The Barryfest Chronicles

Before attending their concert at the House of Blues on Saturday, I was about as familiar with Better Than Ezra as are most people of my age.  Prior to the show, my interaction the New Orleans-based power trio was pretty much limited to the presence of “Good” on the 1990s one-hit wonders playlist a friend and I created during college.

Before I go any further, let it be know that this not an indictment.  We queued up this “Remember the 90s?” playlist every chance we got, and I still find a good excuse to listen to it at least once a month.  And this is not part of some semi-ironic hipster-doofus creem dream, my friends.  If you catch me drinking a High Life while grooving on “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth (With Money In My Hand),” it is because I non-satirically enjoy both the Champagne of beers as well as Primitive Radio Gods’ most well know contribution to popular music.

While I don’t have much to say about the bands of varying musical inclination that showed up just long enough to drop these gems on the world before they went back to doing whatever it was they did before their heady, two-month amble around late night talk show stages and alternative radio stations, I’ll defend the brilliance of these chart-toppers until my last breath.  Give me “Save Tonight” or give me death.

But as far as seeking out any of these artists when they hit the road? C’mon.  “Good” is a fantastic song, but is it any better than “Pepper” or “Flagpole Sitta” or “Counting Blue Cars”?  No one can really say for sure.  So for me, that puts Better Than Ezra in about the same class as The Butthole Surfers, Harvey Danger, and Dishwalla: pretty much off my radar at almost all instances that I am not listening to their most well known songs during a leisurely game of caps or on the first leg of a road trip.

Even if I was the least bit curious, why would I want to ruin any of these masterpieces by doing something foolish like putting them in the context of a full album or live performance?  That’s a high risk, high reward endeavor I never planned to undertake.

But as I have learned pretty much everyday since I got down here, few things go as planned in Big Easy.  New Orleanians my age love Better Than Ezra.  I’m talking “I have their demo EP on bootleg cassette” love.  I’m talking “I’ve seen them about 13 times” love.  I’m talking “Fuck Endymion, let’s I’m going to the BTE show at House of Blues” love. (And, yes, I’m talking “I affectionately refer to the band by a moniker” love).

With that in mind, I joined a large group of natives at the House of Blues on Saturday for Better Than Ezra’s annual Mardi Gras swoop through the Crescent City.  And you know what?  The put on an awesome show for a raucous crowd in an incredible venue.  I still think they fit the classical definition of a “one-hit wonder,” but I realized that their one-hit was not just some sort of concession they were willing to offer in exchange for a moment in the sun.  As I found out over the course of the night, “Good”  was one of a long line of upbeat, accessible rockers that have kept the band going strong for over two decades, the only difference is that it was released as a single at the exact time it happened to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the moment.

Better Than Ezra came off as a group upon which MTV and popular radio stumbled, not the other way around.  Because unlike most of the other catchy tunes from the one-and-done groups I listened to in middle school, the song that sent this group into the stratosphere was pretty similar to the rest of their material, not a blatant attempt to make their sound more radio-ready.  I realize this is just a veiled way of saying that all their fucking songs sound exactly the same, but their consistency is admirable, even if it comes at the expense of diversity.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather listen to 12 different variations on “Good” – a specimen to say the least – than sift through 90 minutes of post-grunge schlock-rock in a dingy club waiting impatiently for the Screaming Trees to launch into a spirited rendition of “Nearly Lost You,” a song that was their only hit because it is the only thing in their entire cannon that is actually tolerable.  And I am sure some of the poor, uninitiated schmucks that got roped into a Blind Melon show during “No Rain” hysteria didn’t much care to watch Shannon Hoon warble around the stage in a heroin-induced stupor as wave after wave of heavy distortion and feedback rang their fucking bells when they expected a short set of mid-tempo toe-tappers performed by mandolin-wielding long-hairs and fat chicks in bumblebee costumes.

I will stop myself before this devolves into a missive on the relative artistic integrity and relative importance of every band to be featured on a Buzz Ballads compilation, because as I said before, taking too close a look at any of this is a zero sum game at best. I’ll just say this:  Better Than Ezra game me exactly what I hoped for but had plenty of reason not to expect all.  And it was good.

