12 Months of Live Music

When things started opening back up in 2021 after fifteen months of living in a cocoon, I was chomping at the bit. I purchased concert tickets left and right, many from bands that probably wouldn’t have made the cut in 2019, but in my newfound freedom seemed like necessary luxuries. Twelve months later, I look back on a year’s worth of live music. It was a great run. All but two of the acts I had never even seen before. You can read below for details, but Joseph and Sammy Rae & Friends win my two best shows of the year. The War on Drugs earns my worst. Nearly everyone else gets high marks.

September 18, 2021.  Black Pumas, preceded on different stages by Poi Dog Pondering, Moon City Masters and Sheila E.  Sheila E. proved to me that she kicks ass even in her 60s, putting the rest of us aging schlubs to shame.  I was unhappy that I had to leave the end of her show to ensure my attendance at the beginning of the Black Pumas concert, though they were terrific too, easily one of my three favorite bands of the past half a decade.  Sadly, they’ve cancelled shows for the latter half of 2022, leading to questions about the long-term health of the band.  Hopefully they’ll release more music soon.

November 13, 2021.  The Fixx, preceded by Fastball (the acoustic duo version of the group).  The Fixx was fantastic, one of two bands I had seen prior to 2021.  They are in my mind one of the most underrated bands of the 80s and 90s, achieving a level of musicianship and lyrical content that surpasses most of their contemporary and more-popular brethren.  Fabulous.

November 21, 2021. Sammy Rae & The Friends.  I’ve written about this band before, but they are ridiculous.  Sammy Rae’s voice is out of this world, and she really sings, eschewing the vocal shouting that appeals to the masses on shows like American Idol and The Voice.  As gifted and as ebullient a performer as you’ll ever see grace the stage.  One of my top two concerts of the past year.

January, 2022.  Pinegrove.  Postponed due to COVID.  Stay tuned.

January, 2022.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones.  Postponed due to COVID.  I eventually got my money back, but fortunately got to see the band in August at the Sacred Rose Festival.  Stay tuned.

January 15, 2022.  Nate Bargatze.  Not a musician, but a fabulous comedian who manages to be hilarious without resorting to the low hanging fruit of vulgarity and profanity.  Not that I’m a prude, but comedians like Jo Koy assault the audience with F-bomb after F-bomb, and it becomes tiresome.  Bargatze takes another path.

February 27, 2022.  Ralph Covert.  Formerly of acts like The Bad Examples and Ralph’s World, this local Chicago musician played for 2 hours and 45 minutes!  I shit you not.  Playing as a trio for most of the night, Ralph told stories and played selections from throughout his career.  Terrific.

March 27, 2022.  Bright Eyes, preceded by Christian Lee Hutson.  I took a chance on this one.  I only know that band’s final two albums and really dig them, but my dabbling into their earlier efforts has left me mostly unimpressed.  Fortunately, the band brought it with a crazy number of musicians on stage, including at times a mini choir and orchestra.  Led by Colin Oberst, the band clearly has its fanatics, as illustrated by the woman behind me who sang every lyric to every song…loudly.  Admittedly, I was kind of annoyed, but also impressed!  And I didn’t feel that I – a minor fan at best – could possibly bitch to someone who was clearly more passionate than I was.  Great show.

April, 2022.  Spoon.  Cancelled by me due to double-booking.  Damn.  This one hurts a little, as I rank their latest album among the best of 2022, and it looks to have been a great show.

May 4, 2022.  Aimee Mann.  Postponed due to COVID.  To date, this hasn’t been rescheduled.  I haven’t seen Mann perform since Til Tuesday opened up for Tom Petty in 1985!

May 5, 2022.  Steve Hackett.  Performing a short set of solo stuff followed by the entire Seconds Out Genesis album, this was a kick to see live, especially with my son.  Such a high level of musicianship, and I finally got to see Supper’s Ready live!

June 25, 2022.  Again with my son, this was the first time I saw Billy Joel since 1990, and he really surpassed my expectations.  Sure, he played it extremely safe with the setlist, but damn, I can’t argue with the quality of the tunes, and I was impressed with Joel’s vocal ability at such an advanced age.  He seems very at ease in the elder statesman role, probably happy to be alive and still performing for appreciative fans.

July 15, 2022.  Adrian Belew.  I kind of went to this one on a lark, unsure if it was worth the hassle.  It was.  The show cost all of $35, and it was sparsely attended, so my friend and I could stretch out in relative isolation during a high-COVID time.  Belew was fantastic, playing the guitar as no other with an unbelievable bassist and drummer to fill out the trio.  The music is weird and not always in my wheelhouse, but he was fun to see live, and I’m thankful he performed “Three of a Perfect Pair,” a favorite of mine.

