -- 'Dark Star' isn't the movie you want to offer as a waterline of your taste, y'know? I mean, it's a hoot. It's John Carpenter's first movie, after all, and it has hippies and aliens and suspense. Only problem is, if you don't smoke hash, the movie comes off as what it was -- a low budget science fiction camp epic about four personality impaired nerds stuck on a space ship for twenty years. With an alien who looks like a Hippity Hop or a giant version of one of the fungi we've seen in the yard the past couple of years, pressing up out of old tree stumps like a creepy dildo.

Anyway, the next serious recommendation was a little more satisfying -- 'The President's Analyst,' a James Coburn (rest in peace) vehicle that was a real howler in light of the current governmental paranoia and invasions of individual citizens' privacy. For some bizarre reason, I don't think people in the late sixties would have thought The Phone Company should be tapping their phones and listening in on even the aggregates of their conversations, or else this movie never would have been made. It certainly wouldn't have been as good a joke as it was in this movie, at least, if people genuinely had believed their conversations and behaviors were being pawed over by members of their government. Cult movie or not, it skimmed a zeitgeist that wasn't just paranoid UN-haters. Back then, everybody hated 'the government' and 'The Phone Company,' not just canaries in the coal mine.

Tonight, we watched 'Westworld,' which I'd recalled sucking a bit when I saw it, back in the late seventies. Sometimes, we mellow, and as we age we can find nuance in movies that we didn't find originally, or at least enough camp value to make them laughable.

'Westworld' still sucks.

When you spend the last fifteen minutes of a movie asking each other why Richard Benjamin's character doesn't do ... well, anything much but run around, the suck quotient rises so high you start yelling "grab a weapon, wouldja? Jeez! How many times does that bastard have to show up on your ass before you realize the last one didn't work?" ... it sucks.

So I've added 'A Boy And His Dog,' 'Omega Man,' 'Damnation Alley' (with the caveat that the movie kind of sucked) and 'THX 1138' to the list. If I must sit through bad early to mid seventies SF, it might as well at least be based on well-written original stories, however badly executed.

As much as I hate "Chuck-Chuck-Bo-Buck-Banana-Fana-Fo ... uh ... you'll have to get out," (bonus points to anybody who can pinpoint where I stole this routine) Heston, I'll credit that Omega Man was actually a pretty decent campy science fiction movie. Of course, so was 'Soylent Green,' if only for the interminable jokes about Soylent Green being people. It was even concept-checked by Steven Colbert's voiced character, Phil Ken Sebben, on 'Harvey Birdman,' only instead of Soylent Green it was the cafeteria's baba ghanoush. One of the reasons I actually cried real tears when Phil Hartman died -- that SNL sketch he did based on that scene was pure genius, one of the funniest things I ever saw on that show once the original cast all left to make progressively less successful movies, become some variety or other of assholes or die of drug overdoses. Or else be Bill Murray.

Footnote -- 'Westworld' can be dumped, steaming and sparking, squarely at the feet of global warming denier Michael Crichton, whose last worthwhile effort was, in my opinion, 'The Andromeda Strain.'

Though I never actually saw the movie all the way through, I also threw 'Rancho Deluxe' into the mix. It isn't science fiction, it's just Lebowski-type gooniness. Oh, yeah -- we'll probably rent 'The Big Lebowski' at some point in the near future, too. I'm sure we'll both kick ourselves for not having seen it years ago.

I hate seeing movies in the theater. You can't pause them to get up and piss, and for the most part, you can't have a glass of wine (or three, if the movie sucks, CF: Westworld) while you do so. I think I developed bizarre anxiety attacks when seeing movies while I was in a period of serious emotional turmoil, and I've never quite got over it. Sitting in a theater demands a really captivating movie, for me, or I start worrying about shit I can't do anything about and stop watching the movie.

Yeah, I'm a freak. I'm guessing the prior posts where I made arguments in favor of bands like Foreigner and Zebra (granted only for single songs by either of them) probably already convinced you, if you know who they are. I never really minded being a freak, for that matter -- what the hell kind of boring conformist makes a judgment like that, anyhow?

Exactly.

Hasta!

In addition to old, I am profligate.

And busy. Without going into sufficient personal detail to give much away, work got blowed up in a tsunami of chaos a couple of months ago, and everything's still staggering around. I went from doing twenty hours in four days a week to doing thirty-five hours in the same four days, and throwing in a couple of hours elsewhere to make full-time. And there still are weeks when there's work left on my freakin' desk.

I don't want to bitch about work here, though, I have other outlets for that. Work is about as far from arts and music as anything I can imagine, for that matter, and that was the original point of starting this particular outlet. Just briefly explaining to my nonexistent fan base why I ain't posted nuttin' in almost two months.

I suppose since it involves Todd, I should make a remark about the New Cars. All I've seen so far is the quasi-new single, "Not Tonight," on Leno. As someone remarked elsewhere, it reminded me greatly of Utopia minus Willie and Roger. I mean, it's half the old Cars and half Utopia. Not that I don't appreciate any chance I can get to see Kasim Sulton perform -- I even saw him when he was in the Blackhearts, backing up Joan Jett in 1990. Well, okay -- Cheap Trick also were on the bill, or the odds are we wouldn't have ponied up for the ticket price. I love Kaz, but I wouldn't have paid what we paid to see Kingdom Come and Joan Jett, without the added impetus of the Rockford gang.

My brudda's already bought tickets for the show they're scheduled to play in our neck of the woods. The significant other Expedition Sailor and I have not purchased said tickets yet, though I'm not sure if it's just pure inertia. The show will probably be great. Todd still can sing the paint off the side of a Chrysler. Kaz is a better bassist every time I see/hear him. And we actually found the motivation to purchase the entry fee for Dwight Yoakam. I've loved Todd's stuff for over twenty years.

Gofigger.

I don't know. I guess there's some rebellious part of me that says this whole New Cars detour is really just a way of bankrolling his Roth IRA so Michelle and the Toddclone don't starve when he's past earning a living. I don't mind that, don't get me wrong -- on a personal level, it's fine if Todd's trying to put the Harvard entry fees in the bank for his larva to go to college when Todd himself may or may not be around to earn it anymore. That's good, progressive thinkin' on the man's part, and I'm all for that kind of thinking on the part of breeders everywhere ... but I don't feel compelled to finance it anymore. I've bought most of what Todd's recorded and released under his name, over the years. I've liked at least two-thirds of it, which is as good or better than I can say for any other artist I ever "went catalog" over, including Cheap Trick.

It just smells funny.

I don't even feel good about admitting that. I worry I'm becoming judgmental in my old age, or at least quick to judge. At the same time, I don't see any freakin' reason I should buy something I have a feeling is going to be unsatisfying to me esthetically, or even go so far as to squick me out with its transparently commercial aspirations. I want to be wrong.

I SOOOOOO want to be wrong, you can't imagine.

And yet I'm really much more interested in the new songs the 'Mats are supposed to have on the album that's to be released shortly, here.

Don't get me wrong -- a Utopia reunion? Road trip to Toronto! Chicago! Whatever. I'd do that in a New York minute. But maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that I lost interested in The Cars not long after Candy, Oh! and I just don't give a fat shit anymore. There were perhaps three or four songs from that album on that I care if I ever hear again. I put the Cars in the same cultural niche, for my own tastes, as Foreigner. The early stuff they did that I liked, I really, really liked.
The rest of it just didn't reliably do it for me.

I love ya', Todd, and the same goes for Kaz, but I just don't know that I can justify the ticket price for my local venue to see you cover "Let The Good Times Roll." Especially when I don't know how long after that song was originally recorded I'd have paid the entry vig to see Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr play it.

Man, I feel like such an infidel. I just can't get my enthusiasm behind it at all.

I want a couple new 'Mats songs and a new Sloan album. Because somewhere between the two, I'm convinced that's where the agnostic's line on heaven lies. And heaven lies.

Fixing a hole

When I was a teenager in the late '70s and early '80s, relying fairly heavily on FM radio for new music, there was a DJ who did the evening shift on a formerly kickass rock station in Cincinnati (WEBN, which was originally owned by the Wood family, then Randy Michaels started Jacor with the money, which merged with Clear Channel, and now it sucks), named Frank Johnson, who used to call Cheap Trick 'the Sears Beatles.'

