Brushes with Greatness
Aug. 3rd, 2024 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThings from this week I am leaving out:
- Work. Which, frankly, sucked. Having all of Wednesday morning wasted in a useless court hearing with an asshole on the other side and my own client being difficult to deal with. Finding out when I got back from that on Wednesday that a client lost a case the previous week, diminishing any feeling of accomplishment from finding out another client won theirs from the previous week. Finding out on Monday that my current largest-dollar case, which had been scheduled for this past Tuesday, was once again postponed at the last minute. Much of the rest of the week spent trying to focus on two clients, each sucked into bureaucratic nightmares I am having trouble extracting them from when I'm not mixing them up with each other because their nightmares are so similar. And the ex-client, or maybe he isn't yet, with whom things have gotten so toxic that he demanded his file materials back and wouldn't even sign a receipt for them. (I brought in a co-worker as a witness.)
- The tour wot I took of the almost abandoned editorial and printing facility of the Buffalo News, on Tuesday afternoon after both the hearing that morning and my friend's big Rochester show that night got postponed. Tons of pictures, stories and more than a few ghosts in that building, one of whom came home with me....
- And the cognitive assessment I had on Thursday. Almost two hours of looking at pictures, reading and listening to lists of vocabulary words, drawing objects and literally connecting dots. Some of the picture work was a book of "what is this?" identifiers, going from the "man woman person camera" easy shit that a certain old man "aced" when his pill-popping unlicensed doctor administered it, to more complex drawings of a protractor, a tripod, an abacus (the PA administering it to me said she didn't know what an abacus was when she started giving the test), and.... a harp. So I told her the story of the one I had just seen a photo of and the story of how I came to see it. In time, I will tell it here. I go back to the MD in 2-3 weeks to find out what all of these tests may tell.
All of these experiences were combinations of long, frustrating and uncertain. Yet three times this week, I ended the day happy, redeemed from the drudge by three musicians. Each of those happies resulted in, or from, somebody being made relatively Internet famous.
Two of those three people were me.
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I’ll begin with the one who isn’t me. The past several years, NPR has run a contest to make itself more relevant to The Kids who mostly get their music these days from streaming services rather than the radio. It’s called the “Tiny Desk” contest, and the rules are pretty simple, or were before the lawyers got to them: a musician or band from the US creates and uploads a video of an original song, which has to be no longer than ten minutes and clean enough to play on the radio. I thought there was a requirement that the artist not be signed to a recording contract, but that may just be implicit in the 300 references in the rules to the entrant warranting that the video isn't subject to any rights or royalty claims from anybody else. The eponymous mandate is that the video has to include a desk in it.
Over 7,000 entries came in during this year's competition. I knew at least five of the performers from the Buffalo music community who submitted videos; oddly, Rochester didn't have any, at least none promoted, maybe because they were all writing the same song. The nationwide winner (which got mondo promotion, the promise of mentorship and an appearance on an NPR stage in DC in May), was a Sacramento band that goes by The Philharmonik. But in the past few weeks, All Things Considered has featured some of the best entries in various musical genres. From Latino to rock and folk to rap earlier in the month, this week featured three of the best contest entries highlighting jazz. And one of those three is a friend from right here in the 716!
You know, in the 1960s and '70s, there was a movement of what was called soul jazz, a music that had more of an R&B groove, still with the jazz tradition but not that swing I was telling you about earlier. There were tracks like the "Work Song" by Cannonball Adderley or anything by the band The Crusaders from the 1970s. And I mention that because soul jazz is alive and well with the entry called "What Time Were You Born?" from Ellen Pieroni & the Encyclopedia of Soul....
You know, Ellen, in fact, plays the same instrument as Cannonball Adderley, the alto sax. And in this tune, she doubles the melody with the guitarist Adam Bronstein. When she takes her solo, it really warms my heart because I hear the same soulfulness of Cannonball or any of the sax players who played with Ray Charles back in the '50s or the more contemporary alto saxophonist, David Sanborn. And, you know, the secret ingredient is the prominence of the blues in this style. So while we heard earlier Danae Greenfield and her band changing things and expanding the stylistic rules, this band is very retro but with a nice new sheen.
If that embed doesn't work, try this:
https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5052807/nx-s1-3e52cbed-612e-4d84-8920-d761503ead99
Either way, Ellen's portion of the segment starts just past the five-minute mark:) Or watch the Tiny Desk entry itself at this Youtube linky:)
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That was broadcast Monday. On Tuesday, I began my own journey into the Valley of Viral.
