Tag: music

Good evening! Hi! Hello! How are y’all? Gonna ask you to do one thing for me tonight, that’s all…

There are times when I suspect that the entire purpose of the existence of the United States of America is to create the strange set of events that led to the career of Aretha Franklin. Now is one of those times.

I would also like to thank the Internet for letting me download the entirety of Don’t Fight The Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin Live at the Fillmore West 1971 which is out of print from Rhino Handmade and costs $250.

Music Quest

There was a band in the 1980s called Big Daddy. They did 50s-style covers of top 40 hits. This may sound like a bad idea, but they were great. I especially liked their versions of “Sussudio” and “I want to know what love is”. Their stuff was unsurprisingly on Rhino Records. They had an album called “Cutting Their Own Groove” that was particularly fine.

Anyway their stuff is 581% unavailable. People sell their vinyl albums and their one or two CDs for an average of 70 bucks.

If anyone has digital files of them, or vinyl, or has seen some, let me know! I hunger for novelty.

Cold bare ruined choirs where once the HONK HONK HONK HONK

Kerry Getz at Diedrich

Kerry Getz played D’s again tonight. She’s too good for this circuit. This isn’t the best-shot photo in the world but it captures her personality pretty well. She asked me right after that if I was one of the “infamous bloggers” and I didn’t really know what to say.

I let someone check his email with my Powerbook and have a friend for life, I think, because he got one email with a big new job for him to do and one back from the girl he likes.

Talked to Rachel and her friend.. Candy? They’re both college freshmen and full of excitement! which is great to hear.

Managed to avoid being murdalized by drunks or running over any of them as they skittered across 17th St. from the IHOP parking lot to Pierce Street Annex, Bar of the Damned.

Currently I am still in a cooking frenzy. I am simultaneously roasting a corned beast and making fish soup with a crapload of saffron in it.

Westwood Memory (I may have posted this before)

Some time in the late 1980s I was in Westwood Village, which is the part of L.A. just south of UCLA. It had been a big entertainment district, the place to be on Friday and Saturday Night, but was in a steep decline. Most of the fancy stores and restaurants had gone, things were dirty, and most of the pedestrians were lost souls. I was among them, since I was taking the bus from my unsuccessful psychotherapist back to my grimy Hollywood apartment.

It was maybe 9 pm, cold and blustery, and the first drops of rain were moistening the blowing trash so it stuck to people and objects unpleasantly. Coming up towards the bus stop, I came upon this scene:

In the doorway to an office building, one of the local homeless poor had set up camp. He was about 35, dressed in what had once been a decent suit which was torn and stained and shedding buttons. He himself had a mop of blonde hair and a dirty face wreathed in a joyous smile. He had a boom box going full blast and was singing along lustily, with a cap on the ground in hopes that someone would reward this piece of impromptu street karaoke.

The song he was performing? Barry Manilow’s 1976 hit “Looks Like We Made It“.

I still wonder about that guy. He certainly wasn’t seeing the dingy, damp, urban failure in front of him, or the RTD bus or the other bums or me in my jeans & jacket & backpack looking at him in horror. He was in heaven, maybe onstage in Vegas. Maybe he even was Barry. Looks like we maaaaaaaade it! I wonder what happened to him?