Excellent day

 I'm currently reading Ruth Reichl's book, Garlic and Sapphires, The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, about her experiences as the Food Critic for the New York Times.  I'm really enjoying the book.  It's about some of my favorite things:  food, eating out, and New York City.  I highly recommend the book to anyone who likes reading about food.  My paper's food section comes out on Wednesday, and I always pull it out and read the restaurant reviews with my breakfast.  (Not that we can afford to eat out very often, but it's fun to vicariously live and eat through the reviews.)

And I had a chance to live fully (not vicariously) this past Thursday.  It was a great and full day.


I got an email Tuesday afternoon asking if I could do the Sonic Detour on Thursday, and Justin Townes Earle (JTE) was coming in to play live.  I know Nell often has bands in and she is far more comfortable than I am interviewing people, thinking off the top of her head, and in general presenting a cohesive sounding interview.  Any time I have to do an interview, I'm nervous.  In addition, Marcie (aka Queen of the Morning Show) had interviewed JTE and done a fabulous presentation on her show on Tuesday morning, asking questions about songs and then playing the songs they had talked about.  She did such a sympathetic interview and got him to talk about his myriad problems.  I didn't want to do the same thing that she did.  (I can thank my friend Joyce for suggesting this...she said do something different and direct the listeners to the archives to listen to Marcie's interview.)  I spent Thursday morning prepping for the interview and for the show.

It's a bittersweet time.   I've been a programmer at WMNF for over 20 years, and major programming changes are coming up. My time slot is no longer there.  I've had shows and lost shows and not been renewed and got passed over for slots that I thought I should have.   In other words, my heart has been broken time and time again when the Program Director and I didn't see eye to eye on what I should be doing at the station.   I won't go over all the history here, but suffice to say that WMNF is an important part of my life, and being a programmer at WMNF is an important part of my identity.  Thank goodness it is not all.  I've got a lot more parts to my life than just the station.  My family is first and foremost.  Next is my love for riding my mountain bike.  There's lots more in me too:  shopping at thrift stores,  bargain shopping for groceries, cooking, gardening, growing african violets and roses.  Exercise beyond riding my mountain bike.  I love my road bike.  I fall in and out of love with running.  I've been a gym rat and miss it.  Love swimming laps, too.  What I'm trying to say is if I don't have a slot in the new schedule, it'll be incredibly difficult and painful but it won't the end of my world.

Knowing all this, I prepared the Sonic Detour show for this past Thursday as either an audition for a show on the new format or a swansong for what has been.

I had several themes for the show.  (This may sound silly for anyone not connected to community radio, but almost all of us who do shows take what we do to heart and try to do the best we can each week)  First and foremost was JTE.  I also wanted to play some of my top ten songs of the year since it is that time of year.  I was also gonna be playing songs from the 80's, trying to promote our New Year's Eve show. And I had to give away the CD of the week. And I wanted to throw in some Christmas stuff.  That's on top of the normal DJ stuff to do:  Underwriting,  PSA's, cross promotions, forward promotions, priority copy, etc. 

Musically, I was proud of what I played.  The songs I played rock my world and I hope the listeners enjoyed them as well.  The interview went well.  Marcie came and sat in on it and watched and listened.  She gave me a thumbs up, and if Marcie said I did a good job, well, that's that.  JTE was an incredibly easy interview, very talkative. The songs he played sounded great.  He did throw me for a loop, however, when he confessed to having been through rehab 13 times.  How does one respond to that bomb?  I stuttered something like, "Oh, well, then you can teach the class now, huh?"

I'd asked my music list, Postcard From Hell, if they had anything they wanted to know or any songs they wanted to hear.  Before the interview started, I told JTE about the requests.  He said, well, uh, I hadn't planned to play either one of those. (Good thing, Christchurch Woman's got an FCC violation word)  I was going to come out of the news with the title cut from his CD, Harlem River Blues, before I introduced him, but he said.....no, I plan to play that one.  So I played Move Over Mama at his suggestion.  He played
Harlem River Blues as his first song.  It's a folk/gospel song.  I've had the damn song in my head for the past month.   I get up at night and it's there, reverberating in my brain.  He slowed it down just a tad, and the result was wonderful:

Lord, I'm goin' uptown to the Harlem River to drown
Dirty water gonna cover me over and I'm not gonna make a sound

The other songs he played sounded fabulous, too.

After the show, I hustled down to New World Brewery (NWB) to eat before heading out for the shows.  I love pizza and NWB makes the best pizza ever.  My husband doesn't like pizza, so if I get a chance to eat at NWB I take it.  I phoned in my order and headed down.

