Sounds of the hall in roughly 33 1/3 minutes!
[Note: You can add Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your iTunes by clicking here. The Rock Town Hall feed will enable you to easily download Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your digital music player.]
Playlist and more after the jump
Dad Rock.
“Dad Rock” is a term for all that old ’60s and ’70s music that today’s dads listen to. I’ve seen references to it online, heard my kids mention it, and I’ve even tuned into a radio show called Dad Rock. Understanding the demographic of this site, I think it’s fair to say many of us have Dads that are from the pre-rock era. That’s the case for me, too, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have any rock(ish) records in the family record collection when I was a kid.
My parents were in college when rock and roll emerged, and were graduates when it was only a couple of years old. To them, rock and roll was teen music, utterly beneath them. In the 1950s, the median age for getting married was 20 for women and 23 for men; if you were in your 20s, it’s safe to say you identified as a grown-up.
My dad was an amateur musician and was in charge of entertainment on his army base in Germany, but he never ran into Elvis (who was there at roughly the same time). In 1977, he and my mom were dragged by another couple to go see Elvis on what would be his last tour; they attended ironically and the performance simply confirmed their long-held biases.
But they had been liberal young parents in the ’60s. We had a Pete Seeger record stuck in among the jazz, classical, light opera, and show tunes albums. And they were not completely closed off from the pop culture. Indeed, I think they tried to like rock at some point in the late ’60s or early ’70s, but didn’t get too far.
What rock or pop-rock records did your parents have? Here’s about all we had:
I think my dad, despite not really getting rock (I remember one conversation I had with him where he had no clue who Chuck Berry was) respected the Who’s crack at making an opera. He never listened to the album much, but he liked owning it and I believe he went to see the movie version, and possibly the stage show.
Dad turned 80 the other day. We got him tickets to Madame Butterfly.
Hey, gang. Mod’s impertinent commentary about Jimi Hendrix’s late career — and specifically his disdainful dismissal of Jimi’s performance at Woodstock — got me thinking about the original big ‘do at Yasgur’s Farm. A quick search on the web for basic set list information on the event led me to conclude that there was a lot of shit that went down there I had no idea about. CCR? Johnny Winter? Neil Young? Mountain? The Incredible String Band? It got me thinking.
Mainly, it got me thinking: is there a snowball’s chance in hell I would have ever braved the traffic jams, the weather, the stench, and the bad acid to check out this show? And if not: how would the show have to have been edited to get me up there?
Of course, I’m just as eager to understand your opinions on the subject. Have a look at the following set list, and let me know your thoughts.
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
The Replacements play their first “reunion” gig in Toronto at Riot Fest this weekend — and it’s creating quite a stir, back in the Twin Cities at least. They close the show Sunday, right after Iggy and the Stooges. There will be lots of press coverage in the Twin Cities media as Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson strap it up — no Chris Mars, though, and Slim Dunlap has big health issues.
So to prepare: There’s this nice “Meet the Replacements Family” chart that a local station cooked up.
How about this rendering of the Let It Be cover (shot on the Stinson’s roof) recreated in Legos? Nice!
Wish I could be there — but it’s a good thing I’m not going — I have the mother of all summer colds and am just getting it back together after a week of laying low.
From where I’m coming from this is an event show — where I would consider traveling to make it. What say you? — in the spirit of an earlier post — is this a ‘why bother’ event or a real event?
Happy birthday to me. I have turned 50 years old.
Before receiving my AARP card a couple of weeks ago, I had been thinking my 50th birthday would mark the beginning of my middle-age period. Statistically speaking, though, I should have gone middle-age crazy 10 years ago. I’m two thirds gone if I’m reasonably lucky. Shit.
So, I’ve blown my middle-age period feeling like an overweight man in his early 30s, but with the frequently curmudgeonly attitude of a septuagenarian. No sports car. No hot tub. No Tommy Bahama shirts. No island getaways. No golf. Just more records and guitars and rehearsals and recording sessions and baseball games and family and friends and food and Dugout Chatter on Rock Town Hall. There could have been worse ways to spend one’s 40s.
I’m 50, and despite the aches and pains of my first season with neighborhood friends in an over-35 baseball league I’m in consciously better shape than I’ve ever been in my life. Even when I was a kid and playing sports as frequently as the day allowed, I only played to compete. I was never conscious of my body and how prepared it was for whatever game. Stretch? Sure, when there’s a close play at first I’ll stretch like Willie McCovey. Jog? Only if the coach makes us. Lift? Sure, a hoagie or a cheesesteak—or both—to my mouth.
I wanted to share some really deep thoughts about reaching this milestone and how it relates to who I am as a music lover, but I’ve realized that no matter how happy I am with my life, when it comes to music I still hold to many of the same views about things that most people would not stop to consider. Even some fellow music lovers wonder how I can hold so deep a LOVE or HATE for specific musical details. Just last week my close personal friend and drummer, Townsman Sethro, was learning the arrangement for a new song with me when he stopped playing a rhythm on the ride cymbal and said, “Wait, you hate when I do that.”
“What do I hate?” I asked.
“You hate when I do this,” he said, as he tapped out a fancy, dancing pattern on the ride cymbal.
“Do I hate that?” I asked.
“You hate everything,” he said lovingly.
It actually sounded good at this particular point in the song, so I told him to carry on with it, but to avoid not getting too cute. Only in rare cases, I suddenly realized, am I cool with what I consider to be a “cute” pattern on the ride cymbal.
Much is made about the kinder, wiser, gentler moderator I’ve become since launching Rock Town Hall with a group of like-minded friends in November 2002 (when I was only 39 and probably acting like a mature 26 year old), but time has not broken me of some of my didactic approach to musical experiences. On this, my 50th birthday, I will share 50 didactic thoughts on the first 50 musical topics that come to mind. Enjoy, learn, and thank you for your part in making my life about as much as I could have hoped it would be.
Sounds of the Hall in roughly 33 1/3 minutes!
For this mix, I really didn’t feel like speaking over the tracks, or putting down bed music in order to list songs with my tinny laptop microphone. I’ll let the list below suffice, and happy listening!
[Note: You can add Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your iTunes by clicking here. The Rock Town Hall feed will enable you to easily download Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your digital music player.]
It’s become commonplace now at giant events like Super Bowl halftime shows and awards shows to see an artist perform to an audience of a couple hundred beautiful, enthusiastic, coordinated fans-for-hire doing what I call cheer-syncing (or crowd-syncing), a term I propose adding to our RTH Glossary. Sometimes the camera pulls back to show the crowd rushing the stage as they are set free from their holding pen. In the case of The Rolling Stones’ 2006 halftime show the cheer-syncing professionals were actually enclosed in a pen within the band’s stage. Talk about a captive audience.
Everyone is beautiful. Everyone’s got their hand raised to the heavens, like they’re in a Pentecostal church. There can’t be that many Pentecostal churchgoers at televised rock performances, can there?
How far back does this practice of hiring an audience to crowd the foot of the stage and essentially pee their pants in unison does this practice go? Was this idea spawned after choreographed rock performances in Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy? No one really cheers like that do they? How often does an audience actually rally around a performer the way they do on these televised spectacles?
