Bobby Henrie’s Shoes at Bop Fest in Rochester, New York
Bob Henrie’s left foot is blurry because southpaws tap their left foot. The photo is blurry because the sun was going down when The Goners took the stage at Saturday’s Bop Fest. You don’t have to reinvent rock ‘n roll, you just have to be good and Bob Henie and the Goners are still the best band in the city.
The US Japan World Cup Final was another roller coaster ride, going into overtime where the US took the lead on another Abby Wambach header and then lost the lead to force the dreaded penalty kick round. Someone had to lose. It was a beautiful game.
We had our neighbors, Rick and Monica, over for dinner a few nights ago and we ate out on the deck. Monica spotted these raccoons in a tree behind our house and we watched them for a while. Monica said they can be vicious. She told us about a friend whose Irish Setter got in a fight with a raccoon near a pond in the woods and the raccoon almost drowned the dog. I started thinking about the Coon Hunting Convention that I played at outside Bloomington. I was in a working country band, playing two to three times a week in every American Legion, VFW, Elk’s, Eagle’s and Moose Club in southern Indiana and one of the strangest gigs was playing outdoors up on a flat bed trailer for coon hunters. As far as I knew they didn’t shoot the raccoons, they just “treed them” at night using dogs and flashlights.
Monica said the boys in her family used to go out after dinner to shoot ground hogs. They were a nuisance on two counts because they ate crops in the garden and they dug holes that horses might step in their holes and break their legs. Monica said she never ate a raccoon but she did eat squirrel one time. She couldn’t remember what it tasted like other than it was full of buckshot.
This morning I was reading the paper out back when Stella, our white kitty who only goes out for a few minutes in the morning to go to the bathroom, came face to face with one of the raccoons. I broke up the encounter but now feel like I’m going to have to borrow Leo’s Have-A-Heart trap to catch these guys and have Animal Control haul them off. I watched a video last night on how this all goes down. The exterminator in the video recommended peanut butter and jelly as bait.
Columbian coffee bags at Canaltown Coffee in Rochester New York
It feels really good to look at something and decide you could live without it and then throw it in the trash. I had this old rusty wheel barrel that I found in someone else’s trash a long time ago. Sparky put a new wheel on it for me. I filled with other junk last night and took it out to the curb. I usually have a moment of remorse but don’t look back.
Still getting rid of junk is not as easy as it sounds. Where do go with stuff that might be worth some money like old records. eBay is not as easy it seems either. I brought a pile up from the basement and let Rick Simpson take his pick from them. He found ten that that liked and built his weekly “Gumbo Variations” radio show on WRUR around the scratchy old vinyl. Each set started with one of our old records (Paul Butterfield, Ginger Baker, Charlie Hayden, Chuck Berry, Crazy World of Arthur Brown) and Rick built on those for a pretty cool but sort of out-of-body show.
We order our coffee ten pounds at time, whole bean from Canaltown. The owner, Pete, roasts in the back room and provides an incredible aroma for the whole neighborhood.
Womens Cup 2011 – US beats France 3-1 in semifinals
How are you supposed to get anything done during the World Cup? You just can’t. Peggi and I watched the US beat France this morning while sitting in my parent’s living room (you can see some of my dad’s paintings in the shot above). My mom even made lunch for us.
And on the way home Peggi said we ought to go down to our neighbor’s house to watch Sweden play Japan in the second semifinal game. We barely had time to check email before kickoff. Japan was even more stylish than France in the way they played the short ball and passed around opponents with finesse. They hardly broke a sweat. Sweden beat the US in the opening round, just one week ago today, and Japan beat Sweden today so what are the US’s chances on in the final on Sunday? Everything rests on Abby’s shoulders.
Winning is not everything but I do wish I could beat my neighbor, Rick, in horseshoes. Not so much for the sake of winning but just to be able to see him with his tail between his legs for a while. Maybe that is the same thing. It felt real good to see the US beat Brazil in the 122’nd minute on a beautiful cross that Rochester’s Abby Wambach nailed with her head. And it was especially nice to watch the game with my mom while sitting in my parent’s living room, a few blocks from Mercy High School, where both Abby and my mom went.
