Paul Wesley

I have a friend who likes to go to parties and whenever music is discussed, she likes to offer how much she loves Yoko Ono's music. Invariably men will lose their shit, and she'll calmly double- and triple-down on how great Yoko is. She says it's like a superpower where even if a guy thinks he's being trolled, he takes the bait anyway. The funny thing is that EVEN AFTER SHE'S TOLD ME HOW FUN IT IS, she mentioned to me that she actually, really, truly enjoys Yoko's music, and then I lost my shit and started finding examples of those fucking dolphin-noise vocals on YouTube and then went off about how indefensible that is on any level. So... a superpower. Maybe Brick has it too?

Haha. I agree about that song. It's ridiculously formulaic and dreadful. That attempt at a 3-note hook for a chorus... Ooof. Maybe we should have a "worst song by a great artist" thread? You could also put me down for "You Might Think" by the Cars.

Wow. "Running on Empty" is easily a top-10 desert island album for me. I discovered it when I was maybe 14 and just about to buy my first acoustic guitar. Everything about it was a peek into an adult world - songs about love and loneliness and drugs and addiction and life on the road. It was (and is) a masterclass on songwriting, and those ideas were animated by brilliant musicians who served the song above all else. And part of that was Lindley's solos. They're just incredibly lyrical and tasteful. They have perfect phrasing, they have ideas that build and morph, they have beginnings and endings. IMO, the only other soloist who compares in those respects is David Gilmour. I remember an interview with him where he talked about collecting wild polyester clothing from the 50's to 70's, and the interviewer asked him where in the world does he find thrift stores that have those things? "Salt Lake City, man. That's the Mecca." I'm gonna raise a glass to him tonight.

ThorpyFX fallout cloud is the best Muff-style pedal that I've personally used. I like it even more than the Analogman fuzz that cost twice as much (and I subsequently sold). We are definitely living in a golden era of pedals, with products from multinational corporations, from dudes on college football forums, and from everyone in-between... literally around the globe. Not only that, buyers can audition them on YouTube and have them arrive at the front door in a couple days. It occurs to me that you could have eight or ten guys with pretty big pedalboards and have no pedal appear in more than one rig, and all of those chains could have a tuner, compressor, gain (or three), fuzz, wah, phaser, chorus, delay, reverb -- and each one of them could be just fantastic.

This is how I feel about Fender amps. It's not that I don't think they can sound glorious, it's just that they don't sound glorious when *I* use them.

Is my TV messed up or is Disu green?

I rewound the DVR to find that "foul" on Rice. There wasn't one.

My wife has bought houses where she has zero "game" at all... she just knocks on the front door and then raves with excitement about how wonderful and magical and amazing it is. Just gushes with praise for paint colors and furniture, etc. The next thing I know, she's best friends with the seller, and that seller is doing everything they can (including lowering the price) to make sure she gets it. It's crazy.

When you say "petty," you mean like spending $12,300 to move each Venezuelan migrant from 4 states to his West to 8 states to his North in order to illustrate how brown people lack humanity?

I hope your hot-rodded Ibanez serves you well. Sometime around 91 or 92, my main guitar was a Squire Strat, and it was a pretty mediocre instrument. Partly at the urging of a young guitar-shop employee who was a brilliant guitarist (we were briefly in a garage band together*), I bought an RG550. Within a few years, it was pretty obvious that there is really nothing about my personality or my preferred styles of music that would correlate with me playing a pointy guitar with a mirrored pickguard. It was forgotten and packed away for a loooong time, and I may have even put it on craigslist for a few hundred dollars at one point. But I'm glad I still own it. I cleaned it up and set it up a year or two ago, and it just plays like butter and sounds *really* good. And this absurdly-styled $800 guitar is one of the best-engineered guitars I've ever owned (fit, finish, tuning, intonation, rock-solid electronics with no crackle or buzz). I don't need to own an HSS Strat, because this thing does that bridge humbucker thing about as well as it can be done. *I was invited to sit in with his band. They had their own room with a PA in a rehearsal complex, which seemed really big-time to me. First practice: Everyone in the band consumed eyebrow-raising amounts of drugs and alcohol. But I liked them and they were really good musicians, and I thought maybe I just caught them on a wild night. They suggested a few songs for me to learn, and asked me to sing on some things. So I did my best to rehearse and learn them, and then I went back the next week. The second practice was even more of a rumshpringa than the first one. So I said what everyone says when they're quiet-quitting a garage band: "Guys, I have a thing next week and I'm not gonna make it."

