And Now, For Something Completely Different

Ok, sometimes I can’t help myself, so apologies to Monty Python, but it felt like a natural title since most of my recent posts, infrequent though they may be, have been of a serious nature. Today, not so much. I want to kind of blow the carbon out of this thing and get back to a more light-hearted nature today. I don’t know about you, but I need it.

So, I recently spent an evening in Durham, NC at a concert, namely – The Last Waltz. If you’re a music person you may be asking (Go ahead, I’ll wait…)

“Hey, wait a minute, didn’t that concert take place back in the 70’s?”

To which I would reply “You are correct. But this was a re-creation of the original concert put together by Warren Haynes and produced by Robbie Robertson.”

Now then, one of the joys of attending a concert, in addition to the obvious #livemusicisbetterlive thing, is interacting with random strangers. Occasionally this is wonderful, but, by and large, it leaves me silently muttering to myself and shaking my damn head.

As in… casual, pre-show conversation with a fellow a couple seats down revealed he had seen (or was planning on seeing, frankly it all gets a bit blurry) The Doobie Brothers with Michael McDonald. And that’s where the blurry started. If you know me IRL, there’s a real good chance you know my feelings (looking at you O-town) about the band Journey. If you don’t know, my personal feelings about that group of “musicians” can be summed up like this… If modern music were a cat, Journey would be the hairball that said cat was attempting to hack up. How’s that for a visual? So, with that frame of reference as a starter, where does Michael McDonald fit in? I’ll get back to this later.

This year has been probably my favorite concert-going calendar year. Twenty or so concerts/music festivals since the start of 2019 kept my soul in a good place. Without going back through my calendar to confirm (well, maybe a peek or two) my memory, in 2019 I saw among others; Patty Griffin, Drive By Truckers, Gary Clark Jr., Greensky Bluegrass, Yonder Mountain String Band, Manchester Orchestra, Big Thief, New Pornographers, Strand Of Oaks, American Aquarium, Bottle Rockets, and a few that I’m blanking on. I also made it to a wonderful music festival in Lexington, KY; Railbird Festival, in what was its inaugural event. 2020 promises to be pretty good for me musically too, with tickets already secured for Beale Street Music Festival in May and High Water Festival in April. As a bonus, four of my fav people are coming to join me in Charleston, SC for High Water, so in addition to a really killer (and it is) lineup, the company should make for a pretty spectacular weekend.

So, let’s backtrack to my metaphor. I’ve been thinking about how best to describe my feelings about Mr. McDonald as he relates to my taste in music. I feel like I should put out a bit of a disclaimer here. Obviously not everyone has the same taste in music. And I fully recognize it takes some amount of skill to sell the number of records a major label artist, in any genre, sells over the course of their career. But see, that’s the good thing about music. You can have strong opinions about what you do or don’t like. There’s enough variety that if you don’t like a particular artist, you need not listen to it. Tangentially, no one forces you to listen to that which you don’t enjoy. Turn the station, you know? I’m not opposed to trying out artists I’ve not heard before. Seven of the acts I listed above are bands I’d either never heard of or had never listened to until I contemplated buying tickets to their shows. And I thoroughly enjoyed each of the shows. By the same token, I won’t be purchasing a ticket to go see Micheal McDonald in this lifetime. Something about his voice maybe, or his look maybe, or the fact that I feel he is singularly responsible for turning the aforementioned Doobie Brothers from the kind of band that you sing along at the top of your lungs to their numerous hits as you drive down the road with your car windows wide open into the smarmy, self-aggrandizing treacle that was produced from the time he joined the band until the world at large tired of his musical diabetes and stopped buying their records for fear of slipping into a coma.

Too much? Yeah, maybe. But imho Michael McDonald is the hairball the cat coughed up after eating the initial (Journey-based) hairball.

I feel so much better having gotten that off my chest btw. Even though I feel like there’s a really good chance my respective timelines will become loaded down with links to MM songs. I can think of at least a few of you that have that loveably antagonistic approach. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I do, after all, have an intimate relationship with my “delete” button.

In a perfect world, I’d crank out some type of year-end or decade-end post. So, it’s a definite maybe. But if it doesn’t happen I’d just like to say thanks to everyone that has continued reading my random tomfoolery here on the interwebz. I hope you all had the best holiday season ever and I wish you all a safe, and happy new year!

Peace!