July 26, 2022.  Pinegrove.  My daughter turned me onto this band, and while I enjoy their output, I can’t exactly name a song by them.  But this was one of those tickets I purchased way back in the fall of 2021, figuring, “What the hell. Take a chance.”  Playing twenty-two songs almost uninterrupted, the band was tight, offering a multitude of changes of tempo and feel, with odd-metered output and crunchy guitar making this a feast for the ears.  I was glad to have the plugs handy!     

August 26, 2022.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones, preceded on different stages by Sierra Hull, White Demim, City and Colour, Punch Brothers, and afterward a half an hour of The War on Drugs.  A stellar opening day of the Sacred Rose Festival in Chicago, I was greeted with a variety of acts, all really good except The War on Drugs, who I found to be ponderous and overly sincere with songs lacking hooks.  Oh well.  St. Paul & the Broken Bones, on the other hand, were stellar, with lead singer Paul Janeway leading the way.  He especially gained my respect after thanking security for getting his “fat ass” back on stage after a romp through the crowd.  Anyone who can laugh at himself is cool by me.  Oh, he can sing too!

August 28, 2022.  Khruangbin (but it was not to be), preceded by The Infamous Stringdusters with Molly Tuttle.  Bad weather made this entire day at the Sacred Rose Festival precarious.  I got to see an abbreviated setlist with the Stringdusters and Molly Tuttle, who were terrific.  Alas, nearby lightening shut things down thereafter.  My friend was particularly distraught after waiting for two hours in the front row to see Khruangbin, only to be turned away.

September 9, 2022.  The Shins preceded by Joseph.  Such a score on this one!  I was a little unmotivated to see The Shins on a weeknight, concluding that I may have been a bit too zealous with my concert ticket purchases earlier in the year.  But then a few days before the show I discovered that Joseph were opening, another band introduced to me by one of my daughters.  I liked their output and wondered how they might perform live.  Wow.  I mean, wow!  Three sisters singing tight harmonies to nothing more than an electric guitar and an occasional MIDI kick drum trigger.  And they killed it!  One of my top two concerts of the past year. I came home and immediately ordered their acoustic album on vinyl.  The Shins came out and killed it as well, offering a lot more urgency and energy than on their studio albums, and singer James Mercer was in great form, nailing the high vocal parts that Mercer could have been forgiven for reworking to accommodate his aging voice.  But no, even on the powerhouse “Simple Song,” he hit those suckers perfectly.  Great show.

And so ended twelve months of live music.  Not too shabby.  At present I don’t have tickets to see anyone, perhaps needing to take a reprieve after such a breakneck pace.  But it was a helluva good run.

The Cheap Trick book, This Band Has No Past

It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m ready to get things rolling again.

Last spring I wrote about Brian Kramp’s run-in with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a short-sighted entity who temporarily shut down his music podcast, Rock and/or Roll. The silver lining in this fiasco was that it freed up Kramp’s time to complete This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, available now at Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores. I am not a die-hard Cheap Trick fan by any means, though I do think that Dream Police and In Color are nearly perfect power pop albums. Beyond that I’m a modest fan at best. Nonetheless, I found Kramp’s 300-plus-page read to be a delightful trip to the world of live music in the Upper Midwest during the 70s, and a meticulous record of how this band earned their success. If the book can capture the interest of a casual fan, I think that hard-core Cheap Trick followers will be ecstatic.

Kramp conducted more than eighty interviews for the book, including particularly insightful contributions from original drummer Bun E. Carlos and band manager Ken Adamany. The other original band members – Tom Petersson, Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander – didn’t participate, but their words are well-documented from past interviews, and I didn’t find their lack of direct input to be a drawback. If anything, it may have helped to keep the book focused and allow for more contributions from other players in the band’s history.

This Band Has No Past, a title taken from the mock-biography included in the band’s debut album, meticulously covers the origins of Cheap Trick from its modest roots in Rockford, Illinois, with forerunning bands such as The Grim Reapers, Bo Weevils and Fuse, to the recording of the wildly successful Cheap Trick at Budokan, the album that finally garnered the sales that eluded the band through their first three releases. You might be asking, “How the heck can a 300-page book only cover the band’s first few albums?” Kramp does this in a multitude of ways, all of which I found appealing.

First, he put the band’s evolution in context with contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and the releases of Jaws and Star Wars, plus events that played tangential roles in band members’ lives, such as the details of the Richard Speck murders (which would inspire the song, "The Ballad of TV Violence") and the story of the plane crash that took the lives of Otis Redding and six others in 1967. As it happened, future band manager Ken Adamany owned the Madison, Wisconsin club where Redding was to appear that night, and Rick Nielsen’s band, The Grim Reapers, opened for what turned out to be somber occasion.