I can't really tell you whether it was intended for mocking, irony, left-handed praise ... they were from around Chicago, where the Sears Tower is, and they never pretended the British Invasion wasn't an enormous influence on their songwriting and sound, so mocking or not, it was appropriate. It would have been an enormous lie (kind of like Tori Amos claiming she never heard Kate Bush when she started doing ... well, stuff that sounded exactly like Kate Bush). The only thing that monicker leaves out is the fact that Cheap Trick also were the 'Sears' Move/ELO, Kinks, Badfinger, occasionally Who, and once in a while, at least live, Rolling Stones. Rick Nielsen is a more adept songwriter than to, more than occasionally, be guilty of outright pastiche -- perhaps on the Move/ELO covers. Otherwise, he (and, on occasion, Zander and Petersson) did a creditable job of playing starlings and borrowing the things they wanted to buff up a more Midwestern U.S. version of the stuff, but being fairly original otherwise.

I think I've mentioned before that my older sister, who was 'of age' to really get into British Invasion first-wave stuff like the Stones, Kinks and Beatles, used to play 45s all the time; that I learned the lyrics to I Wanna Hold Your Hand when I was still wearing diapers. There also were singles like the Stones' Get Off My Cloud and Satisfaction, the Kinks' Well Respected Man, and some of the lesser lights like Gerry and the Pacemakers' Ferry Cross The Mersey and Gary Lewis and the Playboys' This Diamond Ring. I think my favorite Beatles single was We Can Work It Out -- I still love that one.

My foundation in popular music, therefore, was BI power pop and the stuff that borrowed from it, to various degrees, down the line. I first heard Cheap Trick when the single for Voices went on the jukebox at the little lunch dive across from my small town high school, circa '79 or '80. That was after '...At Budokan,' and I'll be honest -- there isn't much on 'Budokan' I prefer to the studio versions. I'd already been through this with Peter Frampton, my first passionate attachment to something my sister didn't listen to a decade before I discovered it. When I started buying Frampton's earlier solo albums -- and after my sister married, I discovered my brother-in-law also liked Frampton and loaned me cassette copies, after which I scraped together my allowance to buy vinyl copies for myself -- I realized that unless you'd been to a concert, often live albums lacked something. In retrospect, thirty years later, they're like wanking -- a pale version of the excitement of actually seeing the band, and only useful if you've already seen them live and can use the live album to invoke memories of the show. I've seen Cheap Trick several times since then, though, and I still don't like 'Budokan' much. I even got to see Frampton a couple of summers ago, after thirty years of liking a lot of his stuff, and '...Comes Alive' still doesn't hold a candle, for me, to the 'Something's Happening' studio album.

Frampton doesn't really count as British Invasion, I guess -- he was a hair too late (no pun intended) to pass for British Invasion, and most of the projects he was in, including solo ones, really borrowed more from American garage rock, southern boogie rock and blues than British stuff. It's kind of funny, actually -- The Small Faces did one of the most quintessentially British pop singles ever, Itchycoo Park, but Steve Marriott was all southern boogie/blues when he put together Humble Pie. Wait -- Lowell George did a lot of British Invasion derivative stuff when he was recording as Lowell George and The Factory, too. I wonder if it's a virus?

British Invasion bands also often were influenced by American blues, though there's a lot more Buddy Holly than B.B. King in the Beatles and the Kinks than there was in Humble Pie or anything Frampton did later. I think Frampton qualifies more as a mainstream rock guy, really, at least post-Pie. The Beatles pulled in other American popular music influences than simply blues, though -- hell, Ringo even sang a cover of Buck Owens's Act Naturally, and I understand George Harrison also liked American roots music, beyond what came through in Buddy Holly's work. Harrison might have been the tertiary songwriter for the Beatles, overshadowed by McCartney and Lennon in sheer volume if not necessarily quality, but his guitar playing on the stuff carried his influences through their songs, presumably, even when he didn't write them. There are lots of power pop songs with chicken-picked solos in their catalog, in other words.

My next great passion for BI influenced power pop was Todd Rundgren. I heard a retrospective of his work on FM radio one night around the summer of 1983 (probably on a local public radio station, since for some reason WEBN never played him after 1976, nor did its sterling competition in that era, 96-Rock, a much better station than WEBN ever will be again). It was around the time 'The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect' came out, and I got a quick primer in his stuff in about an hour. There is no thinner gloss to place over British Invasion pastiche than the one Nazz put on it -- though the Chad-and-Jeremyesque Gonna Cry Today belies the fact that they, too wanted something more than to simply be a Beatles cover band. The Nazz version of Hello It's Me didn't hold a candle to Todd's re-recording of it on 'Something ... Anything?' but did mark at least an effort to wander beyond cadging Beatles guitar riffs and vocal production. Todd has said he wrote it in half an hour on the bus while touring. I don't know if it's true, but his life is pretty strange -- I can't imagine he has a lot of motivation to make that kind of shit up.

Don't even make me talk about Meridian Leeward.

Todd broke away from that whole esthetic, largely, when he released 'A Wizard - A True Star!' around '74, though. There's some Beatlesque stuff on it, but frankly it compares as much with Zappa and California psychedelic pop and early American progressive rock as much as anything British. Reputedly, between 'S...A?' and 'AWATS!' Todd experimented with psychedelic drugs for the first time. Whether this is true or apocryphal, there obviously was a conscious choice on his part to move away from the whole British pop thing, and into more edgy (bombastic?) territory.

The first Utopia project album was all stuff built on this same foundation -- prog rock, I mean. Fantastic settings, long internal dialogues with spiritual figureheads, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the Utopia project with John "Willie" Wilcox, Kasim Sulton and Roger Powell that Todd waded back into the 'borrowing from British pop' vault, and even then the first album from this era, 1977's 'RA,' sounds marginally more influenced by British Invasion pop but still is a progresive-style concept album based on quasi-archaic themes and has long disquisitions on ... well, something other than love and the pedestrian difficulties and poignancies of modern life. Granted, Hiroshima is more of a mainstream rock song than prog, though the closing line, 'don't you ever forget ... don't you ever fucking forget,' guaranteed even it wasn't going to get airplay on mainstream stations. Utopia generally didn't seem to be about that, though, even later on.

The return to more traditional pop songwriting didn't really flash with Utopia until 'Oops! Wrong Planet,' a quasi-concept album that contained the uber Utopia song (covered repeatedly, usually badly, by at least a half-dozen different artists; most notably England Dan and John Ford Coley), Love Is The Answer. Love In Action is probably the most effective song on the album, to be honest, and it hews to the traditional verse-chorus BI-pop song structure, though there is a dual-lead solo between Todd on guitar and Roger Powell on his home-brewed nerd-tech keyboard that kills me every time I hear it. It isn't so much Beatlesque as Wingsesque, though I won't accuse Todd of McCartney pastiche by this point in time and in their respective careers. Todd was out on the boards before the Beatles broke up, and I'm guessing anything he picked up along the way also was picked up by McCartney through the same channels, neither could reasonably be accused of nicking off the other.

In both cases, it amounted to pulling in good musicians from the pool and using them effectively. As far as I'm concerned, the best of McCartney's post-Beatles work was done with Denny Laine; some of the stuff Todd did that I like best was with this particular formation of Utopia.

Utopia largely hung it up in the late-80s, though there were a few new post-album tracks -- one of my favorites, Monument (a solid revisit of More Light from 'POV'), popping up on the Passport 'Trivia' anthology, and some later tracks on a Rhino collection of 'POV' and 'Oblivion' (this second anthology also includes Monument).

This was kind of a sad time for me, music-wise -- power pop was morphing into hair metal, much of which really didn't cut it for me. The best bands from that era -- I'll probably write about it later -- weren't very Beatles-influenced unless they did it ironically. Generally speaking, because there had been a depression in the music biz in the '80s, if one band had a hit there were ten bands within a month playing pastiches of pastiches of the New York Dolls and/or old Iggy Pop (cf. Poison, Motley Crue, etc.). Little that was done was even innovative ripoff -- most of it was blandly overproduced, slick ripoffs of another hair metal band's last hit, an enormous clusterfuck of bad 120-beats-a-minute guitar pop, or else you were stuck with speed-metal and Metallica (whose work I have never liked, but who were, at least, more original than most of their peers about it). The comedy wing of the hair metal revolution was where I hung out, and I'll probably write about it sometime.

