3/31/17
Pam and I went to see Eric Church play in Staples last night as part of his Holdin’ My Own Tour, and afterwards all we could say was, “Hallelujah!” He put on a spectacular show, opening with a cover of the late Leonard Cohen’s iconic song. He delivered a haunting tribute to the artist by playing the song in the dark, while a spotlight illuminated an empty circular area of the stage. The effect was as reverential as it was emotional.
Eric Church is not easy to pigeonhole. He is country, yet he isn’t. He is hard rock, yet he isn’t. He is bluesy, yet he isn’t. He is gritty, yet he isn’t. He is
sappy, yet he isn’t. He is modern, yet he isn’t. He is pop, yet he isn’t. He is outlaw, yet he isn’t. He is southern rock, yet he isn’t. This makes some sense, as his musical influences range from Hank, Jr. and Merle Haggard to Metallica and AC/DC. After his performance last night, we decided he is just damn good and do not care if he is genre conflicted.
Eric Church did not have an opening act. He played for about three hours, singing over 30 songs, and taking a 20 minute intermission. He also took a few breaks to down some Jack Daniels, which he clearly enjoys. I guess when one of your songs is titled Jack Daniels you might have a propensity for drinking it on stage.
We loved it that he did not have an opening act. Very few artists play a show without one. A show like that is reserved for the likes of Bruce Springsteen, who defines the standard by which I measure all other live performances. And Eric Church’s performance ranked right up near the top. As one of his hit songs is named Springsteen, it should not have come as a surprise that he would emulate the Boss, and deliver a marathon concert.
Vocally, he was off the charts, demonstrating over and over again just how good he sounds live. He had total command of the stage, which was starkly minimalistic in its decoration, enabling us to focus on his music. He swaggered. He screamed. He showed passion and emotion. He communicated and connected with the audience. It was obvious when he was pumped up, and he inspired the audience to echo his energy. He even challenged us to hang with him all night, as he was giving it his all and he expected us to do so as well. Eric Church exemplifies why Pam and I go to see shows. No record ever recorded and no video ever produced can duplicate the euphoric feelings evoked by attending a live show, and last night we saw a great one. Just like Bruce, Eric Church’s recorded music pales when compared to seeing and listening to it live.
With a 30+ song set list, the show included most, if not all, of his great songs, including Mistress Named Music, Drink In My Hand, Mr. Misunderstood, Like a Wrecking Ball, Smoke a Little Smoke, Pledge Allegiance to the Hag, Record Year, Kill a Word, Three Year Old, and Springsteen, just to list several of them. He also covered I Love LA, the Randy Newman song, to pay tribute to the Los Angeles audience. Some of his best moments where when he was singing with only his acoustic guitar keeping him company. When his band was playing, they were seriously good, and he sounded great with them. His sound mixers did a great job balancing the vocals and the other instruments to yield a near perfect concert experience. Adding to our enjoyment was Joanna Cotton, a backup singer who provided a seriously gritty and soulful delta dimension to several of the songs.
As we decided to buy the Eric Church tickets months ago and as we did so at my urging, I knew I would not need tequila or doughnuts before the show to induce me to see it. After seeing it, my only quandary was whether I would have to drink some Jack Daniels as a toast to him before we see him again. And we will see him again.
OK, I did it. 11 and a half months after my 1977 911 Targa caught fire in my garage, I bought another 911. This one is a beautiful, well mostly beautiful, 1974 911 Targa. I did not need it, but I wanted it. I felt unfulfilled with my experience with my 1977 911. I also felt a deep sense of loss because I never got to know and enjoy the car before it burned. The 1977 was a project car. The 1974 is not. It is a very nice, mostly stock, 1974 911. Sure it has a few issues, but it is 43 years old. So issues are to be expected and they will be dealt with over time.
not need to make it any thinner by not leaving her room to park her car in the driveway. The 912 has issues and needs work. I will get to them, soon. First, though, I wanted to play with the 911.
I explained the situation. His first words to me were, “Did you do what I told you to do on Saturday when you picked up the car?” What could I say? I was not sure what that had to do with this, so I said, “Not exactly.” That was not the right thing to say. I told him what I had done on Sunday. That got me a well deserved earful about knowing when to follow directions and how if I did not follow them, he would, justifiably, stop giving them to me.
Mark made me promise to complete all the steps exactly. I told him I would. On the way home, I put in the fuel system cleaner. I filled up the tank. On Saturday before I went to breakfast with my Porsche friends, I took the car on a 60 plus mile freeway jaunt. Mark was out of town Saturday so he was not at breakfast, That did not stop him from calling me at a few minutes after 8 AM when the parking lot portion of breakfast was starting. He asked me the following question: “Are you on the side of the road?” I said, “No.” He asked if I was at the Spitfire. I said, “Yes.” He asked me if I followed his directions exactly. I said, “Yes.” He said good and then promptly instructed me to do it all again the next week. What could I say to that? I said, “OK.”
lbum, 12 Stories. This was the fourth time all of us were going to listen to her. We knew with absolute certainty that this would be a big night in a big town.
performance. She did not disappoint.
