Quick drive-by YIPPEE note to tina f:

The Wilders are coming to my backyard next month! They'll be playing at Bean Blossom, on the same stage Bill Monroe played. Can't wait.

Apparently, he got a "job" and is "busy."

My current plan is to avoid this at all costs. I decided that today. It is 84 freaking degrees and they are opening up my apt. pool. Screw looking for a job!!

The Wilders are coming to my backyard next month!

FUN!! Have a great great time. I first heard them when they played at a co-workers wedding several years ago. The couple had met at Winfield and wanted a band from stage 5 (unofficial campground stage) to play at the reception. Good times. No body plays the fiddle like Betse - who is an amazing walking archive of American folk music.

(Side story: Last year at Winfield we were walking back to our campsite after seeing the Wilders and a friend mentioned that Betse was a degreed musicologist and someone else said that old-timey bluegrass fiddlers shouldn't be called anything that technical. We couldn't decide which was a more appropriate title for her: a "remember-whener" or a "looker backer".)

SO. Wilco did cancel the first 8 dates of their tour.

Hayden - I can't remember if your show was before or after May 1. Everything after May 1 is supposedly still on. But not my show.

I'm kinda sad - but I am going on the camping trip I planned around it anyway - and I just hope that Jeff gets better.

A pox upon the house of the poster who put "Dizzy" in my head. I hate that song an awful lot.

My show is cancelled, Tina. Oh well, maybe they'll come back. Have you heard the new album yet? It's streaming at their website.

I haven't heard the new album yet. My dial up can't play more than about second of it without cutting out (no matter how long I let it sit there). And now the release date has been pushed back to June 22nd.

I have one friend who likes it and one who wasn't impressed after her first listen.

What do you think of it?

The biggest thing that bums me out about them cancelling is that it would have been the first show of the tour - and in Columbia, MO - which was Uncle Tupelo's 2nd hometown. Jeff has played the Blue Note seventy gillion times. It would have been fun to see them greet the hometown crowd after all this time. Oh well. Maybe they'll come to Lawrence or KC when they head back this way.

That must've been two years ago last January.

Kee-rist, time flies when you're getting older. Hells bells - it probably was that long ago, dammit.

Yoinks.

Stop getting older, Frank!

My insatiable need for glam has caused me to buy the newest compilation from RPM (who did Velvet Tinmine), Glitterbest. This is an epiphany causing compilation where the coin drops and you suddenly get the cultural context for a very specific shift in style and taste.

This collects a bunch of post-glam/pre-punk rockers from the mid-seventies by bands like The Jook and The Hollywood Brats and Milk n' Cookies and Jet (the 70s group, not the current hitmakers). These are mostly British bands who desperately want to sound like (a) Bowie and (b) The New York Dolls. And then - DUH! - I'm thinking, "These all sound like the second cousins of The Only Ones" when I notice that one of the songs on the comp is "City of Fun" by England's Glory. (This is the name of The Only Ones before they got their stellar guitarist - whossisname? John Perry? - and this song was also done by The Only Ones, who are most famous for "Another Girl, Another Planet.")

In brief, this collection connects all the dots between glam and punk in an era that had no obvious transitional band which has endured (except The Only Ones), and it includes musicians who later went on to be in groups like The Vibrators and Ultravox among others. Which is not to say this is the first rare glam comp I'd recommend (that would be Glitter From the Litter Bin), but this is good proto-punk-power-pop.

Now I need a New Yorker to go by Other Music and pick up Satin Dustbin and Clap Your Hands Stamp Your Feet two semi-boot CD-R compilations of rare glam compiled by Ursula 1000 and not otherwise distributed (but are getting a lot of play on WFMU).

looks around hopefully

I can't remember if I already mentioned these first two earlier in here, but TMBG's Indestructible Object and John Vanderslice's Cellar Door are (still?) both great.

More recently received were two more XTC albums: Oranges & Lemons and Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2). The former is still sinking in, but I am now the property of the latter. SUCH a sucker for Andy's love songs, in their several forms. But especially "Church of Women", with the warbled -ers and -ings and the glorious innuendo.

Lie for a lie, but a truth for the truth . . .

Hi everyone! I'm still here! Just not posting as much as I did when I led a life of leisure. It's nice to be missed though.

Hi everyone! I'm still here!

Hello! I'm definitely not just stealing this number!

Seriously, getting reacquainted with a mere 40-hour week again has been enough to leave me in the dust in several Internet locales.