Happy Mardi Gras, everyone.

I’ve had a dog in the fight for four of the last six Super Bowls.  I know there are scores of people out there that would give any number of appendages or offspring to see their favorite NFL team play in a Super Bowl let alone have the luxury of a semi-legitimate reason to root for teams from both Chicago and Boston, but I want to assure you it is not all hand-pounds and reacharounds.

At the risk of sounding like a total ingrate, I think it is worth pointing out that there are actually a few negatives of having more than a passing interest in the outcome of The Big Game:

You have to sweat the small stuff. Anytime that any of my favorite teams in any major sport are involved in a game of any sort or significance, I spend most of the day worrying about how crowded the bar is going to be, or how big of a television my friend has, or whether or not I bought enough booze, etc.  I am growing increasingly neurotic as I get older, so if you combine that nervous energy with any doubts about the actual outcome of the game in question, I am pretty much whipped by the time live coverage starts.

This year, I spent Sunday evening alternately squished on an uncomfortable couch, perched on an armrest and leaning against a doorjamb.  For some reason the game was tuned to the standard-definition feed for the entire first quarter, and even after that problem was rectified, my view was partially obstructed as a result of my bad posture and one of my friend’s huge noggin.  Additionally, there was no room in the refrigerator for the 12-pack of High Life I brought so by about 7:30 I was drinking tepid beer.  But you know what?  I couldn’t care less.

Regardless of the outcome, Monday morning is going to suck. Super Bowl XXXIX fell exactly on my 21st birthday so my friends were gracious enough to organize an enormous viewing party/birthday celebration ostensibly somewhat on my behalf.  Dozens of my closest acquaintances filed in to a cozy off campus apartment and took part in cold beer, Buffalo Joe’s, and a football shaped birthday cake.

I am sure I would have really enjoyed the shindig if I wasn’t boxing out the keg in the corner of the room with the only other Patriots fan in attendance, nervously pounding chicken wings, Camel Lights and pitchers of keg draft at a superhuman clip because I was too locked into the game to enter into any meaningful interpersonal interactions but needed to do something with my piehole to cut the tension.

By the start of the third quarter I was nearly blacked out and had no voice after going apeshit during Paul McCartney’s rendition of “Hey Jude” and, after the game had ending with the Patriots on top, I proceeded to stretch my drunk into the wee hours of the morning celebrating many happy returns.  Even through the sheen of a Super Bowl victory, thought, the heartburn and hangover made Monday morning pretty hard to endure.

I spent the first few hours of last year’s Super Bowl XLII in a similar way.  Although I was in a bar in New Orleans as opposed to an apartment in Evanston and I was pounding Abita Amber instead of Miller Light, all the important details are the same:  the other Patriot fans and I were glued to the set, stuffing our faces with greasy food, soaking ourselves in booze and chain smoking heaters.  When it was all said and done, I still drank until the wee hours of the morning, but this time it was in commiseration, not celebration.  Suffice it to say, Monday morning was rough.

This year I cut myself off before the fourth quarter and made it back home in time for the outrageous hour-long episode of The Office, which I watched perfectly buzzed and from the comfort of my bed.  I still felt like shit on Monday morning, but then again, I always feel like shit on Monday morning.

Gambling loses all its fun. Between pool squares, strip tabs, mulit-spot props and side bets, Super Bowl Sunday is best day for gambling ever.  It is kind of a shame to have such a huge focus on the final score that you are are forced to ignore the outcomes of the dozens of other wagers you may have placed, ranging from the length of the national anthem performance to how the NFC teams’s score compares to LeBron James’ point total from that afternoon’s NBA action.  I mean, how much consolation is hitting the halftime square if your hometown team is on the receiving end of a shellacking?  And what good is winning $100 on the coin toss if you end the night with a tally in the loss column?

As of late, my proclivity towards gambling has been inching closer and closer to “degenerate” territory, so I was pretty excited by the prospect of indiscriminately laying money on any number of lines without even a second thought about how may illicit activities may interfere with the cosmos or tip the karmic scales.

