Okay, let’s rock ‘n roll…

I suspect those of you who still have this thing in their RSS feed already know about my streaming radio show, but here goes. It’s still a thing! Although it’s bi-weekly now, because it takes up about 6 hours of my Saturday and I needed half of my Saturdays back. (It’ll go back to weekly when I retire, if I’m still doing it by then.)

You may have also seen my reaction on other socials to the passing of David Lindley, perhaps the greatest musician on this planet. That one hit me hard, as I’d been a big fan of Mr. Dave for at least 40 years. So, in case you missed it, here’s the 3-1/2 hour tribute show I did for him a few weeks back.

And the playlist:

DAVID LINDLEY – El Rayo-X [EL RAYO-X/Asylum] 1981
RY COODER – Little Sister [BOP TILL YOU DROP/Warner Bros.]
BOTTLE ROCKETS WITH DAVID LINDLEY – Rocket in My Pocket [ROCK AND ROLL DOCTOR: A TRIBUTE TO LOWELL GEORGE/CMC International] 1979
THE PAHINUI BROTHERS WITH RY COODER & DAVID LINDLEY – Jealous Guy [THE PAHINUI BROTHERS/Panini Records] 1997
DAVID LINDLEY & EL-RAYO-X – Something’s Got A Hold On Me [WIN THIS RECORD!/Asylum] 1982

DAVID LINDLEY – Mad Mountain Medley [ANTHOLOGY OF THE BANJO/Tradition] 1961
THE DRY CITY SCAT BAND – Baldheaded End of the Broom [FOREVER CHANGING: THE GOLDEN AGE OF ELEKTRA RECORDS – 1963-1973/ELEKTRA] 1964
KALEIDOSCOPE – Egyptian Gardens [SIDE TRIPS/Epic] 1967
KALEIDOSCOPE – Seven-Ate Sweet [INCREDIBLE!/Epic] 1969
LEONARD COHEN – So Long, Marianne [SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN/Columbia] 1967

JACKSON BROWNE – Running on Empty [RUNNING ON EMPTY/Asylum] 1977
JACKSON BROWNE – Late for the Sky [LATE FOR THE SKY/Asylum] 1974
JACKSON BROWNE – The Load-Out / Stay [RUNNING ON EMPTY/Asylum] 1977
JACKSON BROWNE & DAVID LINDLEY – Take It Easy [LOVE IS STRANGE: EN VIVO CON TINO/Inside Recordings] 2010

DAVID LINDLEY & HANI NASER – She Took Off My Romeos / Pretty Girl Rules The World [LIVE IN TOKYO: OFFICIAL BOOTLEG/Pleemhead Records] 1993
DAVID LINDLEY & HANI NASER – Afindrafindrao [PLAYING EVEN BETTER: OFFICIAL BOOTLEG #2/Pleemhead Records] 1995
DAVID LINDLEY & WALLY INGRAM – Cat Food Sandwiches [TWANGO BANGO DELUXE/Ulftone Music] 1998
COODER-LINDLEY FAMILY – Sí Bheag Sí Mhór [LIVE AT THE VIENNA OPERA HOUSE/Pleemhead Records] 2018
BONNIE RAITT & DAVID LINDLEY – Everywhere I Go [LOOKING INTO YOU: A TRIBUTE TO JACKSON BROWNE/Music Road Records] 2014

WARREN ZEVON – Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded [WARREN ZEVON/Asylum] 1976
MARSHALL CRENSHAW – Someplace Where Love Can’t Find Me [GOOD EVENING/Warner Bros.] 1989
JOHN PRINE – Way Back Then [THE MISSING YEARS/Oh Boy Records] 1991
JUNE TABOR – Beat the Retreat [BEAT THE RETREAT: SONGS BY RICHARD THOMPSON/Capitol Records] 1994
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN – Racing in the Street (’78) [THE PROMISE/Columbia Records] 2010

RY COODER & DAVID LINDLEY WITH JOAQUIM COODER, BOBBY KING, TERRY EVANS & WILLIE GREEN – Mercury Blues [NEW ORLEANS JAZZ AND HERITAGE FESTIVAL, MAY 1, 1994]
RY COODER & DAVID LINDLEY WITH JOAQUIM COODER, BOBBY KING, TERRY EVANS & WILLIE GREEN –
O Death [NEW ORLEANS JAZZ AND HERITAGE FESTIVAL, MAY 1, 1994]
RY COODER & DAVID LINDLEY WITH JOAQUIM COODER, BOBBY KING, TERRY EVANS & WILLIE GREEN – Across the Borderline [NEW ORLEANS JAZZ AND HERITAGE FESTIVAL, MAY 1, 1994]

