But I’m glad I forced myself outside. The tag-team combination of the music and the exercise helped lift my spirits. First I got a one-two punch of 1970s TV when the iPod played the themes from “The Odd Couple” and “The Rockford Files” back to back. Two great songs from iconic TV shows, both of which were on Friday nights, I think. I had even purchased the 45 of the Rockford theme way back when, at the Melody Shop in downtown Augusta, Maine. A few months ago I even went online to find out who plays the guitar solo on that. The consensus is that composer Mike Post played it himself, although some people theorized it was Les Dudek. It’s that good.

Sometimes the iPod has an almost uncanny way of picking the right song. After the exercise in TV nostalgia it played “Barely Breathing” by the Reivers. That was a strange coincidence because just yesterday I had been thinking about the CD it’s from, Pop Beloved, after reading an article in the Washington Post about the record store where I had bought it.

The store was Melody Records on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, just north of Dupont Circle. The article said the store was going out of business. Truth be told, I was surprised to hear it hadn’t closed years ago. Running a record store these days is about as smart as operating a dinosaur ranch. It’s only the dinosaurs like me who still buy CDs, and I don’t buy very many. Once we purchased objects that contained the music; now the music comes unencumbered by a physical body. Its just bits and bytes that flow through the ether and into your storage device. Tunes today are like those beings from old “Star Trek” episodes that evolved until they were just balls of energy (which must make it very hard for them to adjust their earbuds).

There was a time, though, when Melody Records was just one of many record stores I would visit on my walks through Washington. If I decided to make the big hike home from my office near L’Enfant Plaza I could hit the Olsson’s near Metro Center, continue on to check out the new-arrivals bin at the Olsson’s near Dupont Circle, peruse the cutouts at the nearby Kemp Mill Records on Connecticut Avenue, then cross the street to peek into Melody Records. I think I bought only two things there—one record and one CD—but they were good purchases. The record was Happy All Time by the Primitons and the CD was Pop Beloved.

Local station WHFS turned me on to the Reivers when I moved to DC in 1986. Back then the band called themselves Zeitgeist until another group by that name threatened to sue them. HFS was playing the band’s cover of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” the song originally made famous by Willie Nelson. I liked it enough to buy the album—at Tower Records, I think. I saw them live every time they passed through DC, always at the smelly old 9:30 Club on F Street, around the corner from Ford’s Theater. Every show was excellent. On one memorable occasion their encore was Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song” and that was me jumping up and down in front of the stage in the nearly empty club, screaming, “Thin Lizzy! Thin Lizzy!” Ah, good times. The hangover the next day? Not so good.

They were a great band, a pop-oriented quartet from Austin, Texas, fronted by the sweet-and-sour vocal combination of Kim Longacre and John Croslin. Longacre had a powerful, pure voice and Croslin sang gruffly like Lou Reed but their voices worked together beautifully, like a good marriage. A lot of their songs were about family and relationships and just trying to make things work out, so sometimes it felt like a musical marriage. And although I was listening to the Reivers today on a cold and damp January morning, they are really a summer band, best heard on a steamy, humid afternoon with a canopy of green leaves above your head and a cold beer in your hand.

The followed up their debut with Saturday, a Don Dixon-produced album (which I only recently got on CD). Next came what might be their best album, End of the Day, which includes “Star Telegram,” one of my favorite Reivers songs , a nostalgia-drenched look at a past that is gone forever. With its imagery of fans, backyard barbecues and cold soda it also reinforces my feeling that the Reivers are meant to be heard in the heat of a languid summer afternoon. The fact that they do a rocking cover of the showtune “Lazy Afternoon” on that album only reinforces that opinion.

I bought End of the Day at the big Tower Records near George Washington University, which has also gone out of business. The Olsson’s chain is gone, too. I just went online to check and gasped with surprise and sorrow to find a placeholder page that said, “Olsson’s is closed.” While I can’t feel as much sorrow over the end of Kemp Mill, which was the least personal of them all, I did buy a fair amount of product at their stores. I especially loved their cutouts (which is how I got Dumptruck’s Positively Dumptruck and the first, Nick Lowe-produced Katydid’s album, among many other purchases).

That’s another thing about records and CDs— each one can act as trigger for a specific memory. I can still remember my feeling of excitement when I looked into the new arrival bin and found Pop Beloved. In those pre-Internet days I had no idea it was out, or even being recorded. You don’t get that kind of captured moment when you download a song. It’s like the difference between getting a letter and receiving an email, buying a book or downloading one. I’m not saying that to rail against technology, but something has been lost.

Jonathan Edwards, known to his friends as "Mr. Sunshine."

“We are all sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

Bill and me at Fenway, October 24, 2004. Those were happier days.

