Enjoy This EP | BorderLight 2026

With book, music and lyrics by Paige Scott, Enjoy This EP is a one-hour play from Indianapolis that chronicles the lyrical annihilation of a twit. Zachariah Stonerock is the picture perfect embodiment of a critic, specifically a music critic. 

But this isn't Sideways, the white male snob slouching towards middle age does not charm the attractive younger woman in spite of his many unpleasant attributes. At least, not for long. Not only does Lisa M. (gorgeously voiced by Hannah Boswell) put up with very little of his shit, unbeknownst to him she is an artist, a musician, a good one, and she does not require his validation. 

Not that she wouldn't like it. She just doesn't need it. Or him. It's a really great takedown of the myth of the put-upon, self-styled intellectual snob who really, really deserves love, a character that Paul Giamatti has played several times, actually.

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026

Barenaked Ladies (band)

There was this interesting phenomenon in the mid 90s when Gen X so-called “alternative” acts were making this deep dive into our collective unconscious. This was all part and parcel with our generation rising into adulthood and reclaiming (and declaiming) our maimed childhoods.

Weezer’s "Blue" album (1995) includes nods to KISS and Kitty Pryde. Smashing Pumpkins' “1979” is a yearning paean to adolescence. Ben Folds Five reminded me that they’ve got my old ID and I’m all dressed up like The Cure.

Then there was the Canadian quintet Barenaked Ladies. We were first told that their name originated when founders Steven Page and Ed Robertson wanted to create songs that make you feel the way you did the first time you saw a bare naked lady.

I can’t remember where I heard that explanation, but I heard it at the same time I was exposed (yes) to their first LP Gordon, and I got it. It reflected a yearning which is, supposedly, devoid of malice, if only because when you are an adolescent, you are too small and weak to act upon it, to do any harm, you just want. And you want badly.

The problem is, we don’t remain small forever. And like a Stephen King character who transforms from a bullied, spotty nerd into a strong, attractive stud (see: Arnie Cunningham or Harold Lauder) the protagonists of Barenaked Ladies' songs treasure amusingly geeky and nostalgic touchstones. Listen to "Enid," or "Grade 9."

But – as in a Stephen King novel – this arrested emotional development can be a defense for wretched, toxic behavior. Yes, I fell into Gordon as though it had been written for me. From the first strains of "Hello City," which I experienced as a young man trudging through the snow-packed sidewalks of Cleveland, producing and promoting underground theater in a remote storefront, I was lost in these emotions. They get me! They get us! Our crowd is making the music, and it’s really good!

I was also aware of the abuse that is inherent in the lyrics. “I put my hands around your neck / you wrap your arms around me.” It wasn’t subtle, but you know. Guys feel like that sometimes, it’s just a song, you know?

Their second album, Maybe You Should Drive, was released in August 1994, and if I thought their first album was written for me, this one was as though they were stalking me. By that time in my life I was playing an unwinnable game, balancing my relationship with the woman who would soon be my ex-wife with the woman who would become my life partner and the mother of my children.

I love you … intermittently.

A is for asshole, I’m sorry.

She’s my alternative girlfriend.

Jane doesn't think a man could ever be faithful,
Jane isn't giving me a chance to be shameful.

I mean.

For a guy who is not much of a live music guy, I have seen this act more than most. At the Odeon in 1994, Jacobs Pavilion in 1995, at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium in 1996. The second single from their third album, I Was Born on a Pirate Ship (say it while holding your tongue) and released during the Night Kitchen years, was “The Old Apartment.” It’s an aggressive song about a man reminiscing about an abusive relationship – he is the abuser. The music video is incongruous, depicting a young couple trashing an apartment together. But the song is about a violent, abusive man missing his lost love and regretting his behavior. He doesn’t sound changed.

Why is this important? Why has this stuck with me? Because it's not merely cognitive dissonance, this melding of sweet melancholy, loopy humor, and aggressive tendencies. It's not honest, it's gaslighting, making excuses for poor behavior. I'm not a bad guy, look how silly I am, I'm not a bad guy, I said I'm not a bad guy didn't you hear me?? It's Incel Rock.  

"One Week" was fun, I remember it being used for the opening of 10 Things I Hate About You. But that was in 1998. By then I was thirty, and past this second childhood, it was time to get serious, to become a man. Ideally, a good man. That is for others to decide.

Just Kids (book)

Pengo’s 2022 Summer Book Club

“I was full of references.”
- Patti Smith, “Just Kids”

Earlier this month, Luke and I had a “New York City 1980” double feature (viewings spaced by seven days) where we watched Alan Parker’s Fame and Allan Moyle’s Times Square.

Fame is, of course, the fictionalized story of a few teenagers making their way through the School of Performing Arts, and as such it had a remarkable effect on me as an aspiring performer. 

Times Square, a lesser-known flick, is a rock and roll love story between the child of a rising NYC councilman and the street-dwelling kid she meets in a hospital as they are both treated for mental health issues.

While this version of Fame is not a musical, Parker employs his talents melding song with narrative, as he also did so successfully with The Commitments. Each tune is from a source – a rehearsal, a performance, a realistic moment alone creating a tune – but each could be its own music video.

Moyle’s film could have been a groundbreaking queer teen fantasy, had the producers not insisted on an alternate ending which is pure Hollywood bullshit. But it’s all worth it just for the scene in which our protagonists, Pam and Nicky, bop down 42nd Street to Life During Wartime.



They are both artifacts of a transitional moment in the history of the city, documenting a Midtown which no longer exists, but also in their own way setting the stage for the MTV era which was to come. Like the man said, don't you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?

“Today the city is populated by benevolent ghosts.”

Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids is (tangentially) about another point of major transition in the city. The focus of this book is primarily her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it is also therefore about their paths, together and apart, as young artists in the very late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Photo by Norman Seeff, 1969

I believe I was only first made aware of Smith when someone produced a lab production of Cowboy Mouth, which she wrote with Sam Shepard in 1971, a roman à clef of a play, a thinly veiled examination of their brief time together. Yes, I knew the song Because the Night, which she wrote with Bruce Springsteen, which was a hit when I was ten years old, but I couldn’t have told you who sang it.

