Crowded House is one of those bands from the 80’s that people seem to think are a one-hit wonder (“Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over. . .”), but I’m here to tell you that couldn’t’ be further from the truth. They released albums as the original lineup until 1996, when they split up.
Neil Finn, the group’s lead singer and main songwriter, continued on with a successful solo career throughout the Nineties and into the new millennium. I was in the front row at the Roseland when he played there; it was definitely one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, and everyone in the audience was very appreciative of him for coming to town.
There were a couple of ‘best of’ Crowded House albums in the intervening years, and a tragedy when the drummer hanged himself a few years ago, but they’re back with a new album and a new lineup.
I was doing a bit of ‘Tubing today and somehow stumbled onto Crowded House, and this video, which captures exactly what I love about them. Neil Finn writes perfect, intelligent, catchy pop songs, and each of the band members is a tremendous player and singer in his own right.
This video is of the song “Whispers and Moans” at the Sydney Opera House.
Saturday I got up early to drive to tiny little Welches, Oregon to see my friend Andrea play and to hang out with my recording friend Jim. (He and I produced Andrea’s CD.) Since she’s living in Europe now, we’ll take any chances we can get to hang out with her. Jim and I talked over breakfast, and she arrived while we were finishing up. Huge hugs all around.
She played her set and sounded awesome. There were a few songs that were new to me. One in particular (which I don’t remember the name of, but I do remember that it was in E minor!) was especially stellar. At the end of her set, I stood up and clapped, and then motioned with my arms for everyone else to stand up and join me, and we all gave her a nice, big ovation. It was a great way to welcome her home and send her off again, all at the same time.
Tonight she and I got together for dinner at Queen of Sheba, one of the better Ethiopian restaurants in town. Portland is known for, among other things, being a very ‘white’ town (to put it kindly), but for some reason we have a plethora of Ethiopian restaurants here. In fact, another new one just opened up recently, and it’s not even very far from where I live. Must. . .investigate. . .
After we were done with dinner, she asked if we could drive down to EliteHippieCollege. She had just finished reading a book called ‘Blue Like Jazz’, the author of which had gone to that college, and had written movingly about a park with a little bridge. She wanted to find it. I said, “Let’s go.”
We drove all over and found nothing until we went around to the back side of the campus, and sure enough, we came to a large, forested area, replete with two bridges. We parked the car and walked across one of them, and found a slightly overgrown path to walk down along the pond at the bottom of the ravine. We ended up here:
The picture quality isn’t the greatest because it was starting to get dark, which meant that my poor little camera was trying to compensate, and it was hard for me to hold it still while the shutter was open. (Have I mentioned how much I want a better camera? And a tripod?) But the place was beautiful, the conversation was great, and the mosquitoes weren’t too bloodthirsty.
It really started to get dark quickly, so we headed back up the forested path. We stopped under the bridge to take more pictures, and here’s the best one:
It was just. . .an excellent evening. I don’t want to trivialize it any further by reducing it to mere language.
Friday night was a gig with Breanna and Justin down in Salem. Every time we play there, we play at a place called the Blue Pepper, which is a brilliant little music venue/coffee shop/lounge/internet cafe/art gallery where we love to play. I arrived with my cello at a little bit before seven o’clock, put the cello inside, and went outside to talk on the phone. I didn’t see Justin or Breanna, but there were two guitars set up on stage, so I didn’t think much about it. I went back out to make a quick phone call, and a guy with bleached blonde hair came out and said, “Is that a cello in the case?”
‘Yup.”
“Are you playing tonight?”
“Yeah, with Justin and Breanna.”
“That’s interesting, because I’M playing from seven til nine.”
“Oh really?” I laughed. “Looks like I have some phone calls to make, then.” I called Justin and said, “I’m at the Blue Pepper. Are we playing elsewhere this time?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll drive around and meet you, and show you where the place is.”
So we caravanned over to a cool new venue called The Space, which wasn’t open when we arrived. Turned out we were almost an hour early, so Justin & Breanna got out their guitars and sat on the sidewalk to sing and play. I called J, and we talked on the phone for about half an hour, then I walked over to eat (since JustBre had already eaten) at McMenamin’s. I had a surprisingly awesome combination of salad, tater tots and red wine. Incidentally, that seems to have been a good recipe for better-than-average cello playing, because I really felt like my playing was ‘on’ all night, which happens every once in a while.
Inside, the Space is what I imagine the love child would look like if the Blue Pepper and Seattle’s Sunset Tavern ever hooked up for a steamy night of forbidden passion. The walls are painted red with white trim, there’s a cobalt blue curtain covering the window behind the stage area, and there are large, colorful paintings everywhere.