Needless to say, I was happy when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden took over the radio, even if I was only peripherally a fan of 'grunge' itself. While it was far removed from the Beatles, and most 'grunge' bands played the guitar solo way down (something that still hasn't much recovered, sadly), played flashy musicianship way down, and concentrated on lyrics and song structure more. If I have to give up guitar solos, at least please write decent lyrics. Say what you will about Kurt Cobain, he was a good lyricist -- and by that I mean he seemed to genuinely enjoy playing with words, and playing words off each other. Aesthetically, grunge was largely a distillation of Sonic Youth dynamics into the 'barbaric yawp' of disaffected suburbia.

Before I come off sounding totally clueless, I realize Soundgarden -- and, for that matter, Queensryche -- don't fit the grunge label. Both bands had acrobatic and adept lead singers, were highly guitar-oriented, and generally hewed to the traditional verse-chorus-solo structure of, say, Graham Bonnet-era Rainbow. They exceeded hair metal by writing songs that actually were polished and 'about something,' or at least about something other than watching women in G-strings spin around a pole at a strip club. Black Hole Sun ... wow. Jet City Woman. There were some good things to say about hard rock in that era after all -- too much to say here.

After Seattle realigned mainstream rock music, there was a general schism into sub-genres. You had what was essentially a revival of 'frat-rock' or 'mullet-rock' with bands like Blink-182, Linkin' Park, anything that qualified as 'rap-rock' really ... a resurgence of Beach Boys and British influenced singer-songwriter stuff (I'm defining genres more by market appeal than actual sound, here) like Barenaked Ladies and Elliott Smith (anything that, in retrospect, qualifies as 'adult alternative') ... 'No Depression' or 'y'allternative' bands like the Jayhawks and Ryan Adams's old band Whiskeytown (often played on the same stations as the 'adult alternative' stuff) ... a small punk resurgence that pretty much seems to consist, now, of Green Day ... and puppy-eyed 'emo' which, to my ear, sounds pretty much like grunge with the 'loud' dynamic removed.

The late '80s and early '90s in Great Britain saw a sea change, as well. While Seattle was changing the esthetic here in the States, shoegazer bands like Jesus & Mary Chain and the Cocteau Twins accomplished much the same evolution with British pop -- which was to say, de-emphasized flashy performance and guitar solos in favor of a more textural affect. One Canadian band that started out heavily influenced by this movement, but evolved (or devolved, depending on your take on British Invasion bands and bands influenced by British Invasion bands) beyond it was Halifax, Nova Scotia's Sloan.

Sloan haven't been especially successful, in sales terms in the States, possibly because they weren't (aren't, as far as I know) ever really determined to be 'international rock stars' if it meant tailoring their work to the market rather than working at what they felt they did best. Whether it's because they were incapable of change -- and I find it hard to believe, comparing 'Smeared' with 'Between the Bridges' that their moderately successful longevity is due to anything but unwillingness to surf trends -- or stubborn, they have a niche market among Canadian pop fans and Yanks who like third-generation British Invasion-influence-influenced bands that, apparently, is at least lucrative enough to keep them making albums and touring occasionally.

What makes Sloan a treasure chest for power pop fans who don't mind a band's being derivative is that while they vary in the volume of quality work, the band consists of four independent songwriters with very different influences and tastes. Chris Murphy (generally the bassist, though he can mash up a creditable Keith Moon impersonation on the drums on occasion) and Jay Ferguson (not 'Thunder Island/used to be in Spirit' Jay Ferguson) pull most from invasion-era British pop, like Badfinger, the Kinks and the Beatles; Patrick Pentland's influences seem more guitar-oriented, though like most guitarists who 'came up' in the era of Kurt Cobain (and being the band's biggest My Bloody Valentine/shoegaze fan), he seems shy to solo much or often; and who the hell knows what all Andrew Scott (multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, atavist) draws on. Most of his songs are in the lengthy, noisy progressive vein that brings to my mind 'Mutiny Up My Sleeve' era Max Webster.

Life Of A Working Girl, for example, appears to be Chris Murphy's nod to/update of Wings' Another Day. The songs themselves are often wistful, thoughtful, occasionally outright melancholy and frequently seem to say, without saying it explicitly, 'born ten or fifteen years too late.' All in their mid-to-late 30s now, the songwriting has matured. The influences aren't any less obvious, though their nods are more circumspect -- one song from one of the earlier albums, I believe it's one of Pentland's, nicked a guitar riff straight out of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion; another, who knows whose (some albums credit individual songwriters, others credit the band on all songs), uses the guitar stings from the Beatles' Getting Better. The songs these little steals appear in sound nothing like the songs they're cribbed from, really, but show a vocabulary of mainstream rock, British Invasion pop and other sources.

Which takes me back to what I said about Rick Nielsen -- like starlings, Sloan like to pick up shiny bits and weave them into something larger, or at least structurally more diverse.

Kind of makes me wonder if, ten years from now, some kids who liked Sloan will come along and their peers will think they invented those Badfinger riffs the band they're sending up took from Cheap Trick, who steeped them out of the originals. Probably.

"Dear friend, it's been a long, long while ..."

Okay, that's kind of cheap -- it's Derek Dick lyrics, and I don't even know if I own the album ('Internal Exile' -- I have a best-of, but I don't think I have that one), though historically I remember hearing the song. That's a fairly sad story, Derek Dick, what? The guy is brilliant enough, but also shirty -- he's alienated folks. Like, the whole band he was semi-successful in (Marillion). Not that they managed anything worth hearing without him. Not that he might not have been worth putting up with. Ah, well, the vagaries of the biz.

Anyway, I'm going to take the cheap and sleazy way out and grab another ten from ITunes to rant/blab/reminisce about rather than doing anything much else. Pop music is, after all, more than wallpaper for me. I ain't no internal exile, though I'll question my choices in the larger scheme of things until the day I die, I suppose. You can't do what I do -- any of the several things I have some competency doing -- without interacting with other people, sometimes unfortunately. I imagine Fish feels the same way about the world.

So it's Saturday night, and I've had a few, and ITunes is humming in idle, ready to provide rant fuel, so let's go, eh?

One: Cheap Trick -- Didn't Know I Had It

From one of their most underrated albums, 'Woke Up With A Monster,' and the theme song for the end of my first marriage. On the whole, the album is uneven, but the gems are shiny, shiny, shiny. The full chorus of this one is 'I didn't know I had it 'til I threw it away/I'd been holding everything except for love, I wish I had you back today/I didn't know I had it 'til I threw it away.' That pretty much sums it up, and in deference to personal pride and being the decent human being I want to be as regards the ex, I won't say to whom the lyrics are intended. 'You were the magic and I made you disappear/now I'd give everything I own to have you here,' it's the way you want someone to feel when things go to hell. Tells you what you bailed out on. That's all I'm gonna say about it.

Two: Ben Folds Five -- Philosophy

Holy shit. That's probably what I said the first time I heard this. Eleven years of piano lessons, between the elderly spinster and the Methodist minister who knocked up the high school girl, and there ain't no way in hell I could ever have kissed the hem of Ben's sweaty T-shirt. I'm thinkin' the first one of theirs I actually heard on the radio was Where's Summer B? when I got out of the car on the way home from the gym to call the public radio station to harangue the DJ about it, but it doesn't matter. This whole album is a jaw-dropper for all of us dilettante piano players who didn't 'get the feeling' from playing, however good we might have been. I was mediocre, at best, and couldn't play 'by ear' -- I could and can still read music, thirty years later, but Ben don't read no music. He plays shit he's sucking up from some subterranean stream of noise. Saw him last year (less the Five, opening for Rufus Wainwright), and he still does it. An old Internet friend used to describe the feeling I have for Ben as 'giggling fanboy.' That's about freakin' right -- I understood it immediately when he said it. Met him on a Ben Folds mailing list, for that matter, though he actually liked other stuff better. Afghan Whigs, even -- I grew up in Cinci and I still don't 'get' Greg Dulli, so you're on your own, though I live in Dayton now and I do 'get' Bob Pollard. Maybe it's because I likes me a glass of wine now and then, and while I've never written a song I'd not be embarrassed to play for another human being, I've written a pome or two and several pathetic novels' worth of fiction. Riding the line Dylan Thomas fell off, in other words -- how much alcohol inspires, and how much pickles? Ask Bob, I don't plan on giving advice. He doesn't, either, I guess -- I know the story behind How's My Drinking?