This afternoon, I was trying to fish out a tip for the barista at Rue De La Course when I found a relic from the previous evening crumpled in the back pocket on my jeans.  A quarter page, bi-fold pamphlet titled The Only Doorway was mixed in with the loose dollar bills and bar tab receipts one would normally expect to come across after a night out on the town.

When you think of a typical French Quarter souvenir, I’m not sure if literature extolling the virtues of receiving Jesus Christ as your personal God and savior makes the short list, but this type of shit is actually more common than you may think.

New Orleans is full of sin, and wherever you find sin you’ve bound to find a few people trying to offer salvation.  And when religious zealots descend on Bourbon Street, they are usually armed with megaphones and offensive placards reminding all the Democrats, drunks, rock ‘n’ rollers, adulteresses, potheads, homosexuals, lesbians, Masons, Shriners, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Evolutionists, Catholics, Satanists, Abortionists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, liberals, fornicators, prosperity preachers, atheists and “worldly lukewarm once saved-always saved Christians” that they are in imminent danger of eternal damnation.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

These obnoxious bigots start making a scene around the time Mardi Gras rolls in by harassing every poor soul that drifts into earshot and relish the opportunity to take the fight to any inebriated onlooker that dares to inquire what, exactly, they are trying to accomplish with their message of hate.  If you test any one of the shitbirds impeding your safe passage through Jackson Square, you learn pretty quickly that they’re not just throwing this nonsense around for effect and don’t take their intolerance with cream and sugar.  They devour and expel that poison neat with the rocks on the side.

So when I noticed a huge PVC cross off in the distance as my friends and I were leaving Pat O’s after putting in some heavy work at the Piano Bar, I braced myself for an explosive encounter.  I realize that an “Eat shit and die, you anti-Semite fuckstick” – no matter how artfully delivered – only fuels these sad, sad individuals’ fires and adds little to the philosophical discourse, but what can I say?  After a few Hurricanes, I usually don’t have the wherewithal (or desire) to stop myself from shouting the first bit of reactive gobbledygook that pops into my head.

I had an expletive-laden opening argument primed and ready but instead of crude signs and small-minded rednecks, I was greeted by thoughtful individuals speaking with 12 inch voices and respecting everyone’s right of way.  And even thought I was part of a pretty tough crowd – one which was both shitfaced and 70% Jewish – their message stuck it’s landing a lot more than expected considering it was coming from the New Testament.

See, instead of using a fucked up notion of spiritual superiority as a cloak for violent prejudice in the manner of most Bourbon Street evangelicals, these people just seemed like they might be on to something hip and wanted to spread the word.  Even though we were less than polite at times, their pleasant demeanor and cooler heads prevailed and the entire encounter made a lasting impression on me.

To be honest, though, I still don’t understand why The Bible, out of all the hundreds of thousands of works of literature produced in the annuls of human history, has developed such an incredibly fervent following.  Sure it’s a pretty cool story, but so are The Odyssey, Don Quijote, and The Lorax.  Even a nearly unreadable mess like Naked Lunch sheds some light on the human condition if you catch it right, so where are the barkers on the street spreading the gospel of doing bag after bag of heroin and staring at your toes for days on end?

I am guessing that this is where “faith” comes in, an idea that I have spent many years disparaging in the bitter, condescending manner favored by modern-day secular intellectuals such as myself.  But even though I wasn’t buying much of what those good folks were selling and still think religion is pretty asinine; their patient way of carrying water for the topic lead me to believe it shouldn’t be looked at with any more disdain then most of the bullshit I do in my free time.

After giving it plenty of thought, I can’t really think of any material difference between those kind missionaries dispersing fliers outside Big Daddy’s Female Impersonator Show and yours truly spending $12 to play Gaucho all the way through on the jukebox at Monkey Hill, except for the fact that the Jesus freaks were surely a lot more genial and probably had much purer intentions.