That October was one of the best months of my life. Those first three losses to the Yankees hurt but once the Red Sox fought their way back from the brink all turned golden. I attended Game 2 of the World Series at Boston’s Fenway Park with my best friend Bill, who has season tickets. It was damp and cold all night but who cared? That was the second Night of the Bloody Sock for pitcher Curt Schilling (the first came in the playoffs against the Yankees) and the Red Sox emerged triumphant 6-2 over the St. Louis Cardinals ( whose comeback to win the National League wild card this year was as exhilarating for their fans as the Red Sox’s collapse was crushing to theirs). As we watched game four on TV my wife and I told our kids they could stay up late and watch just one World Series game. They picked that one. The Red Sox won, completing a series sweep, as a lunar eclipse outside turned the moon red in the sky above our house. I blasted Queen’s “We Are the Champions” and we took a picture of the four of us, our fingers up in a “We’re Number One” salute. Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund will always have Paris, but Red Sox fans will always have 2004.

     I also saw the Baseball Project play at a Senators game—the last game of the season, in fact, on a Labor Day that threatened rain but held off until after the game. The Baseball Project is a band formed by Steve Wynn (ex-Dream Syndicate), Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows, Robyn Hitchcock’s Venus 3, R.E.M.’s touring band) and Linda Pitmon (who plays drums in Wynn’s other band, the Minus 5). Buck missed this gig because a back problem had landed him on the disabled list and Sal Maida, who has played with Cracker and Roxy Music, took his place. I had to admit I was a little disappointed that Buck wasn’t there but  once I heard the band I got over it. They played a set before the game, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” did “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the seventh-inning stretch, and played another set after the game. They did songs about Ted Williams, Bill Buckner, Tony Conigliaro and even some non-Red Sox, and they appeared to be having a great time. Afterwards I bought a copy of their first CD, Volume I: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, and had all the band members sign it. I told Wynn I had seen the Dream Syndicate open for R.E.M. back in 1984 or 1985 at the Orpheum in Boston. “That was 1985,” he said and he told me he remembered doing a duet with Michael Stipe for the encore. Several of us tried  to persuade them to become the house band for the Senators. They didn’t commit  to that but they did say they’d be back next year.

This is a poster for a Los Angeles-area show I did not see. But I did get the poster.

An entry on Metafilter about the movie Stop Making Sense led to one thing after another and before I knew it I was wasting time last night watching YouTube clips of a Talking Heads concert recorded in Rome back in 1980. Inspired, I put More Songs About Buildings and Food back on the iPod and listened to the entire album as I walked this morning. It got my blood moving.

1980! That was, unless I miss my guess, 31 years ago. Thirty-one years! Maybe time is after us after all. Count back 31 years before the band played that Rome  concert and we reach the year 1949—and that means that today we are as far removed from the Heads in Rome as they were from Frankie Lane hitting the charts with “Mule Train.” Sinatra had yet to team with Nelson Riddle and there was no such thing as Beatles—in fact, there was no rock and roll yet. Music sure did change over those years and the rest of the world along with it.

I didn’t see Talking Heads until 1982. I saw them a total of three times—once at the Greek Theater in Hollywood, a second time on the same tour at the Hollywood Palladium, and once at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine. All of the performances were memorable and the ones at the Greek and in Portland were downright transcendent. They gave me a feeling that must feel something like religious ecstasy. The two Hollywood performances were in support of the live album, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. When I saw them in Portland it was in support of Speaking in Tongues, the same tour that Jonathan Demme captured on film for Stop Making Sense. I have to say, though, that the 1980 performance looks like it was just as good and maybe even better. They had Adrian Belew on guitar for that one, plus a crack band that included Dolette McDonald on vocals, Steve Scales on percussion and Buster Jones on bass (plus the core of David Byrne,Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth). Someone should release the whole thing on DVD.

Once I began YouTubing the night away I also watched an early performance of the core four doing “Psycho Killer” on a British TV show, probably around 1978 or 1979. That’s back when they wore polo shirts and looked like slightly off-kilter preppies (and when Tina Weymouth could have passed for a boy). Byrne looking like he was singing something autobiographical. He looked intense, like someone who may have really believed his bed was on fire.

It’s a little hard to believe, though, that a mere two years separated that performance from the one in Rome. The great joy of Talking Heads was the way the band gradually threw off the appearance of buttoned-down repression and surrendered to their inner funk. From the start they had been danceable in their spiky, new-wavish way, even when the guitar parts sounded like Morse code and Byrne displayed all the coordination of an alien just getting accustomed to its host body. I always liked the fact that they titled one of their albums Speaking in Tongues because in effect that’s what they began to do. Once the band embraced the joy of rhythm, expanded, and began creating their own brand of intellectual dance music, it was as though they had become possessed—musical Pentecostals. And it was better for them that they began speaking in tongues instead of handling rattlesnakes.

One other great thing about Talking Heads—something many people don’t seem to notice—is their sense of humor. They are a funny band in a deadpan, “are they kidding or not” kind of way. Their name is funny. Calling an album More Songs About Buildings and Food—that’s funny. The lyrics are funny. “Don’t Worry About the Government” cracks me up every time I hear it. (“Some civil servants are just like my loved ones. They work so hard and they try to be strong.” Not a sentiment, I suspect, that would go over well in Tea Party circles.) David Byrne’s Big Suit is a stitch on film in Stop Making Sense and also when I saw it live in Portland. The vein of geeky humor that runs throughout the Talking Heads canon helps save the band from falling into the pitfall of art school pretension.