We decided to go see Cody Jinks play at the Troubadour. It was a spontaneous decision, made because we listened to one of his songs based on a random Facebook post. We liked the song, and we decided to roll the dice and see him perform. Given our steady diet of big, pop country acts last year, I was excited to see some grittier, singer songwriters that do not rely on staging and gimmicks to put on a show.
nyway, the show was very good. The opening act, Ward Davis was great. He had a Chris Stapleton look and sound, meaning he brought tons of soul to his folk country songs. He has spent years in Nashville singing in relative obscurity. So long in fact that his first full length album is titled, 15 Years in a 10-Year Town. He was easy to listen to, and we really enjoyed his performance.
ght. He has a HUGE baritone voice that would fill Staples Center without a microphone. Consequently, he had no trouble filling he Troubadour with his unique blend of high-octane, operatic sounds.
of senseless killings by and of police, in some senses it has been quite a depressing year. A fitting year to fauxtest outside of Trump Tower. A fitting year to listen to “Pink Houses” by John Mellancamp, which I just did, a song which touches on the demise of the American Dream.
I sit here writing this and reflecting on the year, I cannot help but smile. I am a lucky guy. In my bubble, it was a damn good year. I have a great family. A great life. Pam, the kids, Jake (our Golden Retriever) and I are healthy and happy. Need I say more? Probably not, but I will anyway.
Sure we had a few speed bumps this year, but in general they related to material things, which are replaceable. The low point for me was when my 1977 Porsche 911 Targa burst into flames in the garage. As I have written about before, the car was a total loss. The garage was damaged, needing to be rebuilt, a process that is still not complete, nine months after the fire. But, hey, it was only singed and was still standing and the house was untouched. Thanks to insurance I was able to get the garage rebuilt and to replace the burned Porsche with a 1969 Porsche 912 Targa, a car that, thankfully, I still have and which continues to make me smile.
its shallow. Sure its unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Sure its self indulgent. But as I age, I need to find ways to enjoy my free time. I no longer play tennis. I don’t really like to ski anymore, though I do go on one boys trip a year, mainly to hang out with the guys. I never liked golf, of course that may be because I sucked at it or because my allergies went nuts every time I stepped foot on a golf course. For me it’s Porsches. They make me smile.
On Christmas day, I sat in the passenger seat of my Cayman while Kimberly drove us up the coast and through the twisties of Malibu and back. It was another great installment of our Christmas drive tradition. I made her stop at various points to take pictures. And, of course, I took pictures while she was driving. Our outing really made me smile.
spent a fair amount of my free time the past week working on it. I am about 10% done, meaning I have completed about 86 of 854 steps. Along the way I have gone from a Lego Technic neophyte into a mostly functional builder. My inner nerd has blossomed, though some would say it has never not been blossoming. Either way, I have read Lego blogs. I have watched and re-watched lots of YouTubes about the subject. I have made some mistakes, but I have fixed them before I got too far along. I have been enjoying the build process. And guess what, I have been smiling as I build it.
My gift arrived a couple of days ago. It was heavy, heavier than I could have guessed. I opened the boxes carefully, as the packaging is really nice. I knew I was going to be in for a lot of work to put this together, but I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. As I have written about earlier, I am a Lego newbie, and this would be my first project. I saw nothing wrong with this, even if it was like learning to dive by going up to the 10 meter board instead of just diving off the pool deck. With the box opened I took out the instruction manual, marveling that it contained 854 steps and was over an inch thick.
g out cellophane bag after cellophane bag containing hundreds of tiny plastic objects that in no way resembled any Lego pieces I had ever seen, I reassessed the challenge that constructing this model was going to present. Pam just looked at the parts and laughed. I just look at the parts and gulped, as they resembled three dimensional hieroglyphics to me.
n Saturday I got more serious and hunkered down for a couple of hours. As the crow flies, I completed up through step 26 out of 854. Of course, my build did not go as the crow flies. Instead, I had to backtrack several times as I realized that I had used a wrong part. So I guess I completed about 45 steps in total by the time I finished for the day, but only 26 counted. The good news was that by then I had a pretty good understanding about how to read “Visual Lego.” The fundamental problem I encountered was that I had unintentionally used the wrong part a couple of times. The manual has lots of detailed pictures of tiny parts. The problem for me was that pictures have so little detail that it was difficult to distinguish one part from another based on the pictures in the manual. Then I got smart and googled the instruction manual. I found several YouTubes that walked through each page of the manual in a video. but they added absolutely no value to me. Then I found a pdf of the manual. This find was priceless, as it enabled me to zoom in on the pictures, which gave me a little better sense of what I had to find.
Kelsea Ballerini is a young artist in every sense of the word. She is in her early 20s, and this is her first tour as the headliner. This was the first time we saw her perform live. We tried to get tickets to see her last year when she performed at the Troubador, an iconic, but tiny, 500 person venue on the West Hollywood and Beverly Hills border, but it was sold out. So we were happy to see that she was coming back to Los Angeles, and Pam purchased our seats as soon as they became available. In the months leading up to the show, Pam and I had questions about the playlist, as the show was being billed as a holiday show. We both had assumed it would be a regular concert with maybe a holiday song or two in the mix. We were wrong. It must have been billed as a holiday show because it was near the holidays, not because she played any holiday music, which she didn’t and which was just fine as far as Pam was concerned, as she is not the most ardent of holiday music fans.
