all your taste is in your mouth

The Christmas CDs — guilty pleasure or not so much?

Now that we’ve all had a chance to listen to the latest set of Christmas CDs, why don’t we share our opinions on each disk? I was thinking, from each disk, we could pick the least guilty (”hey, I really like that song — you shouldn’t feel guilty about liking it”), the most guilty (”I just can’t listen to that one — sorry”), and maybe one other observation, like, on Carl’s CD, the version of that Bread song is not the one we all know and remember — maybe it’s a victim of the long feud between David Gates and James Griffin. I’ll post my comments on Friday or Saturday — I encourage/challenge you all to do the same.

Todd update

When I’m sleeping in on a Sunday morning, I usually try to see who is performing on Private Sessions on A&E. This past Sunday, Hall and Oates were on, and they mentioned this website where folks come to Daryl Hall’s house for a bit of drink, a bit of food and some music. Now, I know Daryl’s not the most popular guy, but the premise seems pretty good, and he’s had some great folks on, including, last month, Mr. Rundgren. They made their own sausages from scratch, they drank martinis, and they played some excellent music (it’s most of the Hall and Oates band, except for Oates). They did a bunch of Todd stuff, including Can We Still Be Friends, which I’ve never actually seen him perform in all the shows we’ve seen, one Hall and Oates song, and a couple of soul classics — Expressway of Your Heart and the Average White Band’s You Got It. He’s also done a session with Nick Lowe, which I haven’t checked out yet. The website is www.livefromdarylshouse.com — give it a once over.

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Hell freezes over … again

Is this one of the signs of the apocalypse? First, hell freezes over and now this. I think I always knew Don Henley was a greedy bastard — this confirms it. Needless to say, I will not be attending this conference.

STEVEN LEVITT DELIVERS KEYNOTE AND DON HENLEY PERFORMS Together, SAPPHIRE and the ASUG Annual Conference provide unparalleled business-critical learning opportunities because they combine current, real-world customer experiential education with visionary insight into future SAP application offerings and business strategies.

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Evoking fond memories or bad cover band

So, for the first blog entry, I’ve decided to discuss a music topic, one that I hope will generate plenty of “lively” discourse. The topic is bands that continue to tour long after they’ve ceased to be relevant, and whether those bands evoke fond memories of days gone by, or have they become just a bad cover band.

Rolling Stone actually ran an article a few issues back called “The Battle of the B-List Bands” which referred to competing bands touring on the “good name” of former big bands, like L.A. Guns, the Temptations, Guess Who and Asia. The article tried to assess which of the competing bands were truer to the band in its hey-day, either in terms of how many original members were currently touring or which band had more essential members. In some of the examples, there was no contest — of the two touring Asia bands, one has all four original members and the other has a guy who for a while filled in John Wetton’s spot as lead singer. Aptly stated by the writer, “if you have to see Asia, go original”.

This got me thinking of other bands who tour on what might have been a big name…

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