Three: Paul Westerberg -- Trumpet Clip

The Unabomber. No, seriously -- that's what Paul said was at least one of the inspirations for Trumpet Clip, in an interview back after 'Eventually' came out. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the few cuts worth hearing more than a few times on that album. I don't know. The 'Mats have recorded a couple of new tunes, so rumor would have it -- we didn't all give them up after Bob croaked, some of us actually liked a few songs after that, and I thought '14 Songs' was good. Oh, yeah -- and 'Stereo/Mono.' So I'm willing to give the new singles a chance. I'll have to wait a couple of months, since the new album ain't due until the middle of June, but hey -- so much of what's come out since the first solo album has been dross, I'll take one for the team and wait.

Four: Sloan -- Stove/Smother

Screechin' hoot -- I don't know much about this, I found it on an anthology of indie music from Geffen's early nineties stable, on ITunes, on the hint from a fan website. This little lyric snippet, 'Used to wonder if you understood the way I felt about the stove at our friend Eric's house/I wish you'd leave me be' is well worth the buck I flipped to Apple for the download. This thing is a trip, and probably was intended to be -- they achieved their goal, at least with me. There's a wandering piano line (I suspect courtesy Andy Scott) that blips in and out of both parts of the thing. The first half is kind of a dopey rubato repetition of the lyric snipped above, probably one sung by Patrick Pentland and the other by Jay Ferguson, which rolls into a fuzz-guitar trainwreck post-punk number that's definitely Andy Scott shouting (mostly in the right speaker of my headphones), probably live. Sloan fans consider it a lost track, and many of them don't like it much. Doubtless. Reminds me of Cincinnati's Raisins' Slave/Dressmaker medley, which has much the same dynamic, though the first half of this Sloan duo isn't nearly as hard, and the Smother half sounds a lot like the first half of the Raisins lost track. Bar/club/theater bands. You absolutely cannot beat a power pop combo that came up through the clubs, I don't care what you say.

Five: Counting Crows -- Raining In Baltimore

Shame about Counting Crows -- they never topped this tune, no matter that they did a couple of albums beyond this and some soundtrack numbers and, for all I know, are still recording and releasing stuff. When Duritz stopped doing whiny shit, he stopped sounding convincing, and I lost interest. I guess I was in a whiny state of mind when 'August And Everything After' came out, and it was really appealing. Raining In Baltimore was the apex of 'wow, I really get this tune!' for me. It's not like Hootie and The Blowfish (who were roughly consanguineous), who only had one good song. Counting Crows really crafted a good album in 'August,' but they never managed to top it, in my book of pop songs I'll listen to for twenty years or so. Sorry, they have to compete with bands like Cheap Trick and the Beatles and the Kinks; Van Morrison and Steely Dan's occasional forays into power pop. This song, frankly, gets there. A couple of others on 'August,' yeah. The rest of their oeuvre? Nah, sorry.

Six: Steely Dan -- Bodhisattva

Speaking of Steely Dan and all. This is a definite 'mood song' -- when I want to hear it, I mean, I really want to hear it. Kind of like Dr. Wu. I think it won me over with the dual lead work at the beginning, long before I ever had Eastern philosophy in college and actually knew what a Bodhisattva was. So many of their songs were either thinly-veiled drug references, or ... well, religion is a kind of drug, for some, so I guess even this one is. Most of their songs are, one way or another, except Never Going Back To My Old School. I think that's the only Steely Dan song I know that I don't think has several layers of meaning that include drugs, questionable sex, gambling, the Mafia, hooded political references or odd religions. They seem so normal in interviews, it's kind of funny to think of it that way, but ... well. You explain Steely Dan some other way. Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- I like that about SD, and I've always liked their stuff. I just 'get it' on a different level the more experience I gain in the world. I guess I won't catch up until fifteen years after one of them dies, but I can wait a while. It's good to have goals, right?

Seven: Max Webster -- Waterline

You know what I was saying about Steely Dan? You can kind of transfer that 'drugs, questionable sex, gambling, the Mafia, hooded political references or odd religions' notation to Max Webster, I guess -- or Canadian versions thereunof. Pye wrote a lot about being a musician, though, on top of the other stuff (even though he was really 'only' the lyricist). Waterline is a little difficult to decipher. I'm not Canadian, I'm fifteen years too young to know what the Zeitgeist of the era was when the stuff was written (even in the States, and they weren't here very much), and frankly, I'm pretty sure Pye DuBois is some kind of brilliant freak. He's written some of the most cogent, beautiful phrases you can pull out of songs and use for e-mail signatures ever, but the songs themselves only make sense on a larger picture, kind of like looking at Degas or Seurat -- each song is kind of a dot in a larger picture. Max Webster, other than occasional albums that were mildly pandering, like 'A Million Vacations,' reveled in doing really good songs that were obscure, well-turned and produced in such a way that you can't tell, other than the instruments (lots of analog keyboards), that they were recorded thirty freakin' years ago. The production is some of the cleanest and least dated I've heard on seventies music, and Kim has a style all his own on lead guitar. Okay, you can tell it wasn't recorded between Cobain and the past couple of years -- Kim actually plays guitar solos. I miss guitar solos.

Eight: Cheap Trick -- If You Want My Love (demo version)

This verison of If You Want My Love is a demo version from 'Sex, America, Cheap Trick' that is, in my reasonably well-turned opinion, a better shot at the song than the album version. It's just electric guitar, bass, drums, vocals and I suspect mandocello, Nielsen's favorite freak instrument. No big, swelling calliope, or DX-7 pads, which are (sadly) unavoidable on early-to-mid-eighties power pop. I mean, Cheap Trick were a devoted guitar pop band, so there's always plenty of that, but I really like the stuff that only has the stringed instruments, the drums, Zander's (occasionally bizarre and almost always compelling) vocals and occasional acoustic piano (usually played by Kai Winding's son, Jai) on them. I can hang with some of the stuff that has synth on it, don't get me wrong -- I just never thought it really integrated as well as it could with Nielsen's songwriting style. Most of their stuff he wrote (there are some credits for Zander and Petersson on the early stuff, and on the post-diaspora stuff, but for better or worse Nielsen has written the bulk of their material), he most likely wrote on an acoustic piano or a guitar, and putting synthesizer on it back then, though it probably made it more palatable for top-40 radio in the narrow window when they actually got top-40 radio airplay, diluted the effect of a consummate vocalist, a tasteful lead guitarist, an economical drummer and two different bassists (one acceptable, the other really pretty good). This demo version also has an extended middle-eight. The demo version clocks in at nearly four and a half minutes. It was shortened by about thirty on 'One On One' (as was the single version of Tonight It's You, from 'Standing On The Edge;' remember that cheesy, easily dated boxing video?) for the MTV generation and top-40 radio's fascination with four-minute or less fodder. I don't hang with that especially well. If you need five minutes, give your legacy the five, cripes! That's what the boxed set was about, I imagine -- getting out those older versions of songs that Epic wouldn't release at the time. The original skiffle version of I Want You To Want Me is a stone hoot, too, really.

Nine: Beatles -- Norwegian Wood

Someone on a web forum made a compelling argument that the phrase 'Norwegian wood' was supposed to be a sort of Cockney rhyming slang/Lennon pun for 'knowing she would.' Considering the lyrics of the song, I guess it's legit enough. I don't think it was David Ehrenstein, though he's the kind of person I've bumped into enough places, who knows enough people, I'd find it not beyond my belief that he might have said it. He has, it seems, enough connections with enough people that it's the kind of thing he might have heard, but I don't think it was him, for some reason. It was some dim, left-field region of the web where Ehrenstein doubtless hasn't even ventured. He needn't. That's all I'm sayin'

Ten: Van Morrison -- Jackie Wilson Said

I don't even care if he's an old poop. Jackie Wilson Said is one of the best rock/pop songs ever recorded. Of course, my knowledge of both British and North American pop, rock and power pop is reasonably wide -- my list of 'best rock/pop songs ever recorded' is voluminous, to say the least. Regardless, Jackie Wilson Said is one that I've never tired of throwing on anthology discs/tapes. It's in my 'ultimate power pop' directory on ITunes (the one I usually use for these mental masturbation sessions, just BTW), because it really is. Of course, I have 317 songs in the directory as of the current date, and there will doubtless be a few more a month ad infinitum, because between waiting for older stuff to be released to ITunes, buying discs and finding new stuff, I throw a few a month in there.

