Category: Silently Thinking Out Loud
I like to think out loud and see if anything sticks or salutes before I go ahead with it. It’s like the Grateful Dead cooking songs for years on the road before they committed them to commercial recordings. It’s way-social.
Introducing Lester Tester: Thingery Reviewer
We realized the other day while we were shopping at another site that we do not have any reviews of our products and toward that end we have hired a reviewer.
That is not to say that we don’t want our users writing reviews, but just in case they don’t, somebody is.
Our new reviewer, Lester Tester, has filed his first review on a record chosen from our catalog randomly:
Click Here For Lester’s First Review
Now obviously, we would prefer that Lester rave about our stuff. We might give him a list of Things we think he’ll like, just to get him into a positive frame of mind.
He’s going to be honest, though, because we think you probably like that, and in this case The Big Boss can’t disagree a lot anyway.
Check the catalog often once he gets going-it’ll add a dimension to the experience around here and maybe it’ll start something.
Record Grading Station One
This is where we grind out our records. There are various ways to do this, and this is a temporary set-up because it really should include some kind of intense light or lamp of some kind because you cannot grade records in low light, and it’s missing a thing or two I’d add like maybe shelves for sleeves and other supplies.
And I’d rather be using our component stereo system but that has to wait until I switch in another turntable. Nonetheless, there are maybe 100 records there, sorted into decades, waiting for their turn across the turntable. In general they’ve risen out of piles of junk not pictured, and have been selected for their “possibilities”.
This is just my opinion, based upon experience since 1991, but I’ll be reasonably delighted if five jewels pop out of the group.
That percentage would be lower if it were a “raw” group.
For the past six weeks or so, we’ve been working the 70s section of these records and have a number to go. We might never get to the 80s section as far as offering Things for sale, which is just fine with me because I’m not sure I personally survived the 80s era anyway. I know I did pretty good in the 70s (grin).
After the jewels graduate from this group, they have to go upstairs and live with me a little bit. They have to make it across a second turntable. I have to ruminate about their sleeves and confirm the “correctness” of their labels. This is a critical juncture because it’s at this point that I can and do arbitrarily decide my collection wants the piece more than anybody else’s, and that certainly does not maximize profits for the stockholders.
No, wait, *I’m* the stockholder, aren’t I?
Anyway, I just thought I’d share the process.
Then The Records Finally Go Here
Barcodes: Weapons Of Mass Distribution
We’re due for a little “refocus of the site”. A big part of that is going to pertain to the era in which we want to specialize.
A big part of THAT in the record business happens to be barcodes, a point I’ve wanted to make for a long time.
Barcodes came into general usage in 1974, originally of interest to grocery stores, but they really didn’t hit the record industry until about 1980. We’ve seen one or two from 1979 in our former brick and mortar, and maybe they even reach back a little farther than that. Not ALL records produced from 1980 onward had barcodes, but a bunch of them did.
By 1990 they were reporting to The Industry that records were dead. That had a profound effect on things.
Marketeers are skittish people.
Anyway, let’s say a guy wanted to focus his retailing attention on a span of about ten years. Maybe because he doesn’t feel any more ambitious than that, but maybe he wants to present himself as Some Kind Of Authority.
In the case of yours truly, a great starting point would be 1969. Music was powerful then, bands were discovering how to take control of their projects. The world changed, people landed on The Moon, Bob Dylan landed in Nashville.
That decade would end in 1979 then. That’s really convenient. I’ll tell you why.
Say you’re glancing through a thousand records. I do that sometimes. Say you’re trying to add to your stock. A quick way to do that within our 1969-1979 model would be to flip through the lot looking at their BACKS for the barcodes. Quick way to calculate the percentage of the material we might be interested in.
So, all the barcodes go over “here”, out of the way. Is that to say every barcode is evil? Of course not. For example, yours truly is a Grateful Dead collector and they certainly churned out some stuff in the 80s. In fact you could almost make the point that they churned out some of the ONLY stuff in the 80s.
No, barcodes on records are inherently evil because they produce “data” that is analyzed like data about bolts or plastic dolls. This is not a good thing when you’re peddling art.
The music industry was better off when corporate guys didn’t have data. By 1990, they were buying computers for guys like me so that the computers could call each other on Saturday night and report via barcode data what was going on in The Industry.
They had to call me because my highest volume item was one stick of incense and they didn’t have my self-made number in their database. I might have sold a lot of Guns N Roses, but I sold millions of one sticks of incense.
