apple juice

It’s always a fun time seeing Mike Doughty in concert.

I arrived at First Ave. way, way too early, sometime around 6:30. What was I thinking? Well, I was thinking that I didn’t have a ticket, and I was also thinking that about 7 different places on the net said the show was at 7.

The show wasn’t at 7, the opening band was at 7:30 and then M. Doughty and his human band were on around 8:45.

This actually turned out to be a blessing. I met some fine people who had also arrived a bit early for the show, and my lady was able to finish up her homework and come down to the show! She arrived about 7 minutes before they busted into the first song.

We grooved for the entire show, even though I one point I became acutely that my back really, really hurt! I must be getting old or something 😉

The music was a good mix of some old and some new, although admittedly, most of the new sounds a lot like the old. But that’s really not the point for us. We’ve listened to these guys for so long, it’s just fun for us to hear Doughty stand up there and refer to the keyboardist as “The Doveman” and for him to play Firetruck (which was written by a 4-year-old) and for him to tell us all that he fell asleep to the blue light of Pimp My Ride.

At one point in the evening, Doughty went off on this story about getting a phone call from one of the members of They Might Be Giants about doing a benefit album for Moveon.org

Now, we’re not a political band, but for those who don’t know, Moveon is an organization dedicated to getting George W. the fuck out of office. So all of you go out there and vote in November.

The crowd went nuts.

After being underwhelmed with their last effort, Hello Nasty and the subsequent 4 years of fresh gray hairs added to their heads, I was not expecting great things from the new Beastie Boys album. At most, I had hoped that there would be one last tour in support of the new album, and I would finally be able to see them before they announced their retirement.

I could not have been more wrong.

To The 5 Boroughs has been a very pleasant surprise. The MixMaster Mike beats and scratches are probably the tightest of any Beastie Boys album ever. It is clearly hip-hop through and through this time around as well. No jazzy interludes from the Check Your Head days. You can roll down the windows and crank it up. This will be a great summer album for embarassing your wives and girlfriends as you roll around town.

The rhymes themselves, are, well, the Beastie Boys. They sound better on the album than they would if I were to type some out here for you. But it’s the Beastie Boys. We’ll leave it at that. The lyrics do have a sharp political edge this time around (besides the obligatory 3 MCs and 1 DJ look-a-like “Triple Trouble”). Since no one else in mainstream music seemed to be carrying the anti-Bush torch, they have happily grabbed it and are proudly displaying for all to see. At this point, they really have nothing to lose, but it would be nice to see some others in the mainstream music arena really start to step it up.

Overall, fans of the Beastie Boys, pick up this album.

Here they are, in no particular order…

• Outkast – Speakerboxx / The Love Below
• The White Stripes – Elephant
• Black Eyed Peas – Elephunk
• Dizzee Rascal – Boy In Da Corner
• The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
• Grandaddy – Sumday
• Basement Jaxx – Kish Kash
• Holopaw – Holopaw
• The Strokes – Room On Fire
• Radiohead – Hail to the Thief

Did I miss one of your favorites? Let me know? I love to hear new music!

With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?

So the M.I.T. system, using the analog campus cable system, simply bypasses the Internet and digital distribution, and takes advantage of the relatively less-restrictive licensing that the industry makes available to radio stations and others for the analog transmission.

What’s ironic is that prior to this analog distribution… someone is controlling the playlist through the internet…

At some point, hopefully our lawmakers will realize that copyright law needs to be completely rewritten. It was written for a different era.

And hopefully, the lawmakers won’t be writing the new copyright laws in one room while taking checks from the RIAA in the other room.

We can hope, can’t we?

What a night!

