What a difference a year makes....

[captainsblog]

On one level, there's the sense of Normal being out there in sight.  More and more businesses and services are being permitted to reopen; I waited too long to look into getting my hairy head mowed, and will now have to wait until Monday morning for a chance at an appointment next week.  Outdoor restaurant spaces are getting the go-ahead for limited dine-in. As for work, I just returned from Rochester yesterday which was my second visit since March 13; two more are scheduled for next Tuesday and Wednesday, with my office there now finally ready to allow clients into the office with a very strict protocol of testing, tracing and cleaning before and after.

Now if only the fucking country could regain its mind.

Our biweekly poetry gig continues to be Zoomed, and many of the participants, already shellshocked over COVID, are now having to deal with the smell of teargas and the sounds of gunshots within close range of their apartments, near here and elsewhere.  Then, lest we get any false comfort in thinking It can't happen here, this is the City of Good Neighbors? Niagara Square went viral on Thursday night, with a pack of po-pos approaching a protester, one pushing him to the ground to bleed before rolling his Very Entitled Police Officer Eyes and moving on without rendering assistance.  Two cops were suspended; their 57 brethren on the Riot Squad reacted by all quitting the team in protest over the city suspending them. ("Quitting the team" does not equal giving up their jobs, seniority, paychecks or union protections.)  There were much quieter protests there last night, the city has banned the use of chokeholds on persons in custody, and maybe, maybe, some good will eventually come out of this.

While that story was unfolding on the news and social media yesterday morning, I was heading to, around and then home from Rochester.  It was for a deposition of a client, and it was agreed in advance that my opponent would appear remotely from his home through an audio-video hookup while the witness and I showed up at the stenographer's downtown office.  This was my first venture into any downtown since Shit Got Real in mid-March, and it brought back some sad and surreal memories. 

We were required to wait in the hall while they got Grumpy Old Man connected on the other end of the video setup, and with nowhere to sit, I walked down the hall to a sight familiar from barely a year ago:



The entrance was locked, and the room was eerily silent, but this is what was in it last June 25th:



No biggie, just me, dozens of other jazz lovers and Heather Bambrick on her first visit ever from Toronto to dazzle us with her trio.  Now that festival is off until fall and, with a second wave being fully feared, who knows if it will happen even then?

The client I came with, who works with a business a block away, tells me his employees are afraid to come back to work. In the Cultural District.

Not even privilege protects.

We have to do better.

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Music certainly helps. It may be the only thing that does now.  So many performers are finding ways to keep it together despite not being able to play in public; we've been doing as much as we can to support them, and the venues that did and will host them.  There are lots of Meaningful Album tags going around; after posting 10 of them which really are from my past, someone else asked me to do another 20.  I switched it around and am using it to remember to order music from friends and not-yet-friends, whether way back in my memory or fairly new to us.
 

1) Lucinda Williams, Good Souls Better Angels: Started here mainly because Eleanor wanted it, not so much because Lucinda needs the money, but she's as on her game as ever.

2) Christopher Brown, Hangin' In Live at the Town Crier: I met Chris opening for Lucy Kaplansky in his native Hudson Valley, and he's been trying to do weekly gigs online. This live show is from the venue from my meeting him (a previous location of theirs up the road from Beacon); I'm on its mailing list, also, and I recently Zoomed into a live open mic of theirs. Just this week they made the painful decision to shut their doors until they can invite people back in, and they've put up a gofundme.  There is no shame in that when billionaires got capital gain tax relief in the WEREALLYCARESABOUTOURDONORS Act.

3) Maria Sebastian, Yellow Envelope: now a good if once-met friend, she also recommended this from her back catalog.  I played it through while lawnmowing after a particularly bad day, and appreciated how much she can rock it out.

4) Susan Werner, Club Passim: Didn't know of her until she hosted Dar Williams a few weeks back on a Youtube gig. She did play locally at least once, I'm told, and I hope she comes back, because this live performance from the famed club in Cambridge (Our Fair City), MA, is awesome. Particularly this track.

5) Folkfaces, Fat Ol' Rat: Frontman Tyler Westcott is in about 40 different  bands, and I've seen him all around in various incarnations. This came out last summer and I'd been looking for it, but bought it on an All-to-the-Artist Day on Bandcamp.

6) Davey O, The Long Way Home: I've seen Dave at a number of local venues, and he's been doing weekly Facegigs during the 'demic.  One from a few weeks ago was a runthrough of this entire album, so I done ordered it.

7) Deanna Witkowski, Having to Ask: We have most of her newer stuff, but she recommended this older collection from one of our favorite jazz pianists.

