Conversations With My Son

Dad: (driving over an overpass) Cal, we're going over a bridge!

Son: (excited gasp) It's not a water bridge. It's just a car bridge.

Dad: Yeah.

Son: Yeah.... There's no water down there. Only cars.

Dad: Yeah.

Son: Yeah.... Boats can't go on the road. There's no water on the road. Only in the sea....


I absolutely love the prattle of a 3-year old! It will break my heart when my son is too old for it.

2 trips to the Boston Garden

Feb 3, 2007: Saw Rod Stewart with my parents and my aunt. It was a solid mostly non-embarassing show. We had nosebleed seats. Rod is still quite good-looking for a 60+ year old guy, and many of the middle aged women in the expensive seats were remarkably infatuated with him. Rod belted out most of his hits in a professional, light-hearted manner, with little stage banter and plenty of conventional 70's rock poses. He mangled a couple classics (I'm Losing You, for example), delivered the goods on Every Picture Tells a Story, Maggie Mae, and Forever young), ran through a couple of pointless cover songs (a CCR and Janis Joplin tune), and got the crowd singing on some ballads. The band was annoying. A scantily clad, 20 year old, Ann Coulter lookalike was the saxophonist when what you really want to see is a rough, grizzled Clarence Clemmons type. There were some needless solos including perfunctory drum and bass solos, and an ill-fitting banjo solo which brought I'm Losing You to a grinding halt. Also, I feel some kind of strange white guilt whenever I see a trio of token black female backup singers arrayed behind a painfully white singer. In the second set, most of this excess was reigned in, and he ran through a well-chosen selection of hits and more obscure numbers. The man hasn't written a song that I truly like since 1973's Never a Dull Moment but he does have the occasional palatable song amidst his 70's disco schlock and his 80's synth-pop dreck. It is somewhat disconcerting, however, sitting next to your Dad singing "Do ya Think I'm Sexy?" at the top of his lungs.

Feb 14, 2007: Saw the Celtics end their 18 game losing streak against the Milwaukee Bucks. Pierce was in vintage shape, and Gerald Green knocked in a bunch of consecutive 3-pointers. Pretty much everyone on the Celts played well. My Dad and I really enjoyed ourselves despite the sensory overkill of an contemporary NBA game. The inane antics of the cheerleaders and the advertisers, and the endless barrage coming out of the sound system and Jumbotron still get to you, but tonight the game was good enough that we could happily overlook most of it. The local sports radio guys keep telling us it is a good thing that the Celtics are losing because we will get a good draft pick, but the real fans, of couse, want to see W's. Personally I found that an 18 game losing streak was having a negative psychological effect on me, when coupled with the cold and the darkness of a New England winter. Getting a win went a long way towards casting off that pall. We had great seats behind the Celtics bench ($150 seats, mind you). After the game, we went back to my Dad's house and like a couple of teenagers re-watched the Tivo-ed game in the hopes of seeing ourself on the screen.

GBV

I intended to assemble a best-of-2006 list, to give some kind of aesthetic closure to the previous year, but I gave it up. The album is seemingly moribund. Everyone I know is walking around with an iPod (except me). Hell, in Newbury Comics, they play an iPod over the sound system instead of the CDs they are selling. The Tower Records I used to haunt as a college dropout went out of business this year. The legendary rock critic Bob Christgau got canned from the Village Voice after 30 years of Consumer Guides. My college roomate got fired as the editor of Spin after that magazine got bought out for a miserly sum. Album sales are way down. You get the picture. A list of albums is just not going to have the same vitality it had in the past.

So in lieu of an artificial best-of list, I put together a list which more accurately reflects my 2006 listening habits. This was the year of Guided By Voices and rap for me. Since my late-life interest in rap is somewhat embarassing, I will pass over it here and focus on my white-boy-rock demographic. For whatever reason, GBV became my favorite band, displacing Oingo Boingo. Perhaps the fact that they broke up two years ago piqued my nostalgia.

I was somewhat into GBV in college when my aforementioned roomate and I had a minor religious experience upon spinning a review copy of the Bee Thousand LP. (Yes LP). Even though we both loved it, neither one of us ever felt the need to seek out any of their other albums. It is such a perfect album, but I guess we both assumed it was the apotheosis of some sort of minor subgenre -- lo-fi, whimsical guitar rock -- that was not worth probing too deeply.

In the past year, I started going back and buying their older albums. I rebought Bee Thousand during my first trip to Madison WI. Since then I have bought every album they released after 1991. I listened to those 8 or 9 albums endlessly this year. (I do have a crummy corporate job but it does permit headphones). I read a book on GBV during my second trip to Madison: Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll. At some point, I rented the movie Bubble from my local library, only to find, as the credits rolled, that Bob Pollard did the soundtrack, so it is defintely the year of GBV for me. I will not try to describe why I love them since you are either in the cult or not by this point, and I am not interested in evangelizing. I will just say they are a band that fully deserves their cult-like following. I may be too late to the picnic to consummate my relationship with the band (Bob Pollard broke it up in 2004) but they gave me a couple hundred hours of listening pleasure this year:

Top 10 Guided By Voices Songs (in painfully considered order)

1. Gold Star For Robot Boy – Bee Thousand
2. Ghosts of a Different Dream – Under the Bushes, Under the Stars
3. The Closets of Henry – Half Smiles of the Decomposed
4. Tractor Rape Chain – Bee Thousand (*)
5. Jane of the Waking Universe – Mag Earwhig!
6. Dirty Water – Earthquake Glue
7. Learning to Hunt – Mag Earwhig! (*)
8. Game of Pricks – Alien Lanes
9. Peephole – Bee Thousand
10. The Brides Have Hit Glass – Isolation Drills

Honorable Mentions (Songs 11-20 in arbitrary order)

• I Am a Scientist – Bee Thousand (*)
• Non-Absorbing – Vampire on Titus (*)
• It's Like Soul Man – Under the Bushes, Under the Stars
• Everybody Thinks I'm a Raincloud - Half Smiles of the Decomposed
• I am a Tree – Mag Earwhig! (*)
• The Enemy – Isolation Drills
• Bulldog Skin - Mag Earwhig! (*)
• Expecting Brainchild – Vampire on Titus
• My Valuable Hunting Knife – Alien Lanes (*)
• A Big Fan of the Pigpen – Bee Thousand

*: Also on greatest hits album

Must Have Albums

• Vampire on Titus (1993)
• Bee Thousand (1994)
• Mag Earwhig! (1997)
• Half Smiles of the Decomposed (2004)

Nice to Have Albums

• Alien Lanes (1995)
• Under the Bushes, Under the Stars (1996)
• Isolation Drills (2001)
• Earthquake Glue (2003)
• Human Amusement at Hourly Rates (Greatest hits)

Albums to Skip

• Do the Collapse (1999)
• Universal Truths and Cycles (2003)