“Albert Lee!”
When I left you last week, we were off to the movies – Diana’s first since COVID began. We enjoyed “Top Gun Maverick” very much. At over two hours long, we were a bit nervous, but things didn’t drag at all. The linkage to the 1986 original was very well done on several fronts – Goose’s son saving the day, Iceman (Val Kilmer) as the Admiral in charge, and Jennifer Connely as the bar owner. We highly recommend seeing this on the big screen.
I dragged Diana (might be a bit more accurate than the use of “dragged” to oysters last week) to the downtown McKinney 4th of July parade on Monday morning. Parking was a challenge with the multi-storey garage full, with no sign out front, resulting in a complete cluster as everyone tried to turn around at the top of the structure. We did find a spot on a side street without too much hassle.
The parade began with the usual fire truck and police motorcycles, followed by Maylee and the Mayor, singing songs from the back of a pickup truck. Diana groaned at Maylee, as usual. Then there were the usual boy scout troops, jeep clubs and the like. I liked the pinewood derby car float – bringing back memories of many hours constructing those kits with the boys.
Our favourite group was the RC summer camp – kids and adults racing their remote controlled cars around – some very creative vehicles. Here are some other pictures – old cars and floats. The horn sound from those old cars always makes me smile – “Eeeaww, eeeaww.”
There wasn’t much music associated with the parade – big missed opportunity – until the Scottish pipe and drum group from Fort Worth, towards the end. I laughed at this. Independence from Britain is celebrated with a group of Scottish bagpipers?
We continued the patriotic theme with a trip to the city fireworks show in the evening. This is the first time that we’ve driven all the way into the madness of thousands of people listening to music, and then watching the fireworks. I enjoyed this set to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America.”
Unfortunately, the show was cut short due to high winds – they weren’t very high, just a bit gusty, and obviously not great for a fireworks show.
Oh, almost forgot to mention – Maylee (Mayor’s wife) sang the National Anthem to start the firework show. Diana choked out: “She did a good job.”
Will sent this picture on Sunday. Interesting look on the “future Mrs. Robertson’s” face.
I threatened to cancel my New York Times crossword subscription with this offering on Tuesday – Taylor Swift song titles indeed.
I came across this interesting sight as I was moving through the kitchen. Girls and power tools – be afraid!
We watched “Can You Keep a Secret” on Tuesday evening. This is a quirky romantic comedy that we both enjoyed quite a bit. Alexandra Daddario does a great job as an entry level worker in an advertising agency.
Diana picked our Wednesday evening movie, “House of Gucci.” She got quite excited when the Lady Gaga character drove up at the start of the film – she was driving Diana’s first car – a bright red 1977 Fiat 124 Spyder. This movie was quite good – with great performances from Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, and Al Pacino. I thought Jared Leto was a bit too over the top – reminded me of some kind of crazy Joker from Batman act. I had no idea how nuts the Gucci family were in the 80s and 90s. Would definitely recommend checking this out now that it’s streaming.
I have been trying to get back in touch with the three characters that I hung out with during my years at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland (1981-1985), without much success. I took a stab at googling “Bobby Miller, bass player, Edinburgh” on Wednesday night. Success! I found a website for a Scottish band named North Sea Gas – and there was Bobby – looking just like I remember him. I probably shouldn’t admit that it took me a couple of days of noodling to even come up with Bobby’s last name – running the alphabet over and over again.
I posted a comment on the website and contacted the UK booking agent for the band, explaining what I was up to. And “Hey Presto”, I had an email address a few minutes later – the joys of technology. I also learned from the website that Bobby had married Kristy somewhere around the year 2000.
Here’s what the band sounds like:
I hope I get a reply from the email address I was given.
A reply came in on Saturday afternoon – really brought a smile to my face. Here’s an excerpt:
“You might remember me playing with Fat Sam’s Band while we were at University giving me gigs in France as well as over Britain. I moved from them to start playing Double Bass and Bass Guitar with North Sea Gas around 1988, continuing for nearly 15 years, with mainly Scottish gigs for me but did German Tours and got over to New York State/New York, which was a highlight gig. I did I think 6 albums with “the Gas” all of which I think got Silver Discs, with one Gold Disc. Amongst other musical talents, Kirsty graduated from the Academy in Glasgow in violin performance and she ended up joining North Sea Gas for around three years before we both left in 2002. At this point family commitments and the prospect of lengthy tour schedules made this unsustainable, far less try to keep the day job.
