Even I am not immune to the year-end listing process. Here’s my list of favorite/best shows of 2011. It’s so skewed as to representative of nothing except my particular universe – but it’s not like I’m pretending that 2012 isn’t going to be a laundry list of Springsteen and Afghan Whigs shows.

1. Twilight Singers, San Francisco
2. Wild Flag, Bell House
3. U2, Montreal night 1
4. Big Audio Dynamite, Roseland
5. Horrible Crowes, Bowery Ballroom
6. Twilight Singers, Webster Hall
7. Gaslight Anthem, Asbury Park Convention Hall [I feel the need to footnote this show by pointing out that it was amazing before Bruce showed up.]
8. U2, Giants Stadium
9. Bryan Ferry, Beacon Theater
10. Patti Smith & Lenny Kaye, St. Mark’s Church

If you liked my best shows of 2011 you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

The video above is Jesse Malin onstage at the Stone Pony Saturday night. Yes, that is me, singing along in the background, even though I was taping. I hit record because I was anticipating some kind of hopeful rumination about Paul Westerberg or the Replacements or something similar. Instead I watched a bunch of people stand and stare at the stage.

I continue to remain amazed that in 2011 that “Bastards of Young” is not canon, that it is not mandatory, that everyone in the world does not know the words to it. Or even at least a Jesse Malin audience who presumably bought the covers record for which this was the lynchpin (as per Jesse), that they would know this song. I remain amazed that the Replacements continue to fade from view, that people don’t know and don’t care and don’t care to know. I am like one of those old people who remembers when things were one way and they still think things are that way, because in my day everyone I knew loved the Replacements (or made a conscious decision that they did not) and they were huge and important and hugely important, they were massive, they were the kind of thing you planned your life around, an album, a tour, a show, a television appearance was like a national holiday of some sort.

You argued. You defended. You loved passionately – or, quite possibly, you hated them passionately and would argue and defend your opinion just as vehemently as I would defend my love for them. You cared, one way or the other, you cared. I would have applauded a raised middle finger over standing around looking bored complacency. Back in the day, I saw more than a few raised middle fingers in the middle of Replacements audiences.

(And before you get all “What do you want for a Pony audience on a Saturday when 75% of them were staring at the stage door the entire time, waiting for Springsteen to walk in” [which was, sadly, true] this has happened at Irving Plaza too.)

These days, no one gives a fuck. And I don’t know how you can listen to music or care about music and not give a fuck about the Replacements, because I guarantee you that the people you are listening to right now would not be doing what they are doing without the Replacements.

This ties in nicely to one of my pet causes these days, Gorman Bechard’s documentary on the Replacements, Color Me Obsessed. [Full disclosure: I was interviewed for, and appear in, this film, and am a supporter via Kickstarter as well.] Conveniently, his most recent blog entry talks about the day they interviewed none other than Mr. Jesse Malin.

Maybe this movie will help. At least it will make me feel better that I have done something to help keep the Replacements alive in people’s minds.

If you liked Jesse Malin & “Bastards of Young” you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

Just picked up one of those little Crosley turntables at Target. I have the turntable and the stereo in the living room, but there ain’t that much room in a NYC apartment. It’s got speakers and it closes up just like my mom’s old RCA and has a handle and everything. It’ll do for the occasional vinyl indulgence in my office.

On the turntable for its initial spin was the 45-only release of Greg Dulli’s tribute to Eddie Hinton. His cover of “Hard Luck Guy” is breathtaking. Dulli should get a Guggenheim to be able to work with horns for the rest of his career.

If you liked viva la vinyl you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

When the band broke up, my first thought was “I’ll never get to see Matt Cameron play drums again” and, well, we know how that turned out. But there’s a difference between playing on that stuff and playing Soundgarden music. I snuck through Seattle alleys and darkened under-curfew streets to see Kim Thayil play live with Jello Biafra during the WTO riots. I flew to San Francisco to see Chris Cornell’s first solo gig at the Fillmore. I will believe it when I see it, but there is part of me that is just OVER THE MOON.