And I first became aware of Mapplethorpe when a retrospective of his works, many of which feature images of a sexual nature, became a convenient focus of attack by those authoritarian forces that are currently Panzer-blitzing their way over a half-century of American civil rights and progress. This, when the artist had died only four months earlier, in March 1989.

What is charming and affecting about Smith’s book, fulfilling a promise she had made to her friend and former lover decades earlier to tell their story, is how unaffected it is. It’s a sweet tale of a young woman and a young man who meet cute and have Downtown boho adventures as they make art and aspire to greatness.

Smith is one of those rare artists who had to become an artist because, by her own admission, she couldn’t hold down a steady job – though her ability to find rare books for cheap and sell them high is a skill I find enviable.

Patti Smith in Cleveland
(Photo by Judie Vegh, 2017)

But as I was saying, transition. Brief encounters with Hendrix and Joplin, shortly before they died. Dylan and Ginsburg make appearances, too. Rubbing elbows with the 1960s as it vanished into the new decade which would entirely define them as icons of rock and art.

“The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's actions.”

Five years ago, we took the entire family to the State Theatre to see Patti Smith perform Horses, her first album, in its entirety. 

At the age of seventy it were a fearsome performance from a white-haired punk, full of grit and passion. Our children, aged 15 and not yet 13, recently traumatized by the election, were electrified and inspired by the performance. It was a balm for the parents, too.

Source: “Behind the right’s loathing of the NEA: Two ‘despicable’ exhibits almost 30 years ago” by Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post, 3/20/2017

Phil Collins

“I think Invisible Touch was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Christy, take off your robe.” - Patrick Bateman, “American Psycho” (2000)

Peter Gabriel & Phil Collins
Friday, April 1, 2022

If you were to ask anyone in my graduating class who was the biggest Phil Collins fan, they might tell you it was me. If there was a time to be a fan of Phil Collins, it would be exactly those years in which I was in high school (1982-1986).

Last Friday night, Phil played his last concert with Genesis at the O2 in London. Peter Gabriel was in the audience. He played these farewell gigs seated in a chair, the last decade or so he has been affected by a variety of nerve injuries, and from all appearances lives with a great deal of pain. And yet, there he was. Doing the work. Singing, anyway. He hasn’t been able to play the drums in years.

Phil Collins appealed to me for a number of personal reasons. Because he was a drummer, he is British, his wardrobe was basic and easily appropriated, and because he wrote songs about mature relationships that were in trouble.

Perhaps it speaks to my own youthful escapades in romantic self-sabotage that at a very young age I had a tender spot for mushy ballads about endless love (Follow You, Follow Me), doo-wop songs about cuckoldry (Misunderstanding) and anthemic showtunes about struggling to maintain doomed relationships through inscrutible, symbolic lyrics and an awful lot of shouting (Behind the Lines).

It was my dad who observed that Phil Collins doesn’t so much sing as he screams, and my father really liked Phil Collins. And so did I. Big fan. I’d dress like him, in suit and tie and Chuck Taylors. This was in the 1980s, when Chucks with a suit was considered transgressive. Goofily transgressive.

I remember getting stoned in the basement of someone’s house in 1983 and they put on the just-released, eponymous release Genesis and heard the song Mama for the first time. That was a dark journey.

As Phil Collins at a 1980s Revival Party
with Debbie Gibson (Beth Stolarczyk)
and Paul Shaffer (Pat Shea)

I remember having a springtime infatuation at the end of my sophomore year, and Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) was powerful validation of my every obsessive nerve ending.

I remember getting the cassette of No Jacket Required the day it dropped in early 1985, and how jazzed I felt hearing Sussudio for the first time. Fuck all that prog rock shit, let’s dance!

And I remember hearing the song Invisible Touch on the radio, shortly before my high school graduation. I thought it was terrible. Uninspired, basic. Even the music video signaled he was just mailing it in.*

The rest of the album, however (also called Invisible Touch) has some of my very favorite songs, and my girlfriend and I listened to them all summer. In Too Deep was a touchstone for our entanglement, Throwing It All Away our destiny foretold. It was clear, however, that the bloom was off the rose for me, even as we were committed to seeing the act at the Coliseum together after we had broken up.

He was an amazing drummer. While he did not sing on Do They Know It’s Christmas, he does play the drums and his signature fill (dun - dah dun - dah dun) is unmistakable. He was also a pioneer in the use of drum machines. The opening to Sussudio is worthy of Prince.

 
And I had Genesis posters on my wall freshman year in college, though by that time I was really Team Gabriel, and anyway I was at that time being exposed to all that stuff Butthead referred to as “college music”.

Okay, here’s a story. My dad and my ex-girlfriend and I attended the show, as I said, on January 26, 1987. You can listen to a bootleg of the entire show online, there was a live remote that night as they performed Invisible Touch for the AMAs.

When they started playing In Too Deep I announced, “I’m going to the toilet,” and got up and hopped away.

I returned somewhere in the middle of the song. She whispered to me, “How could you leave?”

I said I had to go to the bathroom.

“Yeah,” she said. “But. This song.”

I was a bit defensive, but also smug. I knew what I did. And so began a couple of years of something like dating which would complicate all of my college relationships.

It's just like a song by Phil Collins.

*"Invisible Touch" was the only #1 single Genesis achieved in the United States. I yield to popular opinion. 

Rememberings (book)

“Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer.” 

- Shuhada Sadaqat (Sinéad O'Connor, Rememberings)

Pengo's 2021 Summer Book Club

Thoughts Upon Reading:

Friday, August 6

We were aware of her immediately, late 1987. That one, with the impossibly huge eyes, shaved head, beautiful and aggressive Irish voice. Troy was about desire, heartbreak ... was it also about abuse?

The inside back cover is shocking. Fashion photos from the before, her dark bob of hair, the sexy poses. Not the person I know. The one who destroyed her career in a flash on live television. The one who was Peter Gabriel’s plaything at WOMAD. Vulnerable, fierce, and quite possibly insane.

Saturday, August 7

Sinéad O'Connor, now Shuhada Sadaqat, the legend: I had conflated two stories I had read about her, though they amount to the same thing. I was given to understand she had originally shaved her head, just prior to promoting her first album, because management insisted she get an abortion.