It took almost no time at all, once this system was in place, to declare that Garth Brooks was the Best Selling Stuff in the world, and mass merchandisers starting just going crazy.
I myself banned Garth Brooks, but that was for his refusal to stop by when he was in town.
Once we had barcodes on music, it was a commodity like socks. What a fortunate turn of events for guys in management, but it started the demise that ironically is going to be my re-entry point into the business.
Weapons Of Mass Distribution, I say.
Now, if I could just think of some snappy slogan that means Before The Barcode. Maybe something Latin. What’s “barcode” in Latin?
End Of An Era At eBay: Trading Assistant Program To End
August 13, 2013
Hello eBay Trading Assistants,
Thank you for your participation in the Trading Assistant program and the work you have done to help others sell their items on eBay. We’ve been listening to feedback from many of you and have heard that the program is not meeting expectations or delivering a significant number of sales leads. As a result, on September 20, 2013, the Trading Assistant program will be retired. Please note, this decision has no impact on your eBay account or your ability to buy and sell on eBay.
Here’s what it means to you:
eBay will no longer host a Trading Assistant directory or provide sellers with Trading Assistant program leads
eBay sellers can no longer use “eBay Trading Assistant Program” logos or other marketing materials referring to the Trading Assistant programTo allow time for processing any remaining leads, the Trading Assistant portal will be available until October 18, 2013 to all registered program members.
For eBay sellers who are “Registered eBay Drop-off Locations” or any other sellers who have physical program marketing materials (flyers, cards, signage, etc.), the deadline to discontinue all usage of these items is October 31, 2013. As stated above, use of digital logos, marketing materials or other program marks will be prohibited as of September 20, 2013.
Note: all eBay sellers may however continue to use the eBay brand within the guidelines of the eBay seller agreement. Click here for more details.
Today’s announcement has no impact on the eBay Education Specialist program.
We appreciate all of our eBay sellers and the work you do in your local communities. Our strategy at eBay is simple: provide our customers the best possible selling and buying experience. We are committed to your success. As new programs and initiatives continue to be developed, eBay will make every effort to find more compelling ways to engage with our sellers.
If you have any additional questions, please contact us.
Sincerely,
The eBay Seller Program Team
Important Dates/Actions Needed:
September 20 – Trading Assistant program is discontinued, public access to Trading Assistant portal/directory is suspended, all digital program logos and other marketing materials must be taken down
October 18 – Registered program members must process all remaining leads from within the Trading Assistant portal queue as access to the portal will be discontinued on this date.
October 31 – Any physical program signage or other program marketing materials may no longer be used
Charles ‘Chuck’ Fitch unmasked as Ebay’s biggest troll | Mail Online
eBay troll exposed
Charles 'Chuck' Fitch unmasked as Ebay's biggest troll | Mail Online.
The Electronic Cigarette
Today I invested 1/7 of my available funds in a disposable electronic cigarette. It said it delivered the rough equivalent of two packs of cigarettes. At its price that’s still more than I spend now for two packs of cigarettes, but I smoke very cheap cigarettes.
Anyway, I’d pay a little more to “fit in”. I’m getting kind of tired of smoking in odd outdoor places and of course I no longer go anywhere that doesn’t allow some kind of smoking at all.
It’s not so much about the judgmental people who explain to me the various reasons why I should not smoke, especially around them, as it is about the funny places where I have to do it. I attend something and I wind up on the fringe of the event or ducking and hiding and missing an event which one way or another cost me money just to attend.
It IS a little bit about my workplace, because people get real mad when something that smells like tobacco comes through the mail addressed to them, but even more about that, it’s about burning my sweatpants.
I often dress for comfortable combat if I know I’m going to be spending a lot of keyboard time and the standard uniform for my combat is a t-shirt and sweatpants. I burn them a lot because I smoke like a loon while I “keyboard” (verb).
I rushed home from the store with the eight dollar cigarette. After a bit of a struggle I penetrated its hermetic seal and read the little slip of paper. “This cigarette” it said, and I shouldn’t be quoting because I’m making it up “will work when you draw on it, and glow red, and you will exhale some stuff that looks like smoke but is really water and it’ll last for about as long as two packs of cigarettes”. The clerk had warned me: they don’t taste very swell, you have to draw hard and they’re not worth it.
I have previously not cared about what things taste like. I didn’t care what these tasted like, but it was acceptable anyway.