I seriously doubt there were efforts.

This pretty much sums it up for me too.

I had to look it up. They were on the northbound feeder road about halfway between 10th and 11th. edit: In college I lived nearby on Waterston and my landlady was the namesake of "Josephine's." Good times.

I just drove past this band who set up their own stage and ran an extension cord out to the feeder road of Mopac at the Enfield exit. So I made three quick right turns, parked, sat in the grass, had a beer. I've had a pretty crappy week, and this was a much-needed bright spot. Thanks, guys.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who read that and thought it was just objectively wrong. Reagan is the Godfather of “Government is bad. We should break the government.” In 1986 he said the most terrifying words you could hear were “I’m from the government. I’m here to help.” I suppose Reagan might be horrified at the way Trump and the Trumpkins openly root for Putin, and relentlessly adopt Kremlin talking points (e.g. Ukraine is not a real nation, Ukraine was never a democracy, we should stop sending all aid to Ukraine, etc.). But culture wars and anti-government rhetoric - that was Reagan’s brand.

"High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everyone likes water." --Attributed to Mark Twain, though as I get older I trust these attributions less and less and always think things might be apocryphal. Anyway, maybe there's a Petty/Springsteen analogy in there. It would be an imperfect analogy, because Springsteen definitely wrote stuff that's immediately accessible just like Petty wrote stuff that's layered.

"Southern Accents" is definitely the most nostalgic Petty record for me. I camped out in the parking lot of the local mall with my best friend to be in line for tickets the next morning (still can't believe my parents allowed that). Spent all the money we had getting tickets for us and our friends. On the night of the show, we were lucky that someone's parents were out of town, so that's where the pre-party was. Invited some beautiful girls (who were into it too), wore the concert shirts to school on Monday... It was everything good about coming-of-age... friendships, girls, freedom, rock music... But with some perspective, it's definitely the most stylistically uneven Petty record. He set out to do a tribute to his home state and to the South, hired a couple guys from The Band, then hooks up with an English synth-pop dude in leather pants (who ends up co-writing a bunch of the songs). Hey, we should hire horns! In the words of the Surly: "What are you doing, Tom Petty?" I agree that the title track and "Dogs on the Run" are underrated deep cuts. The drums and rhythm guitar intro to "Rebels" just instantly takes me back to all the excitement and possibilities of youth. "Best of Everything" is a great ballad. That's four pretty solid songs. I actually like "Don't Come Around Here" if only for the sneering spitefulness of the lyric. It has no business on a record that's a tribute to the South, but it's redeeming. Then there are a few songs that aren't at all southern... and they're really not even good songs ("Mary's New Car"). If I were a music critic, I'd put it middle-of-the-pack - easily behind "Torpedos," "Full Moon Fever," and "Wildflowers." As a mile marker of my life, it was (and is) bigger than all of them.

Great post.

I’m sure the home audiophile guys are equally ripe for satire, but I don’t swim in those waters. But these two videos land painfully close to home (Charlie Bolois actually did calibrate our Studer).

Old but still brilliant and relevant:

Surlyhorns getting ready for Rihanna...

Yeah, without getting into the substance of his opinions (which might take us to the Cloak Room), it was kind of shocking to me in some interviews over the past few years -- seeing how ridiculously overconfident in himself Waters is, and how quickly condescending he was to the interviewers. Just profoundly unlikeable. Probably the most generous (to him) conclusion I could guess at is that he's always been loudly anti-authoritarian - and in 50 years of being a rock star, being anti-authoritarian doesn't really alienate anyone. Until now, when he just has a very unique impression of which actors in the modern world are authoritarian. Again, I'm trying to come up with a (generous) assessment of Waters other than the one in the Gilmour tweet above.