Well, she split with her management, and her entire production team, because of this insistence. She’s already shaved her head when they pressed her to dress more feminine; short skirts and to let her hair grow.

In either case, it speaks to men telling women what to do, and she just said fuck that.

(I will continue to refer to her here as O’Connor as that is her stage name, and her name on the book. When she refers to herself professionally as Sadaqat, I will call her that.)

Sunday, August 8

The assumption was that people who have been the object of abuse are “messed up.” That they have been damaged and therefore have been twisted in the manner in which they engage with the world.

She very clearly describes that they are instead those who can clearly see the world as it truly is, while those of us fortunate enough never to have been dominated or traumatized by anyone, ever, we are the ones with a narrow, fuzzy view of the world and how it works.

O’Connor’s story is a search for being, it is not a rock and roll memoir. There are a few passages about how she “achieves fame” but in fact she makes it sound completely arbitrary, which is the point. Success is arbitrary, abuse is also arbitrary. Those who we see as stars and those we see as victims, neither have done anything particular to deserve their position.  

"The Lion and the Cobra" (1987)
Americans were provided a docile image.

Monday, August 9

Less than a year after she ripped up a photo of John Paul II on SNL, I was surprised to see O’Connor onstage with Peter Gabriel at the WOMAD Festival in Columbus. She had just recorded a duet with him on his most recent album. But you don’t expect to see such high-profile singers accompanying other artists just to do that one song.

But there she was, singing back-up for Peter Gabriel. She sang her part for The Blood of Eden and the vocal for Don’t Give Up which had been recorded by Kate Bush.

It was apparent from the audience, both in the way that she looked at him, and also in the stupid, arrogant manner he was strutting around her during Sledgehammer that they were having some kind of affair. His crotch-thrusting act during that song was particularly embarrassing. He was trying to play it as a joke, but it still seemed territorial. “Hi, everybody! I’m fucking Sinead O’Connor."

He was 43. She was 26. I was 25.

I was not surprised to discover that he was less than serious about their relationship. I’ve been listening to his stuff recently and I’m not sure it holds up. I used to idolize that guy.

Incognito, trolling a protest ⁠— against her.

Tuesday, August 10

It has always bothered me, from the first time I heard it, that Bono introduces the live version of Sunday Bloody Sunday by saying “This is not a rebel song.”

Isn’t it? You evoke a specific instance of Imperial British aggression against a Republican Irish protest, but it’s not a song criticizing British colonial oppression? Is it not a protest song? What is it, then? It’s just a song against violence, in general. Violence is bad. Boo, violence. 

Ok, Bono.

O’Connor has never had such qualms. She once wrote and recorded a song called This Is a Rebel Song because she also believes Bono to be a dithering twerp. She describes herself as a punk, a punk with an agenda, as all true punks have, to call out the abuses of an authoritarian system where she sees them.

In 1992, she was banned “for life” from NBC for her naming of the Catholic Church as the enabler of a system of child abuse. In 2016, the movie Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture for doing the exact same thing.

Her voice, whether she be whispering or screaming, has cut a path through my adult life. I always recognize it, even when she is singing in support of someone else. The later chapters of the book detail the significance of her more recent work, albums with which I had not been familiar. I have been listening to them as I have been reading. 

The sound of her voice has become so familiar to me, like she’s someone I went to school with. In a way, I guess she was.

Music Television: Forty Years On

"Are we living in a land
Where sex and horror are the new gods?"
- Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Two Tribes”

Forty years ago today, at 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981, MTV went on the air. We didn’t get our MTV until early 1983, but its influence was already being felt as HBO (Video Jukebox), NBC (Friday Night Videos) and other networks sought to capitalize on all the new material that was suddenly being generated to feed this new medium.

A short list of songs that were featured during the first twenty-four hours of MTV might seem confusing as it’s not very “80s” but then, what would you expect. They could only play what was available, and the 1980s hadn’t really started, anyway.

 

Why so many Rod Stewart videos? It’s weird.

The major impact of MTV, as I saw it, was the mainstreaming of non-traditional culture. Even as America was course-correcting from decades of increasing liberalism into a decades-long slide back into Puritanical conservative authoritarianism, young citizens dwelling away from the coasts were suddenly exposed to a non-stop Weimar Republic cabaret of sex, androgyny and synth.

Even those elements of pop culture that eventually made their way to the Midwest, used to take months or years to reach us. Commercial television was never very good at pushing trends, only reflecting them, and the internet was a long way off. Suddenly, we were receiving the avant-garde in real-time.

"Girls On Film" (1981)
Duran Duran

There are those who argue that music videos promoted vapid music in favor of attractive imagery. But how any artists who flourished in those first years were inarguable music geniuses whose identity were as visual as musical? David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, Prince – you can listen to their music on its own, it’s brilliant. But it would be a different world without their videos.

Even MTV had to cleave to arbitrary social mores. They censored several videos due to nipples. Blurring the double bass drums in the Tubes clip for She’s a Beauty or zooming to focus on faces, creating fuzzy moments in the Golden Earring video Twilight Zone. No tits, please, we’re American.

Three music videos stand out to me as iconic, specifically because they were edited for broadcast or just not scheduled for broadcast. I hesitate to use the word “censored” because only a government can do that. But the short film which accompanied each songs – songs I would have been listening to regardless – were inspirational to me, for better or worse.

The first, the clip for Girls On Film by Duran Duran and directed by Godley and Creme, a racy piece of work in which the band is depicted playing in the background as staged performances of scantily clad women sumo wrestling men, massaging men, and playing wading pool drowning for a lifeguard.

While this is all presented to satisfy the male gaze, in each case she entirely dominates he, in the last instance leaving the lifeguard unconscious one-inch underwater.

This piece was edited, shadowing, obscuring, or editing skin. The original version had been shown in clubs and on the BBC, but as I learned reading Annie Zaleski’s book on Duran Duran, when it came to releasing it for home video, they actually added additional, provocative material. I thought I was purchasing something I hadn’t been allowed to see on MTV, while what I was really getting was something that had never been broadcast anywhere.

