I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Railway Club Vancouver (March 16, 1988).

This is a “very good sounding show considering it is from 1988. This has a mix of unreleased songs, Greatest Hits songs, Melville songs and even a couple that would end up on Whale Music.”

Like the 1987 show here, this is also their last night in Vancouver. It’s hard to believe that previous show was the same band, as just a few months later (Nov-Mar), the sets are radically different.

It opens with the end of “Lyin’s Wrong,” and then moves into a fun version of Stompin’ Tom’s “Bridge Came Tumbling Down,” and then one of my favorite unreleased songs: “Woodstuck.”

The opening is to the tune of Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done”

I called on Crosby and I called on Nash / I asked them if they want to buy some hash / Oh the deal is done / Hanging out with Stephen Stills, I asked him if he wants to buy some pills / Oh the deal is done.

And then the main body is a rocking bluesy number with the chorus: “You can’t go back to Woodstock baby, you were just two years old.   You weren’t even born” and a big chant of “BAD KARMA!”

Things slow down with a version of “Triangles on the Walls.”

During the banter, Dave Clark talks about going up Grouse Mountain in his jeans and he says he was automatically a “Wofuh”–as soon as you get into the skis you’re going to start saying “Woah… fuck.”

A great sounding “Dope Fiends” is followed by “Green Sprouts” which is “the silliest song of all… about the worms of New Jersey.”  “What’s Going On” has an accordion!  And “Italian Song” has them singing in over the top Italian with an almost ska beat and melody.

There’s a goofy, slap funk cover of “Take the Money and Run.”  It’s fast and rocking, but they leave out the signature five claps after some verses.  Nevertheless there are some great harmonies at the end.

They play an unreleased song “Sue’s Mining Town” which is a bit of a rocker, and then one from Greatest Hits (released the previous year) called “Churches and Schools.”  The set ends with a slow and pretty “Higher and Higher.”

This is the only place you can hear “Italian Song” and “Sue’s Mining Town” and one of the few places you can hear “Woodstuck” (except for this video)

[READ:August 28, 2016] Tennis Lessons

I’ve enjoyed some stories by Dyer but I was actually reading this because he reviews the new David Foster Wallace collection String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis.

But it turns out that this is not so much a book review as a delightfully funny discussion of Dyer’s own tennis playing and how he also wanted to write a book about tennis–but never did.

Dyer proves to be a funny protagonist. In 2008, (age 50) he was about to sell his novel to a new publisher and he imagined writing a book about taking up tennis at age 50. Dyer is British and the popularity and success of Andy Murray was making tennis very popular in Britain again.  It seems like a great idea.

And then Dyer is honest with us:

as a perennial bottom feeder for whom writing has always doubled as a way of getting free shit, I as also hoping that a top-notch coach might be willing to give e free lessons in return for the massive exposure guaranteed by inclusion in the book.

But he never managed to write it and the idea kept nagging at him.  Especially since he was beginning to love tennis even more.  And now nearly ten years later he thought about maybe writing a book about getting into tennis at 60.  But someone had just beaten him to it Gerald Marzorati–Late to the Ball: Age, Learn, Fight, Love, Play Tennis, Win.  Dyer says it is a perfectly decent book and he hopes he can write an epilogue in a few years.  The ideas in it are fun but that it is dull to read with scarcely an interesting sentence in the whole book.

The most interesting part seems to be that Marzorati was filmed at a camp in Utah.  He thought he was doing very well–hitting gracefully. But when he watched the film he realized he was nowhere near as fluid as he imagined and that on screen he looked “every bit my age.”

Then Dyer moves on to the next book in the review William Skidelsky--Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession.  Will is a friend of Geoff’s and Geoff says he can’t review it objectively but he does give some insights into who some of the composite characters are actually meant to be. Until it dawns on him that the “tall Englishman whose game was awkward and inelegant but doggedly effective” might actually be him!

Geoff says that he has now started working with a coach who is giving him small achievable goals.  His coach has just started reading Infinite Jest which leads to Geoff talking about the new Wallace collection.

He says that Marzorati worked at Harper’s when Wallace’s “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” was published.  Then Dyer talks of Wallace’s tennis writing in glowing terms, saying that Wallace’s writing is”painting the lines from the beginning.”

Dyer says that is it s not as easy to write about yourself as people assume but that Wallace was excellent at it–he creates himself of the page.

He says that tennis is very hard to write about.  And even Wallace who is full of metaphors and similes and amazing descriptions has to add in “a crosscourt forehand to level thing up at four apiece.”

Perhaps my favorite summary:

As a writer Wallace is as compulsive as Nadal, forever rearranging his water bottles and pulling his shorts out of the crack of his ass; he’s as twitchy as Lleyton Hewitt; as much a monologuist as Murray. This, it needs emphasizing, is all part of the fun.

Wallace’s article on Federer, Dyer says, was breathtaking–as breathtaking as watching Federer himself. So now, ten years on as Federer enters his decline, it’s painful to see–or would be, were it not for the fact that Roger seems, as they say in the jazz world, “such a beautiful cat these days.”