Now, this was a very long time ago, I was in my early twenties and still pretty stupid considering the events that transpired in this little story I’m about to tell. My friend and I had been out pretty much all night, hitting the bars and the pool halls looking for something….anything to do. Needless to say we were pretty tore up, a lot of beers drank and a lot of smoke passed between us.

Nothing really spectacular happened during the night, we meet friends and hung out; we made some friends and hung out, the usual stuff that young men do in a semi-small town where there are quite a few bars and a few pool halls. At the end of the night (or the beginning of the morning however you want to look at it) we headed home, in a car, in our condition, it wasn’t the brightest thing we’d done that night. But everything ended well.

While we were driving home, it was very foggy and my buddy was driving and like I said we were tore up. So we’re driving along, my friend practically had head against the wind shield, now whether it was due to the fog outside or the fog inside his head, I don’t know. But suddenly he sits back and waves his hand in front of his head like he’s swatting a fly and says:
“Man, you got to put that cigarette out, I can’t see shit.”

Well, I look around just to be sure no one else is in the car and once I see there isn’t I look at him and say:
“Mother Fucker, I ain’t smoking, it’s foggy outside!”
He looks at me and says: “Oh”
That’s it, nothing else was said, and he went back to driving with his head against the windshield.

A few minutes later, he says:
“Whew, I need to slow down.”
I look out the window and watch the road SLOWLY pass beneath us, I didn’t say anything, and even though he thought we were going too fast he didn’t make an effort to slow down.

(This story is way funnier when told in person)

Gonna See My Friend and Got Some seem to blend together to me, not that they sound the same but they seem like bookend songs about getting some drugs, when I was a young guy and into that kind of stuff when I would go “score” I would tell people I was going to see my friend, and if I was holding then my other friends would just as if I “got some”, of course I sure I’m way off base with the true meaning of these two songs but that’s the imagery I get when I hear them.

The songs Just Breath through Force of Nature reminds me of the albums between Vitalogy and Riot Act (No Code, Yield, and Binaural), if they were on those albums those albums would’ve been even better, seriously.

The End is THE BEST song I’ve heard from Pearl Jam in a long time, it’s so emotionally raw and orchestra in the back lends to that perfectly, and the way it just stops at the end is gut wrenching. If you’ve ever lost someone unexpectedly then you probably shouldn’t listen to this track.

Thanks you Pearl Jam, thank you for remaining true to your music no matter where it takes you, lord knows that I’ve bitched about it often enough, and thank you for especially for this album.

Pearl Jam - The End

I love music and movies and my new job is kind of in that field (I work in retail now in the Entertainment department). Maybe I’ll post something once a week, possibly a review of a new release no matter what the genre. I don’t even know if the few readers I had are even keeping up anymore, probably not considering the length of time that has passed since the last post. Hopefully some will return in time. If not, I’ll still continue on.

16 Horsepower - Black Soul Choir

But we’re here to talk about Amorica, and there is no wrong doing on it, there isn’t a single bad track, every song on the album is rock n roll platinum, or at the very least gold. From the starting track Gone to the last track Descending. But the best of them, the diamond among diamond is Wiser Time, there’s no getting past this song without feeling something stirring inside.

Amorica is one of those albums that I never really got the original meaning from, but I’ve made it personal to me by relating my own experiences to the songs, if that makes sense, and it’s become a part of me. That sounds a little weird, I think, but there you have it. Only a few albums have affected me the way Amorica has, it’s become a soundtrack for my memories. Every time I listen to it I’m taken back in time to places I’ve long forgotten, sometimes I smile when it happens sometimes I don’t, either way Amorica will always be with me.

The Black Crowes - Wiser Time

www.blackcrowes.com
www.myspace.com/theblackcrowes

Electric Rodeo
Gone To Carolina
Solid Country Gold
Busted In Baylor County
Some Rowdy Women
The Song Is Still Slipping Away
Lonesome Blues
Manifesto No. 2
Manifesto No. 1
Bad Magick

Steady At The Wheel
Southern Comfort
4th Of July/He Stopped Loving Her Today
Little White Lines
Encores:The Freedom To Stay
Hair Of The Dog
It Ain’t Easy
Ain’t Living Long Like This
Daddy’s Farm

*Download flac files*

It’s a poetic album filling each music note with feeling and intelligence. I don’t think there’s a country artist out there today that can compare to the songwriting ability of Ryan Bingham and Roadhouse Sun proves my point more clearly than I could ever do just writing it down, so just listen to it when it comes out June 5th.

My only complaint is that they put what I consider to be the best track on the album, Day Is Done, and they put it at the beginning. Why is that a problem? Because I usually base my expectations for an album on the first track. In this case the first track was the best and I had high expectations for the rest of the album, and it sort of went downhill from there. I felt a little let down but it’s still a good album, like I said, and that should tell you just how good Day Is Done is.

Ryan Bingham - Day Is Done

www.binghammusic.com
www.myspace.com/ryanbingham

I haven’t seen the first two Butterfly Effect films so if I get something wrong please point it out using ridicule and scorn, but from what I’ve read there’s no relation between the films. This was a good movie, still after dark hasn’t given us anything spectacular this year, but this film was okay. The hero, Sam Reide, of the movie can, of course, travel through time by concentrating on dates and times, but repercussions of his time travel have rippled through to his present to cause some very significant problems, namely a serial killer that has been created by Sam’s time travel.

The one thing liked about this movie was the fact that I wasn’t able to guess who the killer was until right before the reveal, and that was only because they practically gave it away, in that regard the film makers get two thumbs up. But that’s the only part that gets two thumbs. The rest of the movie was a little mediocre, the acting was fine, the direction was fine and the story telling was fine. But that’s it, just fine, nothing made me sit up and go “holy shit”, nothing made me jump or contemplate turning the movie off and wait for someone to come home so I wouldn’t have to watch it alone. In my opinion this is another one I would wait for the Sci-Fi Channel to show on a Saturday night.

One other aspect of the film I liked is that it was a close to real life as you could get, no matter how screwed up Sam made things He always jumped back to try and make things better, and I think anyone would do the same in real life, it’s human nature to think we can always make things better. If a person jumped back and inadvertently killed someone, the pain of that thought might make them stop for a little while but one that pain ebbed to a dull ache that person absolutely jump again to try and make things better.

After Dark Horrorfest
The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations

Before the mid 90’s I had never heard of the New York Dolls before, and when I found out that David Johansen was actually Buster Poindexter I was a little surprised and then to see what he looked like I was very surprised, for all intents and purposes they were two different people. I never got around to buying any of the early New York Dolls records but I have heard a lot of stuff through the internet and when they re-formed in 2006 I jumped at the chance to buy the album, their music today is so much better today than it’s ever been, the song writing seems much wiser and deeper, I guess that comes with living and going through the things they’ve been through.

The album starts out slow; it’s pretty much mediocre stuff for the first three or four songs, but after that, things get kicked up to eleven. There’s a line in the track Lonely So Long “Tried to bum a cigarette – nobody smokes no more”, there’s a picture of relevance in today’s society right there if I ever saw one. Drowning is just an awesome song, there’s nothing I can say to you to convey the utter brilliance that exist within the lyrics of the song.

New York Dolls - Drowning

www.nydolls.org
www.myspace.com/newyorkdolls