It has become impossible to keep up with the wild raspberries in Leo’s garden although many of the neighbors on our street have been trying. Peggi and Monica both made pies over the weekend. I have seeds stuck between my teeth around the clock. And with this heat the berries will soon shrivel up.
Andy and Karen from Dreamland Faces were in town last week. They dropped off a few of their new 45s at the Bop Shop and our neighbor Rick grabbed one for us. Both sides are in Chinese. Here’s hoping they’ll be here long enough for a gig next month when they return. This is a folk song about pretty girls with long braids. “If you want to marry, don’t wed any other – I want you to marry me. Bring all your money and your little sister, get in the wagon, come with me”
Our neighbor emailed us that there has been a rash of car break-ins and mail theft in our neighborhood. She said the police believe they have the kids that were responsible. Mail theft is kind of a big deal. The kids probably didn’t even know how serious an offense it is.
It reminded me of a story I did for the Refrigerator in 1999 when the Post Office was defacing their own mailboxes. They had come up with a new logo, one that looked completely wrong in context, and they were in the process of pasting the new, slightly bigger, logo on top of every perfectly fine old logo on every mailbox in the country. At that time there were still a few of the old logos left on overlooked mailboxes and we encouraged readers to send in their old mailbox sitings.
I wondered what the penalty would be if you got caught defacing every classic, tank-like mailbox in the country the new, hideous, speedy-like-FedEx, italicized logo. Here we are thirteen years down the road. The mailboxes still look like 49′ Fords. They aren’t going anywhere, they’re fixtures of stability in our neighborhood and the “new” logo makes them look like they’re falling over.
Pale Swallow-Wort, invasive species plant in New York State
I hate this stinking weed, an invasive species, called Pale Swallow-Wort, that pops up everywhere. It’s really tough to pull out because in most cases you don’t get the roots when it snaps off just above the ground level but the dry conditions we have now make it the perfect time to rid your yard of this sucker. You can see in the photo above that I was able to get most of the roots. I use two the hand technique and pull straight up with focused concentration.
We have a recording of Hildegard Von Bingen’s music that we play quite a bit but we didn’t realize she was such a polymath. The movie we watched last night about her life, a thousand years ago, hardly touched on her monophonic vocal works. Instead it portrayed her as a dark ages religious mystic struggling with a Catholic church hierarchy that unfortunately still exists today.
Polymath would have been a better name than “New Math”, which was already retro when we called ourselves that back in the late seventies, but anything with the word “math” in there sounds too progressive or soulless which isn’t quite fair too mathematics but . . . I played in the band when we recorded the first single with Howard Thompson behind the glass wall of PCI Studios.
Duane sent us this link to his newest video, one he did for “Juggler” from Margaret Explosion’s latest 45. He takes the the light side of the single and goes dark on us, enriching the music twofold. It’s a total knockout.
We finished Netflix Season 3 of “Breaking Bad” last night and spent some time today with extras at the iTunes store. In that spirit I posted some of Duane’s comments on the making of “Juggler” below.
“The camera is shooting 10 sec clips and turning them into 40 sec slo-mo’s internally. So those little swaying camera moves were actually happening fast. And those swinging planes that sailed by within inches of the camera were really going fast. On another take, I jumped back suddenly, thinking I was about to get hit. Shot at Coney Island till they closed. Back home I came to the shot of the swinging chairs and immediately decided that shot was the opening w/o even seeing the rest. It dictated the whole feel & path. The machines are juggling people. The life we lead juggles us, we learn to be juggled by it from childhood onward. It all fit. I started seeing it all this way and it basically assembled itself. I made a choice not to ride any of the rides, to keep the point of view objective vs subjective. But I’m dying to go back at nite & just ride the rides.”
Ralphie The Gopher in our neighbor’s garden, Rochester, NY
Kevin was in town and he stopped by with his family just after we had had heard from neighbor that there was a gopher loose in the garden that we share. Our neighbor said if we wanted any spinach we better pick it before dark because there might be any left in the morning so we all headed down there to pick a few bags.
This morning we checked email before heading out for a walk and our neighbor sent one telling us he had captured the varmint. We stopped down there and found Ralphie, just as we pictured him, in a cage with a few slices of apples. It looked like he had worn a hole in his nose trying to get out this trap. It will will be a long hot weekend for hi him before the town picks him up on Tuesday and transports him over by the bay.