And it worked. Right away I started to jones for slightly more nicotine, but I had bought some medium version and there was a higher nicotine version, so no big deal. I sat down to the keyboard and began to compose (actually, I think I began to game, but they’re similar). In the summer, since my room is upstairs and a bit warm at times like during unrelenting heat waves, my sweatpants become a pair of Iowa Hawkeye hiking shorts, so I usually burn my leg rather than the pants. This did not happen. I am ecstatic. The thing dangles right in my mouth. I can walk around with it. I can pack stuff while not-smoking it. It doesn’t have any odor.
I didn’t keep track of the time but I can rarely be intense at the keyboard for longer than an hour or an hour and a half without having to change activities and I had already mowed part of the yard in the heat earlier so I decided to nap, having discovered this amazing new technology.
I gave me and the cigarette an hour’s rest and eagerly returned to the experiment but this time the little front part that glows like it’s on fire blinked instead, and blinking means it’s “out”. No vapor that looks like smoke but isn’t. Fail.
Dammit. I am either capable of smoking the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes in a hour when I’m doing it enthusiastically or so or the thing was defective or the claim is a little exuberant. The thing’s guaranteed in some way so I wrote to the company and I also ordered a sample of the more-nicotine kind.
I really wanted it to work. There are other kinds, and there is a non-disposable refillable kind and maybe among those is a solution. Like I say, it isn’t so much about the judgmental people as it is about the sweatpants, but as it turns out it’s ALSO about the ashtray which occupies valuable real estate on my desk and the lighters all over the place which occupy certain real estate in my brain keeping track of them……….
If it just isn’t to be though-if I really am capable of vaporizing eight dollars worth of nicotine in a hour or so, I’ll be very disappointed. I really thought I was on to something.
Catalog Change: Records By The Year
Help me not overthink this but the entire record industry has organized records wrong for all of its existence.
Look anywhere, and they’re organized alphabetically by artist. They might be categorized by genre on the store shelves but anywhere else they’re not because why would they be?
With that in mind, we are reworking our store catalog within the record album category to be organized by date, at least by decade (for the time being because we have such a tiny selection).
That’s strictly because our admin likes to think about the date while he’s playing the record. He just got done with a (skipping) Billy Joel album he’d never heard because it was released the year his son was born.
But I digress. Music record albums (or any record albums for that matter) are a snapshot that includes time as one of their main dimensions. They’re blogs from several decades before when we thought of those.
So we’ve got new categories like: Record Albums 1960-1969, and those are still alphabetical by artist, last name first.
Think about it: I personally wouldn’t be caught dead listening in the 80s, with a few exceptions that occur if you want to keep your Grateful Dead catalog complete, but show me a 70s category and I’ll dive right in. More specifically, show me a 1969 category and I’ll dive right in but that’s the general idea, we don’t have one of those yet.
We hope the little bit of re-disorganization will be useful to our browsers, and like we have since 1987, we’ll keep thinking about genres.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation 2013
You know the Jimmy Webb song sung by Glen Campbell, “Wichita Lineman”?
There’s a line in it which goes “I know I need a small vacation”……….
I take off a couple of days a year, probably not enough. Ordinarily one of them is on or about July 6, at which time I go to the Sioux City event, Saturday In The Park, but this year they had nobody on the bill I wanted to see.
So, I signed up to attend a local mini flea market (I’m going to call it that anyway) in the parking lot of a local antique store where I like to hide sometimes.
I haven’t sold outdoors for over a decade. It’s a complete disconnect from me and my regular glued-to-the-computer existence.
Started in the morning too, and I usually start in the afternoon. Didn’t have much preparation time due to events that took place the two days prior to this one.
But I boxed up several hundred pounds of stuff, loaded the van, appeared at the sale and spread things out on a bench, “sort of”. Since I had selected my stock on the basis of its being in my way, there was not a lot of focus or cohesion to what I brought and I figured I’d watch the shoppers and shuffle things around as I noticed what they were looking at.
I didn’t price very much, with the exception of some records which had Rainy Day Music pricing on them.
Unfortunately July 6 in Storm Lake competes with THE major flea market weekend at Lake Okoboji, some 60 miles north of here, and the stream of shoppers I wanted to watch were a bit of a sporadic trickle.