"Relax" (1984)
Frankie Goes to Hollywood 

The video for Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood wasn’t just edited, MTV insisted upon a completely different video or they wouldn’t play it. We got what must have been an intentionally boring video of singer Holly Johnson toying about with the “laser beams” from the lyrics in order to shield the American public from the original clip, directed by Bernard Rose, which featured an orgiastic brawl in a gay bar.

The thing about FGTH was this … for a few years we had all been playing the androgyny thing. Many gay anthems of the early 1980s are couched in vagueness. We could pretend George Michael was into those girls, and that Boy George was just an act. Because they didn’t come right out and say it, in their lyrics or during interviews.

But Frankie was up front about it, and that meant we had to choose. Not whether we were straight or gay, you can’t choose that, but were we going to open ourselves to the difference?

You could rent the Duran Duran video from the local store and I did, several times. I had to order and purchase the Frankie Goes to Hollywood VHS. Almost ten years later you couldn’t even buy the Nine Inch Nails video “album” Broken, it was a widely-distributed bootleg recording of a simulated snuff film that Trent Reznor commissioned but never released.

Included on the many-times dubbed-over copy I picked up at Record Rev was the video for Happiness in Slavery, directed by Jon Reiss. The supposed “single” from the new EP (no commercial station in Cleveland would play that song nor any other from the record) the clip presupposed censorship and Reznor didn’t provide any alternative for the song until the Woodstock ’94 live performance version.

"Happiness In Slavery" (1992)
Nine Inch Nails

Performance artist Bob Flanagan stars in this darkly hilarious scene, filmed in black and white. A mockery of faith and trust, Flanagan enters a room, lights a candle, strips naked and voluntarily sets himself into a machine that tortures, rapes and disembowels him before grinding up and shitting out his corpse.

Why is that funny? No idea. I can’t remember, it sounds horrible. But there was something deeply troubled in my soul in my mid-20s and I had to see it. By the 1990s music videos were beside the point and MTV was already in the process of transitioning from those to original, episodic reality-based programming.

Which means of course, the only people who bemoan the fact that MTV no longer plays videos must be well over forty themselves. They don’t actually wish MTV was still playing music videos 24 hours day – they wouldn’t like what they’d be seeing.

To put it another way: No one misses music videos on MTV, they miss the person they were way back when they watched music videos on MTV. 

 

Duran Duran's Rio (book)

"Duran Duran's Rio"
by Annie Zaleski

Pengo’s 2021 Summer Book Club

Almost ten years ago, I met the biggest Duran Duran fan in the world. She was sixteen and went to Berea (now Berea-Midpark) High School. She had seen them in concert three times, was furious they were not already in the Rock Hall, and educated me on how Red Carpet Massacre (2007) and All You Need Is Now (2010) were the best albums they have ever recorded, at least until that point in time.

I have seen them in concert only once (though I have bought tickets to see them twice, which is story for another time) and must admit I haven’t kept up. She may have been right about that. But we definitely agree they should be in the Rock Hall. They still aren’t. They may never be. Rock critics have always dismissed the “Fab Five” and they are the ones who decide.

One rock critic does take them seriously, and that’s Cleveland scribe Annie Zaleski. You can find her work everywhere, Rolling Stone, A.V. Club, Vulture, Stereogum, she wrote the liner notes for the 25th anniversary re-release of REM's Out of Time album.

Bloomsbury tapped Zaleski for their "33⅓" series, which are little books about big records. In her edition, Zaleski examines the creation and cultural impact of the Duran Duran album Rio. I didn’t need her to tell me why this is a very important album to me. What I did need her to tell me is how.  

(Before I really dig in here I want to report how relieved I was to read, in the very first paragraph of Zaleski's introduction that she, who is a little more than ten years younger than I, was first introduced to this record in the 1990s. So, though much of what is to follow is steeped in nostalgia, it is the music itself that is doing the heavy lifting.)

Carnival EP (1982)

Sophomore efforts generally suck. There is an urban legend that Kurt Cobain wanted to call Nirvana’s second big label album Mediocre Follow-Up but the money people wouldn’t let him. That’s actually a good record, but that title (and others, including Verse Chorus Verse and I Hate Myself and Want To Die) was more inspired than it’s ultimate title, In Utero. And that’s the thing, artists - all artists - can get told what to, or second guess themselves.

You wrote a dozen songs, made them tight and perfect by playing them in clubs across wherever, for years, put it on wax, and it’s a hit! Then you have to go back into a studio and create something new and untested, from scratch, and right away, too.

But it was all happening so fast for Duran Duran, they were touring their eponymous debut album, and still writing, and playing in the studio, and seeing the world, and it was all fuel for a record that would be, had to be, even more interesting than their first.

Rio was released in 1982. The year I turned 14. The year I broke up with my first girlfriend. The year I stepped from young, innocent romance into something a bit more tremulous.

Of course, we didn’t get Duran Duran in the bedroom communities of Ohio that early. We didn’t have MTV that early. But some suburbs did, and they were requesting singles on WMMS. And my college-aged brother (where they did have MTV; Athens, Ohio was one of the first places that received it right away, in August 1981) had the vinyl and dropped it onto a cassette for me to listen to on his Walkman.

And then one day we did get MTV, in spring 1983. And that was a heady summer. Even at that age, in that place, at that time, there were nights. Crowded, unchaperoned parties. Small get togethers in basements or backyards. Late nights with old girlfriends, early mornings with new girlfriends.

Alternate "Rio" cover
(Patrick Nagel)

To me, Rio, the album, describes an entire summer’s night, from dusk to dawn, in that place, at that time.

1. Rio is walking into the party, seeing who is there, and who isn’t.
2. My Own Way is dancing, with absolutely everyone.
3. Lonely In Your Nightmare is the first possibility, a private conversation.
4. Hungry Like the Wolf is utterly failing to get off with that person you have had your eye on.
5. Hold Back the Rain is the second wind, an impossible rush of ebullience.
6. New Religion is making out with someone unexpected in the toilet.
7. Last Chance on the Stairway is, well … exactly what the title means.
8. Save a Prayer is that moment you discover something stranger than love.
9. The Chauffeur cuts either way. You are going home alone or you aren't.

