And so Remembering Now is a strong return to form. He's never going to make music like he made in the 1970s again, and that seems an unreasonable expectation from anyone turning 80. But he still sings with soul and verve, and he's written mostly better songs this time around. The band has been around a while, and they are good. He tends to make long records, and if he'd edited out maybe three of them, it might approach perfection. You can read more detailed reviews elsewhere, but suffice it to say that if you gave up on Van Morrison a while back, now might be a good time to check out his new one.
Saturday, July 5, 2025
Van Morrison Remembering Now 2025 ...and Them 1964-1967
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Live Shows Part 2: 1980-2025
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Talking Heads 1983 Blossom Music Center. The show they made the movie of, one of my all time favorites.
The Neville Brothers/Dirty Dozen Brass Band Tipitina's 1980s. This one should be on my top ten list for sure. I always loved them, and they were amazing. Another show I didn't realize was happening in advance. Super hot on a steaming New Orleans night, well into the wee hours.
Various 80s/90s shows:
Robert Palmer x2 at Nautica, and the Odeon. Great showman and singer. Dony Wynn, drummer extraordinaire kept time with great precision no matter who else was in the band.
Bob Dylan/Del Amitri Nautica (I got into Del Amitri later, and only realized that I'd seen them live in retrospect).
Santana at Nautica, Lindsey Buckingham at Peabody's Down Under (in a bar!), The Subdudes Peabody's Down Under, James Brown/Wilson Pickett at The Front Row (they were both fabulous). Peter Tosh Front Row, Bruce Cockburn, Joe Jackson/Todd Rundgren, Moody Blues, Melissa Etheridge x2 Nautica (quite the entertainer, she really rocked).
David Bowie The Coliseum, Michael Jackson The Coliseum, The Grateful Dead The Coliseum (they were terrible), Bob Dylan The Colliseum (The Budokon show, and I liked it a lot), Bob Dylan Akron Civic during his Christian phase, and he and the band were very good.
Dwight Yoakam Blossom Music Center. k. d lang Music Hall, and again later at Cain Park.
Don Dixon and Marti Jones at least five times at Beachland, Music Box, The Empire (funky room, great show, a top ten entry). They were always excellent, especially when they had Jaime Hoover and Jim Brock with them.
Glass Harp reunion Akron Civic Theatre 1997.
Marsha Ball, Erma Thomas, Tracy Nelson 1999 on the Sing It! tour. They were wonderful. To get to see Tracey do Down So Low live took my breath away.
Lucinda Williams x2 The Odeon 2001, Nautica 2004? Smoking hot both times.
Marti Jones/Amy Rigby as The Cynical Girls Beachland Ballroom, Cheryl Wheeler Beachland, Matthew Sweet Beachland, Marshall Crenshaw Beachland, Marsha Ball Beachland, The Proclaimers Beachland, Nick Lowe solo show Beachland.
Wilco/John Doe 2008 Lakewood Civic Auditorium. One of the loudest shows I ever heard. Fortunately I had hearing protection, but when the opener is super loud, you know you're in trouble. Wilco was great even if unnecessarily loud.
John Hiatt The Empire, rocking out with a full band. John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, Joe Ely 2007 State Theatre, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett 2011 Akron Civic. Those last two were songwriter acoustic shows.
Fiona Apple Cain Park 2012. Oliver Mtukudzi, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013. Pink Flamingo State Theatre.
Jazz category:
Ahmad Jamal x2 Purple Onion Toronto 1990, Jazz Alley Seattle 2006. One of my very favorite jazz artists.
Bill Frisell Jenny Scheinman, Greg Leisz 2007 Winchester. Wow. I'm so glad I got to see them in a small bar with an appreciative audience.
Pete Fountain Pete Fountain's Club 1980s, Allen Toussaint/Preservation Hall Jazz Band Music Box 2014, Preservation Hall Jazz Band Severance Hall 2000s, Diana Krall State Theatre 2012, Monty Alexander Nighttown 2010s.
The Cleveland Orchestra, Severance Hall 1995-2025, I've seen the orchestra at least 60 times. I subscribed to 4-6 concerts a year for at least ten years. Around my birthday in February each year they would have "stretch" concerts featuring new or neglected works, and things that were generally challenging. Some were good, others were pretty bad, but the good ones opened my ears to new and unique experiences. But I love Mozart, too. My most memorable series was seeing Mitsuko Uchida play and conduct Mozart piano concertos during the early-mid 2000s. Then the series was repeated from 2008-2015 and recorded for Decca. We saw the shows that were recorded, and of course I bought the CDs as they came out. Uchida's Mozart is beautiful, and her style suits the fluidity of the Cleveland Orchestra perfectly.
