Y’all know how I tend to get a little twitchy when I go too long without a show?
Thanks to Yonder Mountain String Band and Stage AE, I get to fix that in a few hours.
Uncle Crappy
words. pictures. beer.
Filed under Music …
thirty.
My relationship with MTV was always a little different.
Once I got past the initial thrill of just seeing the network, which turns 30 today, I was a little dismissive of MTV. There was some remarkable stuff there, sure, but between the endless stream of Top 40 stuff that I never found all that interesting and the fact that MTV largely ignored the music I was interested in — with the exception of 1987, otherwise known as the Summer of Touch — I generally didn’t find much there for me.
As I think about it now — more than a decade after MTV traded in music for crappy reality programming — I wish I had paid a little more attention. There was more good stuff there than I gave it credit for, and some of my favorite musical moments — and some sort of non-musical ones– were a direct result of watching.
I got to watch portions of the revived Woodstock festival — the fun one, not the ugly one a few years later — and seeing the Nine Inch Nails set — remember the mud flinging? — was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen on television anywhere; also, seeing the Allman Brothers set on that Sunday mornings was priceless.
But this is about video, right? I liked Nirvana, but I didn’t love them until I saw this:
The chilling Leadbelly song was the perfect way to wrap up their Unplugged set.
The 1993 VMAs did two things for me: I got the perfect version of “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Pearl Jam backing Neil Young, but that was preceded by something even better:
Stunning.
I can’t find the clip of my favorite REM appearance on MTV, even though I know it used to be available on YouTube. The band did a live set on the network not long after Bill Berry left the band. Before the launched into “Radio Free Europe,” Stipe urged the audience to shout FUCK throughout the song in hopes that MTV couldn’t use it on air. And then the band roared through a sloppy, garage-y and joyful version of the song. This is similar , especially in that Stipe can’t remember the words, but I have to find that clip again someday:
And yeah, the Summer of Touch:
I still love it. Happy birthday, MTV — turns out you weren’t so bad after all.
#ohiotour (sunday).
Besides that night’s show in Cincinnati, I had one thing on my mind when we got up Sunday morning — breakfast.
And that’s when the day got weird.
Mrs. Crappy found a place in Fairlawn called the Sweet Pea Cafe that had a fabulous-looking breakfast menu and sparkling reviews on Urbanspoon and Yelp. I had taken a cursory glance at the menu the week before and hadn’t noticed the corn-and-bacon pancakes — please allow me to repeat that: CORN-AND-BACON-PANCAKES — and I was stoked when we placed our order. The wait certainly would be worth the payoff, right?
Waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Um.
Unfortunately, I can’t answer that question. We arrived in time to spend about 45 minutes on breakfast before we headed southwest towards Cincy, and while I didn’t expect breakfast to hit our table Pamela’s fast, I also didn’t think waiting for our meal would eat up that entire 45 minutes. When we finally gave in, we were met with a shrug from the owner, who made us wait to ask him about the wait for our order.
No food. Indifferent owner. Sweet Pea Cafe outside of Akron? Avoid.
And while we gamely made do with our day-old Giant Eagle subs for breakfast, we got lost in Akron. We found the nastiest rest rooms we’ve seen for years in a gas station-Subway combo south of Columbus. We had to switch hotel rooms in Mason — our Cincy-area stop — because the bathroom in our first room hadn’t been cleaned. We encountered horrid traffic outside of Riverbend. We even had to move once we got parked because the kids who were directing traffic weren’t bothering to direct traffic.
But once we finally kicked back in the lot with a beer or two, the crap of the day started to melt away. It wasn’t as hot in Cincinnati has it had been at Blossom. We met an excellent dude from Louisville who works as a brewer for New Albanian in southern Indiana, who was happy to give us a taste of his excellent APA before we went inside.
And then there was the show.
I loved the set list from the start, but I have to admit that I was still feeling a little clenched from everything else that happened that day — so the band sort of snuck up on me a bit. I hadn’t heard a Punch You In The Eye before; I hadn’t seen a Twist in a couple years. But when Mound started up, I finally started paying attention. A smooth Jibboo, a Fee that Mrs. Crappy almost missed and Backwards — still my favorite song from Joy and one that’s turning into a monster live — wrapped up the first set, with a cool breeze and a stunning sunset to top it off.
