The Barryfest Chronicles

As the final notes of “The Curtain With” vanished into the cool Vermont air on August 15, 2004, I was exhausted, dehydrated and completely heatered-out (Coventry was the culmination of many things, not least of which being the most nicotine drenched six months of my life).  But more than all of that, I was confused.  A month-long hallucinogen binge and five straight days without a good night’s sleep didn’t do much in the way of helping me process the monumental events unfolding around me, but even if I was perfectly straight as Phish was supposedly drawing their career to a close, I doubt I would been any more clear-headed as I made my way back to the damp campsite I had called home for the weekend.

I was at a loss.  Even after following them around for the entire summer and amassing a gratuitously large collection of live recordings from their first 25 years, I only had a few years of legitimate fandom under my belt, making me a relative novice in the whole Phish game.  Plus, I got into the band during college – when free time was a renewable resource, substance abuse had no appreciable consequences, and the world was an altogether simpler place – and to be honest, I was already wondering about Phish’s long term standing in my life now that I was tentatively inching my way into the real world.

So suffice it to say, I didn’t know my dick from my balls as I headed to the Manchester, NH airport covered to mid-calf in caked-on mud and probably smelling like an ashtray that just ran a marathon. Then without ever really digesting what was going on and/or coming to a conclusion about how it all made me feel, I moved on with my life.  And the longer I went without queuing up a show, the easier it become to explain away my reverent devotion as something as innocuous as youthful indiscretion or as insignificant as a fluke.

I really did a number on myself in the fours years since Coventry, considering news that the band was getting back together could barely get a rise out of me.  I put in for the ticket lottery like the rest of the citizens of the world, but I did it with the caveat that if my number failed to come up, I would strongly consider letting the dream die completely.  That’s right, friends.  I was willing to let a random pre-sale drawing cast the deciding ballot on whether or not I was going to allow myself to enjoy the musical styling of Phish in the future.

And I’m embarrassed to say it, but I almost had myself feeling relieved that I got passed over.  I mean, imagine how impractical and inconvenient it would be to travel around the country catching as much of the summer tour as possible now that I have a job and other adult responsibilities.  And I haven’t earnestly listened to the band in ages, so maybe I don’t even like their music anymore.  And shit, after taking so much time off, who knows if they will even be as good as they once were.  Fuck it, right?  Maybe it is best that I leave Phish on the trash-heap of passing fancies that I go through life claiming to have outgrown.

This, of course, begs the question: When did I become such a fucking ninny?  It only took one listen to this past weekend’s reunion shows to realize I have been pulling the wool over my own eyes and I’ll be goddamned if I let the bullshit charade go on any longer.  Of all the reasons I could conjure for why I was done with Phish, not a single one of them even approaches “good.”  It may have taken me a while, but I’ve finally got it figured out…  just in time for the summer tour.

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.

Dear Alex,

When it comes to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, nothing surprises me these days.  Long before the Mitchell Report was even commissioned, I had pretty much made peace with the fact that during the thousands of hours I spent watching baseball as a kid, either on the tube while eating sandwiches with my dad or live and in-person after shelling out ungodly amounts of money at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, I was looking at little more than a rotating cast of circus-freak junkies with drug habits that would make Pete Doherty look like Robert Barnes.

I am far from a baseball purist so I will spare you a lecture on taints, but I will go on record as saying it really fucking sucked when I figured out the specific era I grew up watching will go down as one of the dirtiest stretches in the history of any professional sport.  It was juiced-up pitchers throwing to juiced up hitters in almost every game, so there isn’t a single statistic from the entire “steroid era” that is free from the influence – be it positive or negative – of the excessive amount of doping that was going on at the time.  It was a fantasy land of large foreheads and shrunken testicles where nothing was real.

Sure it hurt, but I eventually got over it.  I still love baseball, but it has been a while since I approached any allegation of wrong-doing in the majors with even a marginal amount of shock or skepticism.  A resigned “Sure.  Why not?” is about all I can muster these days.  Maybe a “Figures.  Asshole.”  if the perpetrator is a dick anyways,  but I am no longer capable of anything that even approaches excitement, melancholy or doubt when the latest rumblings hit the news wire.

That was, of course, until Sports Illustrated outed you as one of the players who pissed hot during the 2003 round of anonymous drug testing designed to investigate just how big a problem Bud Selig had on his hands.  As a die hard Red Sox fan who wishes nothing but occupational ill-will on the entire Yankee squad and a lifelong baseball lover who never though you played the game the way it was meant to be played, this year’s annual spring training steroid speculations saga got a rise out of me for the first time since Jose Canseco named names way back in Juiced.

And then came your Peter Gammon’s interview and the press conference, which each added an amazing new wrinkle to the whole situation.  Here you are – the highest paid player, a mortal lock for a spot in the Hall of Fame on your first shot, and the misunderstood hero that was sent to banish the evil Barry Bonds from The Elias Sports Bureau’s record books – not just being accused of using performance-enhancing substances, but openly discussing the allegations.

Fuzzy math, factual inconsistencies and my complete disdain for you as a human being aside, I’ll admit you’ve gotten as close to facing the music as anyone of your stature, and for that I think you deserve some credit.  Your candor, although staged, made me realize that I, too, once found myself immersed in a culture where the loosey-goosey use of any number of performance-enhancing drugs was rampant.  I, too, felt great pressure to perform at a high level.  And to get an edge, I, too, turned to illicit and banned substances.

