Funk Babblings

Those of us in the Great Lakes states can easily forget that we're actually living in border states -- Canada is just across the lake.

With that in mind, I was interested to learn that not only will passports be required (rather than just drivers license and birth certificate) to cross the Canada border by air starting in 2007, and by land starting in 2008, but that the passport requirement is not planned to apply to crossing by ferry or private boat. There are a LOT of private boats crossing between the US and Canada on the lakes every day.

If I were the type of person to be paranoid about terrorist attacks, I might start worrying about attacks on Cleveland -- or the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant. Instead I'm more interested in the quickest and easiest way to flee the country if and when necessary. Well, I'd also just like to go see Toronto sometime.

Still gotta find my birth certificate though. And I've been intending to get a new passport anyway for a year now; the one I got when I was 17 is long-expired, and I'm hoping to avoid a passport with an RFID chip.

I've been trying to pay more attention to what bands are coming to the Cleveland-Akron area (forget Canton, nobody comes here), and my calendar has taken an unexpected shape. Three weeks in a row there are shows that interest me on Wednesday nights. Then a Thursday.

I happened to recall this fact around 8 last night, just in time to check the calendar and see that in fact the series started last night with The Reputation playing at the Beachland Tavern. The show was scheduled to start at 9, with two opening bands, so I figured if I got there by 11 I'd be fine, and I'd probably be home a bit after 1. I was right, amazingly enough.

I got there at about a quarter till 11, and the second band was still playing. Soon Elizabeth from the Reputation saw me and came over to chat a bit, but I couldn't hear most of what she was saying. (This is a big reason I don't have any close friends in the indie rock world even though I sorta know a lot of people -- it's always too loud for a conversation. It's also one of many reasons that trying to meet people in bars isn't a good thing.) The Reputation went on shortly after 11, and I noticed that Elizabeth hadn't set up a keyboard; unusually for this band, it was to be an all-rocking set with no slow piano-driven songs. (I like the fast songs best.) Along with my favorites from their two CDs, I counted four great new songs; the last of them took me until the chorus to get into, but after that I was totally hooked. There were only about two dozen people in the place, most of which were at the bar instead of in front of the stage, so it was quite the intimate show.

Afterward I hung around a bit, waiting for a chance to talk to Elizabeth without a band playing, but of course everyone wanted to talk to her. Eventually she actually told people she needed to go talk to me. She was marveling that I was the person there that had been going to see her play the longest, since I was a fan of her old band, Sarge, and saw them play a couple times in Columbus in the mid-late 90s. Of course, there still wasn't time for much of a conversation, since I had to get home to bed and she had lots of others to talk to (not to mention packing up the gear).


Next Wednesday is The Sounds at the House of Blues. I've never been to the House of Blues, and I'm not that familiar with the Sounds, so I'm not sure if I'll go to this one, but when I heard them I liked them.

The following Wednesday is Watershed, a favorite Columbus band I've been going to see since 1993, playing at the Beachland. This is pretty much a must for me.

And then the following Thursday, again at the Beachland, is Kathy Valentine & The Impossible. Kathy Valentine was the bassist for the Go-Gos, which is why this one interests me.

Well, I went to Notacon yesterday after all. I decided it was worth $100 to have a new experience, outside Canton, and possibly hang out with people.

( And I was right. )

Unfortunately I never got a chance to get contact info for the new friends I'd made.

I've thought it might be fun sometime to go to Notacon in Cleveland ever since I learned about it at the first Ohio LinuxFest a few years ago. But I never seriously considered going until this year. I even got on the mailing list and was alerted as $50 pre-registration was closing a week or two ago. I figured I wasn't sure about going, I'd probably only go for one day if I did go, and I was too busy to bother pre-registering.

Of course I discovered that this was a mistake.

Today I looked at the schedule and some some things that would be really interesting to attend. I'm also thinking that going there next Saturday could be the sort of fun I could really use right now. Then I saw that to register at the door is $100, with no lower-cost day-passes. I think it would be fun and interesting, but I'm not sure I'd get $100 worth of fun and interesting out of one day.

Ah well. Two months until Marcon in Columbus. And nontacitare already took care of the pre-registration and hotel there, so I can't mess that up. I think this year I'll check out more of the music than I have in the past.


In other geeky news, I think I finally got my 5-year-old laptop all set up with Kubuntu running on its new hard disk. (Maybe I should update my web page about it.) So far it seems to be working better than ever; for example I might not even need to use a PCMCIA card to get public wireless access anymore, just hit a key to activate the wireless adapter on the back cover. It's kind of odd seeing its old hard drive sitting bare on top of my other machine, hooked up through an IDE-to-USB adapter -- especially when it whirs to life as I read data from it.

Friday evening I went up to Cleveland to see Room Nineteen and the Prodigals at the Grog Shop, sans nontacitare, who likes the music but not the process of driving an hour to a bar and standing around for a few hours. Unfortunately I didn't check the starting time of the show until after 7, when I discovered that it was scheduled to start at 8. It takes about an hour for me to get to Cleveland, plus a bit more to get to the east side neighborhood where the Grog Shop is, and attempting to follow the Grog Shop's unclear directions didn't help either. (On the last part, luckily the part where I diverged was close enough that my previous knowledge of the neighborhood got me there easily.) On top of all that, this was my first time going to the Grog Shop since their move to the opposite end of the Coventry Rd strip (to a former BW-3 location), and just figuring out which door to enter was difficult.