Thirty-one years! As I watched the songs from that Rome concert I got no sense that the music had dated at all. The band sounded great—big, thumping bass lines from Weymouth and Jones, high-energy rhythm from Frantz, chugging guitar underpinnings from Harrison, a great, squealing menagerie emanating from Belew’s guitar. Everyone in that band was in to form and Dolette McDonald was a revelation. What a band! What a night! I get excited just thinking about it.

I was a Miller fan way back in high school. Maybe even junior high. This was back in the 1970s, mind you. I had started playing trumpet in fifth grade (although my inspiration then was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) so I naturally became interested in big-band music. I can’t remember how I first started listening to Miller. Maybe it was because we played some of the Miller band’s songs in swing band, with me taking the trumpet solos on “In the Mood” and “String of Pearls.” That might have triggered it. Anyway, eventually I bought an album called Pure Gold that included the band’s biggest hits and later I got a two-record set at Mammoth Mart. I still have both those records. I also blew the then-colossal sum of $10.00 for George Simon’s Miller biography. It was chock full of anecdotes and photos. It was also the first time I came across the expression “in his cups” to describe someone who was drunk. I think it referred to Bobby Hackett, the trumpet player who ad-libbed that terrific, bouncy solo in “String of Pearls.” It seems that some swing-band musicians liked a good drink now and then. I recall a from the book story about how one of Miller’s musicians showed up drunk for a gig and the bandleader—who was a notorious taskmaster and a bit of a cold fish—made him play solo after solo when the poor guy could barely stand.

So somehow I stumbled into Glenn Miller fandom, 30 years after it peaked. I even relived the ghosts of big-band rivalries past when I started to vaguely resent Benny Goodman once I read that his band could swing better than Miller’s. I later came to realize that this was probably true. In our house we had a battered copy of the soundtrack to The Benny Goodman Story. It belonged to my Uncle Artie, who had once played trumpet in a swing band in Maine. I listened to it and was blown away by “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the great live version from Goodman’s famous Carnegie Hall concert. That song and Miller’s “In the Mood” now serve as shorthand for any film that wants to establish a 1940s setting.

I have to admit that the Miller catalogue contains a lot of bland songs and plenty of cutesy stuff, too (I’m looking at you, “Chattanooga Choo Choo”). But there was plenty of good material. However, beware of substitutes. I added some “Glenn Miller” tunes to my iPod a while back but I didn’t like them. They weren’t real Glenn Miller. They were re-recordings done by some modern band and you could sense their falseness from the first notes. The brass was too brittle, the drums were too much in the foreground and everything had the feeling of trying too hard. It was the audio equivalent of those commercials that use film that’s supposed to look old—but the fake scratches and tears in the black and white stock can’t hide its youth. Real swing band recordings have a certain warm sound, a quality that modern recording equipment doesn’t capture.

Later I added some real Glenn Miller, from a two-album set that my friend Bill had converted to MP3s. It was called Glenn Miller: A Memorial 1944-1969. (It must have been originally released on the 25^th anniversary of his death.) Whenever I was at Bill’s place way back when I’d pop one of the discs on the turntable and listen to “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” which has a really cool fugue thing between the trumpets and the trombones that just rises and rises in intensity until the whole band comes in and shuts the door.

My favorite Miller tune of all time, though, isn’t one of his better known ones. It’s a weird mashup of swing and opera, a big-band arrangement of “The Anvil Chorus” from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore. My knowledge of opera begins and ends with Tommy but I do know that anyone who believes the Miller band couldn’t swing should listen to this little number. It swings like it should be in a cartoon with animated animals playing instruments that bend and stretch to the beat in ways that defy the laws of physics. It starts with the drums fading in and the trumpets doing a “ta-dah!” thing before the band picks it up with a little Verdi riffing. The bass and drums just push things along, and the solos are all short but intense. I especially dig the trumpet, which spits out notes like they’re coming from a machine gun. Near the end there’s a great drum solo (in my imagination a cartoon octopus plays it) and then a clarinet solo ushers in the rest of the band for the big finish. All the sections start playing off each other like the parts of a well-oiled machine, saxes talking to trumpets, trumpets talking to trombones, drums and bass just pounding along, as if a bunch of conversations are going on separately but at the same time working together perfectly—and then one of the trumpets climbs up and up the scale until it reaches this screaming high note. The band vamps with a little Verdi before things draw to a close. “Anvil Chorus” just kicks ass.

Another great song from the this album is the “St. Louis Blues March.” This one dates from the time after Miller enlisted in the army and led military bands. He wanted to play marching tunes that would help soldiers put a little swing into their steps but his superiors preferred that he stick to the usual Sousa marches. Listen to this swinging march and you’ll see that Miller was on to something. Whenever I hear it I can’t help but start marching myself. It’s a good thing I don’t pass anyone as the song plays in my ears this morning or I would embarrass myself by snapping a jaunty salute.

Miller eventually made it over to England and a few years ago I visited some of the places where he and his band played over there. I even stopped by the airport where he took off on his final flight into nowhere. His airplane disappeared over the English Channel in December 1944 as he was heading over to newly liberated Europe to play for the troops. The actual airport is gone but the original control tower remains and it houses a small museum of Miller memorabilia.