After almost an entire decade now of having to listen to a cranky orange old man hurling epithets at anyone who dared get in his way- from his own party's "Lyin' Ted" and "Little Marco" and "DeSanctimonious" (all of whom have groveled back to him), to other world leaders like "Little Rocket Man," but especially our challengers to him who got branded with "Crooked Hillary" and "Pocahontas" and "Sleepy Joe"- we never seemed to find a way to strike back. I went with "Cheeto" for awhile, while cleverer ones like "Orange Numpty" and "Don the Con" came and went without taking him down. Yet somehow, just this past week, in response to the entire outpouring from the other side, one epithet seems to have finally stuck and gotten under their skin:
Weird.
Yes, it is. It's also the word that's doing it. And so, I turned my gaze to the pinnacle of that epithet, to the man who, beginning with an accordion in a bathroom (weird, but not as weird as self-pleasuring on a couch*), has made recordings and videos and concert tours and a feature film out of being not just weird, but Weird Al. I went to his official Facebook page and suggested he get in on the triumph of Weird over Evil. And a mere two days later, I got an acknowledgement from Al himself-
He liked it! He really really liked it!
The notification came with the "blue checkmark" that confirms it really came from him (or at least somebody on his password-enabled social media staff)**. This will be important when we get to the next story, because there are plenty of Pretenders out there, and I'm not referring to Chrissie Hynde.
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That gets us to the event that ended July with a story of harmony, hockey and happy.
We've long been fans of a Canadian singer named Kathleen Edwards. She's been performing since the 90s, recorded her first EP in 1999, and became better known in the US early this century after playing the South by Southwest Festival and getting signed by the folk-friendly Rounder Records label. She was one of the local musicians invited to perform in 2003 at the SARS Festival in Toronto, which she told quite the tale about years later that I'll get to. We first got to know her through her song "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory;" it's from her third studio album Asking for Flowers, which was released in 2008 but, as I posted here at the time, we did not discover until my NPR friends in Rochester played it in 2012. I immediately recognized the reference to retired NHL goon Marty McSorley, who appears in the video for the song.
Kathleen continued gaining US traction with several appearances on Letterman, but then decided to give it all up. She returned to her mostly childhood home of Ottawa (she's the daughter of a Canadian diplomat), opened a restaurant which she Alanis-ironically named "Quitters," but then got back into recording and touring just in time for COVID to hit and turn her support of her comeback album into what she referred to the other night as "dogshit."
Ah, the other night. Although loving all of her music and stories, we'd never seen her perform; then came word that our favorite small-club venue, Sportsmen's Tavern, was featuring her on July 31. I immediately scored two tickets and posted here about my plan for what I would ask her to sign. I knew she knew Marty McSorley, the Not the Great One from the Edmonton Oiler dynasty-
- because he appeared with her in the video for "I Make the Dough." I decided that, since she had no new album out to sell at the show and we had most of her earlier ones, I'd have her sign one of his vintage hockey cards. It took the better part of a day to conclude that no Buffalo card shop was going to fulfill that order, so I found one online for all of three bucks (plus 10 for shipping by Canadian Post) and hoped it would beat Amazon's promised delivery by the day of the show.
It did, and safely in pocket, we headed to the venue a good 90 minutes early. Sportsmens is great for listening, but has limited seating and we've had to either leave early or send Eleanor home separately because she couldn't stand up through a three hour wait, opener and set. Even getting there early, we got some of the last seats in the joint around a table, and that was only because the owners had expanded the seating next to the stage by appropriating space that had been an outdoor alley to an entry door and turning it into covered seating. (Well, mostly covered, as we shall see.) The food was decent, the beer non-alcoholic, and our company consisted of my longtime friends Ken and Ellen, their son Ben and his partner Lou; he and Eleanor hit it off with talk about the lighting of the venue (which made his chicken fingers look purple) and of our respective living places.
They hadn't announced an opening act, but she had one, who came on right at the scheduled start time. I usually cringe at the sight of an opener, especially when it hasn’t been announced, but Matt Sucich was talented, funny, and kept his promise to only go for half an hour. He told us he was from New York City and apologized for being a Jets fan, but we never take them too seriously anyway. His playing and intonations reminded Eleanor of Paul Simon. Matt had a mailing list he asked us to sign, which I did, and he had his most recent album in various formats, which I later bought. Also later, he helped with my quest to reunite Kathleen with that old-school hockey player I had in my pocket.
After a break between his set and hers, Matt would return to the stage as Kathleen‘s second guitarist, along with a very good bass player and a talented gentleman on a pedal steel keyboard looking thing. 
(That picture I took will return later in this story.)
I snuck a shot of the setlist as I often manage to do-
- and she mostly kept to it, with a couple of additions and one change in the encore. She just played for the first four or five songs, then told us this was her last performance before she's heading down to Nashville to record her first album in four years. It’s being produced by Jason Isbell, who made time for her in what she said were his only 4 1/2 days of availability for the rest of this year. She played one of the new songs she’s planning to put on that album, which she knew people in Buffalo would appreciate, because it’s called “The Leafs Still Suck.”