The shot above is from the 6/20/96 gig at the Showbox, right before they left for Lollapalooza. At 4pm on a Friday, tickets went on sale at the Blockbuster above Queen Anne. I got in line at 3pm the day of this show. The problem with Soundgarden, of course, is that the audience is full of Pantera wannabes. I have photos from Lolla 96 at the Gorge where the pit looks like Scylla and Charybdis were inside of it. I worry about it being emotionally void. But I also know that I will go once just to find out for sure.

I will also remind you of the site that set the standard for what a band website COULD be: The Unofficial Soundgarden Homepage, where I had to go to dig out that photograph. And you would have to have been a member of SOMMS to understand the headline of this post. For that reason, I will not explain further.

If you liked FREE KIM THAYIL. you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

When Soundgarden broke up, my first thought was “I’ll never see Matt Cameron play drums again, this makes me incredibly sad” (and we all know what happened there), and the second one was, “I’ll never see Kim play guitar again.” Yes, extreme, but it was sad (yes, Soundgarden fans could be sad).
This incredible link is to a story about the only time I saw Kim Thayil onstage post-SG. It was during the WTO riots in Seattle, downtown was effectively closed, but yet there was a show at the Showbox with Kim Thayil playing in a band with Jello Biafra and Krist Novoselic. I wasn’t going to go, I was going to go, I wasn’t going to go, and then someone on KEXP stated: “If you have somewhere to be downtown, you have a legitimate reason to be there, and the police cannot stop you from going there.” So I picked up the girlfriends and taking a long, roundabout way off of Capitol Hill, we went to the Showbox.

(I was trying to remember just now my reasons for the round-about-ness. If I’m remembering the evening right, we went north to the Ship Canal and then down Eastlake to Denny and then to Alaskan Way and came UP to the Showbox from the water. I have a vague memory of there being a restricted zone of some sort around the Convention Center, and also that there was a Sonics game at Key Arena that was being allowed to continue despite the riots, and figuring we would blend into that traffic.)

We parked on the street and ran to the club, which was half empty. There was a folk singer type of some sort. While I admired the protestors, and in my cranky old age would so be with them now, at the time I was just grateful to be gainfully employed and didn’t have the ability to take the time off work and go protest – I believe that some managers in groups at the Empire told people that if they happened to be “out sick” during the WTO, they would lose their jobs. Now I find that unquestionably lame on my part.

So the folksinger is singing about the WTO, and I guess if he had been good we would have felt differently, but he sucked, and we are there to see Kim Thayil, and we are just waiting for him to start singing about the spotted owls and the salmon next. (I have an email I wrote to friends somewhere, that I am going to go home and try to dig out.)

But next – Kim Thayil! With JELLO BIAFRA. And Krist Novoselic, in a moment he wasn’t in post-Nirvana pompous blowhard mode. It was incredible, and it was an incredible moment, because everyone there had to face the SPD to get there in some fashion, and made a choice to be there, in a shuttered dark desolate downtown Seattle. It was powerful and anarchic and beautiful.

I’m not sure, btw, that this was Novoselic’s combo per se, but he coughed up the video so I’ll give that to him. For me, the night was Kim’s. And it is stil a real tragedy in my mind that he no longer plays guitar on a regular basis.

If you liked kim thayil you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

If you liked pigs are flying somewhere you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

But no, don’t worry, I don’t let myself get off that easy. The original constraint on the project is a little fuzzy, but it involved some definition of definitive. And while I wasn’t old enough to remember this particular shot heard ’round the world, I can still to this day hear this song and imagine that I can remember what it would have felt like to hear the Beatles in real time, in the cold drab grey early 60′s, and how it could completely turn everything topsy-turvy. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” more than any other song symbolizes that moment to me, because it was the first (okay, discography nerds, not The First, but for all intents and purposes, the first), the first glimmer, the first gasp of salvation.