So I got there at about 7:40, in time to hear Room Nineteen's last two songs. Both were old songs from when they had Fletch in the band doing backing vocals, and it was interesting to hear the songs without her voice. But I really wished I'd made it there earlier.

The Prodigals were up next, on tour to promote their sixth CD. The last time I saw them was sometime in the late 90s at the Dublin Irish Festival, when they had only two CDs out. They were about what I remembered and expected, but with some rhythm section personnel changes, including an amazing bassist keeping up with the accordian note-for-note. (I could barely hear the guitar at all most of the time, but this is hardly a guitar-driven band.) I ended up buying three more CDs, omitting "Live at the Beachland Ballroom". But I got too tired to stick around for their second set -- and it was only 11:30 when I left.

At that point I noticed that the Coventry Rd strip really needs more late-night restaurants, considering the late-night bars there. A La Bamba ("Burritos as big as your head, open till after the bars close") would be great there, since Que Tal seems to close at 11. It seemed that my only choice for dinner at that point was a pizzeria. (My original plan had been to stop at Chipotle or Baja Fresh in Akron on the way to Cleveland, but my late start eliminated any hope of that, and they close at 10 or 11 too.)

Going home I attempted to follow the official directions (backward) that I'd only partially successfully followed to get there, but got fairly lost. Luckily my basic knowledge of Cleveland geography (E. 114th St is more west and closer to downtown than E. 116th St, and so on) became useful, so I was able to head in basically the right direction and eventually get to the freeway.

Hey cool, Room Nineteen is playing Friday at the Grog Shop in Cleveland, along with Celtic rockers The Prodigals. I might get to drag nontacitare to this one....

This Friday is one of those many times when I wish I could be in two places at once....

( Bob Mould in Cleveland )

( Room Nineteen in Columbus )

( Saturday, Cleveland and Canton )

A few more ideas for what to do this weekend, for those in Ohio anyway....

( Cleveland/Akron )

( Columbus )

If I were going to be in Columbus Saturday night (not Friday as I first said), I'd be at Skully's for the Third Annual Joe Strummer Memorial Clash Benefit Marathon. It starts a 6:30 with a showing of the film Rude Boy, followed by 16 bands performing three Clash or Joe Strummer songs each. I'd especially want to see The Secret Sound Of The NSA and Red Dahlia (whose music is much better than their web site design).

You say you're not in Columbus? Are you west of Ohio? Well, The Reputation may be coming to your town soon. For example:

• Sun Mar 13 - Lawrence, Kansas
• Thu Mar 17 (my anniversary!) - Austin, Texas (SXSW, which I want to go to someday)
• Sat Mar 26 - San Francisco

Say hi for me. :-)

Update: A bit closer to home, the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland has a couple notable shows this weekend.
Tonight (Friday) is a(nother) reunion of Columbus punk legends the New Bomb Turks. (I doubt I'll make it; besides being exhausted from work this week and not likely up for NBT punk, tonight is also the Canton Drum Circle Meetup, which I haven't been able to get to yet.) Tomorrow night (Saturday) is Alex Chilton, who I first knew only through the Replacements' great song about him, but later through his Big Star songs like "September Gurls", "Don't Lie To Me", and "In The Street" (which became the basis for the theme to "That 70s Show").

1. I managed to miss the Cleveland date of the Warped Tour this year. Oops. Ah well, I can stand to save the money (about which I may have more to say later). The Columbus date is Aug 17, but (among other things) I'm planning to be at Pennsic then.

2. After they finish the Warped Tour, Bowling For Soup is apparently coming to Canton to play a September 11 show at the local former minor-league ballpark (which I didn't even known existed). This is really cool, but seems very weird to me; I feel like there's more to this story that I'm missing.

Update: BFS is the headlining act of a local radio station's "All American Music Weekend" day one.

3. I often tell people that the best thing about living in Canton (compared to Columbus, at least) is being only an hour from Cleveland. I was reminded of this when I saw the schedule for the Vote For Change Tour. At this writing, Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., and John Fogerty are scheduled for five dates. One is in Cleveland (Oct 2), one is in Ann Arbor (Oct 3), and the rest are nowhere near Ohio. And the $25 tickets go toward fighting to defeat Bush.

And speaking of Springsteen, John Kerry's use of his song "No Surrender" at his acceptance speech last week was kind of interesting to me. It comes from the Born In The USA album, which of course was Springsteen's hugest album and got mounds of radio airplay. So much so that I never bothered to buy the album; I figured I'd already gotten sick of half of it being overplayed on the radio, plus the misplaced jingoism that surrounded the album turned me off. So I knew "No Surrender" only from the quiet acoustic version on the Live 1975-1985 album, and I've always loved the song even though I normally prefer rockers like "Cadillac Ranch". Well yesterday I finally bought Born In The USA, and I was amazed that "No Surrender" is a rocker there! So now I like the song even more. (The other non-hits on there are great too, though I still skip over the overly-anthemic title song.)