 So that’s my little Pearl Harbor tribute on a cold and gray morning when the clouds are dropping random snowflakes as I walk. I wrap it up by playing “American Patrol.” It was never my favorite Miller song but it has the kind of patriotic appeal that seems appropriate for December 7. With big-band music on our side the Japanese didn’t stand a chance.

Anyway, years ago my tapes gave way to compact discs and now the compact disc is stepping aside for the MP3 and the iTune. All this passing of once-dominant musical formats reminds me of the movie The Hunger, where Catherine Deneuve played a vampire blessed with eternal youth. Her lovers were not so lucky. They were immortal but they kept aging. Eventually Deneuve had to haul each poor, decrepit ex-boyfriend up to her attic and leave him there amongst the ones who came before, making the place look like a slumber party at Larry King’s.

That’s like me and my music formats. I have my CDs in the sun room. Down in the family room I have a closet full of vinyl records. Way down in the basement, in the far corner of the furnace room, I had a box full of cassette tapes.

A few weeks ago something spurred me to descend into the basement, fight my way through the piles of junk in the furnace room—leaving a trail of bread crumbs so I could find my way back out—and retrieve my tapes. Back upstairs I blew off the dust and rummaged through the box. I realized I had a lot of good music in there, things like the Woodentops, O Positive, the Christians, Muddy Waters, Jonathan Richman, Roxy Music, the Church, the soundtrack from Bachelor Party, the Blasters, the Bongos, Marti Jones, Don Dixon, Willy Nelson, Ray Charles, U2 . . . the list goes on and on.  There were tapes that friends had made for me years ago and compilations I had made to pull together favorite songs from disparate sources. One great tape included an EP by the band What Is This? and a bunch of singles and favorite songs from like Fishbone, the New Marines, Shoes, the Records and the Fall. I rediscovered tapes I made in 1996 and 1997 when WXPN played their listeners’ choices for the top 50 albums in their entirety at the end of the year, so I’ve been listening to stuff like Kim Richey, Van Morrison (The Healing Game), and the Wallflowers, all interrupted at some point by the voice of a DJ from the past. I found some old mix tapes—brilliantly conceived and executed thematic tapes like” Girls, Girls, Girls” (songs with girls’ names as titles, everything from Marshall Crenshaw’s “Maryanne” to Richard Thompson’s “Valerie”) and the Saturday tape that my late friend Harold and I put together. It is, natch, all songs with Saturday in the title.

But the real delight with playing the old cassettes was discovering what lay at the end of each side. Vinyl albums were always shorter than cassettes so you needed to add something extra to fill the emptiness at the end. The filler had to be a good fit with the rest of the album. For me the ideal was to find an orphaned track by the same artist—maybe something from a compilation or a soundtrack—but a similar-sounding band worked too. I was delighted to discover, at the end of a Woodentops tape, a song by a Scottish band I had long forgotten, the Bluebells.

The perfect filler also had to be just the right length. The only thing worse than ending up with several minutes of dead space was having the tape run out in the middle of a song, especially a good song. It could give you mental whiplash for years to come. It took me a long time to stop flinching when the horns began kicking in on Sinatra’s “All or Nothing At All” (from Strangers in the Night)  because I once put that at the end of a tape I listened to a lot on a cross-country drive. To avoid such things when adding filler you had to take the cassette out of the deck, peer into the little window to see how much tape you had left, and estimate how much time remained. Make enough cassettes and you could get pretty good at it.

There was one other rule to making a cassette from an album. You never, ever, captured the sound of the needle touching down or lifting off. That was the audio equivalent of finding a bone in your chicken soup. You had to wait until the needle touched the album and had settled comfortably into the groove before releasing the pause button. And you made sure to hit the pause button before the needle left the groove, skidded crazily toward the album’s center, lifted up with an audible clunk. That required vigilance and sometimes meant a mad dash across the room to reach the tape deck just in time. Otherwise you’d have to rewind and tape over the incriminating needle sound, which was kind of a pain in the ass.

I can’t imagine how many hours I invested in those cassettes. Not just the 45 minutes (and later 50) it took to record each side, but also the endless hours spent writing down the track lists on the paper sleeves that slipped inside the plastic cases. I would curse artists who came up with long song titles and praise those that didn’t. “Run” by New Order was a good song title. “March of the Cosmetic Surgeons: Act 1, Scene 2, The Clinic of Dr. Krikstein. On a podium, Center, MRS. RIPSTOCK-GEDDES is posing as Aphrodite, complete with water jug. Enter Left DR. KRIKSTEIN, followed by his STUDENTS, marching Indian file to the rhythm of the music” by French, Frith, Kaiser and Thompson, was not. Of course, I never wrote that entire title down. At one point I even abandoned the idea of writing down the song titles at all. Occasionally I do have occasion to regret my laziness when I can’t remember a song title.

 But it’s all different now. Burning a CD is not quite the same. For one thing, I recorded tapes in real time. You could sit and listen to the album or CD as you taped it. With a CD it’s more clinical, like the difference between something store-bought and something handmade. But I guess that’s the modern world for you.