I don’t mean that I didn’t do a little business, because I did, and one of the major buyers was a guy I’ve been happy to sell records to in the past. But I didn’t sell my water skis, and I didn’t sell my Old Style Beer advertising piece, both of which I did really kind of want to sell.
The action was largely in polished rocks. Of course, after a decade of slinging those around at eBay I really don’t HAVE a lot of polished rocks anymore, but it was over the rocks that the most interesting conversations took place.
Like I say, it was the disconnect that was interesting. I tweeted a little, so I guess I cheated there, but seven or eight hours without any keyboard time is a radical change for me. The Empire survived (somewhat) although I failed to get out 10 listings on one ID, no calamities occurred without me unless you count the notice from eBay that they were yanking my Top Rated Seller status from my main Id (and I do count that), and it was a pleasant day and I had a tree and didn’t burn all my skin to pieces.
Garage salers or antiquers or flea market shoppers are interesting to me. I’d almost like to add a live loop like this to my regular yearly routine. Dickering is more the norm there than on the Internet (find that surprising?) but there’s a social aspect to it that makes me think it’s more about being able to tell the provenance in an entertaining fashion than anything else. You just slip in the prices at the appropriate time.
I was called upon for the provenance several times. I knew the answers. That was really neat. That’s how I started at eBay: it more about the song and dance then the Extremely Valuable Thing, but over the years due to my affinity for eating, it has become strictly about the money.
Having surrounded myself with things that didn’t carry with them any Selling Drama, I noticed right away that I can remember how to be creative and that being creative is something I like.
If I did three events a year like this one, I could support myself for one day of Real Life, so there’s a bit of a disparity there between the economic rewards and reality, but I noticed one other thing last night-I slept like a baby. I haven’t slept like that for a very long time.
That probably means something.
Personal Note: The Injured Shoulder
Not long ago, perhaps a week now, suddenly my left shoulder hurt. A lot. I couldn’t sleep on it, and I prefer to flop around all night, sleeping on either shoulder. I don’t like to be deprived of the opportunity and being only offered a one-position option.
Arthritis, probably, the barometer had gone down, sometime I react to that.
As the next couple of days progressed, the pain became unbearable. I was reduced to lying in bed and gritting my teeth and sweating through it. I began to imagine maybe the Blastomycosis from ten years ago had returned and I would die. Naturally, by now, I am remembering to pray, but I try not to plead.
During the height of this I was trying to write up maybe five times the new listings I usually do and had been manic at my computer. Oh, oh, maybe I should Google “manic at my computer with left shoulder pain”. Sure enough, I found somebody who had typed their left shoulder into oblivion. I moved a light so I wouldn’t crane my neck, changed keyboards, moved the keyboard (I take lots of notes and have a wad of them at the left of the keyboard and lean a little to the right to accommodate for that).
I consciously changed my posture. I took some aspirin. I tried to stay away from my war game even though one of my cities was being blown up by a marauding bad guy.
I missed stuff I usually attend. After I had to skip a Thursday night thing I dearly love to attend, I decided enough was enough. I decided to go to a doctor Friday.
Unless you read me ten years ago you don’t know how hard I’ll resist that, and I just chose the option most obvious-go to the new place that didn’t sue me for ten thousand dollars of fooling around while failing to produce a diagnosis a decade ago.
For whatever reason, the new place is obviously a favorite of our Central American population and in fact any signs on the wall are in about five different languages. They were quiet, without that strange hospital/factory atmosphere. The receptionist seemed slightly startled by my approach which was “I need to see a doctor please”. There’s some paperwork, she informs me and she assists me smoothly through that. Then there’s the part where I don’t have an appointment.
She calls to someone “there’s an, ah, old guy out here with shoulder pain”. I don’t remember ever being called that before, but I think oh good, that’ll get some attention, I might be a heart attack, even though that wasn’t on my list of likely suspects.
They worked me in after a short wait, in which I was beginning to think I was quite out of place because everyone else who was waiting spoke Spanish and I don’t. But I’m accustomed to being out of place: I qualify under various other attributes besides language.
The nurse practitioner (I think it was) who saw me asked some stuff, eliminated some things and finally came up with maybe we should take an x-ray. However, that was up to me, and I had just blown my backup supply of money getting in the door. Let’s not, I shared.
Ok, she tells me, the most likely culprit is that you bumped it against something or moved funny when you put on your shirt, or some other scenario like that. These things can happen when we get “older”. There it was again. I know I looked like death warmed over because I FELT like death warmed over, but two times in one day? Come on, I can keep up in conversations among people MUCH younger than I am, and they’re often surprised when I tell them my age (despite my overall gray-ish appearance).
