Tag: music

On my second birthday we landed on the moon. – Mike Monteiro – Medium

I’m in my college dorm room and my friend crashes into my room and says “Let’s go see The Minutemen!” I don’t go because homework or some other bullshit. Three months later D. Boon is dead. When someone says “Let’s go!” you go!

Monteiro is almost exactly two years older than me, but this little bit of thought technology he tucked into a caption is apparently sufficiently powerful stuff that you can pick it up pre-50. Just go. See your Minutemen. You’ll be glad you did. Otherwise you’ll turn around and they’re gone.

On my second birthday we landed on the moon. – Mike Monteiro – Medium

You must R.E.M.ember this

MIKE: During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together. We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word. Brothers who truly love, and respect, each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this–there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.

MICHAEL: A wise man once said–‘the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it. I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way. We have to thank all the people who helped us be R.E.M. for these 31 years; our deepest gratitude to those who allowed us to do this. It’s been amazing.

PETER: One of the things that was always so great about being in R.E.M. was the fact that the records and the songs we wrote meant as much to our fans as they did to us. It was, and still is, important to us to do right by you. Being a part of your lives has been an unbelievable gift. Thank you. Mike, Michael, Bill, Bertis, and I walk away as great friends. I know I will be seeing them in the future, just as I know I will be seeing everyone who has followed us and supported us through the years. Even if it’s only in the vinyl aisle of your local record store, or standing at the back of the club: watching a group of 19 year olds trying to change the world.

Early on, I decided to make a used-records store on Telegraph Avenue one of the key settings of my novel in progress. Okay, maybe “early on” is an under-exaggeration. Maybe it would be more accurate to say “the entire novel is just a pretext for spending as much time and money as I possibly can in used record stores.” (A similar rationale doubtless underlies my projected next novel, the epic Tacos Al Pastor.)

Michael Chabon, blogging for a week in relief of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Superbly, I might add.

High Lonesome Theology

Charlie Louvin remembers his brother:

When Ira was killed by a drunk driver in 1965, he died with a warrant out for his arrest on DUI charges and with three bullets buried near his spine-the work of his third wife, who had shot him five times in 1963, after Ira had tried to strangle her with a telephone cord.

For Ira, to be a man was to be a drunk, and he was by all accounts the kind of drunk whose sickness looks and feels like a kind of possession. “Today they call it an illness,” Charlie says. “In those days it was bein’ mean.” Ira’s meanness was legendary. When Ira drank, he fought, cheated compulsively on each of his four wives, and worst for his career, [and] killed a tour with young Elvis Presley, a devoted Louvins fan

The article as a whole is a fascinating remembrance of the duo. Charlie died today at 83.

High Lonesome Theology

The One True Creed: Apollo

Let the Creed apologia begin, apparently. Tucked in amongst this collection of rampant ass-hattery (“more and more couples today find that Creed was underrated!” is the only hack statement not made in there) we have this remarkable statement:

By late 2002, singer Scott Stapp was on a near-daily regimen of alcohol and Percocet—prescribed after a car crash

Uh, what? Is Jonah Weiner trying to tell us that Scott Stapp went to the doctor in the aftermath of a car crash and was prescribed a regimen of alcohol and Percocet, but that said regimen was Q-whenever you feels like it? And don’t fuck around with that rum, Scott, go straight for the gin. I’ve seen some nasty Percocet interactions with the other clear liquors…and, furthermore, as your doctor, I demand you buy the good stuff: Hendricks.

Moving on, we get to this:

Listening to Creed today, it’s hard to reconcile the animus against the band with the music.

See, I’d word that differently too. I’d go:

Listening to Creed today, the animus against the band seems another example of liberal namby-pamby-ism; in any functioning Western society, this band would have been forced to eat its own intestines long ago.

It’s basically the same statement, but I think mine captures the sense of it with a little more flair.