It's been a while since I've posted a music video, so here's a blast from 14 years past.
The Refreshments' most-played song is probably the theme music from "King Of The Hill", but this is unquestionably their best song, and one of my personal all-time favorites.
I haven't had time for blogging due to travel the last two weeks, so I'm going to ease back into it with something requiring less effort than the usual fare.
One of my favorite local bands is Honor By August, and this might be my personal favorite of their many great songs. "Johnny (Pass Me Another One)" is a poignant, heart-felt song and never fails to please when they play it at their shows.
The video up top is more or less the "official" video for the song. Below is another take on the song recorded when Honor By August played last month at the Colonial Tavern here in Fredericksburg. First, a little about this video.
A friend of ours, Young Devereaux, sits in on sax with the band just about every time they play here, and he joined them for "Johnny" that evening, and I'd recorded the whole show on a digital audio recorder I have which is great for capturing live performances. About a week later, Young mentioned to me that someone had evidently videotaped the show and put the "Johnny" track up on YouTube, but that the audio quality was pretty bad. More as an academic exercise than anything else, I downloaded a copy of the YouTube clip using savevid.com to see if I could marry up my audio track with the video. The clip below is the result.
Twitter user @IKIDYOUNOT tweeted a link to this HuffPo article this morning, which brought me a chuckle.
A group of prominent musicians are joining a campaign to close Guantanamo Bay and demanding the release of records about what music was used during the potential torture of detainees there and at other facilities.
Seriously...if you were a musician would you really want to know that your music was used as an instrument of torture?
I haven't posted any music videos in a while (OK...I haven't posted much of anything in a while), so here's something you might like, and unless you're from the Washington, DC area you've probably never heard of them.
Honor By August played at the Colonial Tavern here in Fredericksburg last weekend and Mrs. Poolbar and I caught the show. It was something like the fifth or sixth time we've seen them there, and they never disappoint. This song is probably my favorite from them.
If they play at a bar near you, don't miss it. You won't regret it and when they hit it big, you can say you saw them "when".
Update: Damn...with these Hi-Def videos, I really need a blog template with a wider column width.
Honor By August, one of my favorite DC-area bands, has an upcoming show at the 9:30 Club in Washington on July 11th, and they've engaged in some creative incentives to get their fans to bring as many friends as possible. To wit:
Tickets: 2 - HBA sticker 3 - Lottery entry for signed HBA drum head 5 - one free music lesson from a band member of your choice 10 - Your choice of bowling or dinner with the band at your house 15 - Personal show (invite as many as you want!) 20 - Personal show + we will make a DVD 25 - We will throw a party in your honor (we will supply band, burgers and beverages!) 50 - Michael will clean your house 100 - HBA will write a song about you and perform it at a private show at your house, which we will have just cleaned 500 - HBA will grant three wishes. Seriously
Too bad I'll be in Europe...I'm sure I could have rounded up 20 people to go.
Dorian (front), Chris, Stefan and Rick (back, left to right)
It occurs to me that (1) I haven't posted anything about local music in a while and (2) I've never posted anything about this local band, which Ms. Pool Bar and I have seen, oh, probably 20 times. She Bites Dogs put on another great show last night at The Tavern at Lee's Hill here in Fredericksburg. They're really one of the best local bands, and I'm not just saying that because I know the guys.
A typical show features mostly original music, with a sprinkling of very well-done covers. Their original style is hard to pin down, but sort of blends edgy pop with hard rock. They mainly play in Virginia and the DC area, but with a little luck they'll get some wider exposure with their soon-to-be-released CD.
Yeah, I know, I've been slow in posting new stuff lately. Been absolutely buried with work. But I did manage to find time last night to head down to Celebrate Virginia here in Fredericksburg with Mrs. Pool Bar to catch Tonic and the Gin Blossoms. I've always liked both bands, and we caught the Gin Blossoms back around 1994 or so. It's good to see both bands are still around (well, in the case of the Gin Blossoms, reconstituted) and they both sounded great.
The Celebrate Virginia Live concert series, by the way, is a great venue. It's well organized, offers good food (Famous Dave's BBQ among others) and an over-priced but good selection of beer. Parking situation was good, and it's worth spending the extra money for the "Golden Circle" tickets which put you right in front of the stage and in actual seats. The rest is lawn seating.
Coming up are Toad The Wet Sprocket and Little Feat.
Gin Blossoms frontman Robin Wilson closes the set with an acoustic version of Elton John's "Rocketman"
I sometimes meet interesting people while traveling. Today (well, yesterday I guess, if you're on Eastern time) I stopped for a couple of beers at the airport in Atlanta while waiting for my connecting flight and chatted for an hour or so with a guy named Norman who it turns out is the Norman half of a band called the Kurt and Norman Band. He's the guy playing the keyboards in the video, and seemed to be particularly proud of this tune, which I must admit is pretty cool.