I know I have forgotten a lot. See also Live Shows Part 1 1966-1980.
Monday, June 16, 2025
The Beach Boys
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Sly and The Family Stone 1967- 1975
Sly and the Family Stone were as great a band as everything you've ever heard. They broke new ground on several levels, interracially, politically, and most of all in the pursuit of pure funk. You can argue about who invented funk, but Sly and the Family Stone moved funk forward in a seriously big way. And got white folks into it too.
The 1970 Greatest Hits is an indispensable record. Even if you have all of their studio records, you'd still need it for the three great singles that appeared new on the album. Absolutely everyone with any cool at all owned it in 1970.
Other compilations that came later and include the songs on Greatest Hits are strong contenders these days for someone new to the Family Stone, assuming such people exist. For vinyl lovers, the 2009 Music On Vinyl two-disc The Best of Sly and the Family Stone adds a few more tracks and includes a couple from Fresh, which many see as his last great record. The 2003 The Essential Sly and The Family Stone, on two CDs, is even better, as it includes a couple from the 1967 debut A Whole New Thing (Underdog is definitely essential) as well as Small Talk 1974 and one from Sly's 1975 solo debut High On You, plus lots more album tracks that deserve to be heard.
Many would argue that the best way to appreciate the band is in live performance, and there's also a couple of good ways to do just that. Woodstock: Sunday August 17, 1969 from 2019 or The Woodstock Experience from 2009 both include the whole set, and it's easy to see why they wowed the peace and love crowd in upstate New York (Experience also includes Stand! on a second CD). Live at the Fillmore East October 4th & 5th, 1968 from 2015, available as a comprehensive four CD set or a two LP edited version is also killer.
By the way, their criminally neglected debut A Whole New Thing is not a lesser record just because it sold little and didn't really sound like what was coming. It's quite good. It sounds a little like a good War record without the Latin bit.
Dance To The Music is hands down one of the greatest singles of the sixties.
Cynthia and Jerry got a message they're sayin' All The Squares Go Home!
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Live Shows Part 1: 1966-1980

I was never a frequent attendee at live shows, and I never saw any stadium shows at all. I did enjoy seeing artists in theatre-sized rooms, and occasionally in smaller venues like the Cleveland Agora or Beachland Ballroom. I started making a list a while back as a memory exercise, and it's beginning to feel about as complete as I'm ever going to achieve. I'm going to try to be chronological as best I can. Hopefully I'll get the decade right. I did a list of my favorites here if you want to check it out. So here goes:
The Rolling Stones 1966 Cleveland Arena. My older brother's date got sick last minute and my mom made him take me. It's the only time I saw the Stones, and I don't remember much, but I can see the stage in my mind from where we sat. I was 11.
Lemon Pipers, Rotary Connection 1968 Cleveland Music Hall. My brother played bass. I went with my parents. I fell in love with Rotary Connection, and the amazing voice of Minnie Ripperton.
Chambers Brothers 1968-69? Cleveland Music Hall. I loved the Chambers Brothers. They were really good live, very energetic. I think my mom took me.
The Band 1970 Cleveland Music Hall. One of my most memorable concerts. They were outstanding, doing two hours with an intermission and no opener.
Jethro Tull, Lee Michaels, Clouds 1970 Allen Theatre. Michaels was doing the stuff from his eponymous record with just him on B3 and Frosty on drums. They were killer, and very loud. Tull was good too. The weird bit where Ian Anderson wrapped his leg around the mic stand was wacky.
Little Richard, New York Rock Ensemble, several other bands, Cleveland Public Hall 1970. I got too high at this show, and the New York Rock Ensemble got me through the worst of it and saved me from a visit to the ER. They were one hot band.
Fanny, James Gang, Glass Harp, New York Rock Ensemble, some others 1972? Edgewater Park. So I'm very shaky on this, and it may have been two different shows a year apart. Fanny was great live, and everything amazing you've heard about James Gang is true. I absolutely loved New York Rock Ensemble.
Bruce Springsteen 1975 John Carrol Fieldhouse. A top ten show. Before Born To Run was released, and they were, well, early live Springsteen when he was the only guitarist. They did lots of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.
Sons of Champlin, The Tubes 1975 San Diego. I loved and still love the Sons of Champlin. I had no idea they were in town. I was in a record store and bought their new self-released album. The guy at the register asked if I was going that night to see them, and he sold me tickets. Terry Haggerty is one of my favorite guitarists ever. I liked the Tubes more than I thought I would.