Insted of playing until nine like we normally do, we finished at almost eleven. The three of us were invited to get taken out somewhere afterwards, but I’d come straight from work, and I had an early morning on Saturday (more to come about that later), so I decided to ‘peace out’ and drive back up to Portland.
Suffice it to say that at first the evening seemed like a bit of a disaster, but it ended up being really great.
Late last night, one of my friends sent me an e-mail containing a link to a WebSiteLikeTV video of pictures that were taken at my high school reunion, which happened about a month ago. Naturally, I gave it a miss, because it’s a well-established fact by now that I hated both high school and the town I grew up in. I have no nostalgia for that time of my life at all. I think if I could have it surgically excised from my head, I’d sign up for that procedure before you could finish saying, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’
Based on the pictures from the event, it looks as if about thirty people attended the reunion, out of a graduating class of around four hundred. Normally for something like this, I would post a link to the video so that you could experience it too, but believe me when I tell you that in this case I’m doing you a favor by not including it. I recognized about five people, and only one or maybe two would have been nice to chat with for a while.Â
Everyone went bar hopping on both Friday and Saturday night, and then had a picnic in the park on Sunday, which involved all their kids and families, and sounded pretty awful. Most, it seems, married others from the class and stayed in town. If that had been my fate, I have no doubt that I would not be alive today. I feel very fortunate to have escaped Yakima’s event horizon.
[shudder]
Moving on.
In other news, I got a call from my friend Jim, whose studio I’ve been planning to use for both new recording projects starting this month, to tell me that the golf course outside his place is being completely torn up, redesigned, and then rebuilt. Construction started Monday and will last until spring. The crews, with their huge earth movers, will be working approximately ten hours per day, six days a week. This leaves only Sundays for recording purposes. This is not the end of the world, or the end of either project, but it sure puts a cramp on our collective style.
Work has been extremely stressful this week. Thank gawd for the play-reading group tonight, a gig with IrishBand tomorrow night, and a gig down in Salem with Breanna ‘n’ Justin on Friday night.  And remember Andrea, who moved to Switzerland right after we finished her CD? She’s in town this week and next, so I’m going to go see her play a show on Saturday, and hopefully make some time to get some Ethiopian food while she’s here.
Our apartment building is getting a new heating system this week. The good news is that the people whose apartments are freezing in the winter will no longer have to freeze, the people whose apartments are boiling will no longer have to boil, and the fuel tank which runs out of fuel on the coldest nights of the year will no longer have to be filled. The bad news is that we’ll each have to pay for our own heat, which we haven’t had to do thus far. I know; I know. I shouldn’t complain about that, because we have such a good thing going here. But it will be a tremendous improvement over the antiquated boiler and heating system. I’ll miss the central fan, though. I sure hope they keep that around for the summers.
Hmm. How to end this entry. . .
Well, here you go. Since we were talking about YouTube (no, I’m not going to include the reunion), here’s a funny video about an Australian oil tanker crash.
Today I could barely focus on work because I had so much recording stuff to think about. I kept thinking about how two of the bands I’m in are about to start recording new albums, and in both of those projects I’m doing the lion’s share of the production, recording and mixing.
My eyes popped open at 4:30 this morning, and I had a bunch of ideas about what to do with IrishBand’s recording, and how to go about it, and where to do it, and which songs we should do, et cetera. I also e-mailed Breanna a bunch of times to figure out when we can go in and start on the basic guitar and vocal tracks, and what the process might be like.
I like not knowing what the process is going to be like, truth be told. I like to sit with a song and let God (or whatever) tell me what to play. Production is spiritual for me, and it drives me crazy when people sit there and tell me what to play, because I always think, “Shut your piehole. . .I’m trying to listen to GOD here.”
SHORT GEEK-OUT #1: Last week I bought, with a great deal of help from IrishBand, a Digi 002 recording interface, but it has a slight design flaw with its power supply, which Digidesign is aware of. If you own one of these units, and you have a problem with it, relax. . .all you have to do is call Digidesign and they’ll send you the replacement part (for free!) along with a little instruction booklet on how to install it correctly. That’s what I did tonight, and then I spent the next hour opening up old sessions and listening to them. Good times.
SHORT GEEK-OUT #2: I use a program called SiteMeter here on BFS&T to tell me where all y’all are coming from, and their site was down this weekend because they were migrating to a newer version of their software. Well, after all their and our (meaning the collective group of users around the world) hard work, they released a ponderous, worthless program which they must have received an endless stream of complaints about, because later that day they had already changed back to the original version. God bless ’em. I can’t imagine Apple doing that. Thanks, SiteMeter! I love the original!
Here ends the geek-out. We now return you to your witty, insightful blog, already in progress.