She did mostly older material, with “Options Open” from the 2020 record being the newer one we recognized. She also did a couple of cover songs, each of which had or led to a story. After going off the list to do her cover of AC/DC’s. “Money Talks,” she told a story from that star-studded 2003 SARS Festival in Toronto. She reminded us she'd only been recording for a few years at that point, and said she was a bit overwhelmed by the parade of talent there- including the Stones, Rush, the Isley Brothers and Justin Timberlake. They assembled them all in an airplane hangar for a group photo, and she saw some guys come in, who she thought were little kids: she had no idea the AC/DC members were so short! She wound up getting her picture taken with Brian Johnson, their lead singer; to this day, she told us, that photo is on the mantel in her parents' house, and when their friends stop over, they inevitably ask, "oh, is that your daughter's husband?"
Then she got to her scheduled cover of Tom Petty’s “Crawling Back to You,” and started telling us about how much she loved his music and the opportunity to participate in tributes to him. It was at that moment that the ceiling above us started pouring down beer. Recall that the owners had just built out this section of seating in a space that used to be an alley, but which had the original second floor balcony still over it. There is a ceiling up there, but it would appear there was not enough sealing when they built the addition under it, Kathleen stopped her story and speculated that it was the ghost of Tom Petty joining in the fun.
There, next to the checkerboard square tiles, is the puddle from the beer that almost got us three feet away from it.
She commented on a few of the fans' choices of shirts, recognizing the almost-Canadian SUNY Potsdam college tee that one guy near us was wearing, and shit-talking a little with a guy in the front row wearing an Edmonton Oilers tee. (Ottawa fans don't like them, either.) I'd already met the guy, since my hockey card was of McSorley in his days protecting Gretzky on Edmonton. He not only got the song reference, he also recognized my Rochester Amerks t-shirt, and told me his cousin is former Amerks goalie Darcy Wakaluk, who I remember from the late 80s.
She ended her set, came back out for one solo number and then Matt joining her for a duet of her dog-lover's anthem "Who Rescued Who?" By then we'd been there close to four hours, but I wanted a shot at getting that darn card signed. Eventually Matt came over to the merch table, just as founding 10,000 Maniac John Lombardo was walking by with his usual glass of red wine taken from his usual spot on the balcony. I introduced Matt to Maniac briefly, bought his CD (which Kathleen also sings on), and, not seeing any sign of her coming out, gave him the card and hoped he'd get it to her.
He did. Because the next day, this showed up on Kathleen's official bluechecked Facebook story page:
Having it show up on her real page was important, because later in the day I started seeing my public posts about her show "liked" and even "loved" by "Kathleen Edwards." Also, other peoples' posts about the show, and some of my public posts NOT about the show. Only it wasn't her; it was yet another of the online creeps and/or crooks who steal public profile information about a person and then tries to make friends with any of their friends who fall for the deception. I get one or two friend requests from already-friended people every week; with maybe one exception, they've all been fake. My account has been spoofed, and so has Eleanor's. Yet I was not yet done with the real Kathleen. For on Thursday, she posted a request on her official Facebook page for fans to send in photos from the tour. I chose the one above of her and all of her bandmates. Within a day, that page had compiled many of those photos from our show and some earlier ones into this "reel" with her singing under it. They go by pretty fast, but there, right after a couple by Ryan, the guy in the Oilers shirt, was the one I posted above and sent to her:
I don't think a week can go better on the Interwebs than that:)
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* The Vance story about the couch, supposedly in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, isn't actually in there. Yet the idea of that pretentious idiot writing about pleasuring himself in between sofa cushions was so credible that his PR people have had to waste time and energy denying it. It continues to, um, grow bigger and stickier despite everybody knowing it's not real.
** Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the first social media site to go through a vetting process with public figures that assigned them "blue checkmarks" to confirm to their users that the account was really the famous person's. I know a few people who went through it and it required quite a bit of written proof and double-checking on the site's end. Once the Muskrat took over, he started giving them out to anyone who ponied up 10 or 20 bucks for the privelege. Facebook's blue checkmarks remain relatively reliable.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-03 09:34 pm (UTC)For all the talk about this athlete or that being the GOAT, Gretzky is, in fact, the two highest-scoring hockey players of all time. That is, if you took away all his points for scoring, and just gave him all his points for assists, the total would still be higher than any other player ever. Which also means he didn't hog the puck, he did whatever the team needed to score.
I still go with Cheeto. Was calling him Trumplestiltskin, but too long and literary for most people Cheeto is simple and eary. Even Hedgefund has picked it up.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-04 01:05 am (UTC)The photo of the two of them with the Great One, Espo and Oilers GM Glen Sather lives on in local history- or whatever of it isn't being thrown out....
Photo by Sabres team fotog Bill Wippert, posted by my friend and local historian Steve Cichon.