Hiatt Hits the Big 5-4


John Hiatt turns 54 today. I don’t know about you, but I always think of musicians as older than I am, or more recently, considerably younger. But Hiatt is essentially my age. I suppose I could have waited until next year to write this, when he hits the double nickel, but what the heck – I’m still bummed that I missed seeing him this summer, for FREE, because of my wisdom tooth extraction the day before.

I have no better way to indicate how much I love the music of Hiatt than to indicate that I’ve seen him live once (and would have seen him again this year), I’ve put together compilation discs of songs written by him and covered by others, and I own a majority of his output. To wit:
1979 Slug line NO
1980 Two bit monsters NO
1982 All of a sudden NO
1983 Riding with the king LP
1985 Warming up to the ice age CD
1987 Bring the family CD
1988 Slow turning CD
1989 Y’all caught? CD
1990 Stolen moments CD
1992 Little Village CD
1993 Slug line/Two bit monsters NO
1993 Perfectly good guitar CD
1994 Hiatt comes alive at Budokan CD
1995 Walk on CD
1996 Living a little, laughing a little CD
1996 Master series best of NO
1997 Little head CD
1998 Greatest hits and more NO
1999 Greatest Hits The A&M Years ’87 – ’94 CD
2000 Crossing Muddy Waters CD
2001 Anthology NO
2001 The tiki bar is open CD
2003 Beneath This Gruff Exterior CD
2004 20th century masters: The millennium collection NO
2005 Master of disaster CD
2005 Chronicles 3 CD box NO
2005 Live from Austin TX NO

About 60% of his output. I’m missing some of his early, unfocused work, and some of the other stuff I don’t have is duplicative.

My favorite John Hiatt songs:
1. Shredding the Documents from Walk On. Faux Beach Boys harmony, name-checks Larry King and Oprah.
2. Have a Little Faith in Me from Bring the Family. And the remixed version on one of his greatest hits album, with more orchestration, is definitely NOT an improvement.
3. Perfectly Good Guitar, title track. Reportedly really ticked off Pete Townsend, who has been known to smash one or two.
4. I Don’t Even Try from Riding with the King. Used to listen to this on the late, great Q-104. I love how the intro line echoes Smoke on the Water.
5. Lift Up Every Stone from Crossing Muddy Waters. I first heard this on an episode of A Prairie Home Companion on a co-worker’s 35th birthday, right after his party in Albany, while driving towards Poughkeepsie, my co-worker’s hometown. The song has a gospel feel.

An NPR story on Hiatt. Julie Hembeck, someday, you’ll appreciate the music of John Hiatt.

ROG

Don’t Play That Song! QUESTIONS


A couple work moves ago, my fellow librarians at the time developed rules about what we could and could not play around each other. This was one librarian’s list:

Music I never want to hear again as long as I live
Celine Dion
Brian Setzer
Mariah Carey
Bob Dylan
Sheryl Crow
BROOOOOOOOOOCE
(Southside Johnny, too, while we’re in Joisey)
Air Supply

Another list:
Joni
Janis Joplin
Liza Minelli can be tough
no Cher in the house (not that there’s ever been any)
and, in deference to your favorite band, absolutely no Klaatu

List #3:
Neil Young
Willie Nelson

My list? Nothing. There were no artists that I couldn’t have taken, at least now and then. There is some atonal John Coltrane I can’t listen to for very long, but none of these folks had any. (For that matter, I don’t think we had any Celine Dion, either).

Whereas, there were people we could play that no one would object to:
Lyle Lovett, the Beatles, and Bonnie Raitt immediately come to mind.

So my question: in your house, in your workplace or in your car: when you hear what songs, or artists, do you change the station or scream, “Turn that thing OFF!”? What songs, or artists, are almost always acceptable to a cross section of your family or colleagues? Julie Hembeck, please answer this query.
***
TV Land has been doing a series of Top 10 lists, most of which I’ve ignored. But for some reason, I did watch Top 10 Musical Moments on TV this past Wednesday. A rather predictable list; the vague “MTV Unplugged begins” wouldn’t have made my list, though Nirvana on Unplugged, a “bubbling under” choice, might have. And the ONLY value of actually watching the thing, rather than just getting the list from the site is this little tidbit, about the guest on the Smothers Brothers show who passed out into Mickey Rooney’s arms during the Who’s explosive performance. (It was Bette Davis, and she did perform on the show.) Moreover, the irritating thing about the program is that the 10 p.m. EDT show actually began at 10:04:30; I find that be generally true of that network at night, so if you’re TiVoing, you may want to record the next show as well.
***
LIBRARIANS IN THE MOVIES: An Annotated Filmography.

ROG

What Do We Know?

(Listening to: Information Overload by Living Colour; guitarist Vernon Reid was born August 22, 1958.)

This week, someone at work asked me what the derivation of the term “golden sombrero” in baseball was. I knew what it MEANT, but why that term? It’s hockey’s fault, according to the Wikipedia:
“In baseball, the golden sombrero is a slang term used to describe a player’s dubious feat of striking out four times in a single game… The term derives from “hat trick”, a hockey term for three goals that was applied to baseball as a term for three strikeouts. Since four is bigger than three, the rationale was that a four-strikeout performance should be referred to by a bigger hat, such as a sombrero.” There’s more about this topic here.