And the fact that they could move a girl more than 15 years after the fact to feel much the same way a 15 year old probably felt in 1964 is a testament to something.

So, a short entry, a shortcut, but there was not much else I could write about this band, and at least I hope this will kick-start the project back into first gear.

If you liked the jukebox project #4: The Beatles – “I Want To Hold Your Hand” you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

This is quite possibly the most longest, pointless bridge in the history of rock and roll, just short of that plodding version of “Sweet Jane” on the Rock and Roll Animal album. I don’t know if it always bothered me (not that I was ever a Doors fan) but right now it’s enough to make me want to hurl the receiver out the window.

If you liked SONGS I NEVER NEED TO HEAR AGAIN, #1 you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

I’ve been struggling over the past few weeks over these two entries, obsessing over my memory, trying to recall any significant detail – or rather, any detail at all – behind my discovery of these two songs that would enable me to write a poignant yet hip essay that would cause all of you to reflect deeply and revisit these two tracks with more depth.

Let’s be real.

My obsession over those two songs at a young age can be boiled down to a few universal rock and roll truths:

1) DANGER = GOOD: I had seen Alice Cooper perform on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (my parents had yet to hire a babysitter I couldn’t bribe to let me stay up) and he looked dangerous as hell, and this girl named Bernadette brought a copy of the record to school and there were PANTIES wrapped around the cover.

2) OBSCURITY = COOLNESS: Aside from Bernadette (who was the only Asian girl in a school where there was one Jewish girl [me] and one African-American girl [adopted]), neither Marc Bolan nor Alice Cooper were teen fodder, and therefore, no one else had heard of them.

3) THEY ROCKED. I just liked how the songs sounded. They made me want to turn the radio up loud and sing at the top of my lungs and made me wish for a car with a FM radio and be old enough to drive it around with the windows down so everyone could hear what I was listening to, like all the big kids did.

By rights, “We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad should also be on that list, because I certainly played it as much as I played any of the above. I’m not sure why it’s not. The danger factor came into play because of that centerfold photo: Mark Farner was scary shit to little girls. They weren’t quite that obscure, because they were, after all, from Michigan, but it was still late night drive time music; you didn’t hear it in the middle of the day.

Don’t worry, I promise more depth in future entries: the Beatles are next, after all. You’re going to wish for brevity by the time I’m done with that one.

If you liked the jukebox project #2 and #3 you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/

But I also remember one Saturday afternoon, glued to American Bandstand, the five of them, dressed in rhinestones and satin and velvet, stacked up in order of height, so adorable –

The Jackson Five.

The way I remember it is probably not the way it happened, or is a mélange of different viewings and my imagination. In my mind, the music starts, that hand running down the keyboard, their backs are to the audience, and then one by one, their arms come up in the air as they spin around and begin to dance. All the while, that innocent, infectious riff plays behind it, the riff that says SMILE!, the riff that says, DANCE!

Which is what it made me want to do, for the first time, in a grown-up way, not in a “You’re so cute, put on a show” way. I craved rhythm and longed for the first time for my skinny gangly limbs to cooperate. I wanted to be cool. This was my portal to being a teenager, like my next-door neighbor Ann, who was 15 or 16 and babysat us, who had a boyfriend with a sparkly orange sherbet-colored Camaro, and had gorgeously long and perfectly straight hair just like Cher (while my mother insisted on chopping mine off somewhere right below my ears). Saturday afternoon, when she came home from shopping, she would open her bedroom window to serenade the neighborhood (such as it was) with Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” at an ear-splitting volume. I wanted to be her so badly it hurt.