That wonderful time arrived here yesterday. I walked around the neighborhood in the morning and found the street corners filling up with kids, some of them lugging backpacks so big they could use them as treehouses. Parents with cameras milled about waiting for the buses to arrive so they could preserve the historic embarkations on memory chips. It’s a time-honored ritual, although there was a time when we captured it all on film instead of bytes.

I took pictures of my teenagers on the porch before they left for high school. We’ve taken pictures on the first day of school every year and if I had the energy I would find all the pictures and string them together like an educational timeline. Someday they’ll appreciate it. This morning they just looked increasingly put out at an embarrassing parental tradition that was about as cool as wearing black socks with sandals.

After they drove off and my wife left for work and I was alone the house. It seemed unnaturally quiet. It was hard to believe that summer was over, unofficially anyway. This one blew by faster than any have before. Is that a sign of impending age when life stops to saunter and begins to sprint? Seasons now change in a blur, like the pages in a flip book.

I really sensed summer’s impending end last week. I was clomping around the neighborhood the day after we returned from our annual vacation. The customary post-vacation blues were hanging over my head as dark as the clouds that started spitting rain as I was about halfway through my walk. The skies finally opened up as I neared the neighborhood park. It’s a nice little grassy spot with a roofed picnic pavilion, a playground and a basketball court. A little path, its entrance nearly invisible in the undergrowth, leads down a hill to the creek. One day this summer I was just pushing my way through the branches to get onto the path, singing along to some Elton John song, when I was startled and embarrassed to see, out of the corner of my eye, a pony-tailed woman sitting beneath the trees off to my left. One of my life’s goals is to never have anyone hear me singing “Rocket Man” in public, so I was mightily relieved when I turned and the woman turned into a squirrel sitting on top of a rock.

Today I took shelter beneath the pavilion, sitting on top of a picnic table and feeling blue as I watched the rain splash in the puddles outside. The song that saved me was “The One” by Old 97′s, from Blame it on Gravity. I had bought their Fight Songs CD a while back because WXPN played a lot of the tracks—“Jagged,” “Oppenheimer,” Indefinitely,” “19”—and they were all so damned catchy. Some people have a knack for melody like other people have blue eyes and songwriter Rhett Miller is one of the melodically endowed. Fight Songs sounded like a greatest hits album, one killer track after another so I finally downloaded Blame it on Gravity a few months ago. It’s excellent too. “The One,” which seems to be about a band that also robs banks, immediately lifted my spirits. Somehow it managed to stop the rain too so I pulled myself up, dusted myself off, and started walking again.

The next song was “Ruby Baby,” a Leiber and Stoller cover from Donald Fagen’s Nightfly album, his first solo outing since the end of my favorite band in the world, Steely Dan. The iPod’s digital DJ made good choice, because for me that’s a classic fall album and it made me realize that fall was waiting just around the corner. The Nightfly came out in the autumn of 1982. I had just returned to Maine from my stint in California and had used my clips from the Hollywood Reporter to get some freelance work from Maine’s very own music paper, a swell little publication called Sweet Potato. I had read Sweet Potato for years, depending on it for music and concert reviews and news about upcoming shows, but I never thought of writing for them until I returned from California. Now I was a published writer—heck, I had written for the Hollywood Reporter! Either my clips impressed the editors or they were short of writers because I received an assignment to review The Nightfly. The only pay I would receive was a free copy of the album but that was alright with me. Later I wrote a few features for them for almost no pay but I got a byline and a clip and I felt like I was doing something better than just substitute teaching. The editor also sent me a laminated press card that I could use for . . . well, nothing, really, but it was nice to have. I still have it, too, stored away in a box in the basement someplace. I should dig it out in case I ever need to push my way past the police into a crime scene. “Huntington, Sweet Potato!” I’d say to the cop manning the barricades as I flashed my card “Where’s the lieutenant?”

“He’s in there,” the cop would reply, pointing over his shoulder. “And don’t call me Sweet Potato.”

Each song from The Nightfly reminds me of Sweet Potato and summons up the smell of autumn leaves. Today was no exception, even in the late-summer’s rain and humidity. It was still August but the seasons were turning. And fall promised to be the most wonderful time of the year.

The new one is The Pursuit by Jamie Cullum. I first heard of this guy when I was in Scotland, of all places, driving around while researching a magazine article about James Boswell. I had the car radio on, naturally, and was listening to a BBC Sunday-morning jazz program. Some guy was playing a standard, one of those “Great American Songbook” things that Rod Stewart has since used to rejuvenate his career, but I thought this sounded pretty darned good.

Now, I am not a praying man myself, but I may have asked for a little heavenly intervention at that point. “Please, God,” I thought, “let this not be Harry Connick, Jr.”

I’ve never been a fan of Junior, if truth be told. Normally I could pretty much ignore him but there was a time when it seemed I couldn’t mention my appreciation for Frank Sinatra without someone piping up, “I like Harry Connick, Jr. He’s a lot like Sinatra.”

That’s like saying, “I like my whisky straight,” and having someone else add, “I know what you’re saying. I enjoy Coors Light.” It’s not the same thing. Not at all.