One of my racquetball buds was trying, and failing to tell this joke:
A man went into his doctor’s office to have a vasectomy, wearing a tuxedo. The doctor asked, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo to your operation?” The man replied, “I figure if I’m going to BE impotent, I’m gonna LOOK impotent.” (Say it aloud – it makes more sense.)
Anyway, he was failing in his joke telling because he couldn’t remember the word vasectomy. It happens – the word just doesn’t come. He was trying to describe it and said, “You know that thing that you have to kill your sex drive.” And while we got what he meant, another of my racquetball guys quickly noted that, in fact, a vasectomy doesn’t kill the sex drive.

One of the things I need to relearn again and again (and again and again)is the fact that what I think passes for “Everybody knows that!” doesn’t necessarily apply.
Case in point: last week, the racquetball guys were BSing, as they are wont to do, giving each other a hard time, when one said, “Well, even a busted clock is right twice a day.” Another of the guys, who was in his 30s, laughed heartily at this, so hard, in fact, that I said, “Surely you’ve heard that one before?” He laughed, “No, I haven’t. That’s really funny!” O.K., then.
***
I was reading the articles about the new Census data released this week, which the Albany mayor has been complaining about an undercounting of the city’s population. I don’t really understand the problem, because the “group quarters” (dorms, group homes, prisons) are not counted, and weren’t scheduled to be counted. They won’t be counted in the future either if the Census Bureau budget gets cut, which may very well happen, based on preliminary legislation.
One of the pieces that I read showed the growth as a percentage of white, non-Hispanic people in only two states, West Virginia and Hawaii. In the latter case, white people are a growing minority population.
***
In some music exchange I was in last year or early this year, someone included Led Zeppelin’s The Lemon Song. This piece touches on my general ambivalence about uncredited stealing by the group, though in fact I have at least a half dozen of their albums.
***
Mark Evanier posted a video link about Post Crispy Critters, a cereal from the 1960s, and even before the video ran, I remembered the punchline: “the one and only cereal that comes in the shape of animals!”, music and all. What an extraordinary waste of my brain power.
***
GUIDANCE FOR AIRLINE PASSENGERS from DHS. In its latest airline security restriction, the FAA has banned all people from flights. Which is the satire?

ROG

Quick Reviews

MOVIE: The Devil Wears Prada. At some point this spring, I saw a trailer for this film, and not just a two-minute clip from here and there, but what felt like three or four continuous minutes before and during Meryl Streep’s entrance. I wondered, Is that all there is to the movie? Well, not exactly, but this film is nearly as predictable as the tease suggest. The only real fun is to watch Stanley Tucci and especially Streep perform. Maybe worth a rental, many months after one’s forgotten the trailer, but not yet.

ALBUM: Adieu False Heart, Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy. I was really looking forward to this album, especially after hearing them perform on a Prairie Home Companion in June. I LOVE the Cajun tunes, usually with Ann as lead and Linda as harmony vocals. And the unexpected cover of “Walk Away Renee”, originally done 40 years ago by The Left Banke, really works. The other songs I enjoy as well, and they’re growing on me more with every listen.

BOOK: I got this e-mail from the author asking me to write a “short review of a new Christian ebook called Land of Canaan: Ancient Hope for Future Peace by Paul M. Kingery“. It turns out to be a 649-page PDF about the coming Apocalypse, using not only citations from the Book of Revelation, but Old and New Testament texts as well. First, I did not read it all. Second, I’m not much into this sort of book, with all of what I would consider its proof texting. That said, you may want to skim through it to see his argument that seems to suggest global warming (chapter 13) and the recent (current?) Middle East conflict (chapter 6 and elsewhere). I was also stuck how, in the last days, “Jesus will return to a high mountain refuge in what is now being called Kurdistan, near the banks of the Tigris River.” If you don’t know your world geography, that’s Iraq, folks. After a 30-page index, there are nearly 20 pages of photos in and around Dohuk, Iraq, where, presumably, the Lord will be coming back.

TELEVISION: The Tonys. Do I mean the awards that were given out on June 11? I do. Carol and I FINALLY watched them over two days this week, and even though I remembered some of the winners, it was still fun to see the production numbers. Also, Jersey Boys’ John Lloyd Young, the “Frankie Valli” character, who recently signed a TV contract, and who was ABC News’ Person of the Week back a couple months ago for going from being a Broadway usher a year ago to a Tony winner, gave the sweetest acceptance speech about himself and his father.

MUSICAL: Beauty and the Beast, Park Playhouse, Washington Park, Albany, NY August 12. This venue of free summer performances has been the grounds for more traditional musical theater (South Pacific last year, Camelot, West Side Story). The Disneyfication of Park Playhouse, emphasized by Park Playhouse II’s two-week production of Aladdin, Jr. this year (based on the movie Aladdin) makes me nervous. That said, it was a fine show, especially the vocal skills of the Beast, played by John Anthony Lopez, who I knew a few years ago, and briefly, as the tenor soloist in my church choir. I always think the ensemble gets short shrift in reviews, so I’ll say they were quite good, and versatile. Still, I hope for more traditional fare next summer. This show ends Sunday.

ROG
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