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Tomorrow night will mark the [cough cough]th Annual Georgetown Cabaret. It's basically the ten best singers from GU and an incredibly tight band playing a couple dozen hits across the last five decades and several genres that haven't been done before. I just looked it up on their facebook invite, it's the 34th year. And it's probably always been awesome. All the money goes to a good cause (DC Schools) so get on it!

Also, I'm producing their DVD, so look for more info on that soonish.

GEORGETOWN CABARET 2009
STATE THEATRE
220 N. WASHINGTON ST.
FALLS CHURCH, VA
9 PM - $15

I don't want to talk about the Caps' breakdown against the Philly Flyers last night. I felt good walking by clusters of their dumbass orange fans outside of the Phone Booth while the Caps were up 2-0. Resting on Laurels is bad. Tell that to the Caps' defensive corps. And oh yeah, while I'm on the subject, in case anyone can pass this along to George McPhee for me:

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, BRING KARL ALZNER BACK UP!! NOW!

And trade Nylander and someone in Hershey and a pick for a good veteran Defenseman. I don't know how to run a hockey team but I know enough to say that our Defense isn't Stanley Cup ready, outside of Green, Poti, Pothier (if his brain shapes up anytime soon...poor guy), maybe Jurcina, and (if you fffffking let him play) Alzner. [cough]

Here's a video of Alex Ovechkin and Mike Green nearly decapitating themselves on a utility cart in the bowels of the Verizon Center. It's hilarious.

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I need to write the lengthy entries that Georgetown Cabaret and Hexagon 2009: What So Proudly We Bailed deserve, but being as how both projects are bearing down on me at once, I'll have to wait until tomorrow to speak about Cabaret. Right now, though, I just wanted to highlight an epiphany I had today while thinking about one of my least favorite hockey players of all time, Jaromir Jagr.

I never liked Jaromir Jagr. Even if I had been a Caps fan back when he 'played' for them (as in, he showed up to their games and scored a decent amount), I would have liked him. I could go on about his arrogance, his apparent lack of respect for the NHL and the rules, or how he leeched off of one of the greatest players in the history of the game for years in Pittsburgh. But I'd be lying to you all if I said that the fact that Jagr once looked like this has nothing to do with my contempt for him.



Yes, I know it was the early 90's and acid-washed jeans and hammer pants and paint-splashes were still in vogue.
Yes, I know Jagr came straight from the crumbled Soviet Bloc to play in the States and didn't understand how ridiculous he looked.
Yes, perhaps the birds-nest perm mullet was, in a way, subversively brilliant. But I don't care.

You suck, Jagr.

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My gift to you all for this week, if you haven't seen it yet, is Ra Ra Riot's new video for "Can You Tell," my favorite song of theirs. It's directed by Taryn Gould, one of our Syracuse people. It's wonderfully done; it makes me think of some love letter to New England Winters, at least how I remember them.



Hope you enjoyed it. There's a lot of stuff happening now. Like, way too much to go into any detail about, other than this and then that.

First, THIS. I'll be performing at the Old Arlington Grill tomorrow (Thursday) night at 7pm. The show's at 2903 Columbia Pike in Arlington, only $5, and a great time. Also on the show are my good friends Aparna Nancherla and someone else whose name I want to kick myself for forgetting. Also, Hot Broth Comedy (the relatively new open mic run by myself and Jake Young) has been going well at the Comedy Spot in the Ballston Mall. That's happening at 7:30, and is FREE. Nora Nolan is the featured act, and apparently Arlington Public Access is showing up to film!! So, yeah.

Tonight the Caps are hosting the Habs in what some people would call an Eastern Conference showdown. What it basically is, though, is the limping Habs fighting against the Caps, who are fighting to prove doubters/haters wrong. Did Montreal really send one of the Kostitsyn brothers down to the AHL? That's odd. Granted, the Caps sent Karl Alzner down again, and he's one of the better D-men on our team. Oh, well. Maybe John Erskine or someone will fuck up and cost the Caps a goal and George McPhee will stop teasing Alzner and tell him to buy a condo in DC already. Also, Eric Fehr is awesome, finally. More on that soon, probably.

Alright, like I said, plenty of stuff building up. Hexagon is a few short weeks away from premiering (more on that soon), and GEORGETOWN CABARET is next week!! Probably one of the best concerts to hit the DC area all year round, not kidding. Their big show is happening at the State Theater in Falls Church on February 26th. If you can't make that, they're doing a show at the Tombs on 36th and Prospect, NW at 11pm on Thursday, if you live in the Georgetown area. Probably more on that soon, too. Check out this teaser I did for their DVD last year...