When such things were not so easily acquired via the internet, one of my prized possessions was Duran Duran's Carnival EP, featuring four club mixes of tracks from both Duran Duran (1981) and Rio. I came across it, in all places, in a record store in Rockland, Maine.

Zaleski mentions this album, pointing out how the tracks are not just extended, but in fact remixed, pushing drum and bass forward in Hungry Like the Wolf, or that My Own Way is an entirely different recording.

How to describe possessing your own, unique version of something? That you can’t just dial up, the moment you want it via the internet? I guess you really can’t.

Flood's Cove, ME. July 1983
(Me, far right. See the bird?)

My senses were overwhelmed that summer. I was an early-bloomer, when it came to dating. I had my first serious girlfriend when I was thirteen. Now, two years later I was seeing someone new and we were navigating the boundaries of our bodies. And I was introduced to pot, which she did not know about and would not have approved of. So, already. Secrets.

When I had been in Maine, in late July (for my birthday, as it was, as it always shall be) I was gripped by what the kids call FOMO, I was skittish and squirrely and unpleasant, I wanted to be home. I needed video games and videos, and I needed her. I also needed a turntable for the Carnival EP I just bought.

The family returned to the cove for Labor Day weekend, for a wedding. That was odd, the air was crisp, no longer summer. The leaves were beginning to turn and I had never seen the cove like that.

Just before we drove to the service, I put on my Walkman and took a walk through the woods to Beatrice Bay. I was wearing a jacket and tie, not my usual attire for this trek. I stood on the rock overlooking Bremen Long Island, across the narrowing Muscongus Bay. It is a sacred space, that rock. The ancestors come and go, the rock remains.

I listened to Save a Prayer (that first trippy eight count, which then explodes across your mind) as I looked past the green waters to the evergreens and wide and brilliant sky beyond. I felt that I was a different person than I had been even six weeks earlier. I didn’t imagine I was an adult, but I knew I was completely a teenager.

"There's been nothing like Rio since." - A. Zaleski

The Pudding Mixes

Ohio University used to break from Thanksgiving to New Year’s leaving those of us without anywhere better to go at home, with or without a job. Home for the holidays my freshman year my girlfriend broke up with me and that was particularly devastating because no one had ever broken up with me before.

She is still the only person who ever has. Yeah, I said it.

Sophomore year, for better or worse, I was much more self-possessed and relaxed into the holidays in a manner I never had before. They were big fun. I was taken by the spirit, the spirit of Christmas, if not of Christ. There were three albums I listened to a lot that season, driving my mother to distraction: George Winston’s December, Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the new compilation to benefit the Special Olympics, A Very Special Christmas.

Since then I have become something of a holiday music nut. I look forward to that time after Thanksgiving when I have permission (in my house) to begin playing holiday music. The house is decorated, I want my mind decorated.

But I don’t like all Christmas music, not just any will do. In the early 90s I made a cassette of my very favorite Christmas songs, C-90 minutes of tunes and that was the soundtrack for me. It was called The Pudding Mix, after the name of the extended version of Wham’s “Last Christmas.”

In 2004 I made a new Pudding Mix CD to share with my colleagues, another in 2007, and again in 2009. But I wasn’t happy with these, because in an effort to fill them out I added songs I didn’t really care about.


I made this fan video of the Firesign Theatre bit "Toad Away" ten years ago.
Unsolicited YouTube comment: "NOT YOUR TYPICAL ALBUM HACK WITH A BACKGROUND!"

But anyway, who listens to cassettes or CDs anymore? A few years ago some folks who worked on Bad Epitaph’s production of The Santaland Diaries asked for a playlist of the songs we used, and so I obliged. It is a great collection of songs. And it’s only an hour, perfect length.

When I played "Crumpet the Elf" three years ago I was inspired to make a collection of songs that I think of as holiday records, but really aren’t.

This year I received a passing request for a new "Pudding Mix" (it was from Daniel) and I was torn. Was I just going to throw together more Christmas songs, without a theme? Just to do it? I decided if I had an hour’s worth of music I could listen to more than once, by December 1, then I would share it. And surprise, I did.

I don’t need to explain too deeply just how to make a mixtape or playlist, Nick Horby has already done this much better than I. It’s not just about clustering a bunch of songs together, they need to sound like they belong together. And there are a number that I have been enjoying listening to recently -- and a few surprise covers I want to point up, cover versions of strange holiday favorites I’d never heard before.



The Closing of the Year: First performed by Wendy & Lisa (formerly of The Revolution) for the holiday bomb Toys, starring Robin Williams. Written by producer Trevor Horn, in its original version it is appropriately sentimental late 80s pop, but in the late 1990s he created a totally bonkers orchestral version featuring Plácido Domingo and Sarah Brightman.

Christmastime in Painesville: In the early 90s this novelty song by the band Slack Jaw was a favorite on WENZ. More recently the song’s composer John Koury joined former deadboys bassist Frank Secich to form The Deadbeat Poets, and it’s their version which is available for streaming. It’s more polished than the original, but then, they are older. And aren’t we all?

Even a Miracle Needs a Hand: In 1974 the Rankin Bass factory produced the cartoon (not stopmotion) special Twas the Night Before Christmas, in which an inventor has created a special clock to welcome Santa on Christmas Eve. However, when it is broken (we don’t need to get into this) a family of mice work to repair the damage. That explains this song’s lyrics … but I must tell you, I did not actually expect to find it when I searched on Spotify. Imagine my utter Christmas joy to discover this beautiful, retrofuturistic rendition, recorded only last year by soundcape hipster Sonntag (Zach Johnston).

The Name of the Game (song)

The Name of the Game was released in October, 1977. The first single from the ABBA album ABBA: The Album, it reached number 12 in the United States, and (I was unaware of this until I read the Wikipedia entry) the distinctive bass line was inspired by Stevie Wonder’s I Wish.

I was nine years old in late 1977. What I find amazing is that even at that young age, I knew exactly what the song was about: A young, self-conscious woman (we will say she, the lyrics are sung by self-identifying women) making an appeal to an apparently worldly, probably older man (we will call this person he) a man with whom she has made an emotional connection, to please be honest about what is happening between them.

However, the real impact of this song cannot be understood in the shorter, 3:58 version which was the American radio edit, which omits the entire second verse. I had the album, it was the first pop record I ever bought, so I was aware of the difference.

