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Election Year Rag / A Dyin’ Cub Fan’s Last Request

November 3, 2016 in Events by Dave Hoenack | No comments

Steve Goodman’s “Election Year Rag” was first released as a non-LP single during the 1972 campaign between incumbent President Richard Nixon and South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The country songwriter — famous at the time for penning the Arlo Guthrie “The City of New Orleans” — could be variously sentimental and sarcastic (A lifelong baseball fan, Goodman titled one of his later albums High and Outside). “Election Year Rag” expresses our universal exhaustion.

And its as true today as it was in 1972. Who could have predicted forty-four years ago that a future election would involve candidates discussing dick size in a debate, caught on tape boasting of molesting women, or caught and questioned by the FBI for violating the public trust. Or interference in our election by the Russians — the Russians! What would Nixon say? — or the FBI itself. We’re so far through the looking glass its hard to remember what real politics were like.

This song is actually the second most relevant Steve Goodman song today. The first would be either “Go Cubs Go” or “A Dyin’ Cub Fan’s Last Request.” Praised for writing “the perfect country and western song” by David Allen Coe, Goodman’s true claim to fame may be his passion for his favorite baseball team.

Goodman’s ashes were, according to his brother David, scattered in left field. David Goodman and a friend bribed a groundkeeper with a Playboy and $20 — we are not making this up — to sneak in and spread the ashes four years after the country songwriter passed away from Leukemia.

This is, strangely, our second music-related post about scattering ashes this week.

The Cubs won the Eastern Division title for the first time just four days after Goodman passed away in the fall of 1984. He had been asked to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” before his beloved team’s first post season game since 1945, and Jimmy Buffett (who has recorded several of Goodman’s songs over the years) filled in. The Cubs lost the game to the Padres, 3-2.

Steve Goodman re-recorded “Election Year Rag” for a short-lived National Public Radio segment in 1979. The spots featured Goodman, accompanied by Jethro Burns, performing freshly-written songs on the subject of current events, but most of them were never aired. We haven’t been able to find these online, let alone anywhere out in the real world.

As they they have at the end of every Cubs victory for years, fans at Wrigley Field heard Goodman’s “Go Cubs Go” after their team won its first World Series title in 108 years.

The minority party in America

November 2, 2016 in Educating you so you don't educate yourself by Dave Hoenack | No comments

This year’s presidential election is historic for many reasons, most notably for lowering the standard of public discourse to previously unimaginable depths. The major party candidates are possibly the least popular in American history. This has inspired some interest in third (and fourth) party candidates, who unfortunately do not seem so appealing if you take a closer look.

The Libertarian and Green Party campaigns were skewered by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, who reached the conclusion that the lack of media coverage they lament may be doing them a favor.

By coincidence, we recently came across this middle sixties Folkways album on the subject of third parties. The bulk of The Minority Party in America is taken up by an interview with perennial socialist candidate Norman Thomas, and from it we can only assume his perceived role for the third party in American politics is to be so absolutely boring that one is forced to take a closer look at the major parties before plugging their nose to cast a vote.

News from the Metropolitan Opera

October 31, 2016 in News by Dave Hoenack | No comments

Some ghastly Halloween news from yesterday’s performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera: ashes thrown by an audience member into the orchestra pit may have been human. According to the New York Times, the incident unfolded during the second intermission of an anticipated afternoon performance of Rossini’s “Guillame Tell.”

The NYPD’s Emergency Services unit has cordoned off the orchestra pit for the ongoing investigation. The Met’s Twitter account noted that all of the orchestra’s instruments remained there. At a press conference, the Deputy Commissioner for intelligence and counter terrorism, John Miller, said the suspect likely violated the city’s health code but that there was no criminal intent.

The suspect told several audience members that he was there to spread the ashes of his deceased mentor. There was only one musician in the orchestra pit at the time of the incident, and that was who alerted authorities. Two porters, wearing gloves, and an audience member may have come into contact with the powder, but were tested by authorities and released.

The Met was forced to cancel its first performance of Rossini’s famous opera in eighty years, as well as an evening performance of the composer’s earlier “L’italiana in Algeri.”

The New York Daily News identified the suspect as Texas resident Roger Kaiser, seen here in a photograph found on his Facebook page. We are not making this up.