Second, Kramp’s devotion to details that other author’s may have deemed unimportant give the story its scope and vibrancy, such as the story of Chris Crowe, a graphic artist who created the band’s logo, the inclusion of setlists from various shows, and an in-depth analysis of which of the debut album’s sides was supposed to be played first (it’s not as obvious as one would think). Kramp scoured seemingly every publication that included even a passing mention to the band – the Racine Journal Times, the Rockford Register Republic, Estherville Daily News, etc. Seriously, I admire the efforts it must have taken for Kramp to amass so much information and portray it in an entertaining fashion. Hell, he included two pages worth of adjectives that various publications used to describe Cheap Trick, and another two pages of adjectives used to describe at Rick Nielsen. Kind of crazy, but really rewarding!

Which brings me to the third point: just as Kramp appears to have worked tirelessly to write This Band Has No Past, the book highlights just how hard-working the members of Cheap Trick and a multitude of other bands were at the time, playing show after show after show at tiny venues throughout the Upper Midwest, from bowling alleys to high school dances to clubs to festivals. The book serves as a time capsule of the gritty but vibrant live music scene during the 70s, a scene that modern day musicians can only long for. While most of the venues were foreign to me, I have to imagine that anyone from the area who came of age during the 70s is going to be thrilled with this trip down memory lane.

Most illuminating for me was the realization that Jack Douglas, the producer of Cheap Trick’s debut album, hand-picked the songs for that 1977 release, overlooking tracks that would later prove to be very important to the band’s success, most notably “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender.” And it’s mind-boggling to me that “Hello There” wasn’t chosen to open the first album; it would have rivaled other great debuts such as “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Chuck E.’s in Love” and “Runnin’ with the Devil.” A fan of alternative history might ponder what would have transpired if these songs had been released earlier. Perhaps success would have come sooner, but perhaps Budokan wouldn’t have become phenomenon it became

Somehow it all worked out. And thanks to Kramp, much of it has been documented in an enjoyable read, and the book itself is an attractive, sturdy publication with color photos and appealing typesetting, making it well worth the price.

Using a Password Manager

Keeping track of logins had become a source of stress and frustration for me years ago, but since I’m a glutton for punishment, I did nothing to change the situation: I kept a six-page list of usernames and passwords that I’d printed from an Excel spreadsheet (deleting the file, of course) and on which I had scribbled in a multitude of additional logins over the past several years. Goodness, I had a lot of passwords to keep track of.

But no more! I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to a password manager – Bitwarden in my case – and after a day of figuring things out and entering all of my information, I’m happy to say that I am positively giddy about my decision.

I’m no expert, so I encourage you to read more on-line, but in a nutshell a password manager keeps track of all of your logins, allowing you to change passwords quickly and safely (and to ones that are more challenging to hack into).  All you have to remember is one master password to log into your manager.  That’s it. If all goes according to plan, I will remember just one password for the rest of my life. This will no doubt come in mighty handy as I age, as there have already been times at Target when I froze because I couldn’t immediately recall my 4-digit PIN.

If the thought of having one service storing all of your data scares you, you are a wise person!  Read on.

It was tricky to know which password manager to use; I spent hours going down the rabbit hole of professional reviews, user reviews, ratings, features and costs, and it quickly became overwhelming. Ultimately, I decided to go with the one CNET described as the best free password manager – Bitwarden.  I have no problem paying for a service, and I may eventually upgrade to one of Bitwarden’s premium subscriptions, but I figured I had nothing to lose by just trying out the software and seeing what it’s all about.

I set up my account and immediately didn’t know what I was looking at. YouTube to the rescue! I don’t know the guy’s name who posted the following videos for the Password Bits channel, but his instructions were impeccable:

Bitwarden Beginners Guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QqIeb1Pu4
Using Bitwarden on Android https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyqxR20I1NY

I followed these instructions almost to a “T”, deleting my saved passwords on Google, as well as my stored credit card information, and proceeding from there. I first got everything working seamlessly on my desktop and then set things up on my mobile device. Things don’t run quite as smoothly on my Android – I often have to do an extra click or two, and occasionally have to copy and paste a password – but it still works quit well, and I can open Bitwarden with my fingerprint. I suspect I’ll eventually get a finger scanner for my desktop so that I don’t have to use my master password on that either. (But keep in mind that if you NEVER have to enter your master password, you will likely forget your master password. This could come back to haunt you.)

Speaking of master passwords, if you lose yours you are screwed. Seriously. Your password manager will not be able to get it for you. Because of this, I have a copy of mine saved in my safe deposit box just in case. You could also ask a friend or loved one to keep a copy for you someplace safe. As for the rest of my passwords, for now I still have the six-page sheet in my house, but as I start to change passwords to safer word/number/character combinations, that sheet will become obsolete and shredded.

