All together under one (small) roof at the Orange Peel in Asheville…
"One Two (tickets) Oh My God!" We got in to see the Beastie Boys.
How ridiculously lucky can you get? This show was at a club that only holds a little over 900 people. It was announced only a day before tickets went on sale, and week before the show. I started loading the ticket page on a couple different computers right before 4 PM, along with a lot of other people. For the most part the site would not load at all after 4. Then, when it did I would get an error when I tried to buy tickets. About 10 minutes later it started saying “SOLD OUT.” I could not believe it. Took a minute to complain/tweet about it. Then, went back at it. Finally, I got through! And it was NOT sold out. Yes!
I wanted to go pretty bad, and my son Mars even more so. Mary said he got so nervous when I was trying to score tickets he couldn’t watch. He went to play his drums for a bit. That didn’t help my concentration.
I got the tickets. You want a shirt, bring money.
We got there over an hour in advance, and the line was already long. The cool thing is it appears the promoters and club did everything they could to keep it fair, and minimize ticket scalping. You could only buy two. Everybody’s tickets were “will call,” even if you got the few they had at the box office. You had to bring the card you used for the purchase and another picture ID. Once you got your tickets you had to go straight into the club. Despite all that I heard people in line with an extra ticket were getting offered crazy money.
I had no idea Biz Markie was going to be there. He DJ’d for about 20 minutes and it was awesome! He totally owned the crowd. His set went through a ton of old school hip hop from the ’80s and ’90s. And somewhat to my surprise the crowd was extra hip hop literate. The Biz kept fading the mix to let the crowd a capella through lines of Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J, even some Bob Marley, and bunch of other stuff I can’t remember. Massively entertaining. “If you remember that one, I know you’ll remember this…”
Of course, he couldn’t finish without giving us a little from “Just a Friend.” Make SURE to watch this video again.
When the Beastie Boys finally came out it was to Biz Markie doing “The Biz vs. The Nuge” (Check Your Head). Perfect.
And I couldn’t believe they had Money Mark with them. Money Mark’s records get played as much as anything in my collection. He’s been a hero of mine for years. Later in the set Mike D asked Mark to come out from behind the keyboards to play “Mark on the Bus.” Brilliant. (Clip from a different show.)
And what about the Beastie Boys? Well, I don’t how it could have been any better. They were fun, funny and funky. They played everything from their earliest punk stuff to a couple brand new songs with something from just about every record, save for License to Ill. I loved every bit of it, but I was especially glad they did a bunch of their instrumentals like “Pow” and “Ricky’s Theme.”
Mix Master Mike put on an impressive show and really turned it out with a scratching solo to open the encore. They finished strong with “Sabotage” and it was time to go home.
A couple other highlights include AdRock giving the crowd dance lessons for the “Jerry Lewis” and the “Funky Penguin.” He’s got skills. And I’ll never forget Biz Markie joining the band to sing Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.” The Biz took his shirt off and every person in the house pulled out their camera phone to capture the big man going natural.
What a lay-off. I think this is the longest I’ve gone without posting. But The Ramones got me going again. I finally saw The Story of The Ramones the other day. To my surprise, by the time it was over I had more respect for the band and the music. I wasn’t aware of Joey’s legitimate OCD issues. Knowing that makes a lot of the lyrics that I once thought goofy seem rather poignant now.
I’ve seen The Ramones no less than ten times. Too bad the year in the dates on both of these tickets got torn off. But as some rock star in the movie said, I can’t recall who, you would walk into their shows and you would have to ask yourself what year it was. Year after year everything was essentially the same. But we kept going because that meant a good show was guaranteed.
Welcome to the singles club. At least that’s what I think I’ll be posting all week. This one is a 12 inch of “Stop This Crazy Thing” (1988) by Coldcut. It’s probably the best dance single ever recorded. If you disagree with that I’d love to hear what you think is better.
Junior Reid (Black Uhuru) provides the perfect vocal complement to this jungle music which is replete with all sorts of hoots and hollers, including Tarzan’s signature wail. The sounds and samples are themselves what’s crazy here and I definitely do not want to stop them.
This is one of the most played records in our collection. Long live Coldcut!
(I found this video of “Stop This Crazy Thing.” The record cover appears to be for a 12 inch (different edition than mine), but the record itself looks like a 7 inch, and the music is shorter. The original 12 inch is seven and a half minutes of jumping.)