She prescribes some prescription version of Aleve and a muscle relaxer. I tell her that second one sounds helpful, it feels like a muscle that won’t let loose. I go get the stuff.
It helps a little bit and when I think about it, I DID have an incident one night. I tend to wander around in the middle of the night, usually checking the computer to see if anything has blown up. I vaguely remember smacking into the corner of some wall and thinking boy, I can’t be doing much of THAT. But that’s all I remember.
I assign the task of recalling that to my Very Deep Memory. The wheels are still turning when I decided to come upstairs tonight and check the usual things.
I manage by throwing things on the floor. People have never scoffed at the idea right to my face, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. The Important Things that I throw on the floor will follow me around, finishing that journey upstairs next to the computer where I will take care of them. Slightly Important Things wait on the stairway, Unimportant Things never get out of the spot in the living room where I relegated them to floor duty.
I hear you: piling things on the stairs is dangerous. I guess it is, because tonight I was coming up the stairs, which have a left turn at a landing, and I wobbled a little bit and smacked my shoulder into the corner. There could be no doubt whatsoever, judging from THAT pain, that this is where the original incident occurred.
So I’ve moved most of the stairway waiting line to other places, and I wont make the useable part of the stairway so narrow in the future. And I don’t have to worry about the manic typing which was a huge concern: a lot of good it does to work like a fiend only to wind up in bed writhing in pain.
The lessons I’ve picked up here are so many that I believe it’s roughly the equivalent of a semester of college with 17 hours of courses.
The main lesson is that I’m Older Now and must be careful because I might totter. But I got other lessons: I found some health care people who were almost pleasant, and for the first time in over 15 years I had to have a prescription filled and I found a pharmacy that was pleasant enough, and I still love my job.
All for around fifty bucks. To quote The Who, especially considering my advance age, “I call that a bargain-the best I ever had”.
New Maker Mark Discovered Among Esther’s Magnets
You may be familiar with our store category which we now call Rubber Fridge Magnets which evolved from a category we had in an eBay store called Esther’s Sister’s Magnets, a group of several hundred rubber magnets Our Intrepid Leader bought for eleven dollars.
We have gone on to set ourselves up as experts, offering an ebook Esther’s Sister’s Magnets Illustrated Checklist Collecting Guide, soon to undergo it’s second revision with a number of new entries.
That’s because we’ve acquired ESTHER’S collection, but that’s not what this is about.
Our Intrepid Leader was just examining a group of those when he came upon an entirely unlisted mark, not found anywhere in the book. This seems like an oddity because it means Esther must have bought some magnets on the sly when her sister wasn’t looking, or maybe because they’re religiously themed, Esther and her sister didn’t see eye to eye when it came to purchasing religious fridge magnets.
Anyway, we are excited to announce that we have discovered the existence of Cross Publishing, Kenilworth, New Jersey, who made at least six religious magnets with very faint impressions on the back but which also significantly stated “Made In USA”, which our previous discoverees did not think to include.
We also have one example from this company (with the USA designation) which is marked Somerville NJ. There is a present-day commercial printer in Somerville by the name of Cross Publishing Co.
This goofs up the title of our book, which up until now has been:
Esther’s Sister’s Molded Rubber Magnets Checklist
An Extremely Serious Examination Of
The Molded Rubber Magnets of Ellisville and Cape Girardeau, Missouri
And Nearby Locales
Do we add “And New Jersey”? Or what? Include a section for Not From Missouri at all?
Stand by, this may take a while. It’s dramatic.
Saturday In The Park, Sioux City 2012 with Tom, Jason, Patrick, Josh & Travis (R)
I guess I went to this year’s SITP as Jesus because at least two people called me that: a little black kid handing out fliers for another festival and a drunk lady waiting for the buses out of the place at the end of the night. That was my first experience with that, and I don’t think it was the shirt, as Tom suggested: I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t wear Eastern Indian dashikis with Iowa Hawkeye logo hiking shorts.
I chose the combination because of the heat, the dashiki being the coolest shirt I own (temperature-wise) and the shorts being the ONLY pair I own.