Coincidentally Peggi was wearing her Ralphie The Gopher hat so I took this picture with the hat on the cage. We ripped our Ralphie cds a while back and gave the whole Tall Tales library to our niece and her husband. They’ve told us many times how Ralphie is their family’s favorite.
Bootsy at the Party In The Parking Lot in Rochester New York
It was perfect weather for Bootsy’s touchdown at the “Party In The Parking Lot” last night. Of course he opened with “What’s The Name of This Town?” and when the cameras came out he said “You gotta take a picture of me because I’m not really here.”
We first saw Bootsy in the seventies at the War Memorial when the Brides of Funkenstein opened the show and Bootsy followed and was then followed by Parliament and Funkedelic. He’s still doing “Telephone Bill” and “Munchies For Your Love” from back then but not “Very Yes” and “I’d Rather Be With You.” With Bernie Worrell on keyboards he did a Hendrix tribute a Sly Stone song and sounded as good as ever but loud as hell.
Paddlewheel boat on Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York
We had read that the lake levels were unusually high and we had to see it for ourselves so we walked that way. We got there too late to see Chuck Schumer make his announcement about new measures to clean up the lake. There is hardly any beach at all at Durand. They control the lake level but they pick a level in the Spring and when we have a lot of rain they sort of have to live with the consequences. They could lower it but Montreal has a dam up there that allows water to run through it while they generate power from it and they don’t want to just dump the water for our sake.
So Wegmans grows this stuff and charges a premium for it while we can grow the same stuff for free? We haven’t even watered our garden yet this year and it’s doing fine. We’ve had fresh lettuce and spinach for weeks.
We went over to my parents to watch the US beat North Korea in the Women’s World Cup. A real clash of civilizations, the Koreans were about half the size of the Americans and young with a sixteen year in starting lineup. Rochester’s Abby Wambach had a beautiful cross and assist on the first goal. We may stop down at our neighbors for the next game since we don’t have cable. We had a big old branch come down in the last heavy rain so I’m firing up the chain saw this afternoon to take of it. I’m planning on using my new noise canceling headphones so I won’t hear you shouting at me.
Redeem Your Empties sign at Southtown Beverages in Rochester, NY
We made a point to visit the street pool today. That’s what it takes. We had only been down there once this summer. I brought my Guston book to read and finally put it down when I got to this line. “I’m not so involved with what the other guy does. You want to upset your own applecart.” Good thing I did or I’d be sunburnt.
Back in the late nineties when Margaret Explosion was was playing Friday Happy Hour at the Bug Jar Casey told about Southtown Beverage and we’ve been going there since. We only get out there a few times a year but it is always an enjoyable experience. It’s the only worthwhile establishment in Henrietta (suburb of Rochester with one of every chain restaurant or store in the world).
You drive through the building entering from the back. You open your trunk and someone takes your empties out. It helps if they’re in bags of twelve or the cases the bottles come in but they will take anything with a NY deposit. That goes for empty seltzer bottles from Wegmans and the 24 ounce Budweiser cans I find when we walk. They have have great prices on beer and “blow out’ specials on outdated beer. I picked up a case of Estrella, brewed and bottled in Barcelona with an expiration date of 5/11, for $16.99. You can stay in your car for this whole trip but I usually pull forward and park out front so I can walk back in and savor the experience with the two brothers who run the place.
I almost forgot I had a blog going here. Just as it should be. With vacation and jazz fest chalked off I reached my hand in the job jar and came up with a good one.
I spend most nights painting in the basement and it is my favorite room of the house. I like the Adirondack siding that came with the walls down there (our cat does too and uses it as a giant scratching post) but I want more white down there at least on the wall I face. So I bought some 4×8 sheets of white panel board from Home Depot and then framed in the wall so I can cover the fireplace opening. The sheets were tough to hang. Peggi and I were wrestling with them when Julio stopped by. He pitched in and had some great ideas for trimming the edges in order to cover our crude cuts.
I went to Home Depot first thing this morning and bought the trim for the top and bottom of my new wall but I didn’t go as far a julio had suggested and trim the sides. But then I changed my mind and decided to add the trim on the side so I went back to Home Depot to buy the last piece. You cut your own lengths over there and then pay by the foot. I came home and carefully cut the wrong angle on the new piece and I didn’t have any to spare so I went back to Home Depot for a third time. This is how it’s gonna be when I retire. I can see it all pretty clearly.