And then there's this non-random song I feel like bloviating about for a while. I've had bits and pieces of this song floating about in my head for (oh, god, this says how freakin' old I am) twenty-five years, and I don't know that I ever connected with who it was. The song is Back Where You Belong. I actually looked it up at least once on Allmusic, so it's not like I didn't know, at some point, who it was. 'You treat me like a fool, but you were wrong/I'm gonna send you back where you belong.' I eventually hit 'memory clip' and had to go find it, so I searched for a string of the lyrics on Google. I found out it was, oddly enough, a Foreigner song off 'Double Vision.' This album came out when I was in junior high school (yes, I am well past my 'sell-by' date and then some, you got a problem widdat?). A friend of mine from high school had a tape of this (entirely possible it was an 8-track), and we used to listen to it in the car. I remember her singing alternate lyrics to Blue Monday -- 'she's waiting for me, but I'm a long, long way from Kroger.'

I don't know if she came up with that or not. You see, she was dating a friend of my cousin's, a guy I had a crush on, off and on, until I hit puberty. He had a crush on another of my cousins, his older sister. I grew up in a small town, where it was major clusterf*ck from birth to the time you left, which, if you never move away from there, is when they close your casket and lower you six feet into the ground. I left at nineteen, thankfully. I've never lived there again, and fate willing, I never will. The few people who still live there with whom I went to school are such consummate losers, however nice they are as human beings, even if I did I wouldn't be able to face them. If you never leave a small, failed southern Ohio tobacco town whose sole claims to fame usually involve lawsuits against the school board and body parts found in local creeks, your life is considerably more resigned than mine will ever be. Bob Plant wrote a song about that, it's called Worse Than Detroit. The town I grew up in? For me (and understand this is a very private, personal judgment) it's worse than Detroit.

Anyway, I dragged this damn song around in my head for years and years and years. Just this past couple of weeks, I decided to find it. 'Double Vision' has been booted up to ITunes, so I as able to download Back Where You Belong. Other than the slightly cheesy analog keyboard solo, the song still kicks my ass. I'm not sure it isn't one of the five best songs Foreigner ever recorded. The lyrics are simple, the music, while kind of Byzantine, mostly sticks with three or four chords and gets in and out in three point two five minutes. Like Blue Monday, it doesn't aspire to higher than power pop, and by hell it gets there and then some. Best song or not, it's my favorite Foreigner song ever.

Even though my most enduring crush from high school sang to me, on one of our sparse (two or three) dates, incredibly off-key, Star Riders, from the first Foreigner album. He had a tin ear, and that's that. So did the ex, though, at least when it came to singing (he's okay otherwise, he just can't really sing). I guess there aren't really that many men who can sing. The current Mister actually is pretty decent at it, for what it's worth in the grand celestial scheme of things.

More random songs

Another Friday random ten. The SO is back in town, buried in reading web journals or websites about tech or commuter trains or airplanes (besides rock and roll, his O/C fascinations). But it beats the bloody hell out of drinkin' alone. So saith Billy Joel, paraphrase-like, circa Piano Man.

Numero Uno: Matthew Sweet – Knowing People

If I recall correctly (and I's perfectly willin' to admit it's more than ten years back in the rearview mirror, so I may not), a friend I'll call Bongo sent a copy of this disc to the former SO of the Expedition Sailor. The former SO did not "get into it" sufficiently, and handed it off to your hero. Not surprising – this particular Matt Sweet album is very, very dark; in fact, one might even call it mordant. The SO, it must be noted, was bipolar – and seldom mordant, even when depressed. The first SO didn't go for dark power pop, especially – hence was not much interested in the Replacements, or many other rich, multilayered musical experiences your hero rolled in like a dog rolls on a dead critter. Perhaps my attraction to mordant power pop had no little to do with the fact that the bipolar former SO of Expedition Sailor was a tad loony, and the significance of the relationship was beginning to be overshadowed mightily by the otherness ... nah. Couldn't be. Anyway, Knowing People was my favorite tune on 'Altered Beast' and expresses a great deal about my state of mind circa 1993-94 without my having to go into painful, excruciating detail.

Numero Dos: 10CC – I'm Not In Love

Quick tale from the mists of time – creepy that I remember this, since it's at least a quarter century old, and I just made excuses about ten years being a long time – anyway ... the first cousin of the Expedition Sailor had broken up with a long-time girlfriend (well, we both were teenagers, I suppose three years is long). He'd gone to sleep slightly buzzed on things he shouldn't legally have had (could have been beer, could have been other contraband substances), with his headphones on and a local rock station playing. Somewhere around the "big boys don't cry" whispers and flange/phase stuff a couple of minutes into this gem, he came straight up out of bed all in a swivet, and didn't connect with reality until he was halfway across his bedroom ,jerked the headphone jack out of his stereo, and realized there wasn't some strange woman lurking in his room, whispering advice to him. It's a funny picture, even if you don't know him, admit it. It is. She screwed, blued and tattooed him, too. She was playin' with both a sixteen-year-old and a forty-year-old community college professor while dating my nineteen-year-old cuz, and she was his age. Everybody in this story but Cuz was psycho. I knew them all, trust me. He was just full of rage and hormones. He grew out of it. I'm sure the rest of them didn't.

Numero Tres: Beatles – I Want To Tell You

Ooh – never noticed there's a quiet little iteration of the lyric in the right headphone right before the main lyric starts – I've heard this freakin' song a million times. I love being old and still finding new stuff even in songs that were recorded fairly simply, on paleolithic recording equipment. I am forced to realize, because of the stereo separation, what a utilitarian bassist Paul McCartney was, at least on this song. Of course, it's entirely possible someone else played it – doubtful, though. Makes (Cheap Trick's) Tom Petersson seem positively (Jaco) Pastorian in comparison, you know? The vocals were the thing the Beatles really did well, and were innovators on, though. This one as well as any from the era, natch.

Numero Quatro: Marillion – Slainte Mhath

"Slainte Mhath" is the Scottish equivalent of "bottoms up," apparently, though actually it means something more along the line of "skol" -- i.e., "to life" or some other hopeful wish for the drinker. This Marillion song is nothing like it. It's Derek Dick's take on the contrast between an author or journalist's (or songwriter's) life and the life of someone he talks to in a bar, a veteran of some sort -- soldier, miner, foundry worker. I guess it's sort of an offhand joke about dilettantism, and the narrator's attempts to glean the pain and difficulty of another type of life for the purpose of enriching (his) writing ... or perhaps just hanging out with the hopeless drunks in the process of making excuses for his sliding off into hopeless dipso tendencies hisownself. This song was the touch-off of a Drambuie fascination of the first SO's that, far as I know, never ended. Kind of an expensive fascination – I was content with Canadian Club, which is quite reasonable and can be mixed with anything. Drambuie, except in a Rusty Nail, tastes rather like cough syrup, to me. I like single malt, don't get me wrong – Drambuie is too sweet, though. Not big on liqueurs. They make my skull throb. I have zero tolerance for that much sugar in that small a dose, I guess.

