Nadas / Coming Home sealed CD 2000 Iowa artists – $14.99 : Thingery Shopping, PayPal Spoken Here
Description Of The Thing:
Sealed compact disc without problems, U.S. issue in original shrink wrap.
Artist/Title: Nadas / Coming Home
Label: Authentic Records 706132 (2000), US
Track Listing:
this is from my personal collection, not-for-sale
Realized $21.29 7/10/11
This is me in college. I’m just doing a little housecleaning and don’t know where to put it.
Tom and I attended John Prine’s performance at The Orpheum, Sioux City, Iowa, last night. Iris Dement shared much of the night, opening with about ten tunes solo on the piano and at various times with Prine, including the encore.
I came away with two immediate thoughts: Prine somehow reminded me of George Gobel, and I really should have caught on by now that Dement is and has been a resident of Iowa for some time now.
I’ve never been to a show at that venue, and maybe it’s customary there, but I thought the crowd was a little tame. Judging by the kind of surprised laughter much of his funny stuff evoked, I’m guessing there were a number of attendees who were not necessarily his “devout”.
That first album was 40 years ago; maybe his “devout” aren’t that mobile anymore (shudder).
I had a wonderful time, it’s a great venue, the sound was adequate (I would have tolerated louder), and all the performers turned in a solid night, albeit without “Illegal Smile”, or something maybe from Common Sense, and without the audience bursting into much sing-along, but I had several transcendental moments, notably during Angel From Montgomery, a song that has always “gotten me”, during which Jason Wilber’s guitar playing was positively sublime, throwing me into a brief Nils Lofgren moment from years ago……
Sioux City (known locally as SUX) is trying to cope with flooding and it’s hard to say for me whether that somehow impacted attendance, but the show wasn’t sold out, and that’s kind of surprising. Prine thanked the audience a couple of times for coming out on a Wednesday night and I wonder if that isn’t a nice way of saying gee, I notice there are rows of empty seats in the back…..
and maybe that has something to do with the part where tickets are sixty dollars. I wouldn’t begrudge the economics of that, but I also wouldn’t have been sitting in the seat if Tom hadn’t bankrolled the operation, so I need to express special appreciation for that.
It was a beautiful night for a drive, even through a couple of wrong Sioux City neighborhoods on the way out, and another successful event for the Rainy Day Music team of the 21st century.
Realized $25.00 5/22/11
My story is basically that I took a brick and mortar store from an alley in an Iowa county seat town of around ten thousand to the Internet. I was thinking at the time it’d probably be lucrative to change to a pay-as-you-go venue where I could reach the world.
It wasn’t like I didn’t test the theory. I overlapped the venues from 1999 to 2002. I compared.
The brick and mortar landlord’s roof was leaking, his light fixtures were fizzling out, he was mad about how much the improvements in the alley cost him (since he owned the entire block), and he had raised the rent exactly one year after he personally promised never to do that.
I was right. I reached the world, they paid better prices than the locals, and the new landlord only charged me money when something happened.
I overlooked something though.
The guy who wasn’t fixing the leaky roof was satisfied with the same amount of money every month. If my business got really good, there was a point where I DIDN’T have to pay as I went. It wasn’t trending that way-business was not particularly good after MusicLand swiped eighty per cent of it, but there was still that incentive to meet “fixed overhead” and then flourish.
At the dotcoms that point never arrives, at least at the venues I’ve found to be viable. Except of course at my own.
I think that probably means something.
Realized $24.99 3/27/11
Realized $9.99 3/19/11
Spencer Iowa bridge Little Sioux River Postcard 1906 Brige Over Little Sioux River Spencer Iowa [] – $8.99 : Thingery Shopping, PayPal Spoken Here
I just happened to have a semi-sobering thought: I’m actually getting old. I can remember starting my car with a pencil.
Sometime about the first of 1971 or so, my parents presented me with a brand new orange Vega hatchback. Wish I still had it today, but those were disposable cars. While I did have it though, I lived in Iowa City, where I was going to college, on East Burlington Street (and later Dubuque Street) where we had to park around the corner on a side street which was completely occupied every night.
My buddies had junk cars and they knew how to make them go no matter what. It doesn’t especially get really cold in Iowa City that much, but sometimes it would long enough to keep a high percentage of those cars from starting because it was too cold.
I wasn’t “good” with cars then, I haven’t been since then and I’m never going to be, but there was one trick that worked surprisingly well with those cars. You took a pencil (kept handy with the car) and jammed it into the carburetor to richen the gas/air mix and that often worked.
I’d have to give it some thought, but it’s probably been three decades or better since I’ve been able to fix anything on any automobile or make it work any differently with anything so profoundly simple as a soft lead number two pencil…….
Realized $18.98 10/6/10