Alice’s Restaurant

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant

There are Christmas songs, of course - we are about to be inundated with them ad nauseum in every store, restaurant, and colleague’s office. Hell, Christmas is sort of a black hole of holiday music, even pulling non-holiday, winter songs like Jingle Bells and Let It Snow into its irresistible gravitational pull.

There are Halloween songs as well, of a sort. Monster Mash comes to mind, and as a child of the ‘80’s, Thriller follows close behind. Jonathan Coulton’s Creepy Doll and Re: Your Brains definitely belong on that list. And if you are somewhat liberal with your definitions, this list offers a number of other options.

But what about Thanksgiving? It sits there, nuzzled in-between the two, a paragon of dietary excess masquerading as a harvest festival cum national heritage celebration. But it’s like a red-headed stepchild in the music department, lyrically and melodically unloved.

But not entirely. Enter: Alice’s Restaurant

This epic musical experience by Arlo Guthrie is the answer to anyone looking for a real, true Thanksgiving song. Well, sort of, anyway.

To be clear, it is absolutely a thanksgiving song. The pivotal events take place surrounding a visit to the titular Alice on the Pilgrim holiday, and the fact that it is a holiday is a causal component of everything that transpires. But the "sort of" comes in because it’s also a little like giving a pig a pancake - one does not fully appreciate what can happen when you give a folk singer a pile of garbage until one reaches the end of this 18-minute adventure.

I don’t remember who told me about Alice’s Restaurant. It may well have been a colleague from the brief period of time in college when I worked at the radio station, in answer to the question above: "why aren’t there any thanksgiving songs?"

I do remember when I first heard it, however. This was all back in the day well before streaming music services, before google or search engines or the World Wide Web. I’d mentioned my interest in finding and hearing the song to MLW and, on a visit with her over a college break, I found it waiting for me on CD in the bedroom in which I was staying. She had made a special trip to a private, non-chain record store (kids - go watch the movie High Fidelity for reference here) to ask about it and then order it for me. I was a very lucky young man.

What I discovered that day was an 18-minute long talking song that details Arlo Guthrie’s real-life experience of being arrested for littering, and culminating in his later encounter with the draft board.

Yes - those two things are directly related, and all told in a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek fashion that is just delightful. You just have to listen to see.

It’s a talking song, but with a sung chorus that occurs multiple times through the tale:

You can get anything you want At Alice’s Restaurant. Walk right in, it’s around the back, Just a half a mile from the railroad track. You can get anything you want At Alice’s Restaurant.

My little family will be listening to this at least once, if not twice, on the way to Thanksgiving dinner. And everyone will belt out the chorus each time it comes around.

It’s really the only thanksgiving song, or at least the only one we know. But it’s the only one we need.

Now I have to go and load up the family bus with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction...

Death Growl

I love Heavy Metal.

When I write that, however, I’ve come to realize that I don’t really know what the reader will take away from the term “Heavy Metal”.

Growing up as I did in the 1970’s and 1980’s it was a clearer, or perhaps just simpler picture. I was introduced to this particular genre of music by a friend from around the corner - Chris. He loved it, and he his older brother Jeff, who also happened to be in a band, had what seemed to me at the time a voluminous collection of music, almost entirely in vinyl (as was the fashion at the time). And what appeared in that collection were bands with a characteristic set of sounds. Found ensconced in that music library was the likes of Judas Priest, Ozzy Osborne, Iron Maiden, Sammy Hagar, and Mötley Crüe, among others.

This music immediately spoke to the early-teenage me. Hard driving guitar work and pounding drum lines gave direction to an otherwise unfocused (and unfounded) adolescent male need for rebellion and and conflict. This was further bolstered by lyrical content that was often focused on themes of science fiction, fantasy, and historical events that spoke to me in ways far more relevant at the time than the vacuous topics of love gained, lost, or unrequited that dominated music played on the airwaves.