Anyway, Norman is an American expat living in Panama who was en route to visit family back home. He says he barely speaks enough Spanish to get by.
Went with Mrs. Poolbar to see a band called Seven Nations tonight at the Colonial Tavern. We'd never heard of them before and may not have gone except we both wanted to do something to try and get out of the funk over our friend's death.
Dude. No, I mean dude. These guys are awesome. And they were down two members from their full complement. Imagine Red Hot Chili Peppers going Celtic - no, that's not quite right, but maybe close. Anyway, they have to be seen to be believed.
They're based in Orlando, Florida so they're not a local act. In fact, their tour schedule shows them all over the US, with stops in Indiana, Illinois, California, Wyoming and even my former home town of Hartford in September.
Check their web site for the tour schedule...they're well worth going out of your way to see.
I think American Girl was the first Tom Petty song I heard. To this day it's still one of my favorites. I found a better vid than this one, recorded in 1978 at something called "Old Grey Whistle Test", but embedding was disabled so I put up this one instead. But check out the link if you want to see Petty playing a "Flying V" type guitar...don't think I've ever seen that before...he seems to be mostly a Telecaster man.
So I saw the headline on this Fox News article just now and got confused:
Teacher Fired for Marrying Divorced Man to Sue Catholic School
I read this as some teacher being fired because she married a divorced man in order to sue the school. Hey, gimme a break...I was at a New Year's party, fer cryin' out loud!
Speaking of the New Year's party...entertainment was provided by a band called BPM. They're a three-piece funk kinda band that performs mostly covers with a few originals thrown in. Actually, some of the covers they play sound better than the originals. Mrs. Poolbar and I have seen them a few times, and they rock.
BPM stands for Bearce, Phil and Mills, by the way...not beats per minute. Catch 'em if they happen to play anywhere near you.
Went with Mrs. Pool Bar and saw these guys last night at the Colonial Tavern. It's about the third or fourth time we've seen them, between open mic nights and full-on shows, and they put on a great show every time. The young (20 year old) lead singer Pat has grown into his frontman role nicely, and it's kind of cool to see his dad "Doc" hold up his end on bass. Keith on drums and Scott on lead and rhythm guitar round out Bucky And The Blues Buckets.
Just a word of advice to "Bucky": Get your show dates on your web page!
As Christmas songs go, Fairy Tale of New York is a bit of a downer. But it ends on a hopeful note, and that's what Christmas is all about, right? Not that hopey-changey stuff spewed by Obama and his cultists, but a genuine feeling that as bad as things were, they can get better. Sort of like 2008, no?
Blogger has a new widget courtesy of iLike which allows users to embed a list of songs in the side bar. I figured I'd try it out, and it's fairly cool...feel free to listen to a random sampling of some of my personal favorites.
I noticed that not all songs are full length. For example, Full Moon, Empty Heart and Lawyers, Guns and Money and This Is Us in my playlist are only short samplings. Still, kind of a cool toy.
I was in Atlanta a few years back and it just happened that Fighting Gravity, my favorite Richmond, VA band (actually, one of my favorite bands, period), was playing at a place there called Smith's Old Bar. These guys from Pittsburgh, PA opened up for them, and they blew me away.
The song here is Born Too Late. A really good tune, but I was hoping to find a clip of I'm A Fool, which is probably my favorite by these guys.
The Clarks tour constantly, mostly in the northeast lately, so check their tour dates.
Alas, Fighting Gravity isn't currently touring. If anyone knows what's up with them, please leave a comment.
Six women and 12 children left the building, but while soldiers were questioning the women they discovered one was actually a man dressed in a burqa, the traditional all-encompassing dress that most Afghan women wear. The man, later identified as the targeted commander Haji Yakub, tried to attack the soldiers and was killed, the military said.
It surprised me a few months back to turn up this video clip of Warren Zevon performing Lawyers, Guns And Money in a guitar solo because his performances were almost exclusively (as far as I know) piano performances. This is from his Excitable Boy album, and it helps to remember that the album came out around 1977, and so the song was written some time prior to that, hence the lyrical references to Russians, Cuba and Honduras.
It's my favorite Zevon song and I've been trying to get it right on the guitar, but the chord changes (D-D-D-A-D-D-D-A-D-D-D-A-E) are a bit fast for my aging fingers.
Today's euphemism is brought to you by a spokesman for Amy Winehouse:
Amy Winehouse's spokesman says the troubled singer is being treated at a clinic following a reaction to medication.
I guess that's less of a mouthful than "overdose brought on by consuming a 55-gallon drum full of whisky, valium, oxycontin, heroin, beer, Palmolive dishwashing liquid and Drano".
Dorian (front), Chris, Stefan and Rick (back, left to right)
Tonic opens up the show at Celebrate Virginia
Gin Blossoms frontman Robin Wilson closes the set