I have already described what it was like growing up, consuming the pop culture of the late 1970s. I had created for myself a somewhat dark image of adult interpersonal relationships. My parents might be square, but my own adulthood would apparently be one of mistrust, and fleeting, furtive coupling.

This song, especially, in its complete 4:51 album version, affirmed and confirmed this theory. The first verse marks her as insecure, and describes her disbelief that anyone would pay her any attention at all.

I was an impossible case
No-one ever could reach me
But I think I can see in your face
There's a lot you can teach me

In its brief, radio-ready incarnation, the song just rises and rises and rises to the chorus, begging the question, what’s the name of the game?

The second verse, however, makes her sound almost pathetic, as though she thinks of herself as some kind of social outcast.

I have no friends, no-one to see
And I am never invited
Now I am here, talking to you
No wonder I get excited

Because there is a second verse, the heights of the chorus is abruptly brought back down to Stevie Wonder’s pilfered, down-beat bass line. The lyrics then dive so much deeper into the narrator’s personal insecurities, which become even more pronounced, and her surprise that this beautiful mentor has focused his attention on this neophyte, out of an entire crowd.

You might even say he is grooming her.

Her complete shock at this development leads her to ask, “would you laugh at me, if I said I care for you?” That’s a special kind of fear, and now instead of asking for the ground rules of the game, she now sounds afraid it’s just a game. Is he using her? Can he be serious?

This second verse raises the stakes tremendously.

Again, at the age of nine, I got this. I understood it. And even then I was worried I might one day be treated the way she is.

As a child it never occurred to me that I could be the one who treats someone else that way.

Which is all to say, I am entirely unhappy with the manner in which this song is employed in the musical Mamma Mia! Altering the lyrics somewhat, it becomes a somewhat creepy plea from a young woman asking an older man if he is not, in fact, her biological father. So glad they didn't use it in the movie.

I have said too much.

Musical Roadtrip

Buffalo, New York

There’s an Onion article people like to post on my Facebook page with the headline, Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation. It came out eight years ago, folks think that just because I like to lecture them about how stupid their taste in music is that I am the kind of parent who schools his own children on what’s hip.

This is not true. My children have their own taste and quite often they are educating me. My friends on Facebook, however, have wasted their pathetic lives on garbage music, and I am doing what friends do. I am trying to help them.

As schedules panned out this summer, I would be driving one child up while my wife flies with the other. Then we switch -- children, that is. I will drive the other and she will fly.

Do I mind driving both ways? Heavens, no. I have developed a healthy aversion to air travel and really like to road. And hotels and dining in unique, interesting restaurants.

The boy, age fourteen, likes music. He plays the drums and bass (stand up, and electric) and listens to his phone. When he hears a song that interests him on the radio, he will look it up on Spotify and add it to a massive playlist of all of his favorite songs.

And that’s the thing. Like a lot of kids his age (though certainly not all) he doesn’t own copies of music. He has no CD player, he has a speaker for his phone, though he prefers earbuds. He does not subscribe to a premium channel, so when he does listen to playlists they are broken up with ads, and when he listens to “albums” he’s actually hearing it shuffled up, often with other “related” songs dropped in. And more ads.

So, my plan was to pull together a collection of CDs to listen on the trip -- entire albums, played all the way through. He gave me a list to get from the library, I chose several from my collections, and we would go back and forth, choosing albums.

The trip was much more exciting, if somewhat disturbing in places, and he rarely looked at his phone the entire trip, which I take as a major victory.

In every single case, whether we were listening to his choice or mine, these were albums he had never listened to all the way through before. Here they are, presented in the order we listened to them, accompanied by brief commentary. He’s O, I am D.

Saturday, Cleveland to Syracuse

The Cure: Disintegration
O: Funky, psychedelic jam band. Weird. There were few lyrics, leaving more space for music.

Pup: Morbid Stuff
D: Surprised it was such much about relationships. Triumphal, yet aggressively emotional.

De La Soul: De La Soul Is Dead
O: Inspired, they had so much to say about the people who misunderstood them.

System of a Down (eponymous)
D: Intense, tight, and dramatic. Old school pun and metal.
O: The first five songs are bangers.

Barenaked Ladies: Gordon
O: They seem like funny guys.
D: Some day I need to write a paper about this album. It won’t be pretty.

Soul Coughing: Ruby Vroom
O: It’s weird and funky and the drum beats are cool and it’s very musical and the bass is fantastic.

Sunday, Syracuse to Friendship

Ben Folds Five: Whatever and Ever Amen
O: The guy who wrote Dear Evan Hansen listened to a lot of Ben Folds.

Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP
O: He straight up says what he doesn’t like about things.

Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
D: This is where my education began.
O: My dad grew up in Bay Village.

Rage Against the Machine (eponymous)
D: Still painfully relevant. Paul Ryan is a chump.
O: Really good debut album right up there with Pup’s.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Trust
O: This is like all the music I like. I like the band, I like him.

Beastie Boys: Ill Communication
O: Shows their punk background. Really embracing that distorted microphone.

The Police: Zenyatta Mondatta
O: The whole album is a greatest hits collection.

Mike Doughty performs Ruby Vroom at the Beachland Ballroom on Friday, October 25, 2019.

Million Dollar Quartet (musical)

James Barry (airborn) as Carl Perkins
in "Million Dollar Quartet"
(Great Lakes Theater)

Finally took in our latest offering at the Hanna, the jukebox musical Million Dollar Quartet. Word has been strong, audiences are loving this, I have had the chance to meet and talk with several theatergoers who may not be familiar with the work of Great Lakes Theater but have seen and followed this show from Broadway to the tour to independently produced productions like this one, and their praise for these particular artists is high.

Personally, I was excited to bring my mother-in-law to see the show. She lives in Athens, and the time has never been right to get her to a show there, but I definitely did not want her to miss this one. She is a great fan of live music, rhythm and blues, and the works of Cash, Perkins, Presley, and Lewis. The whole family came and it was a great evening in downtown Cleveland.