Those stories were typically told in a voice falling in the tenor range - first tenor, to be specific - often with an emphasis on the operatic, often wailing heights those tenors could reach. Consider, for example, Rob Halford and Judas Priest in the title track of Screaming for Vengence:

Or perhaps Geoff Tate and Queensrÿche on Queen of the Reich:

But in the intervening oh, say, 35+ years there have been changes in the heavy metal format, particularly in that vocal approach. Here I am specifically referring to the emergence of the _Death Growl_. This is a vocal approach that is now apparently prevalent enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page, and which is the auditory equivalent of listening to an octogenarian try to clear out half a century of backed up phlegm while also trying to sing (not that I have an opinion...).

Wikipedia suggests that the Death Growl is primarily associated with death metal, and this makes sense to me stylistically. It would also be fine with me, as far as it goes, because that’s a sub-genre of metal I have no need to delve into. The problem is that the Growl appears to be spreading like an itchy rash.

I am a regular user of Apple Music. This is, of course, Apple’s offering for a music subscription service in the vein of Pandora and Spotify. When I set that service up it asked me what my music preferences were so as to offer suggested songs and artists. At that time I included heavy metal among my choices and looked forward to getting recommendations for artists similar to those mentioned above; anticipated discovering the next Ronnie James Dio, as it were.

Apple Music offers up a weekly new artists playlist that appears to be modeled, more or less, around those specified preferences. It’s a mixed bag, within that algorithm, of stuff that I find I really enjoy, and other things that are utterly unlistenable. And in that last category is where virtually all of the new heavy metal it sends my way falls.

Virtually everything that has a true, hard pounding baseline and guitar crunch that Apple Music offers up to me has the non-melodic, throat destroying grunting within it. If I’m lucky it occurs right up front, within the first few seconds of the song, allowing me to dismiss it quickly. Sometimes, tho, it’s hidden away, saved for the chorus. I’ll be sitting there, banging along with the pounding bass line and starting to groove along with the lyrics and then... BAM! Hit in the face with a guttural slap.

Now, I understand that a fair amount of music appreciation is subjective, and just because I don’t find vocalists singing in a style of a 17-year old student post voice change trying too hard at his German pronunciation to be a desirable thing, I’m sure that others do. My objection here is more directed towards Apple Music’s insistence on continuing to foist these examples on me. I can assure you there is virtually never an example of a song with a growling vocal in it that, when appearing on a recommended list, I don’t give a thumbs down. Yet they still continue to appear.

This also occurs, incidentally, with songs that use detectable auto tune - each and every recommended song with this is routinely and summarily rejected (as is indeed right and salutary), and yet that effect also continues to pervade my recommendations. It’s like Apple thinks I really haven’t given these vocal variations enough of a chance and that, like a dry red wine, I just need to develop a taste for them.

In actuality my fear is that these vocal abominations are simply becoming so pervasive that Apple Music just doesn’t have anything else to offer me in the way of new music. In which case, I’d frankly rather simply be given a shorter list.

What I’d truly like to see is a list of options on Apple Music that actually screens out specific features of music. On that list I would obviously check off the Death Growl and Auto Tune, and I wouldn't mind having buttons for obviating pedal steel guitar and anything on which Mick Jagger sings.

Sadly, there does not appear to be a way to revisit the choices made when I first set up Apple Music, and Apple’s support on this topic suggests my only means of input is to either love or "dislike"a song.

Incidentally, "dislike" is not the opposite of "love", by a long stretch, and not nearly strong enough to adequately reflect my feeling about these songs. Still, it’s better than the change for iOS 13, which jettisoned "dislike" in favor of "suggest less like this". Apple wants to know what you "love", but clearly would rather not invite the expression of any negative opinions or ask why I’m disliking or (or asking to "suggest less" - and we’ll set aside the fact that it should be "suggest fewer").

Ugh.

All of which suggests it will be a cold day in hell (or, in new Apple parlance, a cold day in some place other than heaven) before I see anything like the options I’m suggesting.

But hey - a guy can dream, can’t he?

The Good Old Sounds

Almost two years ago now I was pining (or whining) over what to do about my old Onkyo audio setup now that it had been functionally replaced by my iOS devices and a set of headphones. As predicted in that post, I’ve spent much of my time since then simply listening to music in my headphones and letting the receiver sit, collecting dust.

That is, until recently. A month or so ago there was a convergence of factors that led to my reapproaching this issue.