As for the legitimate safety concern of storing all of your passwords in one place, I encourage you to read this article and several others to help guide you to a decision that’s right  for you. 

ALSO, keep in mind something called the Double Blind Password Strategy.  This is a fantastic idea, and one that will ensure that your most sensitive login information – perhaps for banking, investments, email and social media – are never breached, even in the unlikely event that someone manages to access your password manager account. I will be utilizing this strategy once I get everything set up and synched with my wife’s account.

With Bitwarden, you can share logins with your partner for free, or with your family for a very reasonable fee.  So once I get my spouse set up, we will have shared access to some of our common logins, like travel and shopping websites.

If you’ve been on the fence about using a password manager, I strongly encourage you to hop off and give one a try.  It sure beats the alternative stress-inducing password management system: one’s brain.

3 Books on Filmmakers

You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life.  It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution.  I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer.  Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years.  The book is also a lens into how films are made.  How?  Almost always painstakingly.  Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all.  Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed. 

Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born.  His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress.  Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time.  First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.”  Namely, maids and butlers.  I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.

If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios.  Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.

Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result).  Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy.  Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)

But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix.  But wait…there’s more!  You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life.  Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.

I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years.  If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking.  I wish he’d rectify this habit.  But hey, he writes better than I do!

I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.

Book Review: Don't Make Me Pull Over

It wasn’t so long ago that if a family embarked on a vacation, driving was the only feasible way to do it.  I took my first flight (alone, no less) when I was thirteen years-old in 1981, and if memory serves, the ticket for me to fly to San Francisco and back cost around $350, a sum that made a visit to the West Coast impossible not only for my family – hence the solo venture – but for most families at that time.  Vacationing meant driving, which often meant cramming into an unreliable car without air-conditioning, DVD players, phones or hand-held electronic games, and arguing about who controlled the radio and who got to play the Hi-Q peg game next.  Sound like hell on Earth?  Well, it certainly had a few downsides, but traveling by car in the 1970s was actually a lot of fun, and in Richard Ratay’s Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, he takes the reader on a pleasant Sunday afternoon’s drive through our nation’s love affair with hitting the highway.  It’s a terrific read that offers equal parts nostalgia, history and hilarity.

I had expected Ratay’s book to read more like a memoir, and although we do get to know his family – often with comedic results – Don’t Make Me Pull Over is first and foremost a history book, and Ratay deftly introduces sundry topics in an entertaining way.  We learn about the U.S. Interstate, the birth of the garish Holidome, speed limits, the advent of the speed gun and the equalizing force of the Fuzzbuster, the use of TripTik booklets (remember those?), video games, car games, restaurants and the creation of drive-through windows, an achievement Ratay is certain his father would rank as one of the greatest advancements of the twentieth century (well above personal computers, but not quite as high as graphite-shafted golf clubs).

Despite the ample history that’s packed into this entertaining read, the star of the book has to be Ratay’s father, a no-nonsense kind of guy who wants to “make good time” whatever the cost, who bargains with hotel clerks over price, and who settles disputes in the backseat by detaining the offender with his right arm while maintaining control of the steering wheel with his left.  In one hilarious chapter, Ratay tells of his father’s insistence on driving the car for as long as possible before refueling (“No sense stopping sooner than we have to.  We’ll lose twenty minutes just getting off and on the highway.”).  You can guess where this leads, but the results aren’t any less slide-splitting.  Ratay’s portrayal of his father reminded me a lot of David Sedaris’s father in his terrific memoirs, both idiosyncratic but likeable guys who’d probably make great supporting characters in a 1970s sitcom.

Ratay also writes about the experience of traveling as a child, and he fondly recalls the freedom that riding in the backseat used to entail:

After finishing my meal, I’d grab a pillow and retire belowdecks to the floorboard, where I stretched out for a nap on the warm and comfy shag carpet, positioning my belly just so over the hump of the transmission housing.

This stirs my own memory so well that I can almost feel the rumble of the wheels vibrating against my chest.

Because the book is a look back, it naturally leads to a final chapter that accounts for what we’ve lost along the way, and Ratay’s argument isn’t without merit.  He writes about his family’s first trip taken via air in 1981 (the year of my first flight), and laments that they’d taken a trip but hadn’t made a journey.  “The plain fact was that other than purchasing our plane tickets, we’d made no real effort to reach our objective…There’d been no hardships, no squabbles, no hours of tedium, not even a worry that we’d missed a turn…Our flight had allowed us to soar over all the things that once made a family vacation…a family vacation.”  There’s something to this, I think, and add to that technological advances and our desire to be entertained, even those of us who still take road trips may not experience them together as much as individually, each family member glued to his or her own device.

Don’t Make Me Pull Over is a great read by a very capable author.  I’ll be curious to see what Ratay comes up with next.