Kelsea Ballerini took the stage a little while later. She made a dramatic entrance from a door strategically positioned in the middle of the stage. It was a sign that she has spent a lot of time developing her performance style and persona. Her showmanship and stage presence are spot on. She should spend a little more time with her sound board, though. LIke many young artists who have had hits on the radio but have not toured extensively, her team does not mix her songs well as she performs them live. In her case the mix was not far off, but the drums and guitars did overwhelm her vocals on several of the songs. In addition, she came across as screaming instead of singing on a few numbers. This is really unfortunate, as she has a great voice and is an excellent live singer. As usual, the highlight of the show for me was the portion of the show where she sat on a stool and played acoustic guitar. During that time she covered “Tennessee Whiskey” by Chris Stapleton, arguably a very difficult undertaking, but one she pulled off with absolute perfection. I love Chris 
Stapleton’s version, but, if pressed hard enough, I would probably say I liked her version a tad better. She was just that good.
. Unfortunately for me it was cold and windy late Friday afternoon. I was in shorts and flip-flops as I washed it. Pam thought I was nuts. She was right. I did freeze, but I got it washed and dried, tucked it in for the night with its cover on, and told it to get a good nights rest.
ews was that the 912 ran great, enabling me to cruise at 70 to 75 MPH all the way without any issues. When I drive the 912, I drive very differently than when I drive my Cayman GTS. In the Cayman, I am able to react to situations as they occur and use the accelerator in a defensive as well as offensive manner. In the 912, I have to plan ahead, far ahead, as my accelerator is essentially useless as a defensive tool, meaning I cannot accelerate out of trouble. I can only slow down to avoid it. As a result, I drive very passively and assume all other cars are going to cut me off or f**k with me one way or another, forcing me to slow down when I expect it least. Sometimes it is even fun to watch the expressions of disgust on the other drivers as they sit behind me and look for opportunities to get past me.
Sunday morning also dawned clear and cold, but I only had to drive a mile or so to the gym, so I was not concerned about the cold. As I walked behind the 912, I noted that something had leaked overnight. So after berating myself for jinxing the car the day before, I just left it where it was parked, moved Pam’s and Kimberly’s cars out of the driveway, started the Cayman and drove to the gym, enjoying the heat as it permeated the cabin. Despite the warmth I was somewhat chilled by the unknown issue causing the leak and felt the 912 Blues beginning anew.
there since the summer of 1968, at the same time the Chicago Eight, later known as the Chicago Seven, were arrested in Chicago for demonstrating at the Democratic National Convention. Our vacations the past five years or so have consisted of beaching ourselves on either the island of Maui or Hawaii and just chilling in the tropical heat, something at which I am decent and something at which Pam excels. This year we wanted to make a change, and Pam said she wanted to go to New York. Neither of us felt the need to go for a week, so we opted to go for a long weekend, and thankfully John and Kris quickly said they would love to go and act as our tour guides
.
For a long time I put off thinking about New York. It’s not that I didn’t want to go. It was just that I did not have a compelling reason to do so. So after the New York planning was over, Pam and I spent the summer and early fall going to a series of concerts. We also had an amazing return trip to Nashville, where we spent an extended weekend eating some great southern food, speaking on the radio (again), buying some cowboy boots, playing around on some cool Marine armament, watching a Tennessee Titan game, and, of course, spending an inordinate amount of time in the bars listening to country music.
the sights. We enjoyed the play we saw, and with the help of a couple of Pam’s elbows, I managed to stay awake through 99% of it. And, we enjoyed the food we ate at the restaurants they selected. We were thankful that they orchestrated reasonably warm, dry weather, which enabled us to walk with impunity all over the place, see the leaves still changing colors in Central Park and watch the retailers getting their holiday windows ready. Moreover, I relished the fact that they even humored me with respect to the New York experiences I really wanted to have, which included walking on Mulberry Street, eating Pizza (Lombardi’s and Ray’s), eating Corned Beef (Carnegie Deli which is closing its doors at the end of the year) and eating Bagels (No Name Stand in Chelsea Market).
Last, but not least, was our unexpected trip to the Lego store at the Rockefeller Center. After I got over the postage stamp size of the ice rink and the immense size of the Christmas tree adorned with scaffolding, enabling the workers to decorate it, I announced that I wanted to go into the Lego store. Pam, Kris and John found this amusing. Frankly, so did I. I am too old to have played with Legos in my youth. Our girls were never interested in them so we have never had them in the house, and we have never gone to LEGOLAND. But Lego recently came out with a 2,700 piece scale model of a Porsche GT3, and, given my Porsche obsession, I really wanted to see one. So they all humored me some more, and in we went. Even though it has a somewhat exorbitant price tag, I have a feeling I may see one again in the near future, most likely long before I see New York again.