Numero Cinco: Frank Zappa – Montana

Dental floss tycoon ... yeah. Where's the justice in the world, that Zappa had to die so young? I would have loved to have a crusty old social critic like him around, just about now. Lost him and Bill Hicks within twelve months back in 1993. Sumbitch. Look at all the assholes who managed to live a dozen years longer, that the world would have been better off without. Anyway, as for the song -- Montana is one of the most inoffensive Zappa tunes, which is why you're likely to hear it on oldies stations, if you hear any Zappa at all. Montana, Nanook Rubs It, Dancin' Fool. And Nanook is offensive in length. Dancin' Fool is relatively short, and Montana clocks in under seven minutes – I'm sure there must have been a radio edit of around four minutes, since I've heard it on the radio several times over the years. Of course, Frank didn't care what he said, or about whom he said it, so once Clear Channel hegemonized FM radio, you ceased to hear much of anything of his except Valley Girl. Because, you know – it made fun of Californians, and we all know Californians are hippies, and it's okay to make fun of them, so Clear Channel could justify playing only that and ignoring the remainder of FZ's catalog. Overall, in truth, Zappa was pretty tough on everybody – hippies being only one of a score of favorite targets, well more than half of whom were warmongering conservatives and religious fundamentalists. Frank found them somewhat distasteful, to say the least. But Montana is just absurdism – simply and beautifully inane, Dadaist in its superfluous loquacity. I love the concept of the pygmy pony. There's a little epiphany in 'me and my pygmy pony over by the dental floss bush,' and if you don't get it, well ... sorry. You never will.

Numero Seis: Cake – Comfort Eagle

I love Cake. There's something snarky-cynical about those guys that just blows me away – there's a certain Zappa esthetic involved, though they generally keep it down to short songs, and limits are A-OK with me. Comfort Eagle grasps a certain 'young white guy' attitude (I suppose there may be Hispanics who fit in this demographic), I've dealt with several times, over the years. Young non-AA men with limited futures, "the double-wide shine on the boot-heels of your prime" – of course, these guys who were the subject of this song a decade ago probably are either triple or quadruple parents by now, or else sucking dust in Iraq, trying to stay alive, wondering how many more stop-losses they'll endure before they get to come back to a place they keep telling themselves is home that won't feel like home when they finally get here, and if they'll get their dicks shot off and become inadvertent Hemingway heroes.

Numero Siete: Steve Forbert – Is It Any Wonder

Not the best tune off 'Mission of the Crossroad Palms' – but hey, this was a hell of an album. I can't call anything on it a complete failure, and Is It Any Wonder is a primo example of the singer-songwriter quasi-love-song that was familiar enough for the adult acoustic alternative genre from ten years or so ago. I don't know, it's on the album, I ripped it, but I don't have any particular attachment to it one way or another. It's an okay song off a pretty good album from a really shitty time in my life. I guess it's hard to lose with that. This one could have been a great temptation to a very great mistake at that point in my life, but it wasn't, and I didn't, and I'm happy. Mox nix.

Numer Ocho: Replacements – Answering Machine

Anger management for ‘tweeners. Answering Machine is the ultimate lover’s wasted yawp – a 'why am I doing this from here?' lament from a road musician, shouting into a microphone other than the one on the pay phone, because she ain't there. This one and Can't Hardly Wait probably encapsulate the bottom of the barrel of touring as a musician as well as any songs written about that. 'If you'd like to make a call please hang up and dial again. If you need help, please hang up and then dial your operator.' Try and free a slave of ignorance. Try and teach a whore about romance. I guess at the time, the answering machine was the ultimate defense between doubt and dealing with distance, back in the eighties when it was recorded. Hell, now most people can't stand to not be umbilically attached to their cell phones. This was the dying bleat of a road musician to someone who wasn't answering, for whatever or no reason.

Numero Nueve: Soul Asylum – Somebody To Shove

'Grave Dancer's Union' was pretty much both apex and swan song for Soul Asylum. Kind of a shame, really, because they weren't a half-bad band for carrying on the 'Mats tradition (curious that ITunes threw that one out after Answering Machine, actually, since this one is also a telephone song and nobody, from Dave Pirner to Paul Westerberg, ever seemed to think Soul Asylum's taking up the trash rock torch required any apology or explanation). I think some people misinterpreted this one as misogynistic, but I don't think Pirner intended it that way. It came from hearing 'I want somebody to shove' and failing to hear the rest of the lyrics, I guess. It's the most successful song off this one, if I recall, though I kind of liked Without A Trace, its association with a faithless and disingenuous human notwithstanding.

Numero Diez: Sloan – It's In Your Eyes

Why do I keep getting Sloan songs that aren't my favorites, when I sit down to do these random ten posts? This one isn't bad, mind you -- it's not from the early, shoegazer ripoff era. It's one of Patrick Pentland's songs from 2001's 'Pretty Together,' and it's not bad, per se. It's just a midtempo song that's this far (holds fingers a quarter inch apart) from filler. It has a halfway throwaway guitar solo on it, though the rhythm guitar is nice. Keyboard pads I could do without, but hey – I ain't a musician, so I don't know what I could say I would have liked any better than what they did. Lyrically, I dunno, it's okay. Not sure why – maybe it's just not chugging along and rapidly approaching a train wreck, which is the stuff Pentland writes that I dearly love. I like when he's running headlong at the noise, okay? Jeez, sue me. It's not bad, or I wouldn't have ripped it. It's just one of those songs that's like most of the material on Cheap Trick's 'One On One' besides If You Want My Love and She's Tight. Why does it never give me Losing California or The N.S.?

Later.

Early Sunday a.m. ITunes randomness

Drifting, a little, and apologies for the insular and never-to-be-explained nature of the last post. Those who needed to understand it got schoolin' and I ain't explainin' and nobody's readin' this bullshit anyway, so whatever.

Abandoned by my footloose and fancy free, jet-setting other half, who is junketing as part of a warm, fuzzy feelgood trip inspired by a corporate merger between a Northwestern client and his European employer (said junket is in Whistler, BC) this weekend (and who, apparently, has forgotten how to send an e-mail or make a land-line phone call with his AmEx at some point in the last 36 hours), I'm drinking a nice Spanish red and hectoring the Internets (all of them) by making blog posts only I will ever peruse. Could be worse. I could be making drugs in the kitchen sink, I suppose, if I knew how, or carrying on illicitly with youthful freaks who like weird old ladies. I don't, and I ain't, so I'll settle for Spanish reds and the Internet.

As I did once before, and as other bloggers do, I'll just randomly comment on songs that come up on the not-especially-random randomizer on ITunes. If you have ITunes, you know it seems to develop a gruff digital fondness for certain artists or songs or albums that are in your personal library. It's all part of the heuristics, of course, but I don't know how or why the heuristics are written, or why it does this. I would think random was random, but oddly enough there are quirks to ITunes when it's in 'random' mode that I simply can't explain. I'm not a programmer, though -- perhaps there are things I don't know about programming that would explain it.

I either bought or own everything on the list, to the best of my knowledge. I didn't take advantage of Napster, back in 'the day,' to download stuff I was able to get legitimately -- I only downloaded stuff I was never able to find in this cultural backwater where I live, or used it as a preview for albums I intended to buy if I liked them -- for purchase. Most of the rips I have from Napster suck anyway, they were low quality or full of compression artifacts, and seriously, if I found better copies on ITunes once we had it, I damned well paid the $.99 to buy them.

It's not so much that I worry about 'breakin' the law' as that I like for people who make a living putting out music I enjoy to get their vig and I know that at least in some sense, they do if their big corp record companies have a contract with ITunes. If I paid for the CD at some point along the line -- and most of my CDs were bought new -- they got their vig then, so if I ripped it for my own listening enjoyment, and they don't like it, they can suck an egg.

If I've found legit copies of the work later, I've bought them. I used Napster as a preview service, before AllMusic and ITunes offered this service (thirty freakin' seconds, though? Come on, guys ...), and really, the reason I buy instead of stealing is because I genuinely admire people who can do this well enough to please me, as cranky and well-educated about music and especially rock music as I am, and as inept as I am at it myself (however well educated I am in theory), so I want them to see their well-earned royalties.

But enough about my attitudes about music/ripping/ITunes. On to the useless bloviating.

Cut one: Zebra -- Who's Behind The Door?