The first was the death of my Apple Thunderbolt Monitor. This is a 27” monitor that was connected to a Mac Mini that is used for work. I went to fire up that device one day and it just did... nothing. Which is to say that while the Mac Mini was running fine, the thunderbolt monitor resolutely refused to respond.

I have backup systems for this - I can (and usually do) work on the Mini thru my iPad using Screens. This works a treat, and means that I’m not chained to a desk while doing the work. But the death of that monitor changed the landscape - somewhat literally - in my office.

It’s large, if elegant device, that monitor, and it occupied a lot of the acreage on the credenza upon which it sat. After I verified that it wasn’t going to mystically rise from the dead I took it off the credenza. And after a little while I realized that this provided open space.

Open space that could be occupied by something else. Like perhaps speakers...

I dug them out of the spare room and brought them in to the office. My immediate first impression was primarily centered around their size. These are Advent Baby II’s, and they are - or were - considered bookshelf speakers. This, I suppose, in contrast with the taller floor speakers that used to be a common part of sound systems (I have a pair Yamahas that meet this description stored away in a closet). But bookshelf or no, they seem big.

They are much larger than the types of speakers we commonly see nowadays. Whether attached to a computer, or surround sound system, or the common varieties of Bluetooth units out there, the general presentation of speakers is now typically much smaller. Part of this, I suppose, is a conceptual difference about how one will relate to these items. Back in the day, your stereo system - and particularly the speakers - were a part of the decor, a thing to be proudly displayed. While there are exceptions, the rule for the current era seems to be that a speaker is there to be heard but not seen.

To make this work I dragged an Apple Airport Express back into service. For those who are unfamiliar, the Apple Airport Express is from the era when Apple made WiFi routers. The Airport name reflected the full-size home routers, while the Express was conceived more or less as a WiFi network extender. The other feature that differentiated it from the larger model is that it has an analogue audio output that allowed you to hook up to audio systems like my Onkyo receiver. An additional bonus is that the Express connects to devices over WiFi, so you don’t have the issues that can come with Bluetooth.

I had considered using an older Apple TV (the original hockey-puck size design), but that model only has digital audio out, which requires an adapter to interface with the analogue inputs on the Onkyo. I _do_ actually have an adapter for this purpose - occasionally I’ll find myself ordering aspirational devices like that on Amazon - but the adapter requires its own power source (taking an outlet space up and so on). Given all of that, I opted for the simpler approach of the Airport Express - and besides, it was otherwise unused, just occupying space in my drawer-o-technology.

My Airport Express is a post-2012 model, which looks for all the world like a white Apple TV. It’s a small, low-profile device that sits quite nicely and unobtrusively on top of the receiver.

Once the speakers were plugged in and the Airport Express hooked up to the network and jacked into the back of the Onkyo (I connected it to the CD inputs - odds are against my ever having a free-standing CD player needing that spot in the future) it was just a matter of connecting my iPad to the Airport Express to get the music playing.

And this revealed the problem.

No - not any problem with how it hooked up. The equipment all works perfectly. Despite the fact that all three components - Airport Express, Onkyo receiver, and the Baby Advents - are old, and respectively more so as you move down that list - it all just works as designed. I first got the Advents when I was an undergrad, buying them used from another student who was looking for some cash. I was, I think, a sophomore when that purchased occurred, making them somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 years old. I’ll admit that I did have them refurbished several years ago by the folks at Sounds Classic in Rockford, but that was also, you know, several years ago.

The problem, such as it is, is that they sound great.

I mean really good. Rich, deep bass, a warm, pleasant midrange, and yet able to play distinct highs without being shrill. This setup, frankly, puts all of the modern audio equipment I own to shame.

Back when I first wrote about the idea of putting this back into service I mostly figured that all of the effort would be pointless because it really was better to use my headphones:

And yet, here I am, myself, listening to my music on a set of Bluedio Hurricane headphones that I purchased for less than $30 on Amazon, when I should be setting up that audio system and listening to it that way.

Shouldn’t I?

I had not considered, either then or now, the possibility that it would make my other audio equipment feel, well, less adequate (I’ll stop shy of saying inadequate here).