Cancellations at the Metropolitan Opera are fairly rare, although the most recent was during the January 2015 snowstorm which forced much of the city’s transportation to a halt and before that during Hurricane Sandy. The Met’s most macabre cancellation in recent years was after tenor Richard Versalle suffered a heart attack in the first act of Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case” in 1996. He had just sung the line, “Too bad you can only live so long.”

Hymies Halloween mix!

October 30, 2016 in Photos by Dave Hoenack | No comments

Several folks have asked if we’d have a new Halloween mix this year — sadly, no. We just didn’t have time to record the stack of ooky and spooky songs we’ve been collecting. We do have about twenty copies of the old Halloween mix left, if you missed out on that. Free with purchase today and tomorrow, while they last!

And have a HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Its National Cat Day

October 29, 2016 in Photos by Dave Hoenack | No comments

We hope you remembered to get your cat a card.

Anyway, this is Momar. You probably haven’t met him, but he spends a night in the record shop every spring and every fall to catch all the mice. And he has the softest tummy in the world. And on the day this picture was taken, we discovered he likes flowers a lot.

Bernie’s Folkways record

October 28, 2016 in Photos by Dave Hoenack | No comments

Earlier this week somebody noticed Bernie Sanders’ credit on this Folkways Records documentary about five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

Not your typical Blind Shake record

October 27, 2016 in Album reviews, Events, Songs by Dave Hoenack | No comments

For a band with an established base of devoted fans, there’s a fine line between maintaining your image and cultivating your sound. Nobody wants their new album to be the equivalent of the Clash’s Cut the Crap or, well, any record by the Wings. The natural desire to grow as an artist has to be balanced against the expectations of the audience.

This is all the more challenging if you released no less than four records the previous year. Enter the Blind Shake, whose quartet of new LPs in 2015 were each individually solid enough to sustain the trio’s reputation.

Full disclosure: one of those four albums, Shadow in the Cracks, was a side-project, and another, Modern Surf Classics, was a collaboration with underground guitar legend John Reis. Each of those is unmistakably in the Blind Shake oeuvre.

In 2016 the band often regarded as the best live act in the Twin Cities has offered a more modest program of one LP, out this week from Goner Records who released two of last year’s releases. Celebrate Your Worth is their most expansive and inventive album yet, and if any fans felt record collecting fatigue after last year’s onslaught, they won’t regret purchasing this one.

Opening in familiar territory with a song called “I Shot all the Birds,” the new album quickly follows the form of last year’s Fly Right by moving in multiple moody directions. Celebrate Your Worth, surprisingly, contains the most ‘pop radio’ song the band has ever recorded — maybe the Twin Cities’ Current will finally recognize this band after giving “Reasonable World” a listen.

“Reasonable World” is also notable for its vocal clarity, contrasted from the previous track on which Mike Blaha’s vocals are steeped deeply in reverb. This is also the first Blind Shake record to include the lyrics inside the jacket. Jim Blaha tells us this is because they were especially proud of this album, and they should be although we believe they have been consistently compelling since Breakfast of Failures a couple years ago. Not surprisingly, the band is still singing about (alternately) alienation and self-determination.

Celebrate Your Worth also delves into almost drone-y psych rock territory in “Alicante,” an epic for the Blind Shake in that it clocks in at around four and a half minutes. They even expand their sound with the unexpected but absolutely fitting appearance of an organ. This creates one of those moments where the production is so tastefully rich it recalls the massive-budget big name albums of the 70s. “Alicante” is one of those songs that simply sounds so good you feel like you could pick it up and hold it.

This isn’t to say the band doesn’t deliver on what they do best: “Corpse on the Roof” mines the manic and angular territory of their classic sound, and “Broken Racehorse,” which Goner Records debuted last week, feels like a marriage of new wave and post rock. In this same vein the second side provides one of the catchiest moments on the album in “Demox,” which sounds like the evil twin of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.”

We don’t doubt that these three could keep delivering the same old sound and record labels would compete to release the results. While we’re certain we’d still enjoy those records, what we think fuels the devotion of the Blind Shake’s fans is their willingness to experiment. Celebrate Your Worth is a risky album for a group who’s really striven to establish a national name, but the gambit is sure to pay off. It is one of the best records from the Twin Cities this year.

The Blind Shake’s release show for Celebrate Your Worth is this Saturday night at 7th Street Entry. Also performing are Fury Things and Tongue Party. Details on the First Avenue website here.