Posted by Tony @ 7:45:00 pm |

Driving back from the grocery store Monday night I flipped around the radio dial until landing on a classic rock station playing Boston's Peace of Mind. Hadn't heard THAT in awhile and it's one of those songs that evokes a particular time and place for me like few others - namely the garage-turned-rec room of my high school bud Jeff, where with David and Chuck and Brad and the other Chuck and others we played ping-pong and Nerf basketball and wailed some mean air guitar to Boston, Foreigner, Kansas and Styx (the four staples of my senior year in high school). I could never match Brad Delp's vocals, but by god I could match Tom Scholz note-for-note on my airStrat!

Between the Boston flashback and spending some time the last couple of days ripping Dad's Creedence Clearwater Revival Gold cassette to CD for him, I've been idly thinking about the bands that I listened to in junior high and high school before Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, Talking Heads and The Clash blew my young mind. I got to thinking this morning about the school cafeteria and later dorm room arguments over who the best {fill in the blank} player was. The best guitar player arguments were relatively nuanced - reasonable people (and of course we WERE reasonable people) could peacefully disagree over the relative merits of Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. There were proponents of Jeff Beck and of Duane Allman and even Pete Townsend. Whole monthly magazines were devoted to the question. Conversely the argument over the best keyboard player usually lasted about 30 seconds. First of all, nobody really cared all that much. Secondly, the only two real possibilities were Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson and if you liked one, you probably liked 'em both, so it was hard to get passionate about it. Arguments over the best bass player really only took place among the jazz fans (Stanley Clarke, anybody?) and best drummer arguments were all over the place, usually having more to do with preferred style than outright skill. When the focus shifted in the late '70's/early '80's (at least MY focus) more to songwriting and message and style, I pretty much lost interest in those arguments and in prog rock and in technical wizardry that often flew in the face of, well, musicality. I know the guitar arguments still go on and there are still whole magazines devoted to the guitar gods, but I frankly have no idea who most of those guys are.

But for the record, I was in the Jimmy Page camp (although Townsend was a sentimental favorite).  Carl Palmer was my fave drummer and Keith Emerson was my keyboard player, but of course I liked Rick Wakeman too...

Monday, January 17, 2005

PC has some ideas on what to do on Inauguration Day this year, including:

*Get a guitar and go strum Dylan's "Masters of War" on a street corner.
*Follow it up with R.E.M.'s "World Leader Pretend."
*Wrap up the set with the Dixie Chicks' "Cowboy Take Me Away."
*Dissent. It's your right!
*Look at the globe and count up all the countries George Bush doesn't run.
*Kiss somebody for no particular reason.
*Cruelly imagine what junior high school was like for Karl Rove.
*Wave your flag--it's your flag, dammit, not theirs.
*Teach a kid about evolution while you still can.
*Pray.

There are many more - all of them worthwhile. Personally, I'm rather pleased about the good chance of snow in DC this week. The District is notorious for quickly grinding to a sloppy halt with the first few flakes of snow, so that should be a hoot! I'm hoping for a really wet, sticky snow that'll make it way too miserable for any except the most rabid partisans to stand outside and watch the parade.

Big birthday shoutout to the maternal unit! I'm cleaning my room tonight in your honor...

Didn't really do any blogging but I did finally update my links page with a number of blogs that I regularly read. Many were local bloggers like Billy the Blogging Poet and anonyMoses and Eric Muller (huge apologies to those guys that linked to me some time ago for not returning the favor earlier), many others were politically-oriented blogs that I read during the campaign but never added to the page. A couple of my favorites went into the miscellaneous heading, including another good Nashville read and a couple of photoblogs - Bighappyfunhouse and Blue Ridge Blog. Blue Ridge Blog is done by a photog from the Watauga Democrat in Boone and has some wonderful photos of the northern part of the NC mountains. Bighappyfunhouse is not. It's something different - go see for yourself (and visit Satan's Laundromat for more photobloggy goodness - I double-dog dare you!).