I guess it is in everyone’s best interest to find a few things that they love and are not afraid to share with the world.  For me, these things include an ironic jazz-rock band known by most people my age either as a punchline in a Judd Apatow flick or “that dude who did ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’”  For others, it may be a belief that your personal relationship with an unseen almighty being determines what happens after you shuffle off your mortal coil.

These are two very diseparate things for sure, but trying to objectively judge one as more valid than the other is really just a waste of time, time that would be much better spent partying with whatever it is that happens to get your rocks off.

The first thing I do on the morning after a particularly eventful evening is sit down at my desk, hit the space bar to snap my computer out of hibernation and take a look at what is on the screen.  I find the remnants of any drunken, pre-pass out computer noodling a good place to start when you a trying to piece together a night that may have evaded your short term memory.  Here is what I awoke to today:

Firefox, four tabs open: George Starostin’s page on The Band; YouTube video of Bob Dylan performing “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on the 1976 Hard Rain tour; Gmail “Sent Folder” showing I dropped a line to almost everyone I know with a  link to the aforementioned YouTube video (with time stamps beginning around 5:15 AM and stretching to about half past 6); and of course this here WordPress dashboard editor filled with illegible sentence fragments about substance abuse and B-Sides.

iTunes: Playlist featuring three copies of Cahoots set to repeat.

My night began at the Hornets/Clippers game and made its way to Grits and F&M’s, so I could probably tender a few guesses about my state of mind by the time I made it home, but I will never know for sure what prompted a marathon exhibition and examination of one of the most under-appreciated albums of the last 50 years.  Suffice it to say, though, that I am eternally grateful.  Cahoots is fucking awesome.

In almost every review of this album, especially contemporary reviews that have the benefit of hindsight and historical context, there is at least one remark about the irony of the choice of Cahoots for the title.  “Cahoots” implies a sort of mischievously cunning partnership, yet by the time this album was recorded, the whole outfit was practically hulking up for a full-out cage match over “Chest Fever” royalties.  And as far as I can tell, this discord seems to be the only contributing factor to the round rejection of this album, which many peg as The Band’s weakest offering.

So if you feel the need to set the record up for a disappointing self-fulfilling prophecy, it will surely comply.  If you want to call Cahoots 45 minutes of uninspired, formulaic, overwrought attempts at recapturing the majestic glory of Music From Big Pink and it’s eponymous follow up, you will have plenty of mainstream media confederates to back you up.  Anyone with a working set of ear holes can recognize that this is no Music From Big Pink.

But I think the very fact that the performances on this record were clearly phoned in by almost everyone involved (I say “almost everyone” because, to this day, I refuse to say nary a negative word about the venerable Levon Helms) makes the finished product all the more impressive.  Tales of the epic dissension among the ranks of The Band are a dime a dozen, but I am always skeptical about how much hyperbole goes into any Behind The Music-type tale about a group of talented musicians struggling with their own limitation in the harsh face of stardom.

However, the presence of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on this album – a song penned by Bob Dylan but bequeathed to The Band for it’s first appearance on a commercially available studio recording – makes me think that, in this particular case, not only were the rumors about Robbie Robertson’s greed and megalomania true, but the situation may have been more dire than anyone thought.  I can’t help but wonder if Bob Dylan’s motivation for passing along that gem was in any way similar to that of David Bowie when he offered “All The Young Dudes” to Mott The Hoople around the same time.

See, Bowie was a huge fan of Mott and heard through the grapevine that the group was on the verge of throwing in the towel.  To convince them to stay together, Bowie dropped off the lyrics and music for “All The Young Dudes,” a unmatched masterpiece of proto-glam beauty, and let the boys of Mott The Hoople knock it out of the park.

Was Dylan’s offering of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” – a song as perfectly composed as “All The Young Dudes” and just as likely to be a hit for the original artist if he choose to keep it for himself – a last ditch effort to create some goodwill among the members of a band that was at the end of it’s rope?