Everyone had their favorites, I think my wife was particularly taken with Sky Seals’ soulful performance as Johnny Cash, and the girl had a lot to say about fiery Gabe Aronson as Jerry Lee Lewis, and the production is definitely constructed so that it is that man’s show to steal. The boy, the bass player, was very impressed by Eric Scott Anthony as Brother Jay. We asked if it was because he rode the bass on his back near the end, but no, he was the way he rode the thing across the floor playing slap bass, that he knew had a high level of difficulty.

The term “jukebox musical” used to be pejorative, used dismissively by critics to describe shows made of unoriginal tunes, strung together to create an artificial narrative. But these shows are so prevalent the term itself is no longer a put-down. Yes, these are previously written songs, but if the book is strong enough and carries you through and the artists are to-notch, what you get is an evening where everyone gets a live, powerful rendition of songs they already know and love. The audience last night was quite enthusiastic, indeed.

Growing up in suburban Bay Village, I was raised to believe rock and roll started in the sixties, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. We didn’t listen to R&B or rockabilly, I was only marginally aware of Elvis (who passed, as a punchline, when I was nine) and entirely unfamiliar with any of the black progenitors of rock and roll.

It wasn’t until hooking up with the woman I would later marry and getting to know her family and what they listened to that I started to know, understand, and deeply love the music which inspired the British Invasion acts. Most significantly was when we took a road trip to Memphis, visiting Graceland and Sun Studio.

July 10, 2000 (journal)

Did Graceland. I was amazed. Much more enjoyable than I ever imagined. It’s small -- homey, surprisingly un-opulent. It had been described to me as being tacky, but I would call that classist.

What my wife thought she saw was a man from dirt-poor roots who did not try to become someone else, struggling to be normal.

The much-maligned Jungle Room is great! The decor is fanciful, but also kind of sexy. Loved the wall fountain. It’s funny, by that I mean it has a sense of humor.

Everything is modest. A kidney-shaped swimming pool a small one. An ordinary-sized kitchen. Nothing grand. Normal-sized rec room. It was touching. Charming. Some fun, swinging, 60s, 70s era living.

We didn’t go overboard on souvenirs; postcards, a few books, a CD of gospel songs. I am starting to “get” Elvis.

Noticed Colonel Tom Parker was mentioned exactly once the whole time we were there.

July 11, 2000 (journal)

Drove over to Sun Studio. Our tour guide was named Mick, late 20s. Spiky black hair, great glasses, attitude.

And what’s the tour? The front office, the studio itself, that’s it. Mick described the scene, and played a selection of sound clips from recordings and outtakes created right in that very room. It was more than worth the admission.

Our guide was just so great. The tour group was small, and he engaged each of us. Mick was sincere, he loves this music, tapping his foot. He had this wry smile all the time. I wish we had asked him about himself.

Hard to put my finger on, but that is now my favorite rock and roll museum.

Great Lakes Theater presents Million Dollar Quartet at the Hanna Theatre through May 26, 2019

Nineteen Eighty-Six

My daughter is pretty stylish. She dresses independently, not ignorant of current trends, but hardly obsessed with them. Funky tees, colorful belts, ripped jeans and flannel, but also Hawaiian shirts, cardigans, she picks and accepts a lot of odd pieces from her parents and some T-shirts that her younger brother has outgrown.

Lately she’s taken to wearing my middle school windbreaker, my “Bay Jacket,” sporting team colors and those three huge letters on the back, B-A-Y. A blue, white and red blazon striding down the black and gold halls of Heights High. That’s some audacious bougie chic right there.

On the shoulder the number 86, that was the magic number for me (for her it is 21.) Agent 86. Eight-six the gumbo. During my childhood, 1986 was as far as my imagination could go into the future. All years that came after that just sounded weird.

Musicologists used science to determine that 1986 was the worst year in the history of popular music, or certainly the least interesting (what is the difference?) and I find that hard to argue with. The patina of sheer sameness washed over the airwaves.

“Sweet Freedom” by Michael McDonald. “Glory of Love” by Peter Cetera. “Two of Hearts” by Suzi Q. “Who’s Johnny” by El DeBarge. “Invisible Touch” by Genesis. "When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Get Going" by Billy Ocean. Thomas Dolby’s soundtrack to the motion picture “Howard the Duck.”

I was at a club in the Flats that summer and went up to the DJ to request some INXS and he said they don’t play punk music.

But there were several important records released that year. There always will be -- so much new music, every year. Some of it has to be good, right? I mean, nothing will beat 1989, but here’s a couple gems from the year I graduated high school.

Music From the Edge of Heaven - Wham!

Okay, this album isn’t actually good. The band had broken up but they owed their American label one more record. In Britain they got away with a greatest hits compilation (The Final) but we got this. Shitty, dated remixes of the previously released "I’m Your Man" and "Wham Rap," a live track from the China tour and an almost two year old Christmas single (yes, that one.)

But it does include the seriously dirty dance confection "The Edge of Heaven," George Michael’s second single "A Different Corner" and a beautiful cover version of the Was (Not Was) track "Where Did Your Heart" go, an indication of things to come for this, the greatest of white soul singers.

License To Ill - The Beastie Boys

There’s a lot of bad things you can say about this album, and to their credit they apologized for most of them by their fourth record. What happens when you pretend to be something horrible and then realize no one gets the joke, or worse, that you’ve actually become that thing? We knew it was high comedy, and possibly wrong, but that didn’t keep us from drinking too much beer and blasting the thing on the green, playing Frisbee and hanging brain.

Crowded House - Crowded House

A tale of two brothers, the young Neil Finn had assumed the lead from his older brother Tim for the final Split Enz album, turning what had been a schizophrenic lounge act into a seriously polished pop machine. The band broke up and from it he formed this outstanding trio.

Produced by the legendary Mitchell Froom, you cannot put this record on without listening to the entire thing. Overplayed to the point of absolute madness, I still cannot hear the opening chords of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” without losing my shit. I’m right there and I can never leave.

So - Peter Gabriel

Nineteen Eighty-Six is the year Peter Gabriel released So and your argument is invalid.

Especially For You - The Smithereens

Last week the family was celebrating Calvin’s Day, making dinner together and listening to music. The wife and I took turns choosing albums, and this was one I put on. She didn’t even know it -- she knew them, she knew the single, but she hadn’t listened to the entire record.

