February 2020 - Page 4 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Cheap Trick, February 7, 2020 ALB

Rick Nielsen, Robin Zander, Tom Petersson, Daxx Nielsen

I won a pair of tickets to see Cheap Trick at the Palace Theatre in Albany on Friday, February 7. But I wasn’t sure I’d actually go. It wasn’t something my wife wanted to do. I would have given both tickets away, but my offer got no response on Facebook.

It was a strange week. Tuesday, I felt unwell and blew off Bible study, but went to a meeting. Wednesday, I was better, but still woozy. Thursday, the daughter woke up about 4 a.m. with stomach pain, and I tended to her, skipping choir.

By Thursday night, she felt much better. But the school has a policy that you can’t go in if you’ve, er regurgitated in the last 24 hours. She had the last bout, of several, at noon Thursday.

Friday, I fed her and helped her with her homework. She went to school the last period, at 2 pm, to take a unit test. She was even well enough to take a youth trip to Vermont. The question was the weather. They were originally going to leave at 5 but it ended up she was the first to arrive at the departure point at 6.

At 6:15, it’s too late for my church’s First Friday event. And one of the performing groups couldn’t make it. On the other hand, there’s a 7:18 bus (#138) a block from my house that could get me to the Palace by 7:45. I have dinner with my wife. She wants to watch recorded figure skating on TV that evening.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go

I hadn’t left the house in two days, except to shovel the walk and take out the garbage. It appears that I needed to see Cheap Trick. Thank you, CDTA. The seats at the Palace weren’t too bad, one for me and one for my coat. They are off to the left, but only about a third of the way back.

The house was about 2/3 full when the opening act, a Chicago-area band called Rookie played. The three-guitar/bass/keyboard/drum group played eight or nine songs. They were quite good, though the lead singer/guitarist who sang the majority of the songs was clearly the best vocalist. He did the finest harmonies when the drummer sang as well.

The setup between acts talks about 20 minutes, an the theater really starts filling out, with a couple now to my right. Cheap Trick takes the stage. Immediately, the folks nearest the stage stand, which has the obvious cascading effect.

They perform Just Got Back, Hello There, Way of the World, Come On Come On, Lookout and Elo Kiddies before I decide, “That’s enough!” I sit. And so do random other folks. And I can see lead singer Robin Zander in his white outfit between the heads as he sings Magical Mystery Tour, In Crowd, and Speak Now.

Three original plus a scion

Occasionally, I’d see guitarist Rick Nielsen wandering across stage. I only brief caught bassist Tom Petersson, and Daxx Nielsen (son of Rick), who replaced drummer Bun E. Carlos about a half decade ago. Ballad of TV Violence, Ain’t That a Shame, and Waitin’ for the Man. There was lots of swaying through The Flame.

Then they end with two of the songs I, and everyone wanted, I Want You to Want Me and Dream Police. I don’t know what time it was, so I headed for the exits. But I discovered it was only 10:15, so I watched the encore, California Man and Surrender, from the back. The latter featured two of the members of Rookie. The member at their promo table says Cheap Trick has done that the last three shows.

I walk across the street to the bus stop. About five minutes later, the obviously happy crowd came out. The #12 bus arrived at 10:35, and I was home by 11. I was happy, not just with the concert but with the spontaneous evening. A good night.

Why you will marry the wrong person

we are basically psychologically quite strange

I came across this 22-minute video Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person some months ago. Alain de Botton, Creator of The School of Life, spoke at a Google event in London in 2017.

It makes a lot of sense. Happy Valentine’s Day!

“The reason is that all of us will not manage to find the right person, but we will probably all of us manage to find a good-enough person. And that’s success, as you will come to see.” Wow, is this guy romantic!

The reason why this will happen is that “we are basically psychologically quite strange.” In other words: “I know that you’re not easy to live with. And the reason is that you’re Homo sapiens and, therefore, you are not easy to live with. No one is.”

Really? “Our friends don’t want to tell us. Why would they bother? They just want a pleasant evening out… Our parents don’t tell us very much. Why would they? They love us too much. They know…

“And our ex-lovers, a vital source of knowledge. They know. Absolutely they know.” Well, THAT’S undoubtedly true, at least in my case.

“Almost all of us are addicts, not injecting heroin as such… I like to define addiction… Addiction is basically any pattern of behavior whereby you cannot stand to be with yourself and sort of the more uncomfortable thoughts and, more importantly, emotions that come from being on your own.

“And so, therefore, you can be addicted to almost anything so long as it keeps you away from yourself, as long as it keeps you away from tricky self-knowledge… And this is a disaster for your capacity to have a relationship with another person because until you know yourself, you can’t properly relate to another person.”

I don’t want to give away the payoff of Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, but it involves redefining love, or at least the idealization thereof, and sulking and hope and Kierkegaard. Here’s the transcript.

Musician Peter Gabriel turns 70

Peter Gabriel Melt Peter Gabriel is one of my 25 “island” albums. Hmm, I suppose I should specify. There were three or four eponymous albums of his, depending on the country.

I’m talking about the THIRD Peter Gabriel album, the one originally released on Mercury Records in the US in May 1980. “The album is also often referred to as Melt owing to its cover photograph by Hipgnosis.”

At FantaCo, where I started working that very same month, many of the tracks were on heavy rotation on the radio station WQBK-FM, Q104, which was on in the store constantly.

I also heard songs from his first two albums. From Car, Solsbury Hill and Here Comes the Flood. Scratch featured On the Air. And from the last Genesis album featuring Gabriel, the title track of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Melt

Intruder uses the “gated drum” sound of Phil Collins, Gabriel’s former bandmate on Genesis.

No Self Control is well described on a blog about the music of Kate Bush by Christine Kelley.

