Monday, May 23, 2011

It's Not the Heat, It's the Stupidity

Who the hell went and made it all humid all up in here?

Hmmmm. Not too much shakin' this evening. Just went for a quick walk with the Jeanners and talked it up real good. Had a quick chat with the Beej (who is coming to visit this week! Geek games, Thursday night!) on the phone to make some plans, now I'm just drinkin' a beer and probably gonna go read a little Jack London.

Did some drywalling this weekend (last weekend's drywalling party turned into more of a framing party so the drywalling party got moved back a week). Yesterday we had one of Jeannie's Americorp volunteers from work offer to come over and help because she wanted to get some practice doing drywall (J's Habitat affiliate subs out all the drywall work these days), and we've got nothing in this house so much as drywalling practice, so she came over. It was nice having a third person working because then it was more like a mini-party and less like another day working on this fucking house, but a little weird, too, because most of my work pants/shorts have holes and my balls poke out. And I had a surprise fart that popped out and made me feel like an 80 year old man, but the Americorp volunteer either didn't hear or was very nice and pretended not to hear.

I bought tickets to see Daniel Lanois' new-ish band, Black Dub, at the 9:30 Club in DC in a few weeks. I'm pretty fucking excited, for several reasons:

A) I've been following Daniel Lanois since I was 10 years old and I saw on my Joshua Tree tape jacket: "Produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno." And I thought that:
1) Those are really strange names
2) I don't know what "produced" means, but it sounds very important and it
seems like these guys must be responsible for the wonderful sounds on this
tape, almost as much or maybe moreso than the band themselves?
So I started looking for other things that had the name "Eno" or "Lanois" on them, and discovered some pretty great stuff. And this was way before the internet, so it meant lots of magazine reading and record store diving and just generally wonderful hunting time. So it'll just be nice to be in the same room as one of my life-long musical heroes.

B) The band includes Brian Blade and Daryl Johnson. Brian Blade is my favorite living drummer. He's actually a jazz drummer who shows up on a lot of pop stuff, too. The awesome drum pattern in Emmylou's "Where Will I Be"? Brian Blade. Anyway, he's not too flashy, just really funky and unpredictable and he's always dropping heavy bombs into the middle of his beats. Daryl Johnson is just a badass. Thick, funky bass. Once I was at an Emmylou concert and I thought it was Daryl Johnson playing bass, so I yelled out "Daryl!" but it turns out it was not Daryl. Jeannie still makes fun of me for that one. But anyway, Daryl Johnson is a badass, plain and simple.

C) Several other smaller reasons. Black Dub only has one album so they'll most likely play some older Lanois stuff. Lanois usually brings out the ol' pedal steel during shows, which is my favorite instrument but one that I don't get to see live very much.

Anyway, here's a little taste of the Black Dub (p.s. the singer is not my favorite but has been growing on me):



The Jeanners has gone to bed. I should probably follow suit.