TARIKA RAKOTO FRAH – The Rakoto Frah Two-Step [A WORLD OUT OF TIME: HENRY KAISER & DAVID LINDLEY IN MADAGASCAR/Shanachie] 1992
RAKOTO FRAH & DAVID LINDLEY – You Done Me Wrong [A WORLD OUT OF TIME, VOL. 2: HENRY KAISER & DAVID LINDLEY IN MADAGASCAR/Shanachie]
HENRY KAISER & DAVID LINDLEY WITH HANS FREDRIK JACOBSEN & TONE HULBÆKMO – The Sweet Sunny South [THE SWEET SUNNY NORTH: HENRY KAISER & DAVID LINDLEY IN NORWAY/Shanachie] 1994
TIRILTUNGA – Tenarløn Hjå Telebonden (The Servant’s Fee) [THE SWEET SUNNY NORTH: HENRY KAISER & DAVID LINDLEY IN NORWAY, VOL. 2/Shanachie] 1996
HENRY KAISER & DAVID LINDLEY – McMurdo Barn Dance [MUSIC FOR WERNER HERZOG’S ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD/Fractal Music] 2013

DAVID LINDLEY – Down in the Vatican Library [BIG TWANG/Pleemhead] 2007
DAVID LINDLEY & WALLY INGRAM – Methlab Boyfriend [TWANGO BANGO II/Pleemhead] 2001
DAVID LINDLEY & EL RAYO-X – You Been Doing Something Wrong, I Can Tell By The Way You Smell [EL RAYO LIVE!/Asylum] 1983
WARREN ZEVON & DAVID LINDLEY – Casey Jones [DEADICATED/Arista] 1991

DAVID LINDLEY & EL-RAYO X – Tiki Torches at Twilight [VERY GREASY/Elektra] 1988

Let’s all get normal at the luau!

Oh look, it’s an undead (we)blog! Untouched by human hands in almost three years!

Hi, y’all.

I’ve been contemplating resurrecting it via various occult spells and black magic (i.e., actually posting on it again), but I have no idea if there’s anyone out there reading it. I supposed I could have been posting my streaming radio show playlists here (and yes, I’m still doing it!) but other things that cross my mind, just like back in the old blogging days.

I’d kinda been doing that on Twitter, but since Elon Fucking Musk bought it it’s dropped to an even deeper circle of Hell, and I suspect its says (and my days there) are numbered. I plan to go out in a bang by getting myself thrown off by swearing at a Republican, a Nazi (not much difference these days), a TERF, or just some annoying rando fucknuckle. We’ll see.

It’s a pity, there’s still a great Star Trek community there, cooks and chefs, science fiction and fantasy writers, et al. I do enjoy those people. But the right-wing trolls are of course still there, encouraged by Musk as he actually reactivates the accounts of literal Nazis who’d been previously banned. Now he’s made his remaining coders change Twitter’s code so that you actually get your own reach diminished if you block or mute other accounts.

Anyway, I have no idea if people still use RSS feeds (Google continues to have made an ENORMOUS mistake by killing Google Reader; I use Feedly myself), but if you do, and you see this, and you won’t mind recurring content, please holler at me!

*tap*tap*tap* … is this thing on?

Does anyone still have an RSS reader? Will this get noticed anymore? Who knows?

So, hi y’all. Here we are, sheltering in place in the time of COVID-19, trying to maintain our sanity, stuff our monsters into the anxiety closet and nail the door down, and probably drinking more than we should. Coping is something we need to do.

A week or so after I got sent home from work I started thinking of what I could do that might bring me joy, and I decided to start up my old radio show (similar mix, more or less, as I had done at KCRW and KCSN for 20 years) via Internet streaming, and that that might bring some other folks joy too.

The new show is called “Safe at Home,” referring both to our mayor and governor’s “Safer at Home” sheltering order, plus a tribute to my old mentor/colleague/friend Deirdre O’Donoghue from KCRW, and the series of premium audiocassettes she put together for a few years of live performances from her legendary “avant-pop” show “S*N*A*P,” that were offered to subscribers to the station at the time — they were called “It’s Only Safe at Home” and “Safe at Home in the ’90s?”