Hello, party people! Keith here once again to drop some soft rock knowledge on your Heavy Duty minds. Today’s topic: Mike Doughty (or “Dode” as he was known at Simon’s Rock). He was the frontman for the slacker jazz outfit Soul Coughing. He’s a talented lyricist who turns funny phrases like:
They say you snooze, you lose,
Well I have snost and lost
Since the dissolution of Soul Coughing several years ago, Dode has continued making soulful, quirky “alternative” music without quite as much electronic sampling and such. He’s released a bunch of albums and EPs (see ). I haven’t listened to all of them, but I do rather enjoy Haughty Melodic (a palindrome of “Michael Doughty”), which was probably the best-received, critically and commercially. The standout tracks for me on that album are “Sunken-Eyed Girl,” “Your Misfortune,” and “I Hear The Bells,” but “Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well” is the single, so to speak. It’s been featured on some tv soundtracks lately, so it’s experiencing a bit of a renaissance and you may have heard it on the radio, if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I’m more into this sort of thing:
Now Mike has a new album out entitled Golden Delicious. I haven’t listened to it as much as Haughty Melodic but I’ve been playing it for the past couple weeks and I’m really diggin’ it. My favorite track is “I Wrote a Song About Your Car,” and I also really like “More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle” and the single “27 Jennifers” which was previously released on his 2003 EP “Rockity Roll.” Here’s the video for “27 Jennifers”:
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Mike Doughty’s Band live at The Fillmore in San Francisco. He played a good mix of songs from his solo work and the Soul Coughing catalog. There wasn’t anything resembling a mosh pit, but we did get more bacon than the pan can handle. He actually played that track on a Roland SP-606 Sampling Workstation, like in this video. It was quite similar to the way that Jonathan Coulton plays “Mr. Fancy Pants” on the Zendrum in his live act. But I digress.
The non-musical highlight of last night’s show was when Dode set expectations with us for the end of the show. Four songs before the end, he explained that the next song would be “the song before the fake last song,” to be followed by “the fake last song” with an accompanying big rock ending and the re-introduction (including hometowns) of all the members of the band plus the soundguy. The explanation continued something like this, “Following the fake last song, we will turn around, and you will applaud, or not, and then we’ll turn around and act surprised to see you and then we’ll play two additional songs, including the song that’s been getting a lot of radio airplay, and then we’ll leave and you’ll leave.” I had never before heard a performer set such explicit expectations for the end of the show, and particularly liked that he called the fake last song by name.
My personal rule for all the music I’m posting is that I have to listen to the entire thing and decide whether to keep it. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve consumed the entirety of Metallica’s over-the-top-box-set Live Shit: Binge and Purge (1993), again. It’s almost nine hours of live music! There are three VHS tapes and three CDs. I don’t even have a VCR any more. They released it later with DVDs but I couldn’t wait for that. Actually, this was a birthday present, I believe, and it was stupid spendy. But worth every penny!
That package is the coolest. It even has little metal hinges on the back. In addition to the audio and video stuff there is a small stencil, a moss pit pass from the tour, and a great book. The book has tons of photos and photocopies of set lists, and some serious, but humorous, memos about what the band can and can’t do on stage in various countries, and much more.
I got to see them play at least once on this mega-tour, but I can’t find the ticket stub. This package is an even better memento. Happy birthday to me, and as they say the introduction in the book, “Happy Overdose”!
“Tiger Phone Card” is the prettiest and groovinest song I’ve heard in a long time. And the band Dengue Fever is, loosely speaking, consistent with this week’s theme of psychedelic music. Fresh and familiar strikes again, and I can’t get enough of it. This video is of a live performance at The Viper Room. They are playing at The Black Cat in DC tonight y’all! Oh, please, please come to The Orange Peel in Asheville, NC!
Hear the album version of “Tiger Phone Card” and many other great songs at Dengue Fever’s MySpace.
I have had Gogol Bordello’s “Start Wearing Purple” stuck in my head for months. For a few reasons, I haven’t gotten around to buying the album to review it, but I can no longer in good conscience keep them a secret from my millions of devoted readers. If you haven’t already heard of them, this is your lucky day. If you act now, you get the song with the video included for free. Just click the player below. For a limited time, as an added bonus you can also hear all the songs from their new album Super Taranta. Operators are standing by.
The Brain Surgery Experience
Want to know what it's like to have brain surgery? Well here's the long version of my experience. Complete with pictures and videos! Read all about the Brain Surgery Experience.