Start is a snippet leading to I Don’t Remember. “Gabriel jokingly summarised the album’s themes as ‘The history of a decaying mind.'”

Family Snapshot was inspired in part by An Assassin’s Diary (1973). Gabriel said it was “a really nasty book” by Arthur Bremer, who had attempted to assassinate George Wallace in 1972.

And Through the Wire the closest to a straight-up rocker, but with a distorted vocal.

Side Two starts with Games Without Frontiers, also well described by Kelley. We knew the line was “jeux san frontières” but the FantaCo running joke was that it was really “she’s so funky, yeah.”

Not One of Us is another song of alienation.

Lead a Normal Life – “Atlantic Records (the label for the first two albums) didn’t want to put [Melt] out at all…” Atlantic head Ahmet Ertegun wondered “‘Has Peter been in a mental hospital?’ They thought I’d had a breakdown and recorded a piece of crap … I thought I’d really found myself on that record, and then someone just squashes it. I went through some primordial rejection issues.”

Biko – I was vaguely aware of the murder of South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in 1977. But this haunting track gave the incident the worldwide attention it deserved.

Deutsches

For Christmas 1980, our boss Tom at FantaCo gave us each a foot-long cube, which turned out to be six LPs. One of mine was Ein deutsches Album, “released in July 1980… Gabriel sang German vocals on top of completely new recorded instrumental and backing vocal tracks.” I loved it.

After that, I became a big Peter Gabriel fan, buying the first two albums, then Security and ITS German counterpart (1982), with the hit Shock the Monkey. Plays Live came out in 1983. The massively successful So album was released in 1986.

In October 2001, my wife and I were in Cherry Valley, NY, trying to get away from the world. A store was playing Afro Celt Sound System’s Volume 3: Further in Time. I recognized vocals by Gabriel (When You’re Falling) and also Robert Plant. I bought it.

Peter Gabriel turns 70 today. Links to songs throughout.

1619: Before the Mayflower (NYT, Bennett)

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable

I’ve found the information that has been provided by the New York Times in the 1619 Project to be of great use over the past half year. It explaining the effects of slavery in America. And not just up to 1865, but variations that exist to this day, such as the roots of tipping. Check out these audio clips.

I should not have been, but I was nevertheless surprised that so many people were unaware of the year’s significance. Maybe it’s because I grew up reading ads in Ebony and Jet magazines for Before the Mayflower by the late Lerone Bennett. The book came out in the early 1960s, but I didn’t read it until about a decade later. It’s been updated a number of times until 2007.

Before the Mayflower is a great introduction to African American History. But since a lot of people are unfamiliar with it, The 1619 Project became necessary. There is some controversy surrounding the Times series, naturally. On one side is The Battle between 1619 and 1776: The New York Times versus the History Community. On the other, Who’s afraid of the 1619 Project?

I’m not going to get into the debate, except to point out the obvious. Issues of race and slavery and history are… complicated…

The Spanish

For example, “Juan Garrido became the first documented black person to arrive in what would become the U.S. when he accompanied Juan Ponce de León in search of the Fountain of Youth in 1513, and they ended up in present-day Florida, around St. Augustine…

“In 1565… the Spanish brought enslaved Africans to present-day St. Augustine, Fla., the first European settlement in what’s now the continental U.S. In 1526, a Spanish expedition to present-day South Carolina was thwarted when the enslaved Africans aboard resisted.” Still, 1619 was a turning point, if not a beginning.

Here’s A Poem Commemorating The 1619 anniversary: An African Renamed. It’s by Brenda Cave-James, who I have met. We both have Binghamton roots. The poem was inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

This could be useful: The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors. Most of the files are just before or after the Civil War.

The annual baking of the lasagna

Note to OGA: not as good as yours

lasagna Usually once a year, always in the winter or late fall or very early spring, I bake lasagna. I mean, why turn on the oven when it’s 86F (30F)? But when it’s 23F (-5C), that’s another matter entirely. And I generally make at least TWO of them, because the mess from making one just isn’t worth the effort.

On page 247 of Betty Crocker’s 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook is the recipe for Italian Sausage Lasagna. Oddly, it’s in the Meat section of the book. Usually, I don’t put in any meat at all. I have added spinach, though.

This year, though, we had a half pound of chicken sausage, left over from my daughter’s experimental meal the night before. She told me that taking it out of the casings was “disgusting.” Oh, how bad can it be? It’s like ground beef, right? Well, no, actually. It felt clammy. Never again. I’ll slice it instead. The recipe called for two pounds, but we go with what we have.

I cook the chicken sausage, two mediumish chopped onions and some garlic that my wife had in the fridge. Did I add a couple teaspoons of sugar? I don’t recall. Need a lot of tomato. The recipe wants 32 ounces of tomatoes and 30 ounces of tomato sauce. I’ll at least double it.

Cook it all together until it boils, then let it simmer. The book says for 45 minutes, but I’ve gone longer and shorter than that. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix a carton of ricotta cheese, 24 ounces, and a carton of cottage cheese, 32 ounces, with a half a cup of Parmesan.

Don’t cook the lasagna noodles

Then spread the sauce mixture in the bottom of the baking dish. Add the dry lasagna noodles, because dealing with wet pasta noodles is too much like work. Then more sauce, cheese mixture, sauce, mozzarella, noodles, sauce. Basically the idea is to have enough sauce and other liquids so that cooking the pasta is unnecessary.

Cover and bake 30 minutes, and uncover for another 15. Unless your oven is running cool, which ours does, and end up cooking covered another 20 minutes and uncovered for 10 more.

They turned out OK, one with wheat pasta, and one with the traditional style. But note to OGA: not as good as the lasagna you’re bringing over to my house on March 14, OK?

Lasagna – Weird Al Yankovic.