I recently saw the footage again, and I can’t express exactly how badly I felt for Stevie Wonder when I saw him perform back in March with the Jonas Brothers on the Grammys.
Wow.
It was bad.
For someone as great and respected as Stevie, you’d think they could spring for someone whose voices have changed when they hit puberty. Instead, trying to gain credibility for the boys, they just trot Stevie out there like show pony.
Stop for a second and think, just how much bad music has been forced upon the world because of the lack of taste of teenage girls.
In the early 1990s, I spent a lot of nights out listening to live music in the Atlanta area. Off the top of my head, I could easily list a dozen or so bands I saw more than once, and at the same time, there are probably three times as many whose names I can’t remember.
Of all the acts, Michelle Malone, Kristen Hall and Billy Pilgrim got the lion’s share of my attention. I’ve seen them all at least a dozen times in numerous places. Of the three, I’ve seen Malone more than any one else … so much that I no longer have any idea how many times I’ve seen her.
Billy Pilgrim came on late for me. I had seen them several times when they simply went by their names … Andrew Hyra and Kristian Bush. Honestly, they were good, but they were never anything special for me. I never went to specifically see them anywhere. My friend Chris liked them more than I did.
Eventually they got a record deal and took the name of Kurt Vonnegut’s character. They took some of the songs they had performed as Andrew Hyra and Kristian Bush and re-recorded them for their big-label record under the new name, and one of those was a song Bush wrote, “Insomniac.”
“Insomniac” by Krisitan Bush
I can see you, don’t even know you
Falling into the sheets at night
I place my hands flat on my chest
I feel the heart beat back the night
I try counting sheep, and I talk to the shepherd
And I play with my pillow for ever and ever
I sit alone and I watch the clock
I breathe in on the tick and out on the tock
Refrain:
I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor
I don’t have to have these dreams no more
Cause I’ve found someone just to hold me tight
Hold the insomniac all night
Dig my head down deep so I can’t hear the cars outside on the street
And the stars are laughing
They get a kick out of my misery
I tried everything short of Aristotle to Dramamine
And the whiskey bottle
Pray for the day when my ship comes in
I can sleep the sleep of the just again …
So thanks to several copies of their second album coming to our student paper (and one into my hands, of course), and a future girlfriend at the paper who knew of them, I started listening to them a little more closely, and “Insomniac” became and still is one of my favorite songs.
While that song lives on for me, sadly Billy Pilgrim does not. Despite a couple more independently released albums and the rumors of another forthcoming big-label deal, it never happened. They split (I don’t know the details) and that was it. A musical crime.
But that story has sort of a happy ending. Bush went on to join the aforementioned Hall and fellow Atlanta singer Jennifer Nettles (Go find her stuff from the Jennifer Nettles Band/Soul Miner’s Daughter and be amazed) to form … a mainstream country act? … Sugarland.
Hall has since departed, but Bush and Nettles have gone on quite successfully and are one of the few groups played on country radio anymore that I can stand.
And I have always wished that Nettles and Bush would record “Insomniac.” I believe a beautiful song (to me) would only become more powerful if Nettles made it hers.
Well, over the past few years, I’ve searched YouTube and the like, trying to find a clip somewhere of Billy Pilgrim performing it. No dice. The only Bush version I can find (at the top of this post) came from a Gardner-Webb University public-access type TV show.
But I have found something bizarre. On a lot of college campuses, there are these big, male acapella singing groups that perform songs, their voices providing all the instrumentation. I don’t know the proper name for these, but at Clemson, the group was know as Tigerroar.
Well, somehow, “Insomniac” has become a staple of these groups. College groups all over the country are performing it. It was a very strange feeling to watch it for the first time. It’s akin to finding your favorite Led Zeppelin song is now being performed at circumcisions, or something even more weird.
Check out the version of St. Louis University’s Bare Naked Statues:
There are tens of high school choirs on YouTube performing the same song. Amazing. On more than half of the clips, in the comment sections, someone wants to know, “What song is this?” or “Who did this song?”
Anyway, nothing newsworthy. Just a strange phenomenon.
Since I got my XM Radio subscription for Christmas, when Dylan rides any where with me, he listens like me.
I do a lot of listening to the 80s on 8. Last week, driving Dylan home from school, I heard Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” Turns out, Dylan loved the song, and now it can be added to the list of songs I’ve introduced him to that drive Brooke insane (see “Werewolves of London”).
Then, when we’re in the car together with him, we hear “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band.
“I like this song,” he says. “I like the “na na na na na nas.”
So he tells me as I’m taking him to school, ” I like this XM Radio, Daddy. It has a lot more good songs than the other radio we have.”
I tell Brooke this. We laugh.
The next day, she takes him to school and he tells her, “Mommy, for Christmas next year, I want an XM Radio , just like Daddy’s.”
Yesterday, New Year’s Eve, before Brooke went to work in the morning, she told me there were four pork chops in the refrigerator thawing.
“Cook them anyway you want to,” she said, “and eat one for lunch. You can take another to work for dinner and leave two for us.”
So, after feeding Ella lunch, I took my pork chops, which I had lovingly marinated in Italian dressing, outside to toss them on the grill.
I reached down to crank on the gas … and there was none. I mean none as in someone had stolen the entire tank right off my grill that sits right next to my house.
I think I was a little too shocked to even be angry. I was just flabergasted.
Brooke was more surprised than me when I told her about it. I grilled on Christlas Eve, so someone took the tank in the last week.
I’d like to think someone needed it really badly. For heat. Or money. Or because they had no electricity and needed to cook. But I doubt it. Likely some no good loser (like maybe my neighbor’s adult slacker son … can I say that?) who wants to save the money of buying his or her own tank.
So I guess we’ll refrain from grilling for a while, untile we get a new tank.
Among Pell’s accomplishments was the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant program, which passed in 1972 and provided direct aid to college students … better known to you and I as Pell Grants.
Millions of low- and middle-income Americans (including this one) were assisted in attending college because of Pell’s grants.
I, for one, would like to say thanks to Mr. Pell and say a prayer for him and his family.
Sharing gas (and other bodily functions) with the ones you love
I came across this story today about how different couples/families are open … or not so open … with each other when it comes to normally private bodily functions.
Enjoy.
“You and me, babe, how about it?”
The radio station I got hooked on this past summer in Reno, Nev., — KTHX 100.1 FM, The X — just played the Indigo Girls’ version of Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet.”
That never happens.
Never.
First time I’ve ever heard it on the radio anywhere.
Remember they said it
MSNBC.com has put together a wrap-up of the five dumbest things said about the economy in the past two years by political and financial leaders.
Raising Two Americans 