McLaughlin I ain't

But: Charles, your thoughts on the Beach Boys' "Sail On Sailor," plz.

Good word

"But what's the good of lovin' John Travolta/If he's always draggin' you through the mud?"

--June Carter Cash

Their song?

The World's Greatest Lovers are playing a wedding this weekend, and the happy couple has asked us to perform April Wine's classic power ballad, "Just Between You and Me."

I'm so fucking stoked to play some fucking April Wine! That was my favorite song when I was ten.

Good word

"In later years I was often asked what great new idea my economic team and I brought to economic policy making. Rather than give a complicated explanation of the bond market/deficit-reduction strategy, I always gave a one-word answer: 'arithmetic.'"

--Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 537

Urgh

Work has had me running scared for what seems like ages. I remember a time when I blogged expansively, but now it's all I can do to throw up some silly link. I promise once things settle down, I'll get back to my good old habits. Of course, that may not happen till I retire or get a nice cushy state job.

Dispatch from the front

Last night's World's Greatest Lovers show at the Crystal Corner went well, and now that the Hometown Sweethearts are on long-term hiatus, it's all World's Greatest Lovers, all the time (well, every Tuesday at 9:30).

Something clicked last night. I'm not sure what.

But I'm not going to get too heavily into specifics: musicians too often do endless post mortems of their shows, and it's a trap I prefer to avoid. Except that the standard post mortem is for a show that didn't go well, as when WGL bassist Chris Boeger and I last week played a campfire party that was attended by four people. We swapped theories with the host: "Well, it was the beer tasting party today, and I think some people were up at Kohler for the PGA championship, and damn, it's cold." All of which was true, but again: musicians never have these conversations when a show is successful.

About last night I'll share just this one detail: I sang the Rolling Stones' druggy disco classic "Emotional Rescue" almost entirely in falsetto, and the audience responded with lusty acclaim. Afterward my friend Ed the DJ said he couldn't imagine any other Madison singer pulling it off.

Which was nice of him!

But what about this

A certain gymnast picks up some good vibrations.

Forever plaid

Thanks to Carl I've been thinking more about preppie, which I blogged on last week. I don't have time right now for extensive analysis, but it seems to me the preppie fad of the very early 1980s had a lot to do with the last gasps of disco and the counterculture: after all that excess, bland, expensive predictability had a lot of appeal. Reagan captured this mood perfectly.

(I may just have Reagan on the brain since Ereck and I caught up with the TV movie The Reagans this weekend--you know, the controversial one from last year starring James Brolin and Judy Davis, the one CBS yanked. (Four stars to the movie, by the way. Judy Davis is a genius. I don't, however, recommend the Madison public library's DVD. It has issues.))

Apropos of preppie and other early 1980s fads, I wanted to share this page from my fifth grade yearbook (Suzanne Cobb, ed., The Chalice (American Yearbook Co., 1982), 13). At the time, I went to Goodpasture, a fundamentalist Christian K-12 in Nashville, Tenn., so the page is about high schoolers and their fashions. The slipshod yearbook layout is priceless, as is the quaint approach to copyediting.