8) Mark Rust, Our Families Came To Sing: We go way back with Mark, me to Ithaca days, Eleanor to when he performed around Rochester a lot.  I thought we had this on cassette, but it's a later, and professionally produced, redoing of many of the same songs.

9) Amy Fradon, Small Town News: met her way back in Rochester as part of a duo she was then in. Their originals and covers had beautiful harmonies, and this CD from a later band of hers continues that. Not sure if she's still performing, but I sent her a note through  mutual friend Mark to tell her what we were doing and she answered, This makes me happy:)

10) Jen Chapin, ReVisions: we've been friends since she came for a Buffalo Folk concert a few years ago (an we hepped!).  Mark also reminded me to order from her; Our Families leads off with a tribute song to her dad Harry, which her uncle Tom Chapin also sings on.  Picking a new one from her took doing;  I realized we already had most of her recent issues, so I checked her website and this looked interesting, and I'd been looking forward to hearing her take on the great works of Stevie Wonder.

 

Then George Floyd and the aftermath intervened, which made Jen's version of the first song on the album all the  more important. This is NOT the sweetness and light of "Isn't She Lovely." It's a message of strength and anger, that the privileged and the passive need to remember every day:
 

Watch on YouTube

11) And then, just arriving, A.J. Croce, Just Like Medicine: The other morning, fresh off my weird Missing Car dream, I had a random Jim Croce song come into my head. ("Hey Tomorrow," if you must know, not either of his biggest hits which are basically the same song about a bad mean guy getting cut up by a challenger. ) Jim is long gone, as we know, but I knew his son has been recording, and I think I've heard him on WRUR, so I decided to order one of his. Only after ordering did I realize my last purchase was a Jen, also the amazingly talented performing child of a beloved singer from my past taken from us too soon. AJ's collection is a mix of genres- his voice at times evokes Dr. John, John Pizzarelli and especially on a few, Elvis Costello.
 

More to follow. Any you think we should support, comment or shoutout otherwise.

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Ending with three other random music related bits:

Another friend was doing one of these challenges and posted a couple of old Jefferson Airplane albums.  That reminded me of the only collection of theirs I ever owned in vinyl: a late 70s double compilation called Flight Log. It had most of the original band's hits, some Tuna and early Starship, an assortment of bits and bobs from various solo and other side projects, and some great liner notes. The vinyl died, as all of ours did, in the Great 1991 Ice Storm Basement Flood; vinyl copies are fairly easy to find online, but CDs are rare and go for close to and above 100 bucks. Oh, and we still have a cassette of it, and, as of this week, something to play it on:



Yes, it's literally called a Boombox. But it's got Bluetooth, so we can use it to connect to computers and phones to play tunes, or even play radio or any of our hundreds of old cassettes. In time, we will connect cords to software to convert some of those old tunes to mp3, including Ye Olde Flighte Logge.  In the meantime, seeing the tracklist, there was one I couldn't wait for, so I mp3d it and added it to the Volunteers copy on my phone. It's a solo Grace song; turn your sound down before clicking.

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As for that vinyl we used to have: I saw this the other day-



To which I instantly replied (and copied Emily on the comic and the observation, which she totally got):

 Ray: "These darn fool kids today have no idea what this means."
Ray's kid: "Um, we have a vinyl record player and you don't."

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Ending with one more from the Airplane era:

We heard of a bit of controversy this week involving our rare forays into fast food:  Wendy's, long an influencer on social media, took some heat when it was revealed that one of its biggest franchise owners, a dude named James Bodenstedt, has been donating major coin to the Cheeto re-election campaign and even got himself a seat at the table as part of the Regime's task force for Reopening America So It Can Get Sick And Die Again.  The corporate Wendy's has nothing to do with this- they just donated an even larger amount to Black Lives Matter- but I still wanted to know if I was putting Biggie Bucks into the bad guy's pocket. Long ago, I represented creditors of the Buffalo franchise owner, who was local and who eventually had his stores transferred to the family that owned the Rochester stores; but apparently they sold out to the Bad Guy back in 2016.  So our Saturdays at the drive-thru are likely done.

Or are they? Because I was reminded of another Woodstock performer and how he might approach the problem:

Suppose somebody were to drive up, tie up their drive-through, get to the squawk box, sing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and drive off. They’d think he was really sick and they wouldn’t take his order.

And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they’d think they are LGBT and they wouldn’t take their order either,

And if three people do it...Can you imagine three people driving up, singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and driving off? They’d think it was an organization.

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day driving up, singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and driving off? Well friends, they may think it's a movement! And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Trump Donor Movement!

(I suppose they could all instead drive up, order a triple bypass special, Biggie fry and a jumbo orange drink and THEN drive off, but that would be wrong.)

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Now I'm hungry. Just not for Wendy's.