I think it was “the hair” which I wore down because of a little incident last year. Last year I thought I’d do that but instead of applying Head And Shoulders shampoo just before we left I used Head And Shoulders Conditioner, wondering all the while why it didn’t suds up or wash out. When it dried it was like a cement cap the rest of the day and night and this year I repeated the procedure just to get it right and used the shampoo, not the conditioner. Everyone knows you can’t do a thing with your hair after a shampoo and that was the effect I was going for. I think the explanation’s got to be in there, even though Jesus couldn’t have used Head And Shoulders. And didn’t have grey hair typical of a sixty-year old.
But that’s only part of the point I might make. I went to this year’s SITP without any investment in any of the musicians. I know I’m supposed to like Wilco but I’m still devoutly following the musicians I originally liked in the 70’s. I bothered to spend a number of hours last week familiarizing myself with all of the artists’ material I could find on the Internet, so I wasn’t in the dark, but that’s all I had: no history of following any of them, no even remotely-related t-shirts from prior concerts.
I needed a day I could look at idly from a distance. It’s been a while. And I can watch something like SITP from the perspective of one of the older guys. Maybe they meant to call me Moses. And I’ve been to some events before, know how it goes, and over time have become acquainted with some industry people and kind of know how it goes.
First of all, those guys who organize this event get my full admiration. The thing started when they said it would, ended when they said it would (even though Wilco threatened to screw with that) and there were no strange delays, technical glitches or unneeded jabber by the MCs. They added a camera on a boom this year that could be used to show the event from almost any perspective and displayed that on a big screen to the right of the stage, which was a nice feature. I hope they add a second screen to the left side next year.
Second, it’s an amazingly well-behaved event. If there’s lawless behavior, it’s almost all concentrated in the little “dance area” below the front of the stage. I didn’t spend enough time there to attest to any of that, but from my view up the hill aways under the TV camera, something notable never happened. In my time, keeping in mind I went to Grateful Dead concerts almost exclusively, when the lights went down and the band went ker-rang…… a cloud of green smoke instantly appeared over the crowd and never went away. That doesn’t happen in Sioux City and I’m at a slight loss to explain it. Maybe the pot they smoke these days is so strong it doesn’t take enough of it to PRODUCE the green smoke, or maybe the penalties that are supposed to deter the behavior are so high and unrealistic that they actually work, I’m not sure.
I got kind of concerned about it because I was afraid it made my tobacco smoking more obvious and perhaps I’d be trapped in a place without that for eleven hours. That makes me do crazy things. But it wasn’t an issue and the crowd never became tightly packed so it wasn’t even much of a consideration. That was handy because if you’re out of your own house, there’s no place in the world left where tobacco smoking is acceptable.
No, the only OD’s I saw, and have seen in recent years, were alcohol induced. Even at that, maybe all the law enforcement guys I didn’t see anywhere else stood around the fenced-off drinking area and scared people into behaving. I’m not sure-I’ve never been on the other side of that fence and I’ve never paid any attention to that party. I don’t drink, but my companions did, which resulted in me watching “our stuff” for a couple of longish stints that were just long ENOUGH to burn the living hell out of my right thigh and a little spot on my right ankle because the blazing sun noticed right away that my lily-white self had been perched indoors at a computer keyboard for at least a year. Note to self: next year, go outside a little bit in May or June or something and get a little color.
So there I am, burning to death but blissfully smoking, thinking about my life when they interrupt it with loud music. Of course, we expect that at these things, but I like loud music by guys who have been working on their technique for forty years and have really nice equipment and lots of techs to assist them and stuff. That’s not exactly the case with the opening acts-after all, everything has its pecking order and everybody starts someplace. It’s nice of SITP to offer a few local spots to new guys, but it’s not really necessary for me to be there for it.
Lissie fixed that for me. The Dirty Guv’nahs right before her delivered a couple of interesting tunes and a nice Rolling Stones cover but Lissie had a kind of disconcerting worldly view of things you had to pay attention to. A lot of her lyrics make you go “did she really say that or did she actually say….” and she’s a pretty believable rock star, especially since she’s a guitar player. Her light complexion gives away how hard she’s actually working on a very hot day. She’s got some gritty themes. During her performance I really kind of thought she and her band were going to steal the whole show. They were um, very good.
I still thought that through the Chris Robinson Brotherhood. They were obviously competent musicians but I didn’t need to turn it up any more.
But then Gary Clark Jr. took the stage. With authority.