The heat was bearing down on us as we walked around Golden, running a few errands before we headed up to the concert. I stopped by the old liquor store to pick up a couple cases of Fat Tire to traffic back to Minnesota, where they will stay in storage while I carefully meter their consumption. We stopped by Safeway and picked up 3 liters of water to bring along with us. Our colorado trip so far had consisted mostly of drinking water, and from the looks of it, we were going to need a lot. As we started up the car, I was thinking that many of the same people were working at safeway. In fact, the same guy was working at the liquor store as well. Some things change and some things stay the same…

After Safeway we stopped at the little deli off campus and found it closed for the day, so we headed south and stopped a new (since I’ve been there) deli next to Buy Back Games (the place where I waited in fear and anticipation the night of the PS2 lauch. Anticipation because they were drawing names for the privliege of buying one of the 15 PS2s they had. Fear cause I didn’t have $299 plus tax to actually buy it. The geek humiliation would have killed me.)

Anyways, the deli was called Penguini’s, and after making fun of our strange requests for no mayo or cheese, the deli-woman went to work. I promptly schooled Sonja in 3 games of Super Bust-a-Move on the arcade machine they had. As game three was finishing up, our sandwiches were ready and we were off.

About this time, Sonja was craving something icy, so we swung into the 7-11 in South Golden, and almost got hit in the round-about (nothing changes). Some marketing wizard at 7-11 corporate decided to abandon all tradition and logic and replace the classic blue and red flavors with Coke, Mountain Dew, and Banana flavored slurpees. We passed on the young whipper-snapper drinks and picked up some cold Gatorade, (the new “Ice” Gatorade).

My excitement level was building steadily, so we drove over to red rocks, and parked in about one hundred different “wrong” ways about 14 inches from a beat up RV, and a Nissan Pathfinder cozied up on the passenger side soon after we had stopped. Some day I will write an extensive entry on the correct way to park, but suffice to say, this was wrong. How ironic that I was worried about my car while going to see a band that about as anti-consumerism as they come (if that’s an -ism… well, you know what I mean)

Water and sandwiches in hand, we began the hike from parking lot to the stairs where we would chill for the next couple hours. Don’t laugh, it is a hike from the parking lot and I was out of breath when we sat down on the stairs behind some some outdoorsy-neo-hippies (guy reading the bible and making notes in his notebook, and girl reading 100 Great Hikes, or something), and in front of some old guys with Widespread Panic T-shirts. We’ll call them the middle aged liberals, that drank “brew-skis” and read the Onion.

And so begins my rampant sterotyping and labeling of the various parts of the Radiohead crowd…

(part two below)

After sitting and talking for a while, eating our sandwiches and drinking up some water, we heard some cheering from above. Towards the top of the line, people began to stand, and like a fast moving wave, the entire crowd was soon standing, ready to be let in.

It was all a tease, however. We moved up three stairs, then four more, then maybe two. The next thirty minutes we slowly stuttered up the steps in anticipation. But soon enough, we were there. And in. And we made a medium paced jog up the stairs of Red Rocks to settle in to some beautiful seats. Row 43. Dead in the middle.

(continued….)

radiohead news: : North American Tickets

Tickets for the first leg of the North American tour went on sale today. All shows still have tickets available, except for Red Rocks, which sold out in 9 minutes!

Guess who got two tickets?

As could be expected, I have been listening to quite a lot of Radiohead in the past few weeks.

And since we were graced with a new album in the past week, I felt it was time to update the rankings of Radiohead albums. In My Opinion.

1. OK Computer
2. Hail to the Thief
3. Kid A
4. The Bends
5. Amnesiac
6. Pablo Honey

Hail to the Thief may be enjoying a bump in the rankings since it is the newest release, but I’ve ranked and re-ranked all the tracks on these six albums, and I think that HTTT may stand at #2.

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are really tough. Not only is The Bends and Kid A/Amnesiac the complete opposite ends of the spectrum, I think they are all strong albums. Kid A is getting the bump up for marking the point at which the band proved they could completely reinvent themselves, still sound like Radiohead, and still put out a wonderful record.

I’d love to hear some opinions, let me know-