And it stoned me to my soul
– Van Morrison, And it Stoned Me
Stoned me just like Jelly Roll
And it stoned me
And it stoned me to my soul
Stoned me just like going home
And it stoned me
A three week break that seemed like two. Sounds about right.
Hello from the other side.
The line “and it stoned me” popped into my head the other day while I was in the midst of hunting memories due to a random song that popped out of somewhere which is how it always happens.
I listened to Alejandro Escovedo’s A Man Under the Influence a few times this week for the first time in quite a while. It’s one of those albums I can still associate a specific time and feeling with. There are a handful of albums from the early 2000s that probably fit in that way. One thing that was nice about pre-internet-everywhere was cars with CD players and the same disc on repeat for weeks at a time. 🙂
Anyhow. The entire album is great and I have good memories of several tracks. The other night I was specifically thinking of seeing Escovedo perform Velvet Guitar at the Metro in Chicago as part of benefit show for Neon Street, which I believe is or was a teen homeless shelter. The First Waltz was modeled after The Band’s The Last Waltz and gathered a bunch of excellent performers together for a few years.
It was at these shows that I learned of Alejandro Escovedo and watching him perform stoned me.
I even told Michelle the other night that watching him play that one song—Velvet Guitar— had permanently altered my relationship with music.
But there’s a problem! I don’t know what to trust or believe!
He was one of the few musicians that played at all 3 benefit shows over the years and I saw each of these performances:
- March 25, 1999: Pissed off at 2am
- March 22, 2001: I Wanna Be Your Dog
- March 23, 2002: Velvet Guitar
So. I know Velvet Guitar impacted me, and I stand by most of the memory. But does my brain now mix that performance with the earlier ones? There’s no way I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him after seeing I Wanna Be Your Dog so I’m guessing I was already at least a passive fan by 2002.
I’m going to accept the ambiguity and, unless otherwise corrected, continue to remember that it was the Velvet Guitar performance that did the most.
It’s amazing how indelible a memory seems until you start to source it.
I’ll leave it at something like: sourcing may change memories, but it gives them a little more dimension.
Example: I had completely forgotten that Steve Earle played the 2002 show!
And bonus: We saw Iggy Pop perform I Wanna Be Your Dog at the Vic only a couple months later in 2001.
My actually indelible memory from that show is being absolutely convinced my ear drums were going to explode. Thanks, Iggy.
While digging through Escovedo’s catalog on Spotify, I ended up on the No Depression: What it Sounds Like, Vol 1 comp album. I enjoyed the listen, so I searched for No Depression to see if they had other volumes or playlists. I then ran into their Spotify playlist of favorite tracks for the month. The first track this month is Chuck Mead’s I Ain’t Been Nowhere, a great re-purposing of I’ve Been Everywhere.
And from all of that I finally ended up on the No Depression website, saw they were a quarterly nonprofit roots music journal, enjoyed what I was looking at, and subscribed.
No Depression’s site also reminded me that the new Steve Earle album, Ghosts of West Virginia, was due this week. It’s such a great surprise to forget that something is coming and then relearn about it the day before.
I fired it up Friday morning and it was good!
Other things that have been on repeat lately: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters is really, really good and I very much enjoy Jason Isbell’s Reunions.
I’ve been tinkering with my own plugin to stop spam comments, named as well as I can name things, and spent a bit of time over the last many months trying to dial in a handful of word lists as a way to stop most of the spam without relying on an external service.
It’s a game of whack-a-mole, really. You identify a handful of words or patterns that seem to do the trick against a handful of comments just in time for a new bot with new patterns to slide on through and leave a bunch more. Repeat.
A couple weeks ago, after letting the spam pile up a bit, I determined that this strategy was boring and annoying and was about opposite the amount of effort I really want to put into spam detection.
Instead, I added a couple of hidden honeypot inputs: one contains a string that should not change; the other a value that is cleared by JavaScript 1.5 seconds after page load. If either of these appear incorrectly, or if neither appear, the comment is classified as spam.
At about 3 weeks, I’m at a 99.7% spam detection rate. Simple success!
While doing some light pandemic reading, I noticed the words “viral titer” for the first time. I went a googling and landed on titer’s Wikipedia page.
Titer is concentration. Viral titer is the concentration of virus required to infect cells. Titer is also the temperature at which a fat solidifies. The Wikipedia entry adds: “The higher the titer, the harder the fat”.
The phrasing made me laugh and I hope the cleverness of the phrasing was intentional.
Now that I’ve spent this much time thinking about titer, it better appear in a crossword.
I think I’ve learned that schedule is important for me if I want to write regularly. Skipping the Thursday night session the one week was a disruptor. We’ll see what happens next week!
It’s Memorial Day weekend in the US, so this late Saturday posting is more like a Friday posting, which technically means I hit my deadline by my rules.
May it get sunny for a few days and may everyone find music that alters them. 🎸🍻
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