Say what you will about whether or not Cahoots represents the best The Band could offer at the point in time in which it was made (I am sure we can all agree it was probably was not), but if you try to tell me that “Volcano” would have been out of place on The Band or that “Shootout in Chinatown” wouldn’t have blended right in to Stage Fright I will tell you that you are an idiot.  Hell, if you threw an unexpected, soulful breakdown in between the second and third verses of “Where Do We Go From Here,” that shit would be a dead ringer for any number of tracks on Music From Big Pink.  And don’t even get me started on the piano coda of “Smoke Signal.”

So let’s put any ideas that this album is at all subpar to bed right now.  That being said, I get it.  I sucks when you get the feeling that someone is dogging it – whether it be Richard Manuel coming up flat on a chorus or Manny Ramierez breaking into a home run trot on what turns out to just be a long double – but if The Band can crank out something like Cahoots when they obviously don’t have their head in the game and are possibly on the verge of extinction, it should disappoint you only because it is clear they are capable of so much better, not because what you are listening to still happens to be pretty fucking good.

I think that you can tell a lot about a city by the way it rings in the New Year.  Minneapolis, for example, is a fun enough time but not really anything to write home about.  Chicago, on the other hand, offers plenty to do but your options can be limited by the bitter cold winters and spotty public transportation system.  And then there is New York, which is more or less a crowded, expensive theme park.

While especially apparent on the last day of the year, I think the statements above hold true for their respective cities at all times.  So, after getting intimately familiar with New Orleans over the past 12 months, I cut my holiday family time short to make sure I could test my “New Year’s Eve as a microcosm” theory down in the Big Easy.

Now, New Year’s Eve is nothing if it is not another excuse for revelry.  And when it comes to revelry, if you give New Orleans an inch, in one magnificent swoop she will take a mile, your favorite watch and every clean pair of tube socks you’ve got in your top drawer.  Luckily, she will return them before you know they are even gone.  New Orleans is sneaky like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Good luck finding The Rusty Nail on your first attempt.  Seriously.  This place is less than a five minutes from my apartment and it took me at least ten tries over my first six months down here before I successfully made it there when I actually looking for it, as opposed to the few times I did actually stumble upon it during daylight hours when I was still learning how to navigate the narrow, pothole-littered streets of the Warehouse District and subsequently forgot it’s location by the next evening when I was looking to check out it’s capacity for partying.

It is literally located on the wrong side of a dead end street that is hidden under an overpass.  Its signage faces the opposite direction traffic would travel if the one way block on which it sits was not closed for road construction (which it has been at least as long as I’ve lived in New Orleans). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always believed that if you make a habit of putting yourself in unusual situations, you can’t really get that upset when shit starts to get weird. And if you’re also prone to tipping the karmic scales with such flights of fancy as gratuitous alcohol consumption, light prescription drug abuse and unconventional party itineraries, you’re likely to find yourself on the business end of weird more often than not. With this in mind, I guess you could say I got exactly what I deserved when I decided to head into the French Quarter on a Monday evening last week.

Given the fact it was so early in the week, it didn’t surprise me when I encountered far fewer barkers in the middle of the street holding up signs advertising the drink specials or lack of cover featured at the trashy saloons that line the front of Bourbon Street than I was used to.  But even in this relatively serene setting, hip hop was still pulsing out of a fair share of dance clubs that were most certainly open for business.

I’ve heard “Lollipop” at least 350 times in the last year, but the song takes on a bizarrely fascinating and frightening sheen when it is accompanied by a tubby waitress sporting coke-bottle glasses and visible c-section scars gyrating on top of a bar in a haunting manner that is at once repulsive and mesmerizing.  That was the scene just beyond the threshold of a sparsely populated bar known as The Old Opera House, and even though I should be immune to the allure of Tha Carter III by now, the morbidly intriguing nature of what I was looking at gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Kanye,

I spent Saturday night at my first holiday party of the season, so I unfortunately was not able to watch the original airing of the most recent Saturday Night Live, in which you were featured as the evening’s musical guest.  No worry, though, as I have been DVRing that shit since I first equipped my audio/visual set up with DVR technology almost two and a half years ago in my apartment back in Minneapolis.