I walked in with a copy of the new Creative Loafing under my arm.  Steve Bird, NWB owner and husband of my bestest biking buddy, Nancy, greeted me and asked, "Did you see page 19?"  I said I hadn't read it yet.  I sat down and opened the paper.  It was a restaurant review of NWB, and the paper awarded them 3 1/2 stars.  Steve was giddy from excitement.  It was an extremely complimentary, glowing review, which the reviewer is not known for giving.  I thought it was quite a coincidence, since I'm reading the book about restaurant reviews now.  I promised Steve that I'd loan him my copy once I finished.

Bev got there are we devoured the pizza I had ordered.  And friends started showing up.  First, Mike Fisher, (former WMNF DJ)  then John Palmer (current WMNF DJ) and friends of his.  Then Nancy Bird arrived with some SWAMPers, Jason and Ron and Gruff.  They were planning next week's Christmas ride.  It was fun hanging out, but I needed to head over to The Bunker.  Will Quinlan, my favorite local musician and one of my favorite musicians from anywhere, was playing a solo set.

Amy Snider, who does the Tuesday Sonic Detour, hosts a free singer songwriter night every Thursday at the Bunker.  This was the first time I've made it.  More 'MNFers were there:  Patty was doing sound, then the entire news department showed up.  Will started at 9 and did an excellent half hour solo set.  He really is an amazing talent.  He played Diviner's stuff, did a Uncle Tupelo cover for Amy, and did some of his side project, The Holy Slow Train.

Almost everyone who was at the Bunker walked down the street to the Crowbar for the JTE show.  There was a nice crowd, and we got to see the last few songs of one of the openers, Caitlyn Rose.   The first person I ran into was Bryan Childs, who has an excellent blog at  http://ninebullets.net/  

He's into the same type music I am, but even more so. I can say that he and his wife are DINKS, so he's got time.  He's also a mountain biker.  He does a monthly podcast and blogs extensively about music.  He might be getting a show on WMNF with the new schedule, which would be cool as hell.

Kamran was DJing between sets.  After Caitlyn Rose played, the first song he played was Mumford & Sons,  followed by Slobberbone, followed by cool song after cool song.  I told him that it could be me doing the DJing.

OK, it just occurred to me that this entry could turn into all the friends I saw on Thursday night, so I'll just skip that part and get to the show.

JTE came on about 10:45, just him and his guitar.  (OK, details will get fuzzy because by this time I'd had a few)  The first few songs were just him and his guitar, and that big, noisy room was paying attention.  You could have heard a pin drop.  He had the crowd in the palm of his hand. He did an excellent job of seeming to make eye contact, but he was looking over our heads.  But he would scan the crowd from one side to the other and back again.  He brought his band out, a cute woman playing upright bass and a fiddle player, and just ripped it up.  They made their way through most of the new record and some of the older stuff.  The between song banter was great, too.   Justin told charming, disarmingly honest and funny stories about his father and mother, his father's drug addiction, his drug and alcohol addiction, Townes Van Zandt, and anything else that came to mind.  It all seemed fresh.  Sometimes I'll interview someone at the station and they'll tell a great story.  When I see their show, they tell the exact same story.  Not JTE.  All new material, from Marcie's interview to the interview I did to what he said on stage.  I guess he's a born storyteller.

There were some sound issues, for a while his vocals were getting lost, but the sound guy fixed that fairly quickly.

He brought out Caitlyn and her band to join them on Harlem River Blues, the title cut to his new record.  The recorded version is a bluesy, gospel send up, and the version they did just killed.  He then sent the band away and did an a cappella version of Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927.    It's a song about the horrible flood in the 20's.  It's been covered a zillion times, but became an anthem after Katrina:


What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through cleard down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

CHORUS
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tyrin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has
done
To this poor crackers land."

CHORUS

Just Justin and his voice.  It was an amazing musical moment.  Again, not a sound could be heard except from the voice from the stage.I felt privileged to be there to witness the magic.

He brought the band out for another song or two and after a few encores, it was over.  It was truly a magical musical evening.

I will admit that Justin Townes Earle's first two releases didn't do much for me, but I totally love his latest.  After seeing him live, I am going to revisit those first two CDs.  There's a lot more there, I just need to spend the time to find it.  He is as brilliant as his father.

I don't go out and see live music much anymore.  It used to be a necessary element to nurture my soul. It still nurtures my soul.  I guess I'm more selective about what/who I choose to lose sleep over.  I'm glad I made the choice to see this show.

And to run into everyone.  Who haven't I mentioned?  Joyce, Dot, Andrew, John M., Miss Julie, Beth, Roxanne.  And those two cute ever so young girls who were superfans.  The ones I had to drill and make sure that they knew that the song he just sang was a Replacements cover.