This doesn’t change the fact that most of the time when I am listening to music I am not sitting in my office. But it does mean that now, occasionally, when I’m working I can have very high quality - one might even say high fidelity - musical accompaniment. And while it’s low on convenience, listening to music on this system is akin to having an occasional glass of a fine, dry red wine. It’s something that you should treat yourself on occasion if you can.

One Christmas at a Time

Tis the season for all the holiday music to start filling the airwaves and the stores and our public spaces. It’s just possible that I’ve been known, from time to time, to refer to the onset of this event (which seems to start earlier every year) as a humbug.

Just possible.

But over recent years I’ve found myself softening on that perspective, mostly because it means that I can break out One Christmas at a Time by Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick:

Depending upon the circles in which you travel, you may not immediately know who these two gentlemen are, but you should.

Jonathan Coulton is a former computer programmer who decided to kick-start his music career by doing the Thing a Week podcast. This show was one in which he challenged himself to produce some type of audio content - usually a song - each week for a year. This led to a large standing catalog of music (much of it with a decidedly geeky bent), and since then he’s gone on to put out an album with a record label, start an annual geek-entertainment focused cruise, and take the role of House Musician on Ask Me Another.

John Roderick is the frontman and songwriter for The Long Winters, a former member of Harvey Danger, and a podcasting tour de force. He started with Roderick on the Line, which he still does with his co-host Merlin Mann, a podcast that is effectively the best conversation you’ve ever had with a good friend, over and over again. He has since added Road Work with Dan Benjamin, and two network podcasts - Omibus (which I reviewed here) and Friendly Fire, in which John and his co-hosts take apart war movie after war movie.

One Christmas at a Time is what happens when you put two ambitious, creative, out of the box thinkers together and have them make a holiday album. Note - I’m not avoiding the word "Christmas" here for politeness, but rather for accuracy. Christmas is addressed, but so are multiple other components of the holiday season. _The Week Between__, for example, targets that odd period of time after Christmas, but before New Year’s Day where our usual world is in a sort of limbo.

And there’s more - Uncle John is about Christmas, in a way, but mostly it’s about maybe not choosing to invite that one relative - the titular "Uncle John" in this case - who always ruins everything.

2600 will cause anyone of a certain age (and that age is between 45 and 50-ish) and predilection to experience waves of nostalgia. And, depending upon how those youthful Christmases went, perhaps make them a bit bitter. Again. If you are that person you’ll get the title. If you aren’t, well, find that person and ask them.

And there is more, of course. As one can probably tell from the descriptions here, many of the songs have a somewhat humerous bent to them, but this is not Christmas parody. Rather, with these songs you have the artists considering the holiday season from a different angle than we usually see in more traditional seasonal offerings. For this reason, and due also in no small part to the talent of the men on the album, it’s re-listenable in a way that a parody album could never be. It is, in fact, delightful on first, fifteenth, and fiftieth listen.

If you are looking for a bit of holiday listening that is different from the standard fare - a respite from the repetition you find on every channel and in every store - but still want to engage in the holiday spirit - One Christmas at a Time may be just the thing.

It’s available at:

• Amazon (on CD)
• Amazon Music (Streaming)
• iTunes and Apple Music

Halestorm

Heavy metal music as a category can be somewhat confusing nowadays, particularly if you come at it as a more... seasoned fan. For those of us who grew up listening to the likes of Judas Priest, AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, and Sammy Hagar, modern offerings in the category can be somewhat perplexing. Frequently exploration of the category in the modern era results in encountering indiscernible vocals that suggest a singer trying to clear a decade’s backlog worth of phlegm, backed by guitars crunching in a non-melodic pattern that are reminiscent of sandpaper being run across the strings.

Halestorm stands in distinct contrast to that trend. All of their albums are excellent, and their newest release - Vicious - scratches the heavy metal itch in all the right places.

Vicious - which came out July 27th, 2018 - is a vocal tour de force, with Lzzy Hale front and center. She is the force.

I’ve been listening to Vicious for the better part of two months now and, while the band absolutely has its own distinct sound and character, 30-plus years worth of listening to music makes my brain inevitably draw comparisons. And with respect to that, the comparison I keep coming back to is Ronnie James Dio.