I see this as a quasi-agnostic hymn, written to aliens who have surprisingly arrived and changed the paradigm. Admittedly, I just sorta' like the phrase 'quasi-agnostic hymn,' and besides that, the song is apparently kindasorta about aliens coming in and diddling about with earth, right? Ah, hell, unless you're over forty, you have no freakin' idea what I'm talkin' about, 'cause you don't know who Zebra are, you've never heard Who's Behind The Door, and you don't remember art rock. This is actually a power pop song with art rock lyrics -- think Fish-era Marillion, or post-Belew King Crimson, but more to the pop end of the spectrum. I do. I have to wonder if it isn't a reaction by the lyricist from Zebra to reading Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five,' wherein Billy PIlgrim is abducted by the aliens of Tralfamadore and instructed about the aliens' observation of earth's fascination with war. I could be way out there on this one, but generally, there was a lot of rock music in the late seventies and through the eighties that presumed war wasn't a habit of America anymore (and a whole hell of a lot of it that name- or concept-checked Vonnegut, but again, it's an artifact of my 'tweener generation, I suppose). Hah, yeah, well good luck sellin' that right now. Zebra were out of New Orleans (Allmusic sez originally from Longisland, which makes a lot of sense, actually). Wonder if anybody lost a house in Katrina? Are any of these guys sitting in a trailer, wondering about the rest of their lives, right now? Oh, but of course not. Well, probably not. I wish nobody was, but if you wish in one hand and shit in the other, I know which one fills up first. If I were a resident of NOLA, even if I were a middle class white resident of NOLA, I'd probably be wishing the aliens would come down and tell me something or other that would be better than reality. Interestingly, hard rock producer Jack Douglas (who worked with, among others, John and Yoko, Aerosmith, Patti Smith, and Cheap Trick) produced the album from whence Who's Behind The Door came. Sorry, most of the time I don't like bullshit prog/hair/pompous stuff -- but sometimes a crossover song hits me just the right way, and this one did.

Cut two: Utopia -- Man Of Action

"Sometimes justice seems a fragile thing/You paralyze it with a lack of will." My favorite cynic writes a song about action movies. I don't like this one as well as I liked the iteration of WorldWide Epiphany on 'No World Order' with the lyric 'Juliet never made it with Romeo' but the song isn't a total loss. I have to believe, knowing Todd's lyrics as well as I do, that these are intended to be a sort of farce on the whole action movie genre, and America's bizarre infatuation with it. By far not my favorite Utopia tune.

Cut three: Max Webster -- Check

Should have been the band's tour-de-force instead of their swan song, and Check is one facet of the gem that was Max Webster. The headlong, trainwreck romp with the Dadaist lyrics courtesy Pye DuBois (who never joined the band onstage, but who was the seminal and very important member, nonetheless). The falling off the cliff guitar solos and fills, the slightly frantic, yelped vocals delivered by Kim Mitchell back in 'the day.' I loved Max and Kim and much of the band's and his solo output, though it's kind of sad that evenetually Pye and Kim had a falling out and ceased to work together. 'We're just musicians ... here to thin the thickness of your skins.' Yup.

Cut four: Little Feat -- A Apolitical Blues (live, from 'The Last Record Album')

I make the distinction that this is the live version because Lowell George sang, on the live version, "I don't care if it's the Unholy Four, John Wayne and Dorothy LaMour," in the live version, where it's only John Wayne in the studio version of the song. Apparently, 'The Unholy Four' was a spaghetti western from 1969. No great surprise, there. My cousin and his best buddy used to love those old movies. What's annoying is that ITunes lists 'The Last Record Album' as blues, when that was simply a single part of a dozen musical traditions Little Feat mined in their career. Sadly, by the time this album was released, it seemed fairly clear Lowell was treading water with Little Feat. I'd have loved for him to have gone on, he was a great songwriter in the grand, celestial scheme of such things ... but it wasn't to be. Sorry, Lowell -- you can't 'eat Southern' and abuse your body the way you reputedly did and roll on unscathed into your fifties, it just doesn't happen.

Cut five: The Babys -- Midnight Rendezvous

'Kay, I am most decidedly a child of my 'tweener generation. I really liked The Babys, though I wasn't enthralled with anything John Waite did after that. His solo stuff was, largely, uninspired, and the Bad English, while well-produced (and he still sounded great) didn't do much more for me than his exceptionally shallow-confessional solo work. Midnight Rendezvous was an encouragement to a good many non-pregnancy-inducing makeout sessions for many of us in that era, why lie? My first high-school boyfriend even looked a little like John Waite without the cockatiel hairstyle. Short, compact and intense.

Cut six: Utopia (don't blame me -- I told you ITunes wasn't very random!) -- Crybaby

This one is one of my favorite Utopia tunes ever. I love the weird, futuristic video for this one, too. At least Todd didn't shitcan Ellen Foley -- she's in the video for this one, even though she doesn't have a credit for the album, so I presume only Kaz, Willie and Roger sang backing vocals on it. She got rooked on 'Bat Out Of Hell,' or chose not to capitalize on it, whatever. Anyway, Crybaby is a hell of a power pop tune -- it's kind of the "uber pop tune" against which I measure all power pop tunes, for that matter. Man, I can't tell you how much I love Todd (and Kaz, for that matter) when he's on his game. At his best, he really is some of the best American music ever produced. Crybaby is a hell of a tune. There's something visceral and kinetic about the combination of those four particular voices on the vocals -- I've used this gimmick repeatedly in the useless crap I "write" about musicians, that certain voices have certain unique resonances, but it's true. If everybody who was in Utopia at that point could still hit all the notes, they could do Crybaby and the vocals would still make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Cut seven: Abba -- Waterloo

Sue me -- if you're a power pop aficionado 'of a certain age,' ignoring Abba is ignoring a significant influence on future power pop bands. If they did nothing else right (and I ain't admitting that, though some of their stuff was dross), they got the vocal production and the piano mix right. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, but seriously -- other than anything produced by Todd Rundgren, or involving Ben Folds or Elton John, tell me how many bands always get both multi-tracked vocals and the piano mix right. Go ahead -- tell me there were bunches of them, because I'm convinced it was rare enough. I love a good power pop piano line, and it's kind of the side-dish on Waterloo.

Cut eight: Harry Nilsson -- Me And My Arrow

Take Adrian Belew's version of this on 'For The Love Of Harry' and slot it directly behind the original. As noted, this is another one that's entirely limited to a narrow generational time. This was from the soundtrack to a British kids' animation called 'The Point.' Nilsson did the whole soundtrack, and Me And My Arrow was the crown jewel of it. It's simple, it goes nowhere, and it's a beaut. Poor old Harry -- screwed up his voice right at the peak of his career, never got his shit back together. Makes me sad, in some ways. Some of the earlier stuff was weirdly beautiful; this one is just quirkily beautiful. Most of his stuff was one or the other.

Cut nine: Cheap Trick -- Wrong All Along

Not the best work they ever did, songwise, but it's off one of my favorite CT albums, 'Cheap Trick 1997,' the second eponymous album. The thing's well worth the price of admission, I liked it and listened to it a lot, and though this wasn't my favorite cut, it's a good song by relative standards (better than most for at least three albums before or the one after, in other words). I could wish they'd retired after this one, in some ways. Saw them at Sarnia, Ontario's Bayfest a few years back, and I have to say I felt like Nielsen was phoning it in, Zander couldn't even hit all the notes he'd sung on the album they were whoring, and overall, they were disappointing.

Cut ten: The Who -- Another Tricky Day

One of the random decent post-Moon Who songs. I liked Athena, too, but there really wasn't a hell of a lot I liked after that. I confess I'm not the world's biggest Who fan, but I liked this one. The only two songs I bothered to rip into ITunes were this one and You Better, You Bet. This one sounds like something that should have been on 'Empty Glass' or 'All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes' -- in other words, like it should have been a Townshend solo song. Daltrey did his best with it, though, and I'm sorry -- Kenney Jones earned his stripes in The Faces, I hate it when people dis him because he's not Moon. He didn't eat enough elephant tranquilizer to be Moonie. Get over it -- Pete still had some songs to write that he didn't think he could sing well enough for his taste. Actually, according to AllMusic, both Kenney Jones and Keith Moon have credits for this album, so perhaps some of the songs were recorded before Moonie OD'd, I don't know. I have to doubt ATD was recorded before Moon left us -- the drums are tight, appropriate and don't attempt to overwhelm everybody else in the band, so presumably they were played by Kenney Jones.

Feh. Pissed on several levels right now, and ITunes has surpassed me by a couple of songs and gone on to Krokus, Long Stick Goes Boom, so it's time to get outta here and stop dumping crap outta my head now, before I say something I can't take back.

Open letter you'll never read.

Don't worry, it won't take you long not to read it.

Because I finally have had to come around and really stare at the fact that there are simply some things you don't want to be expected to care about.