It was a time in my life I like to refer to as “college.”  During those halcyon days of consequence-free youthful indiscretion, there is no way I can claim to have always been 100% sure of what I was putting into my body.  If I were to have failed a drug test at any point during my four year stint, I probably would not have been able to immediately figure out which of my many indulgences triggered a red flag, either.  And on the occasions that my degree of inebriation prompted a “What the hell are you on?” from offended bystanders, I wasn’t always up-front in describing the particular combination of intoxicants surging through my system.

Granted, I was just looking for something to help me crank out 25 pages on the sociology of complex organizations or heighten my enjoyment of Stop Making Sense and you were violating the public trust and tarnishing the reputation of our National Pastime, but our exploits have more in common than I would like to admit.  And even though you came off as a complete shitbird over the past week (a well-coached shitbird, but a shitbird nonetheless),  at the end of the day I am buying what you are selling.  Unfortunately, all you are selling is a glib cop-out story that still doesn’t really add up.

Given Major Leauge Baseball’s epic fail on all things steroid-related, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this whole ordeal and let you get on with your career, I just ask you please stop saying you are stupid or naive or sorry.  While you and I may or may not have explicitly violated any rules with our substance-abuse, we were both cheating and we both knew it.  And had you not been caught, I am sure you would be showing just as much remorse for your past behavior as I do for mine, which is to say none at all.

All signage found January 15-21, 2009 in Telluride, Colorado

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 »

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 »

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 »

I am always amazed when, after hearing that I grew up in Chicago, people aggressively inquire about how I was able to survive the harsh northern winters.  I realize that for someone who has never seen snow and lives in a place where a 40 degree day in January triggers a front page story in The Times-Picayune about the “Deep Freeze” and prompts all the local talking heads to issue dire warnings to all the folks in the Garden District reminding them to bring their exotic plants indoors so they don’t frost overnight, the idea of making through 12 consecutive months in an area with a seasonal climate may seem quite difficult.

But after enduring my first summer here in the Crescent City, I assure can assure you this:  Summer in New Orleans makes Winter in Chicago look like Spring in Faulconbridge.  What, exactly, do people down here think is so hard about a Chicago winter?

You want to know what I think is “hard”?  Driving around in a car that, even with the protection of a sun visor, turns into a convection oven after as little as an hour in a parking lot.  Or how about walking out your front door in the evening after a cold shower and the strategic, liberal application of Gold Bond to various parts of your body, and still sweating through your entire wardrobe before you reach your first stop of the night.  That’s “hard.” Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s gonna take that heart to sail that boat” – Robin

I have been following The Real World franchise since it’s grainy, poorly lit inception over 16 years ago.  And while I have been pretty adamant about the recent decline of civilization in the last few Real World houses, I realized last night that I have been overlooking a very important fact that has undoubtedly bended my perception over the years.  I’ve grown up.

See, I still consider The Real World: Seattle the undisputed high water mark of MTV programming.  My memories of the show are filled with authentic interactions between dynamic people in real-life circumstances.  There is no doubt that these memories may be entirely accurate.  An equally likely scenario, though, is that at the time the series aired I was a 14 year dork who didn’t even know what “authentic interactions,” “dynamic people,” and “real-life circumstances” actually were. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Craig,

College was a wonderful time in my life.  I met some incredible people, had some great adventures and even managed to learn a thing or two about a thing or two.  It is also where I discovered your wonderful classified service know as craigslist.

It quickly became my first stop when I needed to acquire or get rid of literally anything in my life.  When I needed a cheap fridge to gut and turn into a kegerator, I checked craigslist.  When I wanted to get rid of my futon from freshmen year that was still in pretty good shape, I put it on craigslist.  And when I decided 12 hours before the doors opened that I would be willing to see Phil Lesh and Friends at the Chicago Theater if I could find a decent deal on some tickets, I searched craigslist.

I was constantly in awe of it’s simplicity, elegance and convenience.  But more than just providing a fee-free way to directly connect sellers and buyers, your creation breathed life into such commonly heard yet seldom understood and even more rarely practiced tropes as “trust your neighbor,” “think locally,” and “conserve.”  The revolution would not by televised, man.  It would instead be politely emailed between two strangers negotiating the price of an entertainment center and arranging for it’s pickup. Read the rest of this entry »

September is half in the bag and the heat and humidity down here are still turning my brain to mush on a daily basis.  I’ve been told that there is an end in sight, but I sure as shit haven’t caught a glimpse of it.  I will never act like I am going to miss the Chicago winters – the way they arrive out of nowhere with bone-chilling cold and don’t let up until the torrential rains of spring blow through – but I do feel another dose of seasonal affective disorder creeping into my UV-damaged, sweat-soaked psyche.

I think New Orleans is slowly making me insane.  Thankfully, this is not the type of “insane” that is caused by a bad breakup and then fueled with a steady diet of prescription pills and whippets.  No, no, no.  The “insane” I am feeling now is a good thing; maybe the best of things.  It is a liberating and enlightening psychosis that makes the Charles Shaw taste sweeter and the drunken heaters seem more satisfying.

Unlike up north, where even in the dog days of summer a pleasant cool breeze tips you off that day is turning into night and, eventually, that summer is fading into fall, the shitbird weather down here is in dire need of a desk calendar and a fucking Flick-Flack. Read the rest of this entry »