I knew the late lead singer Pat DiNinzio was an enormous Beatles fan (they recorded not one but two albums of Beatles covers) but having not listened to this, their debut, for the better part of twenty years, I never realized how much their style was entirely inspired by the Beatles first few albums.

The first albums, the rock and roll records. That's what was unique. Countless bands have based their entire careers stealing the Beatles later, lush, over-produced stuff -- E.L.O., XTC … hell, Oasis entire catalog is variations on "I Am the Walrus." But it takes some serious hero worship to impersonate the unique and particular guitar stylings of early Harrison, Lennon and McCartney.

Skylarking - XTC

And speaking of. Lush. Brainy. Philosophical college music to fuck to. Andy Partridge and Todd Rundgren fistfight in heaven and we were left with forty-seven minutes of infectious, open the windows and let florid springtime breeze blow over the naked skin of you and whoever you're with that afternoon.

I could go on. There was good music. We listened to it.

Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," through April 7, 2019.

Sources:
“Study of 17,000 hit pop songs identifies the years to remember – and the ones best forgotten” by Adam Sherman, The Independent 5/5/2015

Christmas Wrapping (song)

This weekend, ageing alt-rock hipster Twitter was going nuts over a tweet from Andy Partridge (XTC) in which he lavished praise on that holiday classic Christmas Wrapping by Akron's own The Waitresses.

"So much about this that I wished i'd done," Partridge said. "The cheekiness."

Waitress scribe Chris Butler on Facebook responded simply, "Speechless."

Indeed. If I received such praise from the man who wrote Dear God I would also be gobsmacked.

Why is Christmas Wrapping such an endurable bop? It's completely dated; early 80s white girl rapping, syncopated, post-punk pop with jangly guitars and jingle bells, even the lyrics lock it rigidly to the year it was released:

Had his number, but never the time.
Most of '81 passed along those lines.

Perhaps it is that sentiment, about never having the time, which makes the story part of the song something everyone relates to.

Butler was commissioned by a record label to create a Waitresses song for a compilation album of indie holiday tunes, and he found the idea of writing a Christmas song (especially in the middle of summer) to be as oppressive as the holiday itself can be.

This was on HEAVY seasonal rotation at our house... and still is.
The Waitresses, CHRISTMAS WRAPPINGhttps://t.co/BlTiPoUBDf
So much about this that I wished i'd done. The cheekiness.

— XTC (@xtcfans) December 1, 2018

"I hated Christmas," he told reporter John Petrick in 2005. "It wasn't about joy. It was something to cope with."

And so, he created a narrative of a young adult - not a parent or a child - working, dating, getting sick, looking for connection, settling for a solo Christmas dinner in her apartment before finding that last minute date at the grocery store.

Truth be told, I was not hip to this song when it was released. I was thirteen and not as cool as all that. But there was an early 80s revival in the mid-1990s, as Gen Xers were recovering bits of their lost childhood, and this record went to the top of my personal holiday playlist in a big way.

Because of nostalgia for the New Wave era. Because it’s downtown and upbeat. Because it’s about striving and failing and being happy with what you have. Because the late Patty Donahue knows what boys like, she’s a square peg, and she can use my comb.

Source:
"How an obscure 80s punk band created a Christmas classic" by John Petrick, The Star Online 12/22/2005

UPDATE: In my original draft, I erroneously said the track was synth-laden. "No synths!" - C.Butler

Sophisti-pop

"I won't try to stop you when you speak of the past ..."
- Everything But the Girl, "Fascination"

We were so fucking suave.

Teenagers for time immemorial have aspired to adulthood. In the mid 1980s this was reflected in the clothes we wore, the way we stood, the music we listened to. For men the clothes were rumpled, structureless suits. We wore ties to school. We posed and smoked, drank wine coolers and listened to the music inspired by our elders.

Wine coolers. Music inspired by. Ten years later we would be doing the real thing, drinking the actual cocktails our grandfathers drank, and listening to Sinatra. But not in the 80s. We were kids. We had soda pop alcohol, and we had soda pop jazz.

Arabica, the only coffeehouse in Cleveland, was a distant oasis of cool, somewhere far on the east side. We heard there were two. But a third opened in Rocky River in 1982, and I would spend weekend nights there, getting smokes from the machine (seventy-five cents a pack) a fourteen year-old getting jittery on black coffee, talking philosophy with community college twenty year-olds whose lameness should have been evident from their hanging out with fourteen year-olds.

The soundtrack was smooth, it was stylish, it must have a saxophone. Roxy Music’s swan song Avalon was the epitome of the genre which has in recent years come to be known as Sophisti-pop, a bizarre combination of pop, blues, and jazz, with period keyboard stylings, and wistful lyrics of longing, regret, and instant nostalgia.

It is not arbitrary that the Bill Murray character sings “More Than This” for the karaoke scene in Lost In Translation.

So styling, and not yet eighteen.

Some singles were big hits on the American pop charts, including Sade’s “Smooth Operator” and Simply Red’s “Holding Back the Years.” George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” certainly falls into this category. Lesser known acts like Prefab Sprout, Everything But the Girl and The Blue Nile, never played on commercial radio, would find their way into our cassette players thanks to recommendations of other pop stars in music magazines, through college stations, and late-night MTV. And we heard them at the west side Arabica.

This was the soundtrack in my head as I wrote The Way I Danced With You, an exploration of this pretense of maturity, faced with the reality of inexperience.

CHARLES: Then I drove her back to her house and we kissed listening to "Winelight."

This music, invoking images of sun-drenched, exotic locations, smoky nightclubs, shimmering, wet city streets. Nameless, faceless lovers, hungover expressions, overcoats, eyeliner and lipstick. It’s an age-old question, and one that won’t stop being asked any time soon. Why do we want to grow up so fast?

The answer is simple, because being a teenager sucks. I’ve lost interest in childish things but am not permitted to do adult things. “There’s nothing to do,” teenagers exclaim, and they are as correct today as we were back then. There really isn’t.

So we painted a picture of Reagan/Thatcher-era wealth and sophistication (or thrift-store chic and rebellion) and put ourselves squarely in the middle.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?

Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," opening March 21, 2019.