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me: reading axl rose's interview in billboard inspired a massive essay i'm writing right now

jake: I'm glad two irrelevant things had a conversation

Before I start talking about the topic at hand, I feel the need to preface it with the statement that I have nothing against major label bands. Major labels are, in essence, unnecessary and poisonous to the greater artistic landscape, but we can’t lay the hammer down upon all bands that went with their support. After all, for all of the bands who rose from the underground ranks to the majors that people sneer at (Green Day, Jimmy Eat World, etc.) nobody in their right mind would assail Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, U2, or anyone on that level of “rock legendry” on the basis that they sold their souls away by signing to majors. Just because Tom Waits retreated from the major label world and remains overwhelmingly relevant doesn’t mean that The Boss has to, obviously.

 I’ve have included AC/DC on the latter list if it hadn’t have been for a couple of things: it’s impossible for me to wrap my brain around their Walmart-only release (Bruce’s awful mistake was a harmless greatest-hits comp for uninitiated casual fans and soccer moms), and “Black Ice,” contrary to popular belief and leading into the point of this spiel, wasn’t necessarily a reunion album.

Reunion albums have a stigma attached to them, but oddly enough these last few years have been a great time for them. Some of the finest reunion albums to come out in, well, ever, have seen the light. Two that immediately pop into my mind are Dinosaur Jr’s Beyond and Lifetime’s self-titled album, which I finally picked up recently and have to admit, it’s good. Really fucking good. Like, may be as good as anything anyone in that band’s done good. We’ve also had some ‘reunion’ albums that haven’t gathered as much respect. Take, for very specific examples, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Zeitgeist and Guns n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy.

I have not listened to either of these albums, nor do I really want to. So I’m not writing to bash one of the Bills (Corgan or Bailey) on a musical level. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be hanging around someone’s house or some kind of eatery and Chinese Democracy will be playing and I may not hate it. But I honestly don’t care.

Initially, I thought that my indifference towards these washed-up rock star’s jabs at earning back their former glory was based on anti-Major elitism, but it’s not. The two factors at work here are objective and personal. The objective part is that both of those bands don’t have a sliver of their former fire, creativity, or, well, line-ups from the late 80’s and early 90’s. The personal, and more significant part, is that none of the bands with good reunion albums meant anything to me when I was younger.



It’s absolutely true that the music you’re exposed to as an adolescent shapes you and your tastes more than anything. When I was thirteen, the Smashing Pumpkins were the most awesomest band ever. Looking at the level of success they enjoyed in the 90’s (much of it MTV-bred), and at how good their albums Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness were and still hold up, no one could argue against that, even at the most post-collegiate, analytical level. (A DOUBLE-CD? WHaaaaaaat? I’m going to have to put this one in the special wide slot at the bottom of my CD rack! My word!) But, right after recording Mellon Collie, Billy Corgan shaved his head and started doing everything possible to alienate his talented bandmates James Iha and D’Arcy Wretzky. The July 12, 1996 heroin overdose of keyboardist Jonathon Melvion and accompanying shadiness of drummer Jimmy Chamberlain was a moment that brought the 90’s to a shocking halt for millions of impressionable youths, including myself. In retrospect, it was more a sign that the Pumpkins had hit the apotheosis of rock n’ roll excess, and down was the only place to go. Soundgarden having broken up three months previous was the beginning of the speedy plummet of so-called Generation X culture.

As far as Guns n’ Roses went, I don’t think they were as good of a band as the Smashing Pumpkins. Perhaps that is because I was a little too young to really get affected by the Use Your Illusion albums in 1991, but I do remember how cool they seemed and how hard they rocked. Axl Rose (aka Bill Bailey… I just like that name) was always an asshole with delusions of grandeur, but from the years 1987-1993 he had a foundation of grandeur to support those delusions. He had Slash, an incredibly talented axeman supporting his caterwauling. Given their excesses, the insatiability of their clashing egos, and I’m sure plenty of factors that didn’t even make it into the press, the band disintegrated before something called the “internet” was even close to being a household term. Fifteen years and a cavalcade of David Lee Roth-style public embarrassments (just, without Diamond Dave’s humility or sense of humor) later, Axl refreshes the Guns n’ Roses brand with a new record that's essentially just a solo album. I don’t care how much crap you’re dealing with or how high you’re aiming, taking fifteen years and millions of dollars to put out one album is unacceptable. Like I’ve said, this has nothing to do with whether the album is good or not. And yes, I would say the same thing about My Bloody Valentine if Kevin Shields tried to do something similar.