The second set started with an indication that the band wasn’t fucking around: Carini. Bam. My first Tweezer, a Crosseyed that rivaled the one we saw at Star Lake in 2003, a Boogie On that might not have been in the ideal place in the set — I was awfully happy to hear it nonetheless — and the capper: a raging Julius into a perfect YEM. Encore? Loving Cup and a thunderous Tweezer Reprise.
Maybe with the exception of Steam, this show had a different feel than the one the night before — a little darker, a little more intense. Blossom was an explosion of energy; Riverbend was about plumbing the depths. Different shows, yes, but the band was near its best both nights.
We didn’t make the same mistake at Riverbend that we had at Blossom — this time, we found food in the lot before we left. Mrs. Crappy found a guy selling the ubiquitous veggie burritos: still warm, beans, zucchini, carrots, peppers, rice and cheese. It couldn’t possibly be more cliché; it also couldn’t have been any better at that moment.
We had a 30-minute drive from Riverbend back to the hotel, and we kept passing exits along Cincinnati’s outerbelt that teased with gleaming White Castle signs. I drove past them all, full, tired and happy.
#ohiotour (saturday).
We left with plenty of time on Saturday to make a stop at Vintage Estates to supplement the cases of Oberon and Route 113 that would get us through the weekend. Our hotel was just a 15-minute, back-road drive away from Blossom, which is still my favorite music venue anywhere. We scored a couple of nice lot shirts for each other (see mine, above; thanks, Mrs Crappy) and marched the 18 miles from the front lots inside in time to get water and beer for the first set.
One of the best things about the weekend was hanging out with Hilary, a friend from home I've known since we were in grade school, in both Cleveland and Cincinnati.
The start of the show was solid, if maybe a little unfocused. I loved the song selection — A Kill Devil Falls to match my new shirt, hearing Fuck Your Face was a treat (no, really), the Little Feat cover gave me — and all 19,000 of my closest friends — a good boost and I’ll never not be excited to hear an Antelope.
But we turned the corner at the start of the second set. Birds is kind of rare these days, and I hadn’t seen them play it before. We all roared through Possum and then, what? Seven Below? Nope, a new song (second time played?) called Steam, a dark, slow shuffle enveloped eight minutes of night before exploding into Piper, always a favorite of mine (even after its transition from a jamming song prior to the last hiatus to a rolling, tumbling energy kick these days).
Sally came up next; a great choice, but what caught my ear happened after the song dissolved, first into a song-based jam with Page riffing on harmonies and then into something a little more sinister: a 2004-style instrumental, shorter than but similar to the one that ended Scents and Subtle Sounds at Camden that year. This one was about six minutes but it felt the same, a chilling, downward spiral, creepy and exhilarating at the same time.
And just as the jam reached its full depth, Fish pops the intro for Hood (random guy, in my ear just then: “We can feel good about this.”), and we’re off, thanks to Mister Minor. But just a little bit into the final instrumental section of the song, there’s a sudden left turn, into Have Mercy — not the ZZ Top one, kids, but the Mighty Diamonds reggae song that Phish has occasionally covered since they got started. After that short respite, we veer back into Hood, which builds to the kind of climax you’d expect at the end of the second set.
Except that we started into Character Zero instead. They hit the first chorus, and Blossom is launched. Bedlam. We had worked our way up to the rail by that point, and got pelted with glowsticks in return, both during CZ and the encore, a luscious version of Slave.
We are happy, exhausted … and hungry. And that’s when we remembered that there’s a Donatos Pizza on the way back to the hotel. We had to wait only 15 minutes for the pizza, and we didn’t even bother taking it back into our room — we ate the whole thing while still sitting in Mrs. Crappy’s car in the parking lot. Sleep came pretty easily, and we had plenty of time for it before what promised to be a killer breakfast in the morning before set headed south to Cincinnati.
addendum, brain edition.
As I told you in the previous post, Twitter was responsible for helping me solve the Great Mystery of the Song in the Target Commercial. Twitter can be helpful like that, and in this case, I would have lost my mind somewhere around lunchtime on Wednesday if I hadn’t been able to figure out the name of that song.
One question remained: Who is @LeeDrever of Vancouver, and how in the hell did he find my tweets about the Target spot?
Your answer:
I am stunned, in the happiest way possible. The Internet can be a big, scary place; it can also help transport a guy and his kid living in Vancouver into my living room in Pittsburgh so they can help me remember a song by an old English band named Status Quo.
One final thing, yinz guys: Meet Lee Drever’s son:
