Some Thoughts on the Robinson Brothers

I've been filling in the gaps in my Black Crowes collection lately. They are, in my opinion, one of the most underrated bands making music today. My conclusion is supported by the fact that, while the Crowes fail to chart consistently (though they do chart), you can hear them on just about any rock radio station you turn to. Classic rock? They're there. Hard rock and metal? There too. Easy listening? Alternative? Yep. I don't listen much to country, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear them there.

So what accounts for the fact that while they aren't what one would consider an A-List band, they're so pervasive? I think it's their versatility. They aren't my favorite band in the world (I'd say in the top 5), but they would be my desert-island band, simply for the fact that they are the one band that it would take me a while to get sick of listening to.

Their songs cover a broad spectrum of musical styles. Sometimes you can hear a Stones influence, sometimes an Allman Brothers. There's a blues infusion, a touch of country, sometimes a latin or bluegrass undercurrent. They strike me as sort of the non-grunge equivalent of Pearl Jam. They are less cerebral than Vedder & crew, and more visceral. While I listen to Pearl Jam to make me think, I listen to the Crowes to make me feel. Some of my favorite tracks are Go Faster, Stop Kickin' My Heart Around, Nebakanezer, Black Moon Creeping, Thick N' Thin, and Locust Street.

The Crowes are also good to listen to contextually--that is, to listen to a large portion (or even all) of their catalog at once, to see how the songs compare and contrast, how their music evolves. How does the experimental sound of Amorica stand up against the more polished By Your Side? Is Chris Robinson at his best when his vocals are more improvisational, or more practiced?

I would recommend listening to the Crowes intentionally, not just when they come on whatever radio station you're listening to (and they will), and moving them out of "oh yeah, those guys" status. You're missing a lot of good music if you don't.

Updates

It's been awhile since I blogged. I blame Facebook, which I never thought I'd get into, but I've reconnected with some old friends, so it's worked out okay.

Now on to important stuff:

Two concert reviews. The first is Lacuna Coil, the second Clutch. Consider it a study in juxtaposition.

My buddy, Stormwater Bob, and I saw LC with three opening bands--Dommin, Seventh Void, and Kill Hannah. Dommin and Kill Hannah were entertaining merely for their absurdity. Dommin has got to be the most "emo" thing I have ever seen in my life. Black clothes, hair in their faces, and roses tied to EVERYTHING. At least they knew their place in the food chain, when the singer stated "We're supposed to get you guys warmed up for Lacuna Coil." Their CDs were $4. Their posters were free.

Seventh void was the bright spot in this parade of self-loathing. They sounded like a cross between Soundgarden, Skid Row, and Corrosion of Conformity. And they looked like they could've (and happily would've) removed and devoured the still-beating hearts of the guys in Dommin.

Kill Hannah...not real sure what to say here. Lasers attached to the guitar, the lead singer in luminous pink eye make-up. Their last two songs were okay.

Finally, Lacuna Coil came on. I'm still not positive I'm a fan. Sure, Christina Scabbia's easy to look at, but for one thing, they were too polished for a heavy metal band, and for another, they had several technical problems--bad luck when you're the headliner. It's like hair metal took that final step and stopped just looking like women.

All in all, the whole show was a little too emo for me, as evidenced by the fact that the only two covers played all night were Depeche Mode songs. I'm sure everybody in the pit went home afterwards and cut themselves while writing sad, insipid poetry about how they'll never amount to being a part of anything as wonderful as Dommin.

As for the Clutch concert, I'm still wrestling with whether or not NIN was better live. Because, up until that point, Nine Inch Nails was the best concert I'd seen.

Let's start with the openers:

Lionize. They are one HELL of a reggae band, considering there's only one person in the band that could possibly be of obvious Jamaican descent. The others looked like they had previously worked in a food storage warehouse somewhere in Ohio. But Stormwater Bob and I rotated their CDs in the player in his car for the rest of the trip.

Next came Baroness. The only two words spoken by anybody in the band came at the end of their set when the singer announced, "We're Baroness," as they walked offstage. The rest of the time was spent in a kind of stream-of-consciousness instrumental of angry, guitar-driven, wall-of-sound state. Good music to hate to. Odd mix of musicians though. The guitarist and bassist looked like members of White Lion, the singer and drummer from Phish.

And then Clutch came on. I've never seen so much energy feeding the audience at a show. The highlight of the night was watching Shirtless Guy go down after taking an elbow to the neck in the pit. Oh, and they dropped a crowd surfer on his head. And this was with less than a thousand people (our local club is not a big venue.) Apparently, Clutch fans (of which I now enumerate myself one) are loyal. And rabid.

Catching Up

Okay, so my early results of the Great Experiment are this: I got tired of not listening to specific stuff when I wanted. It does appear that the shuffle function of media player doesn't really assign a weight by play count. Oddly enough, the two bands that were played the most were the Beatles and Black Sabbath.



I'm trying to figure out why Michael Jackson's death has evoked such a sense of melancholy in me, as I was never really much of a fan. Sure I have Thriller, and I enjoy listening to it, but I was never rabid about owning every piece of music he'd ever released, like I occasionally get about other bands. One of the articles I read offered some clarity and insight into my sense of loss: Generation X is losing its icons. Maybe not its heroes, but the people who inspire nostalgia in Gen Xers. Boomers remember where they were when JFK was shot and listening to Sergeant Pepper for the first time. I remember listening to Thriller when I was a kid, and watching the premier of the video. I remember where I was when the shuttle blew up.



