Music
Aaron Kaercher & His Crazy Neighbors playing outside at Northern Grounds Cafe in Ely, MN.
Waiting for Coldplay to take the stage at Alpine Valley!
Listening to Bad Religion “Generator”. Watch out everyone! 🎶
Bad Religion and Foo Fighters. Nice combo. Recommended! 🎶
Preener's Eve 2008 with The New Standards
Just ordered a Blue Monk Lemonade. Seated for The New Standards at The Dakota. Waiting the arrival of Phoebe and Dave-O!
Phoebe after the show.
Following the Blue Monk Lemonade with a Love Supreme. Awesome.
My friend Greg Merkle got his first album on iTunes – it’s really great.
Neil Young, Harvest Moon → Genius = Nice Fall Friday playlist.
Many errands this morning. Taking break for afternoon espresso and some laptop time. New Michael Franti & Spearhead album playing. Nice.
Buying lots of music from various Winnipeg Folk Festival performers. Crowd favorite so far seems to be Little Miss Higgins.
Greg Merkle: Great Music
This post is a bit of a tease since you can’t (yet) just go out and buy this music. I know Greg Merkle from working at Dow Jones and have been lucky enough for him to share some of his recordings with me. It’s great stuff. He’s starting to do more stuff and getting more online. Check out this video he just posted.
Big Smith & Blue Mountain at The Bottleneck
(Lawrence, Kansas) Tammy and I are hanging out in Lawrence, Kansas this weekend. We are here to fulfill her New Year resolution to see Big Smith play again. It’s been about 10 years since she saw them last, and I’ve never seen them. After scouring their tour schedule she saw that the best option for us was a weekend trip bookended with 7 hours on the Interstate to Lawrence. As an added treat, they played with Blue Mountain. I’ve got three Blue Mountain albums and really like their music.
We drove down to Lawrence on Friday going through rain the entire way. We made it with an hour to spare to get checked into our hotel and walk over to The Bottleneck where the show was. The venue was great. Nice sound, big open area for dancing.
Blue Mountain is on a reunion. They split up in 2001 and decided to pack it in. However, in November they reunited and put the band back together! They put on a great show. It was almost entirely comprised of their existing catalog of old songs given the bands recent reformation. That was fine with me, it was a great walk through memory lane.
After Blue Mountain’s hourlong set Big Smith started to pile onto the stage. Pile is the correct word since there are 6 of them in the band. Big Smith is a family band. All the members of the band are 1st cousins. As they highlighted for us, that means they all have the same grandparents. Big Smith then proceeded to absolutely tear the place down for 2 hours and 15 minutes.
I’m pretty sure that we had no choice but to travel this far south to see Big Smith. I think the northern nature of Minnesota would have put some mojo on the foot stomping and clapping.
I had an absolutely great time whooping it up with everyone else. Halfway through Big Smith’s set I couldn’t help but get out on the dance floor and start stomping and clapping with everyone else. Hillbilly music at its finest!
If I only had a pair of overalls! Make sure to read Tammy’s write-up from the night as well!
Wilco Concert!
Its hard to watch Wilco without being a bitter old man.
Do they really need that many keyboards?
That Jayhawks guy is on stage again! Argh!
Heavy Metal Drummer!
Witnessing young lust.
I can’t help but think that Wilco is becoming the Pink Floyd of alt-country.
Funny smell in the air. Smells like the folk festival.
Lynrd Skynrd of alt-country is probably more appropriate.
Son Volt at the Zoo
I’ve been seeing Jay Farrar play music for around 15 years now. It started with Uncle Tupelo, continued with Son Volt through his solo work and now with the 2nd version of Son Volt. In those 15 years, I’ve never seen him jamming the way he did at the Minnesota Zoo last week. Wow!
Son Volt’s newest album, The Search, has some really great tracks and it plays even better live. The entire band really looked like they were having a lot of fun, and that made the whole concert just great. Farrar even said a few words a couple of times, which is incredible for him.
How odd is it that I saw the Beastie Boys in an old pool, and the following night Son Volt at a zoo. Two great shows, in very odd places, back to back.
Beastie Boys Bombard Brooklyn
No Sleep Till Brooklyn! That was the last song that the Beastie Boys played at the McCarren Pool in their first ever concert in Brooklyn, NY. I was there to enjoy it all!
I had a nice alignment of business travel and concert schedules and picked up tickets to go see the Beastie Boys in this limited tour following their recent release, The Mix-up. I got to have some great Mexican food and margaritas by Union Square, and then hopped onto the L train to head to Brooklyn. The Beastie’s put on an amazing show in a great venue. It was an outdoor show held in the now-empty McCarren Pool. The weather was great and the Beastie’s laid down some huge beats. They put things together in concert that were just great, mixing old and new songs together into new mashups with giant bass tracks.
If you haven’t seen the Beastie’s, you should make a big effort to check them out in concert.
Listening to new Jason Isbell album Sirens of the Ditch.