It’s been pretty successful in making me feel better so far, and I have a few dozen dedicated friends who tune in every week, but I’d like to expand my listenership. Who knows, I might get a whopping one more listener from here!

The show is live on Saturdays at 1pm Pacific Time, 4pm Eastern Time, 2100 GMT, and can be streamed from this referrer URL:

http://gumbo.org/live

After the show goes off the air I edit the recording to tighten it up a bit, then it gets uploaded to my new Mixcloud page for streaming on demand, whenever you want! That link is http://mixcloud.com/SazeracLA

I’ve got five shows up so far, over 11 hours of music, and fortunately I solved my crappy mic placement issues after the second week. (I got spoiled at the radio station by having engineers and tech people around me, and now I’m basically doing this with what I have on hand — a digitized music collection of ~80,000 songs, iTunes, Audio Hijack, a Blue Yeti USB mic, and a streaming server rented from a company in Second Life for the princely sum of $8.80 a month).

Please tune in, enjoy, and spread the word!

We’re here. The concert is tonight. In just a few hours. It’s getting dark already. Holy feckin’ crap.

It had been 11 years since I’d been to Dublin, and even when I was there before I’d only spent a couple of days there total. I’d forgotten what a big city it is, and hadn’t taken into consideration how much bigger it had gotten since I was there last. We spent a lot of time farting around in Kilbeggan, and when leaving I foolishly said to Wesly, “The timing is perfect. It’s about 4 now, so we should be hitting Dublin between 5 and 5:30.”

Yep, perfect. Just in time to hit rush-hour Dublin traffic. And to put us in a traffic jam the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen even in Los Angeles.

It was unbelievable. Un-feckin’-believable. It slowed to the consistency of chilled molasses when we were approaching the city from the N4, but once we hit Dublin city limits, it just stopped. Complete feckin’ gridlock. What might have made it worse is that we found ourselves on a road I didn’t think we should have been on, and I didn’t quite know how we ended up there. Somewhere in Chapelizod I missed a sign, and when I had been hoping to be on the Chapelizod Road just south of Phoenix Park, I ended up on a series of roads (St. Laurence, Sarsfield, Con Colbert, St. John’s West) that were just jammed. I might have taken a picture for you, just to document how bad it was, but I was too busy shrieking “FUCK!” (no, Mrs. Doyle, not feck, the actual F-word), pounding on the steering wheel and perspiring. It was so bad, and we were so far behind the schedule I’d hoped we’d be on, that for a while there I thought it might actually be possible that, after all this expense and travelling, I’d miss the show (at least the beginning).

My expert reading of the Dublin city map left a lot to be desired, too — it’d been over a decade since I’d been there, I hadn’t spent that much time in the city to begin with, and I’d forgotten how the streets tended to be one-way when you didn’t expect, and how hard-to-read the street signage was. Once we got past the traffic and into Dublin 1, I ended up taking a half-dozen wrong turns on the way to the apartments. We ended up stopping at a petrol station at a frighteningly busy intersection way the hell up Drumcondra Road to ask for directions. Apparently the gentleman inside seemed to think Wes was quite mad, but he headed us back in the right direction, which was, of course, back the other way … and it was impossible to go that way from where we were. “Can’t get there from here, though!”

Somehow, we made it … 42 North Great Georges Street, the Mount Eccles Court Hostel and Apartments, checked into apartment #2, looked around (okay, it was nice; not quite as nice as the impression the photo gave, but perfectly nice enough), double-checked the showtime (8:30 instead of 8 … thank CHRIST!), threw our stuff inside, left immediately, got back into the car, and drove to the venue. It didn’t take long to get there at all … but parking the car was another matter. Did I mention that it’s a relative nightmare to have a car in Dublin? If you’re thinking about it, don’t. It’ll cost you more to park it than to hire it, the disc parking system can be diabolical (buy a parking disc-permit from a machine on the street for between €1.60 and €2 per hour, with a three-hour limit, there are evil clampers everywhere who’ll clamp your car if you’re so much as a minute overtime, there are only 9 multistorey carparks in all of Dublin, and only four of them are open 24 hours. Jesus.

Finally, after more wrong turns and U-turns there was the beautiful sight of the multistorey car park on Usher’s Quay, a mere 10 minute walk from the venue … and there we were, a whole 40 minutes early. There was a nice lady outside who handed me our tickets. The bar had just opened. We were there. Good Christ, do I need a pint.