bresna

The Cellar closed a while ago... maybe 2015?

And Red Mitchell and Oscar Petersen and Red Norvo and Cab Calloway and Bucky Pizzarelli and Les McCann and Dave Valentin and Mulgrew Miller and Billy Taylor and Barney Kessel... the list goes on.

Looking through Netflix the other night and saw a "new to me" Bruce Willis action flick, "Trauma Center" (2019). Holy cow is this movie bad and Bruce Willis appears stoned or drunk during his (brief) appearances. Even if he was straight-up sober, his performance was cringe-worthy.

I keep meaning to find this LP. I love bari sax and this band looks like a killer. This one might be worth a needle drop.

That Camden Jazz reissue series also had the only digital release of Pepper Adams' "Reflectory" & "Generations":

Found here: https://www.discogs.com/Sonny-Stitt-Constellation/release/9871475

18 now. I was not going to get this because I had most of it but at this price...

I know two people who had the bullseye and 1 that didn't. That's why I said it can be the only visual sign.

I dry brush every record every time I play it. I don't own a record cleaner. Never have owned one and never saw the need to buy one. If a record is particular dirty, I might put some fluid on my D4 brush. That's the extent of my cleaning. BTW - as I've gotten older, I've realized that my finger tip is an excellent tool to get off small pieces of junk that get stuck on a record. With a little skill and a soft touch, I've been able to pick off some pretty tough pieces of gunk off of LPs and my success rate has been pretty good. In most cases, pops and clicks that were present before I got that junk off now play clean.

Lyme's Disease comes from deer tick bites. Was the tick you took off her leg a deer tick? Deer ticks are much smaller than regular wood ticks. They often stay so small that they are gone before the person realizes that they got bit. The telltale bullseye can be the only visual sign that the person got bit at all.

I still love listening to this kind of rock and I am not going to apologize for it. It brings back memories, good and bad. So what? Memories are not inherently bad and having a good memory certainly helps me at work. Speaking of memories... I remember seeing Van Halen before they "hit it big" in the relatively empty concert hall (Palace Theatre in Albany, NY maybe?) shortly after their first album came out. One of my fiends had it on 8-track and we played it on a constant loop (literally) in several of our cars. I bet there were less than 1,000 people in the place. It was incredibly mind-blowing to see Van Halen playing guitar like that. By their next tour after Van Halen II in 1979, the venues & the crowds got bigger. I saw them in Springfield Civic Center in August of that year. The place was packed this time. And I almost died. The floor was "standing room only" (banned at most venues later on after the Who concert fiasco in late 1979 in Cincinnati) so of course I was down there. Me and my friend Teddy managed to push our way to the stage. They had hockey boards in front of the stage and that's where you stopped. Hard. I saw my friend Teddy almost get a drumstick. He caught it but the crowd around him beat him senseless to get it from him. I started getting crushed up against the hockey dasher. I saw a girl pass out next to me. I called over a guard and had him pull her out. I started getting light headed. I called the guy over again and told him I needed to get out or I was going to die there. He said that he'd have to kick me out if he pulled me out of the crowd. I said that I didn't care. He pulled me out and I jumped back into the crowd on the side of the stage before he could kick me out. I think he let me escape, to be honest. The third and last time I saw them live was in 1980 at the Hartford Civic Center just after the 4th of July and it was absolutely nuts. There were fireworks going off everywhere. There was this (completely drunk) idiot two rows in front of me lighting off bottle-rockets by hand. His aim, understandably, was terrible. Most of the things went off within yards of his seat. Lucky they were only bottle-rockets and not M80s. His aim got worse and one went off real close to his seat. This big guy in the row in front of him stood up and warned him to cut it out. Everyone jumped all over the guy and he sank back in his seat. We thought that was the end of it. Well, Einstein decides to light off another one. It goes out around 10 feet, pulls a 180, and shoots straight at the big guy in front of him, blowing up just under his seat. The big guy jumped up, turned around and knocked the idiot out. At one point, I saw a large firecracker (M80 or M100?) go off down by the floor seats, followed by a young girl stumbling away from that area with blood coming out of her ears. It was insane. My girlfriend was with me and she wanted to leave before the show even started. The lights went down and the show started but it didn't go well. In the middle of the second tune, David Lee Roth brought the band to a stumbling halt and demanded the lights be brought up. He went on this diatribe about people throwing money at the stage and finished up with, "Alright you motherfucker... now we got the lights on! Throw the money now and when you people see who it is, throw him up on stage and we're gonna beat the shit out of him!" He then demanded that whoever was throwing money at them to "throw it now". After a few seconds without anything happening, he started screaming, "C'mon you pussy! Throw money at us now and we're going to beat the shit out of you". Nothing. "Throw money at us now you pussy!!" That did it. Money started raining down on them after this demand of the crowd. You could hear the coins bouncing off their heads, clanging off the mic stands, the speakers and the drum kit. Pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters could be seen bouncing all over the stage. It was insane. It was literally raining coins. Roth screamed, "Aww, fuck you all", and the band stormed off the stage. After a half hour of the crowd chanting and screaming and more crazy fireworks, they finally came out and played one more song. Then they stormed off without a word and the house lights came on. The crowd didn't know what was going on and kept clapping and screaming. After all, they only played for about 15 minutes. They wouldn't come back out. The crowd went nuts. Nobody would leave. The place was about to riot. They sent in the police. An announcement was made that there would be no refunds. At the box office, people were lined up 20-30 people deep, all demanding their money back. They never refunded a penny. BTW, I never bought tickets to another Van Halen show again, not that it mattered to them.

As great as some of their tunes were, they really seemed to mock the music video world. Cheesy would be putting it mildly. I don't feel tardy.

Sirius/XM has switched over their "Deep Tracks" channel (channel 27 over the air) to an Eddie Van Halen tribute channel for a few weeks. I've been listening to it a lot lately and truth be told, I had forgotten some of the great tunes these guys made. Sure, there are a few duds in there too, but overall they mostly range from really good to pretty great. There is one song in particular, "Intruder", that now brings a big smile to my face when I think back to the first time I heard it. This short intro to their overplayed cover of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" (which was often skipped over by many FM radio stations) was very unique as far as rock and roll tunes went. I remember thinking, "What the hell is this"?. It's like avant garde Van Halen. It's too damn short though.

I don't know about that... I know a lot of guys that looked worse than that and they weren't rock stars. Life crap maybe? He did seem to turn his life around later, getting cancer can do that, but by then Valerie was long gone.

This is right around when their marriage fell apart. Eddie with taped up shoes looking like a homeless dude... and seemingly proud of it. Very different Eddie from the one she married.