Other musical highlights have included doing Double Bass for a couple of Runrig singles, live BBC Hogmanay shows, many festival gigs and folk clubs (both North Sea Gas and New Celeste) and a cameo appearance on Outlander (as a Double Bass player in a band). Still doing many gigs in loads of settings both on Double Bass and Bass Guitar.
Also had a brief stint playing football semi professionally but couldn’t commit enough time along with the music, and a part-time university stint getting an MSc to cheer up my first degree, so returned to play for Ferranti’s works team.”
Diana left for Montego Bay, Jamaica on Friday morning. She was snapping pictures of the unapproved stowaway, BP, on the beach by 4pm. Fortunately they don’t have far to walk to the beach – as seen in this picture from the room.
When I spoke to her around 11pm, Diana had just finished listening to some “silly reggae” music on the beach.
Meanwhile, I made the very short drive to the Guitar Sanctuary to watch a show by Albert Lee and band. Haven’t heard of him? Well, let me share some background. Albert was born in 1943 in Shropshire, England before moving to and growing up in London. He was first introduced to music through the piano at age 9, before listening to the likes of Lonnie Donegan, Buddy Holly, and Gene Vincent who inspired him to take up the guitar. His first big hit was “Country Boy” with Heads, Hands and Feet. This song was a big hit for Vince Gill. Lee did a great, high-speed rendition of this at the Sanctuary.
Albert was a member of the famed “Wrecking Crew” in Los Angeles in the 70s, playing on countless albums as the premier set of session musicians. He was a member of Eric Clapton’s band from 1980 to 1985, playing on “Just One Night”, “Another Ticket”, and “Money and Cigarettes.” I was fortunate to see this band at the Edinburgh Playhouse. Lee was the one who took my albums back for Clapton to sign when Andy Bull and I spotted the band going in for soundcheck on the way home from University in the afternoon. Here’s a song from “Just One Night” featuring Lee’s vocals and picking:
Lee also spent several years playing with the Everly Brothers – I was just writing about them last week. Here’s a story he told about that time – I do enjoy a good story as part of a musician’s set.
He played a great variety of music with his own songs and covers by Delbert McClinton, Ray Charles, and Rodney Crowell. I particularly enjoyed this Crowell cover:
That song is “Song for the Life”. What great lyrics:
Somehow I’ve learned how to listen
For a sound like the sun going down
In the magic that morning is bringing
There’s a song for the life I have found
It keeps my feet on the ground
What a treat to have a classic musician performing in walking distance of home.
Saturday was a quiet day for me – household chores, supervising the neighbour boys spreading mulch, catching up on emails, reading, and a trip to Apex for a workout since it’s 105 degrees outside. I did receive notification in the mail that my US citizenship has been approved, with an oath ceremony on July 26th. I’ll need to call and get that pushed out a bit. It seems that our research on 5 years of flights must have been good enough for government work.
In Jamaica, the girls enjoyed coconut drinks, jerk chicken from the grill, and then lobster and champagne for dinner.
Diana reports that she’s having a checkout dive in the swimming pool on Sunday afternoon, in preparation for going scuba diving on Monday morning. Monday afternoon brings a first for her – apparently they’re going parasailing.
Sunday morning brought the Wimbledon Men’s Final – a pretty good start that then became pretty predictable. I smiled at this food truck parked by the Apex when I went in for a swim – I could get some jerk chicken from the barbecue like Diana.
My first book this week was “Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” by Matti Friedman. Here’s the online summary:
“The little-known story of Leonard Cohen’s concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War
In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen – 39 years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end – traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.”
I’m not sure what I think about this book. Sometimes fascinating with stories of a war I knew nothing about, and with tales of Cohen performing for small groups of soldiers in front line locations, at other times very academic and reading like a research paper. The author seemed determined to somehow include all the little snippets of information that he had collected in his investigation into these events.