The answer I didn't want to hear finally got there. You've been trying to tell me for years, sorry I'm so "fick."

This was the answer:

"Plenty ... more than most people ... just not that much."

I'm not really surprised, just disappointed.

I'm sorry I ever made the mistake of thinking the answer might have been "that much."

That was my fault.

Apples and oranges ... and homos.

Just need to get an false equivalency argument off my chest, because it's been chewing on the coattails of my medulla for a week now.

Now, I understand that some people are just homophobic, and that's all there is to the story. For some reason, they believe they have a right to sit in judgment over other people whose lives affect theirs little, if at all.

Personally, I'd hate my own guts if I allowed xenophobia -- that great, overwhelming 'fear of other' -- to run my life the way people who hate others that way let it run theirs, but I'm sort of digressing here.

The great apples and oranges argument many of these fear-raddled little mice will bellow at the tops of their squeaky, paranoid little voices, is this:

"I'm not homophobic. I just don't think anybody who isn't married should get the same benefits as somebody who isn't. I don't think heterosexual couples who aren't married should have those benefits, either."

The apple? "Heterosexual couples should get married or suffer from diminished benefits in the society."

The orange? "Homos shouldn't be allowed to get married, so we can eternally deny them any of the benefits of heterosexual marriage."

Any time any of the cowering little dunces I deal with offers me this false equivalency argument from their piss-stained diapers, I'm just going to say it:

"Your theory would hold a whole lot more water if it weren't for the fact that hateful people just like you have made it impossible for them to get married. If they had a choice, I'd be right there with your intolerant bullshit -- it would be unfair, if they were on the same playing field as the rest of us."

I'm sick to death of people who let their xenophobia determine everything about their lives. It's gross and sub-human. Grow up.

Okay, what the hell ever happened ...

to the Ass Ponys?

Granted, I don't listen to WOXY's stream anymore, and they were kind of favorites at 97X. Still, I wonder. LOhio wasn't bad. I mean, there was no 'Earth To Grandma' on it, but I didn't really like it all that much, anyway.

Tell you a little secret -- I'm a couple of years older than Chuck Cleaver, the guitarist/vocalist (and, I gather, at least co-songwriter) of Ass Ponys. I grew up somewhere around ten miles from where he grew up. We probably had some mutual acquaintances.

One Ass Ponys song stands out as an ear-grabber for me, having grown up around there. It's a song off LOhio called 'Fire In The Hole.' This verse, one of only two, sums up the last two years I was in high school:

Pop the clutch and holler rabbits feet
Roll the windows down
Take a drink to find the strength you need
Then pass the bottle ’round

Well, except for the fact I didn't really learn to drive a stick until I was in my early twenties. Other than that, the whole song pretty much describes what it was like to grow up in the quirky, dirty, anally-retentive shithole where I performed that particular feat of magic. And didn't grow up dirty and anally-retentive, at any rate -- which is the true miracle.

Not to take anything away from 'Baby In A Jar' -- but I don't, in fact, remember where my mood ring is. I may have left it on the sink, but it was a quarter of a century ago, now, and hell if I remember which sink it might have been.

'Astronaut' is good, too. Just not quite as incisive -- I swear, 'Fire In The Hole' gives me serious flashbacks. To places Chuck Cleaver likely remembers about as well as I do, and probably through the same haze of warm beer and fogged up car windows.

I'm so glad I don't live there now. I'd stick a freakin' fork in my eyeball.

It's like my dad used to say.

Not much to post, just had this float up in my head again. Sometimes, I'll use this phrase and people will look at me like I recited the preamble to the Constitution in Mandarin:

"I guess you just didn't hold your mouth right."

My old man used to use that phrase -- it just means "who the hell knows why it didn't work?" Mom still does. I'm old, y'all, but I've had people almost as old as my mother look at me like I had fishhooks strung through my eyebrows when I used that phrase. It's perfect to encapsulate the mystery and sheer bastard-mindedness of machines. I like to use it when something doesn't work on the computer, or something fails one time out of ten, usually when you need it most. It's so good, I won't give it up even if people don't understand what it means.

Y'know what that means?

That means I grew up a hick.

I grew up in a little town with only about 900 people in it. The high school was so small, it was decided in the late 60s it would no longer field a football team because they couldn't both field a football team -- with all the risks of injury that entails -- and also cut, strip and hang tobacco at the requisite times. Basketball was okay -- you had to be a real dingus to get hurt playing basketall. No football -- and they still don't have a team, even now that nobody who lives there grows anything but bitter, anymore.

There are other phrases like that, though of course as soon as I opened up this window I couldn't think of a single one.

This isn't a rural expression, but my dad used to say Dicky Nixon was so crooked he bet he had to screw his pants on in the morning. Hunter S. Thompson also used this phrase for Nixon, I believe, but my dad never read any Hunter S. Thompson. He did grow up along the same river, though. Maybe it was something in the water.

It shows, though, if you grew up in a rural area. For one thing, you don't panic and set your hair on fire every time it snows. If it's not that bad, you still have to get where you're going; if it's pretty bad, nobody's going there. We were thirty miles from anything. We drove a lot of front-wheel or four-wheel drive cars.

I don't know, I doubt much of anybody will grow up in the kind of isolation I did, anymore -- between satellite TV and cable, every kid in every nook and cranny of the U.S. will be exposed to millions of hours of more or less homogenous music, bland situation comedy, dumbed-down news and advertising practically from the moment it shoots out of the uterus. That kid in Manhattan sees the same commercial for nutritionally questionable breakfast cereal that the kid in Podunk does, and also the same misogynistic sitcom and the same bullshit newscast. Local news is all about scaring people into going to Walgreen's to buy something to cure them of diseases they won't get, or convincing them the coming snowstorm will be the worst ever in the history of televised news, so stock up on everything before we all DIE!!!

Feh. I'm not sorry I grew up listening to cats screw outside my window at night, hearing a barge tooting down on the river five miles south-southwest and down the hill. Knowing both my grandmothers -- having them live within two blocks of our house. I don't know if my parents liked that quite so much, though it did leave them plenty of places to dump us if they wanted to go somewhere. I remember playing Flinch with my ancient former-school-principal maternal grandmother, who always smelled of stale White Shoulders, and who wore a dress and stockings (not panty hose) every day of her life, right up to the day she died. Yes, she died in a dress and stockings.

My maternal grandmother, bless her, never could drive worth a damn, though. My uncle loved to tell a story on her, of when he tried to teach her to drive. He said that actually, she could drive okay -- she got to where she could shift and use the clutch and all -- she just didn't know how to stop. He said she just didn't ever put on the brakes -- she used to roll up to a wall and let the wall stop her.

Then there was another joke my dad and another uncle used to tell on his mother. My grandfather loved that old joke with the punch line, "wrecked 'im? It damned near killed 'im!"
Once they explained the joke to my grandmother, she couldn't bring herself to deliver the punch line -- not only was 'rectum' (the real punch line) a word she wasn't comfortable with, she wouldn't say 'damned near,' either. So she's just say "bus' him all up!" I hope she never understood that the reason we all laughed so hard was because she couldn't bring herself to deliver the punch line of the joke properly because she felt it was vulgar. My dad and uncle thought it was the funniest thing to ask her to tell it at family gatherings, though.

Nobody has a grandmother like that, either. Dad's mother raised three kids through the Great Depression in an even dinkier little river town than the one I grew up in. My grandfather was half-ant, half-grasshopper -- he'd work all summer doing odd jobs, painting and doing plastering and drywall, then sit in his chair all winter with his spittoon on one side and an old tube radio on the other while my grandmother took in sewing and kept food on the table in winter. The woman fell apart, eventually. Not that she slowed down for five minutes until she had a stroke in her early eighties -- she used to make sauerkraut every late summer, she had an old grater that was about three feet long that she'd stand in a galvanized metal washtub and grate the cabbage in. Never occurred to me until long after she was gone -- they rented a house that didn't have a bathtub. She also bathed in that tub she grated the cabbage in. I got sick on kraut the first time I ever ate it, so I don't have to go around for two or three days feeling like I have a cat hair in the back of my throat from thinking about that. Small favors.

Adieu -- just felt like dropping this in here. If I think of any more 'you know you grew up a hick if ...' expressions. I'm sure there are more of them lurking in my head.