I look at the Boomers and realize that they were the generation that threw their opportunities away, in defiance of authority. Thanks to this, our generation never had any opportunities. We came from broken homes, or from uninvolved parents--parents who were still following the "if it feels good, do it" philosophy, often at the expense of proper parenting. Our generation has had to find ways to rediscover the values our parents never imparted to ensure we teach those to our children. We learned our lessons of love from romantic comedies, not from our "free love" elders. They had their Easy Rider and Peyton Place. We had The Breakfast Club and The Celestine Prophecies.



So hats off to Wacko Jacko. You were definitely iconographic of Gen X.

Grampa Art: R.I.P.

I found out this week that my grandfather died. It is a sad occasion. He was my last surviving blood-relative grandparent. (I have a grandmother left--my maternal grandfather's second wife. I barely remember his first wife, my actual grandmother. I was very young when she died, so I've always just accepted my step-grandma as my maternal grandmother. She is the coolest old lady ever anyway.) Art was also one of the few relatives on my dad's side of the family I liked. He always made time to take me fishing.

Art lived to the ripe old age of 96. You will be missed, gramps. For you practicing catholics out there, if you could say a few rosaries for him, it would be appreciated.

Step Banking

I offered to explain this concept in an earlier post. The idea of step banking does not apply only to arthritics; it may apply to anyone with bad feet, legs, etc. So I've been told.

Imagine, if you will, that you are allotted only so many pain-free walking steps each day. Say this number is 5,000 (this number is hypothetical and arbitrary, being used for the purpose of explanation; your "number" will be different based on the factors of your infirmity). You can walk that many steps in a day without having your feet (legs, etc.) hurt.

Now, if you do go past this allottment, this does not necessarily mean your feet will start hurting right there. What it tends to do, actually, is subtract from the amount of painless steps you can take the next day. To continue our illustration, say you walk 6,379 strides in a day. This means you will only get 3,621 steps the next day (Day 1: 5,000-6,379= -1,379, which is subtracted from your base total for the next day; Day 2: 5,000-1,379=3,621 treads you start the day with). You do not get those 1,379 footfalls back. If, that next day, you walk your usually allotted 5,000 paces, you will only get 2,242 steps the day after (Day 3: your adjusted base total of 3,621 carries over, because there was no opportunity to replenish your stock of footfalls. Thus, Day 2 works out as: 3,621-5,000= -1,379; Day 3: 3,621 carries over as base, which means 3,621-1,379=2,242. I know, it's complicated.)

So how do you replenish your stock of viable steps? By resting. To again hypothetically quantify, you could say that for every hour of rest, you get 200 steps back. If you rest for four hours, you get 800 painless footfalls returned. If you rest for eight, you get 1,600. If we apply this to our example:

Day 1: You walk 6,379 steps.
Day 2: You're allotment of steps for today would be 3,621 strides, but you rested for six hours for a gain of 1,200 strides returned to you. Therefore, you would have 4,821 pain-free treads alotted for today.

Certain activities enact a penalty applied to your amount of steps. For instance, in my case, stairs would equal 1 1/2 footfalls each, and each tread taken on uneven ground would equal two steps on a flat surface. Standing in one place, for me, is also bad. Every minute of standing still eats into my allotted paces for the next day. To continue our example:

Day 1: You walk 6,379 steps.
Day 2: After resting for six hours, you are alotted 4,821 strides for today. You walk 3,000 on the floor in your office and home, but had to do some field work, and walked 1,500 paces in a grassy, gopher-ridden field. Those 1,500 footfalls in the field are equivalent to 3,000 normal steps. Instead of 4,500 strides used, you have thus taken, for the purposes of banking, 6,000 steps that day.
Day 3: You have 3,821 steps banked again for this day. If you had walked all your paces on day 2 on flat ground, you would have reset to your normal 5,000.

You cannot build up a reserve of possible treads for the next day by resting extra. You will always start out with 5,000. Also, when resting, the longer you are continuously off your feet, the more effective it is. If you rest for four hours, but do so by getting up every ten minutes, you will pretty much negate the effect.

Now, mind you, there are no actual numbers involved. But when you've had your affliction long enough, you'll know. You'll be able to tell exactly which footfall will start inhibiting your ability to move the next day. My advice at that point is go sit for a few.

More on the Great Experiment

I came across this interesting article while looking into the concept of randomness in playlists:

http://www.cnet.com.au/itunes-just-how-random-is-random-339274094.htm

My own experiment is much simpler--having cleared and repopulated my library, I'll be shuffling the playlist, consisting of all songs in my library, everyday for the next 30 days, and seeing what my playcounts look like at the end of that time.

The Great Experiment

Okay, so I've reset my playcount on my media player again, cleared my library and replaced all the files. So now we'll see if my shuffles are a little more random and not influenced by weighing the playcount to make it appear that I prefer certain songs more than others. (It shouldn't anyway, since I almost always have it on shuffle, meaning that the player has played those songs more than others all by itself.)

The goal here is to not hear the same songs over and over, to have a balanced shuffle, which seems to get more out of balance as days go by. Not that I actually think that there's some guy monitoring my playlist from Microsoft headquarters. I'm just attempting to understand what factors influence the frequency that a song appears in a shuffled playlist. I'll post my findings when I have some.