Jonas Kullhammar before his show at Max’s at the Rochester International Jazz Fest
The jazz pass is still a great deal so you won’t hear me complaining about the relative lack of the off beat. We stayed away from the big shows like k.d. lang, Elvis Costello and Bela Fleck and managed to find some great music every night of the nine day fest even if it meant hearing Jonas Kullhammar two nights in a row. I tracked the fest The Refrigerator for anyone who cares about this stuff.
After Norway’s “In The Country” set last night Peggi and I stopped over at Abilene to have a drink celebrate the end of the fest. I didn’t notice who was playing there but I’m guessing it was some shit kicking stuff. This is based entirely on the biker babe who came out of the back room all sweaty and ordered a shot of cherry vodka while we were talking to Olga at the bar. We skirted the crowds in the streets as we walked to the car and we were blown away by the mad sounds bouncing off the buildings, a mix whoever the extremely loud Budos Band in the tent, 38 Special on the Chestnut Street Stage and G Love & Special Sauce on the Alexander Street stage. That was some off beat stuff!
Jonas Kullhammar Quartet at Xerox Auditorium at the 2011 Rochester International Jazz Fest
Jonas charms the crowd between songs and refers to us as the “beautiful people of Rochester.” Jonas Kullhahhar Quartet have been playing together for thirteen years or so and are widely considered Sweden’s best jazz band. If they lived in the states they would be one of our best jazz bands. They’ve been at this festival three times now and we can’t get enough of them.
The piano, bass and drum rhythm section takes off like a rocket and the band is an exhilarating full tilt for most numbers. But their joyous, fresh, crisp playing is also giving way to slower, moodier, seasoned compositions with plenty of space for gorgeous piano, big bass lines and bare hand drumming. They may have stole the festival again this year. They’re playing again tonight at Max’s.
Bill Frisell on the street before his show at the Rochester International Jazz Fest
We were standing in front of the Rochester Club Ballroom but weren’t headed there. We were in the long line for Kilbourn and it was still an hour before the show when I spotted Bill Frisell heading into Brenunzio’s guitar shop on East Ave. I snapped this shot and then got back in line. The woman in front of us, who was also in line for the Frisell show, turned to us and said, “This is and embarrassing question but what instrument does Bill Frisell play?” Popularity comes with a price. After ten years the lines are longer than ever, the shows are more crowded and it’s getting harder to find alternatives to “festival favorites” like Bonarama or The Shuffle Demons.
Frisell opened with some really gnarly, prog stuff and then settled into one of his trademark, lazy, country blues things but the band never really gelled for me. I was always aware of the parts, Frisells restrained control, the plunked violin, the scattershot drums and I couldn’t hear the whole. It all felt rather tedious. We spotted Bob Martin in usual Frisell spot, right behind the sound board. He said he was having dinner with Frisell between sets. Maybe he’ll have the skinny.
Many Worlds with Greg Burk at the Rochester International Jazz Fest
“Many Worlds with Greg Burk” were the most adventurous band we have seen at this year’s festival and they were one of the best. Led by Detroit’s and now Rome’s Greg Burk on piano they indeed explored many worlds. They aired out their arrangements to the point where they teetered, just long enough to make you wonder who’s in charge and then they were off again. They have enough confidence and trust in each other to pull way back intensifying their music with every rest. Colorful arrangements featured flute, soprano and tenor sax, a great bass player and a loose limbed, left handed drummer made for an extremely melodic set
We talked to Greg after their set and told him how much we loved their music. He said they were a little nervous because they felt the other acts here were so much more straight ahead. He’s right on. With club passes that would get us into ten different venues we could not find anything else of interest last night.
Phronesis back stage at the Lutheran Church before their performance at the RochesterInternational Jazz Fest
Finally, a fresh, clear headed, energetic band, unbound by tradition and just enough off kilter to make it all brand new. Phronesis was riveting at the Lutheran Church last night. The bass player drove this band with wild abandon egged on by the frenetic drummer who dampened his snare with a towel and then rode on the snare, tom rims and just about anything but his ride cymbal. He sounded more like a tap dancer than a drummer. The piano player was great and the band tore it up.