Anyway, as I listened to this guy on the radio I was thinking, “If this is Harry Connick, Jr., then I will have a lot of words to eat.” Fortunately for my digestive system, it was not the Big Easy’s favorite son. Instead it was some British kid named Jamie Cullum. He did standards like “I Get a Kick out of You,” but also covers of “The Wind Cries Mary” and Radiohead’s “High and Dry.” It all sound pretty darned good.

Once back in Central Pennsylvania I searched out the Cullum oeuvre but the only album out here was his self-titled first CD. I sampled a few tracks at Barnes and Noble and came away a little disappointed. It wasn’t as dynamic as what I’d heard him do live on the radio. A few weeks later, though, Twentysomething came out and I felt vindicated. It had all the songs I’d heard him do on the BBC, and a whole bunch more. It was a wonderful album. In fact, it remains and one of the few CDs that the whole family (two adults and two teenagers) can listen to together. We had one family camping trip the spring Twentysomething came out and it rained buckets, but we all sat under a tin-roofed camping pavilion and listened to Cullum’s version of “Singing in the Rain,” and it was all okay.

I hesitated about getting The Pursuit because I had heard it lacked standards and that most of the songs were Cullum originals. I shouldn’t have worried. The album starts off with a stomping version of “Just One of Those Things,” but the original songs are all good, too. Cullum even does a cover of Rhianna’s “Don’t Stop the Music,” and it’s not bad—one of those subversive-because-they’re-done-straight versions of popular songs that manage to turn the originals inside-out, like when I saw David Byrne and he ended his show with a Whitney Houston song. One singer’s trash is another singer’s treasure.

The second CD I got was Propeller Time by Robyn Hitchcock. I’ve been a Hitchcock fan for a long time, ever since I was in Boston and WZBC, the Boston College radio station, played “Insanely Jealous” by his old band the Soft Boys. I listened to that and then sat in my room for the next three days until the DJ finally identified the tunes he had played (they can have very long sets on those indie stations). I found an Italian pressing of Underwater Moonlight, the album with “Insanely Jealous,” at Newbury Comics and knew I was in the presence of greatness. (If you don’t have it yourself, you should stop reading this right now and buy it. You won’t even have to leave your computer. Just buy it online. I’ll wait.)

I also borrowed a couple of albums (Black Snake Diamond Role and Fegmania!) from Ted Drozdowski, then a writer for the little rock magazine I edited but now the leader of the gut-bucket blues band Scissormen. I listened to the tapes I made of them on the drive down to Washington, where I was moving to start a new job. I guess those tapes now lie a’moldering in the basement, in the big cardboard box where most of my cassettes now reside, no doubt sharing memories of the good old analog days.

Since then I have seen Hitchcock in concert a whole bunch of times. The first time was at the old 9:30 club in downtown D.C. It must have been the fall of 1985, probably in support of his live album Gotta Let This Hen Out. I remember laughing until I nearly cried at some of his between-song monologues. Another time when I went to see Hitchcock at the 9:30 I walked into the club and the first person I noticed was Peter Buck of R.E.M., standing against the bar. He joined Hitchcock and the Egyptians for their encore. I also saw Hitchcock once in Alexandria at the Birchmere in support of his solo acoustic album Eye. (I still have my Eye tee-shirt, as a matter of fact.) He was actually living in DC at the time. Rolling Stone did a short piece about him where the writer met Hitchcock at the National Air & Space Museum. I was working for the museum’s magazine at the time, so I sent him a letter via WHFS, the then-indie radio station where he often appeared live, offering to give him a behind-the-scenes tour at the museum’s restoration facility. He never replied. That was your loss, Hitchcock.

I also saw him at a great show at the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University. I went to Tower Records the day the tickets went on sale, but not in any camp-out-all-night-to-get-great-seats way. I mean, this was Robyn Hitchcock, not the Rolling Stones. There’s a reason people say he has a “cult following.” I just happened to be in the neighborhood and I stopped at the store to get tickets. The clerk printed them out and looked at them a little oddly. “That’s strange,” he said. “These look like front-row center.” And indeed they were. Tell me that’s not some kind of a miracle. This was on the Queen Elvis tour and it turned out to be another great show, with Poi Dog Pondering and the Connells opening. (I ended up missing Poi Dog, but made up for it a year or two later when they played the 9:30 in a show that surely would make my top-10 list if I ever compile one.) WHFS later broadcast Hitchcock’s performance and I taped it off the radio. I still have the cassette, someplace, on which you can hear me shouting and going “Wooooooo!” at intervals. My ticket stub—front row center—is tucked inside the cover.

The third CD I got falls into both the something old and something new category, because it’s Live! Beg, Borrow & Steal, new release of a Plimsouls concert recorded on Halloween night in 1981. I was living in Los Angeles when it was recorded but I can’t remember what I was doing. It probably involved beer. I saw the Plimsouls only once during my residence in L.A., when they opened for Elvis Costello (Imperial Bedroom) at the Greek Theater. That must have been the summer of 1982. Thanks to KROQ the Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away” provided a good chunk of that summer’s soundtrack, along with “Senses Working Overtime” by XTC, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell and “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League. (My platters of choice that summer were King Crimson’s Beat and Adrian Belew’s Lone Rhino, which may have come out on the same day.) You could mistake the Plimsouls for a typical early-80s thin-tie band, but they were much more than that, mainly because of the sheer passion in Peter Case’s vocals. Even when he was just singing about young lust in “Now,” you got the sense he was damned serious about it. No Knack-style snarking here. Plus the songs were all tuneful treasures. It was as good as power pop got—so good that it transcended the genre. It was just great music and damn any categorization.

