
Paul Wesley
Certifiably Surly-
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Everything posted by Paul Wesley
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I rewound the DVR to find that "foul" on Rice. There wasn't one.
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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.
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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?
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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."
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I seriously doubt there were efforts.
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This pretty much sums it up for me too.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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Great post.
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Share Your Music (it probably sucks but that’s not why we do it)
Paul Wesley replied to NoRagrets's topic in Music
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). -
Share Your Music (it probably sucks but that’s not why we do it)
Paul Wesley replied to NoRagrets's topic in Music
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Share Your Music (it probably sucks but that’s not why we do it)
Paul Wesley replied to NoRagrets's topic in Music
Old but still brilliant and relevant: -
Surlyhorns getting ready for Rihanna...
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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.
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I thought both Dillon Mitchell and Morris finally looked comfortable with the basketball in their hands yesterday. I've gotten the opposite impression all year (especially with Morris).
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Since we're considering Springsteen vs Petty, I took a look on Apple Music at each one's divorce album. Screenshots below. In general, I'd say Springsteen's might be a little more remorseful (I guess having a massively celebrated wedding to a fashion model and subsequently getting photographed on the hotel balcony with your backup singer can do that). Both records have moments of remorse and regret, but also moments of anger. Petty was willing to take a break from the pain and give listeners a pop song ("You Wreck Me"). Springsteen's seems more thematically consistent. You forget how "Wildflowers" opens with five straight radio-friendly songs. Putting five consecutive songs like that on a record is an incredible feat, and it probably tops the consecutive-greatness on sides 1 of "Damn the Torpedoes" and "Full Moon Fever." Despite that ridiculously great opening salvo, I think "Tunnel" might be a better front-to-back record.
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The first half love-fest for Huggins reminded me a lot of the Bob Knight era at Tech. Where the announcers spend a big % of airtime praising him while the camera shows him sitting there very passively as his sub-.500 team gets their ass kicked.
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(I knew I was gonna want to edit but it would be too late) As an aside, I think Chuck Berry is tough to measure and rank, because he arguably fathered the dominant American genres of music post-WWII, but he also wrote pretty much every song over a simplistic I-IV-V chord pattern. How do you compare that to Gershwin or Duke Ellington - or even Willie and Paul Simon - each of whom wrote songs with a vastly wider variety of tempos, chord changes, styles, and melodic complexity?
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Paul Simon Bob Dylan Tom Petty Willie Nelson If you're using objective metrics, like albums sold, radio plays, authorship of songs that are permanently in the American consciousness, people who are/were bigger-than-life icons (e.g. non-musical magazine covers, mentions in non-entertainment media like NY Times), songwriters whose songs are frequently covered... in some order, that's probably your top four, at least of the last 50-60 years, right? I don't know who the next two are... maybe Prince and Springsteen. Johnny Cash was certainly iconic and might get into an objective-criteria modern top 10. Anyway, that's not *my* list, but my guess at seven of the top 10 if you used some reasonable and objective metrics *and* kept it post-WWII. And no one would click on a list like that because it's boring. I'm probably forgetting someone obvious and will wish I could go back and edit this... It gets a lot harder to measure guys that didn't live with modern media... like Hank Williams or Robert Johnson... whose faces most people wouldn't recognize but whose influence was massive. It's also harder to compare guys who wrote in styles that have largely faded from pop culture (or at least faded relative to 21st-century tastes) - e.g. George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, John Philips Sousa, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry.
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New SEC divisions and pods thread (Page 30 starts recent discussion)
Paul Wesley replied to mdmost's topic in Football
If we played OU in Dallas each October and the rest of the conference games rotated on and off the schedule, that would be totally fine with me. I understand that’s not gonna be the outcome though. -
This is one of the music podcasts that I listen to, and they just did an episode on muted-bridge guitars: https://switchedonpop.com/episodes/old-style-guitar-shop-rubber-bridge-reuben-cox And I googled it and it turns out it's a pretty widely-known thing (which instinctively makes me not trust the authenticity of the story): https://reverb.com/news/the-rubber-bridge-guitars-taking-over-indie-music They kind of make me want to go full Bill Burr... "When I was a kid, guitars had Floyd Rose locking tremolos, mirrored pick guards, and they were real pointy. And you dressed like a girl and sang about the devil. Now *that* was music."
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