I did enjoy the descriptions of how this song came to Cohen during this time:
The title of the book comes from the song of the same name, from the album released shortly after Cohen returned from Israel, and is based on an old Hebrew prayer:
And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?
Here’s a paragraph describing the scene of one of the impromptu concerts:
“When the soldiers join Cohen for the chorus of “So Long, Marianne,” their voices are the only sound in the desert. He introduces the next number. “This song is one that should be heard at home, in a warm room with a drink and a woman you love,” he says. “I hope you find yourselves in that situation soon.” He plays “Suzanne.” The men are quiet. They hear about a place that doesn’t have blackened tanks and figures lying still in charred coveralls. It’s a city by a river, a perfect body, tea and oranges all the ways from China. “They’re listening to his music,” writes the reporter, “but who knows where their thoughts are wandering.”
A description of the young Israeli soldiers that I enjoyed:
“In the photographs they are grinning, of course. They’re young and unfazed, chest hair surging from unzipped flight suites, mustaches and sideburns on the older reservists, nicknames like Rhino and Wild Bull, looking less like clean-cut American air-force types than like the military wing of Credence Clearwater Revival.”
An interesting anecdote on how the soldiers reacted to a big music star in their midst:
“The kid said, “Okay, okay, bit-time poet, big-time artist, you come in here, you’ve got the band with you, you’ve got the pretty girls with you, you’re singing all these pretty words and everything, well what I want to know, buddy, is what do you think about me?” Cohen walked off the stage and into the rows of seats, the guitarist remembered, “and before you knew it he had the guy in his arms, hugging him.”
There is only one known interview where Cohen directly addresses his time in Sinai – by the British music writer Robin Pike, conducted in September 1974:
“PIKE: You mentioned that you went back to Israel at the time of the last war and your sang. Can you say a bit more about that? How did you actually take part:
COHEN: I just attached myself to an air force entertainment group. We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site, and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs. Or they would give us a Jeep and we would go down the road toward the front and wherever we saw a few soldiers waiting on a helicopter or something like that we would sing a few songs.”
After that interview there is really no mention of this time anywhere:
“Anyone hoping for a hint had to be paying enough attention to his work to notice the song “Night Comes On,” which appeared a decade later on the album “Various Positions.” By that time Cohen seemed like yesterday’s man, and his American label famously didn’t even bother releasing the album, though it included not only the enduring “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “If it Be Your Will”, which might be his best song, but also “Hallelujah,” now one of the most popular songs on earth.”
What a poor decision by the American record label!
As seems to happen frequently, the crossword comes along with a clue directly relevant to something new I’ve learned. The Wednesday puzzle had this clue for Sinai:
My next book, which I loved, was “Nowhere for very long – The unexpected road to an Unconventional Life” by Brianna Madia. This is a bit similar to “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed, but quite a lot lighter – it has heavy moments but not at the depth of “Wild.” Madia’s writing style and honesty kept me very engaged, with the book finishing way too quickly. I would have happily read another 200 pages or more. Here’s the online summary:
“In this beautifully written, vividly detailed memoir, a young woman chronicles her adventures traveling across the deserts of the American West in an orange van named Bertha and reflects on an unconventional approach to life
A woman defined by motion, Brianna Madia bought a beat-up bright orange van, filled it with her two dogs Bucket and Dagwood, and headed into the canyons of Utah with her husband. Nowhere for Very Long is her deeply felt, immaculately told story of exploration—of the world outside and the spirit within.
However, pursuing a life of intention isn’t always what it seems. In fact, at times it was downright boring, exhausting, and even desperate—when Bertha overheated and she was forced to pull over on a lonely stretch of South Dakota highway; when the weather was bitterly cold and her water jugs froze beneath her as she slept in the parking lot of her office; when she worried about money, her marriage, and the looming question mark of her future. But Brianna was committed to living a life true to herself, come what may, and that made all the difference.
Nowhere for Very Long is the true story of a woman learning and unlearning, from backroads to breakdowns, from married to solo, and finally, from lost to found to lost again…this time, on purpose.”