Heavy metal, new and old, is full of singers who can wail or put that low, gravelly timbre into their voices. But few vocalists have demonstrated the range of Ronnie James Dio - that ability to put all of that range on display in a single song - Don’t Talk to Strangers being a prime example of that:

Black Vultures - the opener on the new album - is the song that most makes me think of this comparison.

They are very different songs, to be sure, but the range within, from relatively soft and quiet to rasping scream, is there in both. Listening to the album, but especially this song, made me want to cue up Holy Diver and give that a listen thru as well.

What’s clear, with all of this, is that Lzzy Hale is a vocal powerhouse. I first encountered her as a guest for the title track on Linsey Sterling’s Shatter Me - a standout song on an excellent album that made me determined to find out out more about the vocalist. As is often the case, I discovered that, while she was new to me, the band has been active for a while, with an existing catalog. What’s delightful within that is that the catalog includes three other albums of original work - Halestorm, The Strange Case of..., and Into the Wild Life; and it includes three EP’s of covers, all under the title Reanimate (e.g. Reanimate, Reanimate 2.0, etc).

It’s that vocal flexibility that makes this so magnificent - Lzzy and crew’s love for the songs they are covering is clear and true on each of these. What’s more, they show her ability to sing virtually anything across the hard rock/heavy metal spectrum. One might expect that, for example, when seeing that Heart’s All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You is on one of these EP’s (Reanimate). One might be more dubious when one sees Whitesnake’s Still of the Night show up (on Reanimate 3.0 ). One would be wrong:

And lest one think that these covers sit only in safe, hard rock territory, realize that artists as diverse as Stevie Nicks, Lady Gaga, and Twenty One Pilots also get the Halestorm cover treatment on these EP’s.

This shines within the new album as the songs range from relatively soft and reflective (The Silence), to funky (Do Not Disturb, Conflicted) to solid hard rock/heavy metal (Buzz, and the aforementioned Black Vultures). And while Lzzy clearly enjoys that heavy metal edge to her voice, she also brings out the baby doll range where appropriate (e.g. on the aforementioned Conflicted).

Of course, a vocalist is not an entire band, and the albums would not be convincing if it weren’t for the rest of the crew as well. The guitar and bass work here is excellent, giving that crunch and funk where needed, in just the right measure. Drum work, handled by Arejay Hale - yes, Lzzy’s brother - is both supportive and complex. Drum work can take many forms, of course, but in heavy metal it often seems relegated to timekeeping with occasional accents for punch and fills. Here you get something different. Arejay‘s drum work has an expected heavy edge, but interesting, lighter rhythms fill in the spaces in-between, and often mirror and add to vocal lines. If you enjoy music where the drummer takes an active role you’ll find things to enjoy here.

While I’m drawing comparisons to Ronnie James Dio, the comparisons vary when we get to lyrical content. You won’t find songs full of angels and demons here. Halestorm‘s topic areas are quite different. Black Vultures opens the album with an anthem about rising up against, or in spite of, others trying to bring you down:

I don’t give in, I don’t give up I won’t ever let it break me I’m on fire, I’m a fighter I’ll forever be the last one standing

This leads into Skulls, which shifts gears into metaphor for people uncritically taking in the information they are fed, along with Lzzy’s inability to simply sit by and let that go:

Leave the TV on Believe what you want If you can’t see right or wrong...

And the songs continue, with a real-life and wonderfully earthy tone - Halestorm embraces the topic of sexuality openly and directly, and this is reflected in songs like Buzz and Conflicted, and more than directly in Do Not Disturb...:

I’m on the very top floor, room 1334 There’s a king size bed, but we can do it on the floor Turn your cell phone off, I’ll put a sign on the door That says "do not disturb" And if I were you I’d bring your girlfriend too Two is better than one, three is better than two...

And further on into relationships gone wrong and the subsequent pain - the album covers a gamut of experiences and emotions. It works excellently as a cohesive piece - in an era where some artists have set aside the album format in favor of serial singles, this is a coherent album true to the name, without a bad moment in the set.

If you have been looking for heavy metal music in the classic style and have been struggling to find it, you need look no further - it’s alive and well, right here in this album and in this band.