Various 70s shows: Loggins and Messina/Little River Band Cleveland Music Hall (Little River band were really good), Average White Band Music Hall, Beach Boys Blossom, Jimmy Buffett (at least three times) Music Hall, Blossom, Stevie Ray Vaughn (and I think B B King on the same bill) Blossom, Boz Scaggs/Melissa Manchester John Carrol Field House, Barnstorm/Todd Rundgren, Starstruck, Kinks (on a bad night) Music Hall, Van Morrison (also a bad night) Music Hall, two bands I absolutely love, and both put on disappointing shows. Morrison was going through some kind of stage fright stage and had his back to the audience most of the night. Ray Davies was just too drunk.
Rockpile/Carlene Carter Cleveland Music Hall 1978. Rockpile were so special, with Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremner, and Terry Williams. As much talent as any other four guys. Carlene was dating or maybe married to Nick, and she was great with them behind her.
Elvis Costello/The Rubinoos The Agora 1979. Costello and The Attractions were just one of the most tight ensembles ever to plow their music into your ears. And the Rubinoos were a blast. Another of the top ten.
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Music Streaming (is killing me)
I started streaming music about a year ago. I bought a Bluesound Node, hired an electrician to run an ethernet line from my router to my living/music room, and subscribed to Qobuz. I don't use the DAC in the Bluesound Node, I use the DAC in my Benchmark DAC3 HGC.
Why Qobuz? Well, Qobuz streams everything in the highest resolution available. I think high resolution audio sounds better than CD, and I find mp3 to be unlistenable. I can check something out with mp3, but it sounds like crap to me on the music room kit. I know that Tidal and some others also offer high resolution streams, but Qobuz is also the service that pays artists the highest royalty rate, although it is still too low. If you want to support artists, listen on a streamer, and then buy what you like on Bandcamp, which actually pays artists reasonably well.
But streaming is killing me because I can no longer keep up with all the music I want to hear. New music listed on Qobuz, old music by artists I've liked but not fully explored, recommendations from music blogs I read, and music reviewed in magazines (I've also started using Libby, a library app which lets me read a ton of magazines).
I have 86 records saved in Favorites in BlueOS, the software interface from Bluesound. A while back I put four that I'd like to get back to on a list on my iPad just to get them out of Favorites. That's 90 records I want to hear again, or which I haven't gotten to yet. Many of them get one listen and are then removed, but if I want to hear them again, I leave them in favorites. There might be a better way to save things or file them to a different list in Roon, I'm not sure. I tried Roon for a while but the BlueOS coupled with iTunes Remote (to listen from my iTunes library on my computer) seemed to do most of the Roon functions, and the additional info in Roon didn't seem all that much better than in BlueOS, especially given the cost of Roon, which is even more than Qobuz. If I want credits or more info, Discogs and Wikipedia do a good job with that. Liner notes would be nice, but I guess I'll get over it.
I have over 1100 vinyl records and over 1300 CDs. Over the years, and with recent purges, I have sold off at least as many vinyl records as I now own and a whole bunch of CDs. I am currently working on putting all the CDs on a hard drive accessible through iTunes. I'm about 1/4 of the way through that tedious job. I still buy vinyl occasionally. I used to take a lot of music out from our local library system to hear it, but streaming has replaced that function almost entirely.
When I want to listen to music I love in the best sound, I listen to vinyl. I know the technical arguments regarding digital music's superiority, but those arguments by themselves don't make music sound better. Maybe it's because I grew up with and never left vinyl. CDs generally sound fine to me unless they were transferred to CD in the mid-late eighties, before record companies and mastering facilities got their act together. I very rarely have bought the vinyl version after I bought the CD. For casual listening or background music (music is never really background music to me), I like the playlists I can find on Qobuz, or ones I have generated myself either in iTunes or Qobuz. Everything in my iTunes is lossless digital. I bluetooth music directly to my hearing aides from my phone at the gym. In my car, I have music on a USB flash drive.
Now I have to go work on catching up on my list of Favorites. I've never used the word "work" when discussing listening to music before now. It's killing me.
Friday, May 23, 2025
Rick Nelson Garden Party 1972
Nelson wrote six of the songs on the record, and they are all solid. The title track is the star, documenting his disappointing experience at an oldies concert at Madison Square Garden. But there isn't a weak song on the record. Rockers Let It Bring You Along, I Wanna Be With You, Chuck Berry's I'm Talking About You (with a jazz middle section!), and the honky-tonking So Long Mama all cook. The ballads are good, too, especially Nelson's Night Time Lady and the closer Palace Guard.
Most of Nelson's work is well worth exploring and available for streaming. As the pinnacle of his country rock records, Garden Party is a fine example of the genre, and just an excellent record by any standard.