I’ve always been a huge SNL apologist, keeping faith in the show even through the doldrums of the turn of the century with all it’s Jimmy Fallon-tainted misery.  Even then, when the majority of each broadcast featured Horatio Sanz in a variety of ill-fitting get-ups trying in vain not to break character and laugh while delivering terribly written lines, I found it amusing enough to keep watching whenever the mood struck and my schedule cooperated. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to subscribe to a pretty antiquated school of thought when it came to the common practice of untagging yourself in pictures that show up on Facebook.  If you got caught from an unflattering angle or in one of those drunken “one big eye, one small eye” smiles that very few of us can pull off, I was cool with knocking yourself out of the caption.  I mean, no one should have to deal with the pitfalls of amateur photography.  But I was patently against people untagging their mug solely because the picture showed them engaged in behavior that they, under sober examination the next morning, found embarrassing or incriminating.

Untag all you want, I reasoned, but that shit still happened.  Just because there is no longer a blue box around your head in the shot of you cavorting with a group of ladies of ill repute – one hand holding a 32 oz plastic cup that says “Big Ass Beers,” the other throwing up “the shocker” – doesn’t erase that episode from the annals of history.  And just because there are no pictures of you smoking heaters directly above a link to your full profile doesn’t change the fact that your efforts to cut back on tobacco after college were flushed down the shitter once you got to the international waters of New Orleans.  You can hide your flaws and missteps from all your friends and networks, but you can never hide them from yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re drunkenly balls deep in a plate of cheese fries at F&M’s on a Thursday night, it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to Louisiana than New Orleans.  This is the “Sportsman’s Paradise” for chrissakes, and I’ve been down here for almost a year and have not actually done anything even remotely “sporting.”

To remedy this, I spent the weekend at Fountainebleau State Park with a crew of brave souls willing to endure some good old fashioned outdoor living in what could easily be the coldest weather any of us will see all year.  Yeah, the winters are pretty mild in southeast Louisiana; but the fact that the mercury doesn’t dip too far below 40 degrees over a 12 month span doesn’t make those 40 degree gusts any toastier when they are whipping across your campsite.

But the trip was a blast, and when I wasn’t gathering firewood, complaining about non-Kosher hot dogs, smoking Natural American Spirits, slugging persey bottles of Charles Shaw, pounding packets of BC, dancing on top of a picnic table to Rilo Kiley, tossing hard-boiled eggs into Lake Pontchartrain, or freezing my dick off after passing out in a tent with no pillow or sleeping bag, I engaged in my new favorite pastime: hypothesizing about whether or not Chinese Democracy is going to be any good. Read the rest of this entry »

Please excuse my tardiness, as I know that I am a day late on posting my personal reaction to the presidential election.  I spent the better part of yesterday in my office with the door shut and my head in my hands, trying my best to hide the most vicious weekday hangover I’ve nursed at work since the days of Wednesday night Tickle Fight rehearsals back in Minneapolis.

Barack Obama won in a landslide on Tuesday, and I can’t think of a better reason than the dawn of a new era to tie one on so early in the work-week.  But Obama wasn’t the only person that won.  Add my name to the list of winners, and while you are at it, throw yourself on there as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I always been a pretty big fan of Halloween.  As a kid, I vaguely remember that the unpredictable Chicago weather always seemed to cooperate and that my neighborhood was consistently pretty solid when it came to the trick-or-treat candy that was being doled out.  And then in college, my fraternity’s big party of the year was called “Phright Night,” which was a huge costume bash we held at this incredible barn in the far west suburbs.  It took about a dozen buses to ship everyone out there, and at some point it became tradition to stock each bus with about 15 boxes of Franzia to keep people hydrated during the hour long commute.

So I was pumping pretty hard last night when I hit my first Halloween party of the year.  I dusted off the sweet Hunter S. Thompson/Raoul Duke ensemble I have been assembling for the last few years and was wowed by all the equally impressive costumes donned by the other party-goers.  All your classics were there:  the throwback basketball team, a few mummies, some guy in a priest outfit making NAMBLA jokes; and, of course, a litany of girls dressed as a sexy version of every public and private sector career under the sun.  It was pretty great. Read the rest of this entry »