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Country Sad Ballad Man: London
Calling... Collect. Michael Ross, 03/20/05 |
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(The following are impressionistic notes
pertaining to rock and roll and tourism last week. Rest assured, more was
done than just the following lines.- MR) The kid sitting across from us on the Central Line is talking about lucid dreaming. He's carrying on about how someone he knows went through this whole routine to time his experiments just right and how it apparently worked. Maybe this sums up how I spent the last week. It sure doesn't seem like I actually went anywhere- at least not by this afternoon- and I was a world away. Half a world, anyway. The second day spent up the road from Hyde Park, we spent time at the British Museum and the British Library. My wife Lindsay and I were in the presence of Lennon and McCartney's first drafts, the Sinai Codex, The Origins of the Species notebooks, Beethoven's Ninth, Handel's Messiah, and the Magna Carta, and I couldn't process it all. It's funny- James Joyce's work seems to make more sense in his handwriting than in print. It's true. That night, my brother gave us a call inviting us to a pub. He was there on a school trip, whereas Lindsay and I are on our own. We accepted and started prepping to get out the door as he gave us a second call. He couldn't in good conscience invite us out without warning me: Wilco was performing across town. I deferred to family, citing my 4/25 tickets in Bricktown- besides, our trip was somewhat on the cheap, so tickets would've blown the budget. At night, as I updated my journal and watched the BBC, I started listening to the iPod on shuffle- it decided that I needed to hear a disproportionate amount of Big Star and Moon Mission Death Squad. I traveled across the sea to listen to Mason Weaver, apparently. We made a series of pilgrimages. Rough Trade, the Alexandria Library of all things indie, was a stop. Their monthly selection was the mix compiled by The Flaming Lips. I started browsing around and it dawned on me: Rough Trade is a whole lot like Size Records, only smaller. And British. I bought an alt-country compilation featuring X, American Music Club, Calexico, and plenty of others- it's what I'm listening to as I write. The one splurge we made was the obligatory visit to the Hard Rock. Yes, the Hard Rock Cafe chain may be more a part of the problem than the answer, but the London location is like Graceland: you have to go, if only for the vault tour. Post-meal, a ticket is issued entitling the bearer to a tour of the vault across the street. After waiting in the gift shop (which did display a David Byrne guitar- nice), we ventured down into the depths with an addled ex-roadie who employed a very liberal hands-on policy with the artifacts. It's not every day that I get to take a photo with my wife wearing Cobain's "Audrey Hepburn" sunglasses and holding the Kurt/Courtney wedding cake topper (I wore Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline hat.) Incidentally, the food was very good and the service was the best we received the entire trip, so there's some redemption. (Thanks, Julia.) As I walked through the Tate Modern, I started equating the art on display with the trip and with what I missed at home. Mark Rothko's work was The Hex, all gauzy and suggestive. Julian Opie's "You Are Driving a Volvo" was a Moon Mission performance, while Warhol's Jackie O. portraits were the Twenty Minutes to Vegas disc. It hit me while I was doing this odd math: London, for all its history and mythology, was no more viable a "rock town" than Oklahoma City. Their radio was every bit as crappy as ours; just because they gave us Pulp doesn't give them a pass for absolute garbage like Girls Aloud. There may be more clubs, but there also was a higher population. Still, we've got every component that they've got: kids with guitars. Kids with keyboards. Kids with drum kits. Plus, we had something they didn't: kids with more heart and soul and drive and fire than self-consciousness or NME-envy. I couldn't wait to get home and goad the students at my school playing in garage bands. I came home this weekend with hope. Hope, and the new Graham Coxon album- they do still get better albums before us sometimes. Lucid dreaming? Maybe, but I'm wide awake now. Crank it up. |
| Previous editions of Country Sad Ballad Man: |
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Dispatch from the front,
five years after -
February 25, 2005 Karl Hass - February 8, 2005 They Don't Love You Like I Love You - October 5, 2004 CSBM Returns - September 14, 2004 Sometimes Hipness Is What It Ain't - July 21, 2004 Reflecting Off Of Your CD - May 20, 2004 Oh Well, Nevermind - April 26, 2004 Fixing the Leak - April 6, 2004 End of First Quarter Report - March 10, 2004 Super Bowl Analysis - February 3, 2004 Liz, it used to mean something when you said "f*ck." - January 7, 2004 The Original - December 17, 2003 |
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