Mr. Moderator

When not blogging Mr. Moderator enjoys baseball, cooking, and falconry.

Last Man Standing: Songs of Excess

Mar 042014

To celebrate Mardi Gras, let’s conduct a timed Last Man Standing on songs of excess. ~~The last comment in by midnight New Orleans time will win a prize direct from the city of New Orleans, albeit this time next week, when I’m back from a coming trip there.~~ [It turns out I was the last to add to the list before midnight New Orleans time on Mardi Gras, so I win/we lose. We’ll let the LMS carry on as nature intends.]

Do I have to explain what I mean by “songs of excess?” I hope not. If so, perhaps you might want to sit this one out. I’ll kick things off with “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.”

Live it up!

Gig-Day Rituals

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 282014

Tonight my band plays its first live show in a few years. We took the last few years off from playing live owing to apathy (our audience’s as well as our own), long before a bandmate’s illness sealed the deal. With our lineup reformulated, a new record to play live, and a refreshed ego (speaking for myself), I’m really looking forward to playing live again. I’m also trying to quell the slight butterflies I get by remembering my gig-day rituals. Let’s see what’s ahead, and I’m curious to learn your gig-day rituals.

Welcome to the Club, Sammymaudlin!

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 282014

Happy birthday, Sammymaudlin, fearless leader of The Back Office, old friend, album cover designer extraordinaire, funny man, soulful man, friend whose voice always reminds me of Ron Howard’s Richie Cunningham voice, and soon-to-be-my-faux-leather-clad running mate in The Big Easy, where I will don the leather fringe jacket. I know you don’t put a lot of stock in dates, but this one is worth celebrating—and milking—for all it’s worth.

Can I say how old you are? Can I at least say you’re now the same age that I turned last June? That’s not giving away too much, is it? Not everyone around here knows me and my personal details. Welcome to the club, if you know what I mean.

Let’s put aside all pretense and get to the parts you most desire: the gifts. Let’s start with your ideal cover band, who will be performing in New Orleans when we meet there next week:

Radiohead: Pushin’ Too Hard?

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 252014

Your Friendly Neighborhood Gollum

Saturday night I watched an hour-long performance by Radiohead on Austin City Limits. It’s the second such hour-long televised performance I’ve watched by the band on PBS. A couple of years ago I saw some performance of them in a studio. In both cases, I was interested enough to keep watching, but despite being impressed by their arsenal of avant-garde touches; instrument juggling; and obscure and cool gear as well as the maximum effort that all the band members put into their music, I got very little out of the experience of trying to listen to and feel the music. It added up to a whole lot of nothing.

Surely, I’ve been missing something.

All-Star Jam

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 212014

Help these yearning cats out with good tidings in this All-Star Jam, won’t you?

When the African American Robed Choir Is Not Enough…

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 182014

I know nothing about the phenomenon of the animated movie Frozen, but a groundswell of attention has reached me in recent weeks. I keep hearing about some song called “Let It Go,” which stuck on my radar because I wrote a song by that title years ago and chuckle at the notion of learning that one of my songs was selected as the big musical number in a Disney movie. Alas, it’s not my “Let It Go.”

Anyhow, I had not heard a lick of this song or seen even a trailer for Frozen until this morning, when an “Africanized Tribal Cover” of the song appeared on a friend’s Facebook feed. The prospect of an “Africanized Tribal Cover,” as the parenthetical title on YouTube promised, was too ripe to bypass during Exploitive Black Rock History Month. See what you think:

For those of you who’ve seen the movie, am I right to assume that the original movie version is not “Africanized” or even “tribalized”? Or was there a reason to “Africanize” the song? Is the Ice Princess, or whoever is the movie character singing the song, at least surrounded by an animated choir of robed Inuits?

Marty Thau Dead

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 172014

I coulda had Marty Thau Presents 2×5!

I’m seeing reports that New York punk impresario Marty Thau has died at 75. Official reports are far and few between, however, in this electronic age, in which almost anyone who’s ever striven to be anyone merits a flurry of “he/she was a great (wo)man…” tributes. I cannot sincerely attest to the greatness of Marty Thau, but he seemed like an interesting person around whom cool artists gathered. He seemed at least as interesting as that spoken-word 1-hit wonder poet Maggie Estes, who sadly passed away at the age of 50 and who had a fling with MTV in the early ’90s, so let’s give it up for Marty Thau.

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