From what I’ve been able to ascertain between recent live clips and interviews, neither Billy Corgan nor Billy Bailey have gotten any smarter since their foundations slipped out from beneath them. Corgan brought Chamberlain, who’d been fired after the heroin debacle in 1996, back into the fold and retained him through a completely disastrous “reunion tour” last year. Axl Rose didn’t notice that LA biker-metal-rock-whatever is not marketable to our post-“Garden State” culture of sensitive, introspective hipster chic. They don’t fit into this mold of the terrible modern rock bands that they inspired. It’s more an exercise in arrogance on his part than it is “sticking to his guns.” Both the Pumpkins and GNR signed bizarro distribution deals as well, Chinese Democracy being sold exclusively out of Best Buy, which only goes to further demonstrate how degenerative these artists are being. When you want more money, you want more money, and I begrudge nobody of that, but they have to reap what they sow.


It’s no secret that Dinosaur Jr and Lifetime reunited for money, too. Dinosaur Jr peaked and disbanded in the late 80’s and Lifetime peaked and broke up in the late 90’s, and both have seen their posthumous popularity bubble and rise over the last decade, both for similar reasons. I vaguely remember discovering who Dinosaur Jr was while I was rocking out to the Smashing Pumpkins in the mid-90’s. Spike Jonze directed a very cool video for their very cool song “Feel the Pain.” The fact that this was essentially a J. Mascis solo project by this point (original bassist Lou Barlow had split to become Sebadoh, and drummer Murph disappeared, too) wasn’t something that would set in until I became a fan later in this decade. I saw them on their reunion tour in New Orleans at the House of Blues at the end of 2007. The show was refreshing, exciting, and above all, LOUD AS SHIT. Watching J. Mascis play the guitar was like watching Jesus walk on water. I’ve yet to hear a guitarist from the last thirty years who’s as brain-crushing.



Anyway, by this time they had released a reunion album called “Beyond” which I really liked. I didn’t understand why I like this album better than anything they’d put out in the 80’s while in their so-called heyday. Now I do: because it is better than anything they put out in the 80’s. After their acrimonious breakup, the 3 men of Dinosaur Jr, given how little money they made from recording and touring for SST Records back in the day, took the opportunity to grow as musicians and human beings. Mascis had a small measure of mainstream success but it didn’t hold up for him. It was almost as if the trio had learned from their (relative few) successes and (many) mistakes since they were young and simultaneously full of both great ideas as well as shit.

The case was very much the same for Lifetime. Five dudes from Jersey who played loud, fast, and focused as hell but wore their hearts on their sleeves most of the time. Considering how much I listened to their NJ punk counterparts The Bouncing Souls in the late 90’s, it’s weird that I never caught wind of this band. I still have a soft spot for the Souls, but no band was better lyrically or tighter musically in their ilk during the 90’s Golden Age of pop-punk/melodic hardcore than Lifetime. Ari Katz’s lyrics are incredible, despite the fact that you can’t understand them most of the time. “Hello Bastards” (1995) and “Jersey’s Best Dancers” (1997) both stand the test of time as the blueprints for that heart-on-sleeve adolescent anthem movement in punk.

So what now? The men of Lifetime are all past the crest of or rapidly approaching 40-dom. They’ve got little kids to support, and millions of bigger kids who never got the chance to see them way back when to impress (see the video above, which I think was shot in 2007). In a way, Beyond and Lifetime have both legitimized the reunions of these bands. J. Mascis and Ari Katz decided that if someone was going to be making money by playing their songs, it should be them. Nobody was about to go out and form Dinosaur Jr or Lifetime tribute bands, anyway. The very reason that tribute bands like Mr. Brownstone and Appetite for Destruction make BANK is because so many people would give their right leg to experience Guns n’ Roses in 1991, but Bailey could give two shits about those people.

The line between “band” and “brand” blurs so easily, but taking advantage of people who don’t care whether the ‘r’ comes into play doesn’t sit well with me. Rock stars are something of a human curiosity sideshow nowadays, since most of the ones that still exist are mummified (Aerosmith, U2, AC/DC, The Who, Rolling Stones, Journey, countless other Casino Jockeys that the boomers just won’t let go) or won’t ever truly become household names (The Hold Steady, Conor Oberst, and Ryan Adams, despite breaking a billion hipster hearts getting engaged to Mandy Moore).