All Over the Place, the album that included “A Million Miles Away,” didn’t come out until I had relocated to Boston, but it brought a little bit of Los Angeles to the East Coast when I found my copy in the bins at Nuggets on Commonwealth Avenue. I told my housemates that one of my goals in life was to see the band perform in a basement club someplace, sometime.

Flash forward a quarter century or so and imagine my stunned surprise when I learned that the reunited Plimsouls were going to play a gig at a place that was literally about a mile from my front door here in the Gateway to Central Pennsylvania. For $8. On a Saturday night. In a basement club. Set the Wayback Machine to 1981, Sherman!

Well, my wife and I left the kids alone without a babysitter for the first time that night and we ventured out. The opening act was a local band called The Parallax Project, who did a great job, and the Plimsouls finally hit the stage around 11:00. What a show! The set list was one great song after another, delivered with characteristic passion and verve. Afterward Case himself hung around for a little bit and we chatted with him. He seemed a little aloof, maybe, a little detached, but also pleasant and willing to talk, even to an idiot who told him how much he liked the song “Estella Hotel.” (It’s “Entella Hotel” and I was the idiot.) But it was fun talking to him, telling him I had last seen the band back in 1981. My wife told him about when we were up in Pennsylvania house hunting prior to our move from D.C., and how WHFS played “Steel Strings,” and that my joyful reaction convinced her we could make the transition from The Most Important City in the World to a place where it seemed everyone knew how to do the Chicken Dance.

The next spring I randomly checked out the Peter Case website and found, to my amazement, that he was going to play a house concert in nearby Mechanicsburg in a week. The host was the leader of the Parallax Project. A friend and I went, bringing some meat for hamburgers and a six-pack of beer. The show was at a modern row house in a development alongside a cornfield. We showed up and tucked $15 each into a coffee can in the foyer. It was another great show—just Peter Case, with his guitar and harmonica, singing songs and telling stories in the living room, while we stood around or sat in resin chairs, drinking beer and listening. After the show we all drank beer, ate dogs and burgers cooked on the grill and hung out. Case talked to a bunch of us for a long time—which probably seemed a whole lot longer for him than it did for us. It was another memorable night.

It wasn’t too long afterwards that Case had emergency heart surgery, which kept him out of circulation for a while. But he’s back on his feet now and has a brand-new album out. It’s on my list.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater offered stories of mystery and mayhem, filled with twist endings, gruesome deaths, and ironic fates. Some of them were originals and some were adaptations. Someplace in my stash of cassette tapes I have a recording I made of the broadcast they did of Dracula. It must have been tough squeezing Bram Stoker’s novel into just a little more than 40 minutes of radio, but as I recall they did a decent job of capturing its flavor. Like all the best radio drama, Brown’s productions used sound to spark the imagination and create a world inside the listener’s head.

Sometimes Brown would do a little promo piece on the show, and his warm, velvety voice made me think he looked something like Sebastian Cabot. It turns out he would have been much more Jeff to Cabot’s Mutt, for he appeared to be a tall, thin man. The strange thing is that I had been thinking about Himan Brown and his radio show just a day or two before I read about his death. Was it coincidence–or something more?

I have a bunch of CBS Radio Mystery Theaters on the external hard drive my friend Bill gave me for Christmas. They came from the collection of our friend Mike, who is something of a pack rat when it comes to recorded sound. I don’t know where he got them, but once I heard about Brown’s death I decided to load some up on the iPod and listen to them as I walked.

The first one I listened to was called “Island of the Lost.” It originally aired around Thanksgiving in 1975, because the recording included a commercial for Thanksgiving items from True Value Hardware (also ads from Budweiser and Buick Skylark). It opened, as the shows always did, with the sound of a door creaking open and some foreboding music, followed by the voice of the host, the late E.G. Marshall. “Good evening,” he said. “Come in.” And so I did.

Marshall had a long and distinguished career, albeit on a lower tier on the Hollywood star machine, but for me he’s always going to be the host of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. He was there to usher is into his den of madness and foreboding and provide ironic commentary on the events we were heard. And then at the end he would wish us “pleasant . . . dreams?” and close the creaking door.

“Island of the Lost” turned out to be fun, goofy entertainment. It was about an older man who—as Fritz, the slightly sinister ophthalmologist, is good enough to explain—nurses feelings of inadequacy regarding his marriage to his much younger and very beautiful wife. So maybe it’s not a good idea that he show up early at the tropical island where he and his wife are going to vacation. She has gone there ahead of him. But why does Fritz send a telegram alerting her of her husband’s early arrival? Why does the hotel clerk seem to expect him? Who is that young man who shows up at his wife’s cabin in the middle of the night? What’s in that locked closet? Why are the man and his wife attacked by a flock of flamingos? (I’m not making that part up.) There’s also an earthquake—or is there?