From page 2 of the book:
“Forty-eight miles later and forty-eight miles from pavement, the van rolled silently to a stop in a network of desolate dirt roads. There had been no loud clanking noise, no odor of leaking fumes, no smoke from the hood. A tie rod end hadn’t snapped, jerking the wheel ninety degrees and sending me skidding violently into a sand-bank. Rusted leaf springs hadn’t cracked in half, rendering the van slightly crooked and limp as though the passenger side had had a stroke. (All things that had already happened up to that point, by the way.) I cranked the starter a few times, pumping the gas pedal with each attempt, but there was no sound besides the cicadas buzzing in the heat.
I jumped out of the front seat – still a far fall even at my five-foot-ten stature – and squatted down to look at her undercarriage. Above my head was the orange and black nameplate I’d had custom-made for her front grille. Bertha. Named after my favorite Grateful Dead song.”
Maybe my favourite Grateful Dead song also.
I love this quote from the start of Part II of the book:
“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later. – Randy Komisar”
Why Madia loves the desert:
“With mountains, the beauty is right in front of you. Their grandeur can be seen from miles away. The shorelines and the coastal cliffs can be felt before you even arrive; telltale signs of cooler winds and sticky salt air, the call of gulls. But the desert is a bit trickier.
Cow-pie and cactus-covered stretches of sand, dotted with the occasional juniper. Jackrabbits and beady-eyed lizards and that Western-movie whistle of wind and buzz of unforgiving heat. Some may find a place like that unnerving, even boring. They might drive a few miles down the road, maybe peer off a ledge into more vastness, and then turn to leave. They’ve seen all there is to see, they assume.
But then there are those who go farther, who tumble down miles and miles of dirt roads until those roads devolve into rocky two-track trails that wind and sink down between the buttresses. And when those tracks end, they forge their own on foot, winding through dried-up washes and aimless cattle trails carved through fields of half-bloomed rabbitbrush and Mormon tea. The sky narrows; the sandstone rises. In a world of instant gratification, the desert still calls to the determined.”
I could feel myself getting quite claustrophobic as I read a section about high-stemming through a canyon that was less than a foot wide:
“Suddenly my palms, soaked with sweat, slipped from the sandstone behind me and sent the back of my skull crashing into the wall. My knees began to slide slowly down the opposite wall, leaving two perfect trails of dark blood like paint. Below me was Bucket and below Bucket was a V-shaped crack that would shatter any limb that fell into it. I screamed Neil’s name. I screamed every swear work I could think of. The nearest cell phone service was over three hours away from the crack I was now wedged inside of in a half-upside-down fetal position.
By the time Neil had gotten Dagwood through and scrambled back to me, my screaming had turned to hyperventilating, I could feel the blood dripping down my back, dripping down my calves, dropping onto Bucket’s back.
“Help me!” I cried as Neil’s face appeared above mine. He slid down beneath me ever-so-slightly, propping Bucket up on one of his legs, effectively removing her sixty pounds of weight from my harness. With a swift motion, he clipped her carabiner to himself and took her from me. I righted myself and dragged my bloodied body behind him as he grunted his was through the walls.”
My last book was “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders. In this book Saunders recreates a class on the Russian short story that he has been teaching to MFA students at Syracuse University for the last twenty years. This book was highly recommended in a review by a writer that I like but can’t remember just now. Saunders is a risk for me – I’ve abandoned a couple of his books in the last few years – particularly “Lincoln in the Bardo”. All the critics raved, and it just seemed like nonsensical gibberish to me.
I am interested in learning a bit about the 19th century Russian masters and will give this book a solid try. I enjoyed the reading and discussion on Chekhov’s “In the Cart.” Maybe I’ll read one or two short stories and discussion a week. I do feel like a slight better educated reader already – Saunders breaking down what’s happening on each page to keep the reader’s attention and to develop the plot and characters.
I listened to the old Pink Floyd album “Animals” last Monday while reading, and loved some of the songs that Spotify automatically started playing when it ended:
Coexist with kindness and compassion!