Dawes: That Western Skyline

I like the passion in the performance. (and the Birmingham reference)

Road Trip!

Jeff and I are splitting after work Friday to travel to visit our old friend David in Panama City, Florida.
David has recently acquired a scanner of some sort and has taken to posting some embarassing and unflattering pictures from our misspent youth. Not cool.
I'm not looking forward to the drive.

It promises to be an interesting experience, hopefully it will inspire me to start updating this stupid blog more often.

Back to School, kids!

Why I don't have a monkey

Come to think of it, my kid has a birthday coming up

Life List: "Big Pink" Saugerties, NY

One of my ambitions in life is to visit and be photographed in front of this house. "Big Pink" is a pink house in West Saugerties, New York located at 56 Parnassus Lane (formerly 2188 Stoll Road). The house was built by Ottmar Gramms, who bought the land in 1952. The house was newly built when Rick Danko, who was collaborating with Bob Dylan at the time, found it as a rental. It was to this house that Dylan would eventually retreat to write songs and play them and try others, in its large basement. The 2 track recordings made by them, as sort of audio sketch book, in the basement itself, came known as the Basement Tapes. These tapes were circulated among other musicians at the time, and hits were made of "Too Much of Nothing" and "The Mighty Quinn" as recordings by other artists, 'Peter, Paul and Mary' and 'Manfred Mann' respectively. The house became known locally as 'Big Pink' for its pink siding. Members of Mr. Dylan's band (with Mr. Dylan himself writing one and co-writing two ) wrote most of the songs on Music From Big Pink at or around the house, and the band then adopted the moniker, The Band. Two of the songs written were on the Basement Tapes. Naturally enough, the house became the site of the rehearsing of the album, the actual recording of which took place in New York and Los Angeles.[1] The house was sold by Mr. Gramms in 1977 to M. Amitin, who rented the house to Parnassus Records a label specializing in classical music which used the basement as its headquarters. In 1998, Mr. Amitin sold the house to Don & Sue LaSala, who maintain the house as a private residence and keep the creative tradition alive by creating music in the Basement with friends from the Woodstock area and beyond.



This is a really cool photo essay by someone making the same pilgrimage, check it out: Click here for photo essay

T Shirt of the Week: Auburn University

No, I don't own this one, I submit this only as evidence that I can take a joke.

This is pretty clever. Touche' barners!

Kristofferson-Coolidge

Great songwriting, great performance. Give it a look.

Here's a great find, the opening credits to "Cisco Pike". I remember seeing this with my brother on a double bill with "Easy Rider" at the musty old Polk Theater in Leesville, Louisiana when I was about 15.

The Getaway (1972)

McQueen, MacGraw, Peckinpah. This is a classic.The Getaway is a 1972 crime and action film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw and Ben Johnson.

The film is based on a novel by Jim Thompson, with the screenplay written by Walter Hill. A box office hit earning US$26 million at the theaters, the film was one of the most financially successful productions of Peckinpah's and McQueen's careers.

It was remade in 1994 starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.
Ali MacGraw

Positively 4th Street-Bob Dylan

The master take of "Positively 4th Street" was recorded on July 29, 1965, during the mid-June to early August recording sessions that produced all of the material that appeared on Dylan's 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited.[8] The song was the last to be attempted that day, with Dylan and a variety of session musicians having successfully recorded master takes of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and "Tombstone Blues" earlier.[1][9] The studio band on "Positively 4th Street" featured Robert Gregg (drums), Russ Savakus (bass), Frank Owens (piano), Al Kooper (organ) and Mike Bloomfield (guitar),[10] with the song initially being logged on the studio's official recording session documentation under the working title of "Black Dalli Rue".

This is a cool video.

Also, there WAS a really cool image generator where you could script the cue cards in Bob Dylan's iconic "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video. It was on the Sony/BMG UK website. Sadly it's now disappeaered so I've edited and removed the link.

"An Everlasting Piece"

I enjoyed this movie, very funny. I caught it almost by accident as it is several years old.


It's hard to believe that a movie about two hairpiece salesmen in war-torn Northern Ireland--a comedy, no less--could work at all, but An Everlasting Piece does work, though perhaps not in the way one would expect. Colm (Barry McEvoy, who also wrote the screenplay) is a new barber at a mental institution and bonds with his fellow barber George (Brian F. O'Byrne) even though Colm is Catholic and George is Protestant. A new patient arrives, who turns out to have been the owner of the only wig company in all of Northern Ireland. Figuring that having a monopoly means easy money, Colm and George convince the new patient to give them his client list, and they're off on a series of rambling comic adventures, aided by Colm's girlfriend Bronagh (Anna Friel, A Midsummer Night's Dream). But when a wig is found at the site of an act of IRA sabotage, the salesmen's lives get suddenly complicated. What makes An Everlasting Piece work is not that it ignores the Irish conflict, but that it pays close attention to it; in fact, the tension of civil strife is a crucial element of the movie's humor, allowing it to dip into a more serious mood without becoming preachy or pretentious. The actors are uniformly excellent; Friel is particularly charming. A comedy about wigs sounds like goofy slapstick; An Everlasting Piece is actually thoughtful and richly human. Directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man, Wag the Dog). --Bret Fetzer

Anna Friel is lovely in it, I looked for an image of her in her traditional Nurse's uniform from the film but couldn't find one.

I'm going on record that I support a constitutional amendment requiring nurses to wear the traditional white skirts, hats and stockings.

Thanks, I'll just keep the job I have now.

I'm not sure what this guy is doing or why it's so important. I assume he's painting.

Suddenly my job doesn't seem so bad.

Rose Bowl

Here's a couple of vacation pics taken in Pasadena a couple of years ago.
This is another in the series "Jay standing in front of a building".

Wet Wille: Drippin' Wet-Live, and Steely Dan: Katy Lied

Here's a couple of essentials from my Record Collection:
This is my favorite Live album of all time. It's almost impossible to describe what it was like to see Wet Willie performing live in their heydey in the mid-to-late '70s, but this comes close.
It was always gonna be a great show when Wet Willie was the opening act, because it caused the headliners to elevate their performance or risk being embarrassed.


Steely Dan has always resonated with me for some reason.

London/Hidcote Manor/Cotswolds

Just a recycling of more old vacation photos


We met up with an old friend, Dave Murdoch who served as our guide and host when we visited Hidcote Manor Gardens and some villages in the Cotswolds, like Chipping Camden".