Forget the Osmonds, the DeFranco Family, Bobby Sherman and the other teen heartthrobs. Forget, even, my first true love, David Cassidy. This was what I wanted all along. My best friend, Linda Fisher and I would practice the Jacksons’ dance steps in the playground at Hollywood Elementary School. We would hide in the little alcove behind the fifth grade classrooms and practice every recess. She could dance and I could not, mostly because she had a brother in high school who kindly would show her the moves. She didn’t care so much about the Jacksons — she was listening to her brother’s singer-songwriter records, which did nothing for me — but she loved to dance. After school, I would practice by myself in my bedroom until the floor bounced and the record skipped and scratched (a lesson learned) and I had to balance a penny on the turntable arm (I was SEVEN, give me a break). My mother would yell at me to take it outside and so I would perform in the backyard for my brother and sister, a captive audience.

I split my radio listening between WLS, across the lake in Chicago, and at night, Detroit radio. The former was still bubblegum pop, and the latter is where I heard the Jacksons and Curtis Mayfield and Al Green and Marvin Gaye. I dutifully wrote down the names of the songs I liked, and then rode my bike to the library to look for the record albums, or would patiently wait until my mother went to the grocery store. Next door was some kind of general merchandise store and they sold 45′s out of their tiny music department for 44 cents. I would dutifully pick up the top 100 list each week, take out my pink spiral notepad and ask for the names of the songs I had heard, written down in purple ink. Don’t worry, I was not that cool. I was still buying Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods and the Sweet (“Little Willy” got banned from my house by my father after a Saturday I played it 10 times in a row) along with “Freddie’s Dead” and “What’s Going On”.

My parents had skipped me a grade, and that always made me slightly on the edge, not the outcast but kids not sure where or how I fit in. But I knew about the Jackson Five and even about bands I didn’t like or care about. My mother, beginning a tradition that continues to this very day, had seen a magazine in the grocery store with the Jackson Five on the cover and bought it for me, and began bringing home copies of Tiger Beat or 16 or the other teen photo glossies. So I knew the names of the brothers and the titles of the songs, I could tell you their favorite colors and what they liked in a girl and their favorite snack food. At lunchtime, I would sit in the cafeteria and recite this information matter-of-factly, by request, while munching on a carrot stick. I didn’t become the cool kid overnight, but I discovered that my possession of this information made my classmates grant me a respectful distance, since I clearly had found a bridge into a world that was still beyond them. It was that first drive to go beyond, to want more than just what I heard on the radio.

And slowly, I could almost pull off the moves, not as well as Linda could, but well enough to perform them together with her in the middle of the playground next to the monkey bars. We weren’t putting on a show so much as we were just confident enough to move our practice area out into the public eye.

It was the first moment when I became “That Girl Who Likes [insert name of band here].” It was the first time I was obsessed with something that no one else around me understood, that I could barely find words to describe. It was the first time I felt that something was mine and mine alone.

My favorite part, still, is at the very very end as it’s fading out, when Michael abandons his sweet falsetto and just SCREAMS: “OH! OH! OH! I want YOU back!” Over and over again, I would move the turntable arm just to hear those last 30 seconds, the 30 seconds of sheer ebullient excitement that captured everything I felt about the song.

Almost 20 years later, I was driving from Seattle to New Jersey and back again, and on the way back west, I route myself up from Indiana into Michigan, and try to drive the roads back to our old house from memory. I parked out front and talked to my father via cell phone about how big the trees were and how small the house seemed. The sidetrack was more out of curiosity and because the place was so out of the way, there would be no reason to be near there accidentally. But the emotions hit me, hard, not because it was my birthplace or because I had lived there all that long (our sojourn in Michigan was only five years), but because (and I am stealing this from something I wrote about that trip) that was the place where the girl I would become was born.

The girl in the backyard, learning to dance to the Jackson Five.

If you liked the jukebox project #1: The Jackson Five – “I Want You Back” you may be interested in my novel, "B-sides and Broken Hearts": http://www.bsidesandbrokenhearts.com/