Nobody around me said it but I thought maybe Robin Trower had shown up. I’m supposed to compare Clark to Jimi Hendrix, I know that, but hoo boy………I have a lot of trouble trying to imagine Clark’s rendition of say, All Along The Watchtower or Foxy Lady. I’m pretty sure I’m completely happy studying why he says “I don’t owe you a dime”. That band played with ferocious power and offered a really refreshingly raw presentation that was devoid of the usual star bullshit. I’d travel to see these guys again, especially on a bill by themselves.
Nothing wrong with Wilco, I think the devout were pleased. I noticed they were able to sing along to every word, which I couldn’t do from just one week of listening, and it looked like the fans were getting what they expected. They certainly got a generous encore; it was kind of like a two-set performance, but Wilco is a really “distorted” band. They’re obviously masters at it, and it IS interesting to listen to guys who have been at it for 20 years with some of the best electronic gizmos money can stack, but there’s a not-so-gentle distinction between distortion, however well-managed, and feedback, and I’m more of a feedback guy. That said, they produced “moments” all over the place, and I’m certainly a new fan of numbers like Handshake Drugs and Jesus Etc. (maybe that’s where all that came from), and Impossible Germany, but I still like straight guitar-driven rock and roll like they delivered in the last two numbers. I didn’t get quite enough of that. Wish I’d kept a set list; I can’t remember what they were.
We got out of there in record time and on the bus in a reasonable amount of time and soon found ourselves back at the Holiday Inn. It being midnight, there was a consensus among our group to drink for a couple of hours and then go to the nearby restaurant, open 24 hours. That’s where I made a fatal mistake. I know there is going to be a stretch before I can smoke again, and for some reason, we hurry into the hotel (I’m not telling you the reason on purpose-you don’t want to know it) and I think wistfully as we whiz by the little group of smokers outside the front door, I should peel off and join these guys, but I don’t.
I’m completely stupid.
I KNOW the drinking part is not fun for us non-drinkers, I KNOW I can strike up a camaraderie with the smokers. You’d be surprised in a world where we’ve become the lepers how quickly we can conjure up topics for conversations where we’re huddled, always outside of wherever it is that we are, missing the event.
I’m going to leave out the fairly mundane details about our next few hours, but after a small semblance of sleep we were up in the morning, myself unhindered by physical discomforts other than two little sunburned spots, my caffeine jones and my nicotine jones. I immediately head outside to the smokers’ huddling area, joined somewhat quickly by Patrick, the other smoker in our group.
While we’re standing there considering our options, a somewhat familiar-looking hippie dude walks by carrying two gallon jugs of water. “Hey, good show yesterday” Patrick tells him and the guy says “oh thanks” and goes inside. I am inquisitive: good show yesterday? “Yeah” says Patrick, that’s the guitar player for Lissie. They must be staying here. I thought that was them last night when we came in but I didn’t want to bother them”.
Oh dammit. Now that he mentioned it, one of the smokers from the night before had been a relatively small blonde, which was one of the reasons I DIDN’T decide to hang with them: I don’t need no trouble hanging around small blondes half my age.
But oh dammit. This is the second time in two years that Tom and I have somehow narrowly averted hanging out with the celebrities, this time literally walking right past them hurrying into a hotel due to general gastronomic misbehavior, which is almost never one of my problems.
I gotta learn to pay more attention. One year Phil Lesh was standing right in front of me eating ice cream while I scanned the crowd hoping to catch a glimpse of him, and I’ve also done stupid stuff like turn down Merl Saunders when he invited us to continue on to Chicago with him from Minneapolis because I HAD to work……….I’ve bumped into Les Claypool when he was signing autographs and thought he was a clerk and tried to buy a used record from him.
We failed to consider the possibility last year that Ray Manzarek and Roy Rogers might just go next door to Minerva’s for a couple of hours when they played at Okoboji and I STILL have two great questions for Manzarek if we ever do manage to predict his next move. We even knew somebody in common that we could have gossiped about.
In 1975, I HAD to visit Coit Tower one day when The Grateful Dead were playing for free in Golden Gate Park.
Duh.
Anyway, attendance at Sioux City was light this year in my estimation. Whatever your reason was for missing the event (probably the heat or you just didn’t know who any of the performers were), you blew it, and you can’t ask for a refund because it was free. Watch for the IPTV broadcast; I heard the camera guy tell somebody “we always show it right before The Fair”, which I presume must be the State Fair.
It was a real hot show. Catch Gary Clark, Jr. someplace when you can.