Red

A while ago I opined about the derogation that is directed towards Sammy Hagar when it comes to his time in Van Halen. This was inspired by listening to Van Halen specific playlists on Apple Music, and those playlists also reminded me that Hagar had come out with a memoir a few years ago, titled Red.

I'd come across the book by chance in a somewhat atypical bookstore in Denver - a place called The Tattered Cover - when we were there for a conference a couple of years ago. I was curious about it - I've been listening to Sammy Hagar since I was in junior high - but it wasn't available on Audible at the time (I've found that I typically can't keep my eyes open when I try to read in the evenings any more, so I capitalize on the opportunity to "read" when I'm driving and working around the house and yard), so I made a mental note of it and moved on.

Listening to the playlists fired up that mental note, and I did a renewed search on Audible, with success this time. A couple of clicks later I was the proud owner of the unabridged audiobook, and set about listening in the car, on my bike, working on my trailer...

...It is, as they say, possible to know too much about those you admire.

Perhaps unwisely, I had entered into the book with hopes of learning about Hagar's approach to writing music, pulling lyrics together, playing guitar. While I would never describe Sammy as a musical genius - for every thoughtful, interesting song like Remember the Heroes or Salvation on Sand Hill there is another like Sweet Hitchiker - his material has often struck me as presenting a working class philosophy, perhaps colored with a bit of California beach life for good measure. Within that structure as well he's always been a master of the hard-rock hook, producing songs with a musical edge that also stick with you.

After listening to Red I don't know any more about how he accomplishes any of that than I did before I started it. In fact, I couldn't even say whether he thinks about his music in any way even close to what I've just described above. The amount of time dedicated to anything about actual music production is so brief and poorly described as to almost leave one wondering whether he actually sees himself as a musician, as opposed to just a guy who shows up on stage in-between parties and expensive purchases.

Red is, in short, a tell-all book.

To be clear, my disappointment here is most certainly my fault. In retrospect, it is obviously the case that someone - either Hagar himself or a manager or publicist with his ear - encouraged him to produce something that covered all of the "titillating" details of his time with Van Halen before public interest dwindled to nothing. After all, his 10-year span with the band started nearly 30 years ago, in 1986.

But there's something more here.

When telling a story - even a tell-all like this book - one would like the author to have some self-awareness with respect to how he is presenting himself. He is, after all, the main character of the book, it's hero, for want of a better word. What we see of Sammy Hagar here, however, is a man in his 60's who, although looking back on his life, hasn't seen, is perhaps unable to see, the inconsistencies between who he describes himself as and who he actually presents as being.

Examples include passages in which he indicates that he doesn't really drink or do drugs, followed a short time later by descriptions of himself jumping into a limo and snorting coke with Eddie Van Halen; and indicating that he was largely faithful to his first wife, except, of course, for all of the random casual sex he had when he was on the road.

Perhaps the most troubling example of this, however, are the ongoing descriptions of how much time he spent away from home, and how difficult it was on his first wife, who nonetheless tolerated it and supported him; followed by his protestations that she was really bringing him down when he finally had to take a year off to care for her after she had a nervous breakdown; and that followed by his eventual breakup with her accomplished largely by avoiding her by moving from place to place ahead of her attempts to meet up with him and to bring his children to see him. At Christmas.

I actually found myself wondering whether he actually read the book after it was compiled (it seems clear from the way it reads that it was a series of stories dictated to someone else to have it out together).

I was grousing about all of this to my 13-year old daughter when I was about two-thirds of the way through the book. I went on long enough, apparently, that she felt the need to pat me on the shoulder and say "Dad, you know you can stop listening to it, right?"

But I couldn't. It was like passing an accident on the side of the road - you don't want to look, but you are compelled. I had to finish it.

There were interesting bits. Hagar is the second musician of his era whom I've learned has chosen to enter other businesses so that he doesn't have to rely upon music as an income (Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull being the first; I'm sure they are not unique in this). I learned that Marching to Mars, probably my favorite Hagar solo album, was a poor money maker. I learned that he owns a chain of bicycle shops.

And, fortunately, I find that I still enjoy the music.