I don’t have a good way to wrap this up, and I just realized I completely overlooked Britpop, which isn’t characteristic of me. All I know is, Blur’s reunion is going to be awesome. I guess it’s because, despite disintegrating right after the Y2K ball dropped, they never really went away. Ah, can of worms, can of worms. I hope you enjoyed reading this. YOU IN DA JUNGLE BAAAAAABY. YOU GONNA DIIIEEEEEEEE.

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I've been working on an essay that was inspired by Billboard's interview with Bill Bailey aka Axl Rose that I'll hopefully post sooner than later.

But for now I wanted to post this video from this dude in Ontario who posts videos like this after every Leafs game. He is hilarious. I think his name's Steve Dangle. More from him shortly I'm sure. I like this one, obviously, because he's giving mad props to the Caps, despite the fact that they just handed it to his favorite club. This is why I love 96.7% of hockey fans.

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I'm an awful blogger. I should have shared the first item here yesterday, and the item thereafter this weekend. Oh, well. Better late than never; here you go.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of what the boomer "sub"culture has deemed "the day the music died." February 3, 1959, a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson took off and crashed in Clear Lake, Iowa in a snow storm. All three were talented and influential, though when it comes to the great canon of Rock n' Roll History, no one could touch Buddy Holly. Unfortunately for Richardson's family, no one would ever say that "The Big Bopper" was their favorite of the three Texan rock stars who died in the crash. They couldn't all be legends. Ritchie Valens (nee Valenzuela) was arguably the first latino rock star, and a number of the songs he recorded in his 17 years on earth (yes, he was 17, as insane as that may seem) are regarded as classics. If your spine needs a bit of chilling, you can hear "Now You Are Gone" on Part 2 of the 2008 Big Takeover Season Finale (click on the link and skip to about 52:50 ; it follows Elliott's almost as outstanding "Drive On To Me").

Now, I've written about the greatness of Buddy Holly on this site before, but this is a special occasion. Holly's definitely firmly entrenched in my halo of IYDTFU artists (If You Dislike Them, Fuck You) that includes the Clash and the Minutemen. Now keep in mind while I've gotten increasingly bitter, I've also gotten more open minded about most music and peoples' respective tastes, so it takes a lot for any band or singer to firmly join the IYDTFU Circle.

I've only been around for half of the fifty years since Holly's death, but I have yet to be convinced otherwise that there was a more important figure in the refinement of Country and Western music into this crazy new "Rock n' Roll." (On that note, stay tuned for a podcast featuring another person around my age who works closely with Buddy Holly's legacy down in TX). In 1959, it did seem like Rock n' Roll wasn't going to stick around. The 50's had seen musical fads erupt and fade, such as the Rumba and the Mambo (cited by the great WFMU Music Blog, which was from where I yanked that photo to the right). By the late 50's, the older generation was finally starting to take notice. Thanks to people who hate fun, a number of the best clips of Holly have been removed from Youtube, but as of today, this clip (complete with hilarious intro speech) of Buddy Holly and the Crickets playing "Peggy Sue" is here for your viewing pleasure.



ALSO, on Friday night, David Letterman put together one of the finest episodes of his show I've ever seen before. He invited on Mary Hicks, the mother of the standup legend Bill Hicks to talk about her son's memory, and to apologize personally to her for his terrible decision to cut Bill's final set from the show 16 years ago. Letterman didn't explicitly state why he cut the set; it was "an error in judgement" and "insecurity on his part." In fact, some of the show's top sponsors at the time were anti-choice organizations, and being as how Letterman had yet to have a quadruple bypass, he cared about what people thought of him and his show. In 2009, that's no longer the case, and he's finally making peace with something that's clearly hung over his head for the better part of two decades. But, don't take my word for it. I've embedded the 3 clips below so you can watch and see for yourself. Also notable was that fact that The Gaslight Anthem got to be the musical guest on this episode. Not a bad night of TV.





Oh, yeah, he also talked about blowing Billy Ray Cyrus' brains out, which was hilarious and probably didn't sit well with CBS brass since I'm sure their corporation had bankrolled him at some point, somehow. Just a guess. I don't have time to look it up, which is irresponsible, so if you have anything to contribute, email me and I'll tack it in here.I'm gonna get going, but as a bonus for those of you afraid to stop procrastinating, here's a clip of Bill appearing on public access in Texas telling the true side of the story.