St. Patty's Day. I sort of think of the holiday is alot like Columbus Day. It celebrates how one man can totally change or almost completely destroy an entire culture. I guess the biggest difference between the 2 are, St. Patrick didn't kill a ton of people and he just adopted celtic beliefs into christianity. Either way it's a good excuse to get drunk and listen to The Pogues all day. Not that I really need one.
I saw the Pogues, as a matter of fact, play in Philly last Thursday, and it was the best I've seen them of the 3 times that I've actually seen them. Although, Vegas last year was the funnest. I traveled to Vegas for the weekend, from Honolulu where I was living at the time, on an Aloha airlines buddy pass. 3 of us were going, I was the only one that made it.
The week before, my other 2 friends played a game of "ankles", where you run down the street with your pants around your ankles and the first one to pull them up loses. During the game one of them lost his wallet and had no ID to fly. leaving 2 of us to actually be able to make it through airport security.
However an airline "buddy pass" is only good for any empty seats on the plane. So after the first flight from O'ahu to Maui, there was only one empty seat on the flight from Maui to Oakland and after my rock beat his scissors i was off to Vegas.
I stayed up all night drinking, and fake waiting for a car/ getting some shut-eye in the lobby of Circus-Circus.
Later made my way to the Irish pub casino, got shitfaced, watched the Eagles lose to the Saints, and found out there was an earthquake in Hawaii that knocked out all the power, which meant the airports were shutdown and I had no access to my money through my debit card.
But the pogues rocked, a vallet guy at Manadala Bay bought me a cab ride to the airport, and I got home.
I saw the Pogues, as a matter of fact, play in Philly last Thursday, and it was the best I've seen them of the 3 times that I've actually seen them. Although, Vegas last year was the funnest. I traveled to Vegas for the weekend, from Honolulu where I was living at the time, on an Aloha airlines buddy pass. 3 of us were going, I was the only one that made it.
The week before, my other 2 friends played a game of "ankles", where you run down the street with your pants around your ankles and the first one to pull them up loses. During the game one of them lost his wallet and had no ID to fly. leaving 2 of us to actually be able to make it through airport security.
However an airline "buddy pass" is only good for any empty seats on the plane. So after the first flight from O'ahu to Maui, there was only one empty seat on the flight from Maui to Oakland and after my rock beat his scissors i was off to Vegas.
I stayed up all night drinking, and fake waiting for a car/ getting some shut-eye in the lobby of Circus-Circus.
Later made my way to the Irish pub casino, got shitfaced, watched the Eagles lose to the Saints, and found out there was an earthquake in Hawaii that knocked out all the power, which meant the airports were shutdown and I had no access to my money through my debit card.
But the pogues rocked, a vallet guy at Manadala Bay bought me a cab ride to the airport, and I got home.
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I learned to play it just recently and the band I recently quit and I fashioned our version sort of loosely on this:
Yes, I was born in Philly and raised in Voorhees Township NJ (home of the Echelon Mall - near Cherry Hill NJ) and lived at 2400 Chestnut overlooking the scenic Surekill River for a while.
I'll be back up there in May.
Elvis Costello
Get Emotional [Young American, 1CD]
Live at Leicester, October 22, 1977.
Few people gave Elvis Costello a chance when he set out on the 1977 Live Stiffs tour, and even fewer could blame them. Up against a bespectacled Herbert and his barely-blooded trio, after all, were ranged the twin behemoths of Ian Dury and Rockpile, artists that had positively decades of experience behind them. Costello, on the other hand, had barely had his name for nine months.
Of course, everyone knows what happened next, as Costello not only pushed his co-headliners aside, he proceeded to shove most of the contemporary music scene behind him, banging out a succession of albums, one-two-three, that remain among the most startling statements of the entire end-of-Seventies nightclub. And this show, taped around midway through the Stiffs outing (Leicester, October 22), shows how he did it.
Quite frankly, this might be the crucial document of the Attractions at their peak, with Elvis firmly transitioning between the airy Dylanisms of My Aim Is True, and the darker idiosyncrasies of This Year's Model, and the band battling behind him with an aggression that renders even the darkest-hearted oldies all but unrecognizable.
But it's a playful outing too, as Costello opens the show with Richard Hell's "Love Comes In Spurts"; acknowledges Dury's own influence on his writing with a seething cover of the Kilburns' "Roadette Song," then cheekily teases fellow Stiff star Wreckless Eric, with a turbulent cover of "The Whole Wide World" - the second time the audience had heard the song that evening (Eric was also on the tour), although it's unlikely anyone complained.
The Damned's "Neat Neat Neat," too, finds its way into the show, stripped back, swampy and stark. But it's the songs that would make up Costello's next album - "Chelsea," "The Beat," "Little Triggers" and, looking even further ahead, "Dr Luther's Assistant," that truly reveal where Costello was at - and it was a darker, more dangerous place than he's ever been before. Whatever you thought of Elvis Costello in 1977, Get Emotional will make you re-evaluate it all. - Dave Thompson