As I said, good, goofy fun that ends in murder and madness . . . and Marshall’s wish for pleasant dreams.

I was a little disappointed when I started the second show, “Deadline for Death,” and discovered that Mr. Marshall would not be my host. Instead, Mr. Brown himself assumed those chores. Once I got over my initial disappointment it seemed gruesomely appropriate that this newly dead man, my very reason for listening to these shows in the first place, should return from the grave to act as my guide. (Apparently, when Brown prepared his shows for syndication after their initial run he had to replace E.G. Marshall as the narrator.) This story was an EC Comic-like tale of revenge, with mobster “Johnny Promise” vowing that the man who testified against him would be dead within the month. There was madness involved in this story, too, as well as a plot twist that involved a seasonal time change. And it turns out that the real thing you can’t escape is a guilty conscience.

It was a real kick listening to these macabre tales from my youth. Wherever you are, Mr. Brown, I wish you pleasant . . . dreams? (Cue the creaking door.)

Tambor was brilliant in that show, just a mass of ego, insincerity and insecurity. Rip Torn as producer Artie and Gary Shandling as Larry were superb, too, as were the rest of the cast. Larry Sanders was an often devastating look at Hollywood, made even more realistic because real stars played somewhat off-kilter versions of themselves. Few TV shows reached that level of steady brilliance. I just wish Oasis had appeared on Larry Sanders so Hank could have performed “Hey Now!” with them.

As Oasis bounced my mind to Sanders, Sanders got me thinking about my own brush with showbiz, and the memories started tumbling like dominos, taking me back to 1982 when I worked as an associate editor at The Hollywood Reporter. Published five days a week, the Reporter was one of the “trades” that covered show business, mainly movies. I got the gig in 1982 through an internship program at the USC film school. It was something of a consolation prize—the internship I really wanted was at Columbia Studios but I didn’t get it.

The assistant editor at the Reporter was a USC film school graduate, so he set up an interview with the editor. He was a fairly young guy, somewhat dapper, slim and with a short-cropped red beard. He interviewed me briefly. “We can’t pay very much,” he told me. “Only $5 an hour.”

I was under the impression that internships were unpaid, so I kept a poker face. “That’s okay,” I replied.

That’s how I got my job at the Hollywood Reporter. I think I worked three mornings a week, driving across the freeways from USC in my trusty 1975 Toyota Celica. The paper was housed in a low, dumpy building on Sunset Boulevard, just down the street from Hollywood High School. There was a tiny reception area, with not even enough room for a chair, just inside the front door. Two receptionists sat behind a glass partition and controlled access to the guts of the operation, which lay behind a small wooden door in a barrier wall that only extended about head high. Right beyond the door was the advertising department but Hank Grant, who compiled a daily column called The Rambling Reporter, had a little cubicle in the corner and the music editor had her desk in this room for some reason.

Beyond the advertising department was editorial, a single windowless room that was brightly lit by fluorescent lights. It smelled strongly of printer’s ink, because the paper was printed right on the premises. The typesetting room was off to the right.

The executive offices were upstairs. The owner and publisher was a woman by the name of Tichi Wilkerson. I thought she had been a showgirl when she met the Hollywood Reporter’s founder, Billy Wilkerson, but it appears she was the daughter of his maid. In any event, she married him and took over the paper after he died. During my eight months there I never set eyes on her. She remained an unseen presence who would occasionally dispatch a minion to deliver messages to the newsroom. Tichi’s daughter was, I think, the assistant publisher. She had a desk in the advertising room.

I sat at a group of four desks pushed together at one side of the newsroom. The editor sat across from me, the assistant editor next to him. The editor’s assistant–at least I think that was her title–sat next to me. Other reporters had their desks around the room. They all worked on battered manual typewriters, the kind of things you’d pick up at garage sales. Even in the world before word processors these typewriters seemed like museum pieces. The explanation I heard blamed their presence on the movie version of The Front Page. According to this story, the reporters once had new IBM Selectric typewriters, and then Tichi Wilkerson attended a screening of the classic Ben Hecht newspaper comedy and decided that a real newsroom sounded like the one in the movie, a symphony of clack-clacking manual typewriters. She ordered all the electric typewriters removed and had them replaced with machines were probably new when Hecht wrote the original play. Only the music editor managed to dodge the edict and keep her IBM. Maybe that’s why she was out in the other room.

It was a great job—even better because I was getting paid for it. I’d come in each morning, drink in that unique smell of ink and coffee, and find, neatly folded on my desk, a freshly printed copy of the day’s Reporter and a copy of our rival, Daily Variety. I’d sit down, peruse the trades, and then do whatever was asked of me. I wrote some headlines, edited press releases, and wrote reviews. I got to write a few news stories. I wrote one about the death of Randi Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, who died when his plane tried to buzz Ozzy’s tour bus. Another time I checked the AP printout one Friday morning and saw that Vic Morrow and two children had been killed by a helicopter on location for The Twilight Zone. The Reporter didn’t publish on weekends, so by the time Monday’s edition came out the story would be old news, which is why the editor let me report it. I dutifully called the offices of director John Landis and producer Steven Spielberg for comments. I’m still waiting for them to call me back.

Once I fielded a phone call from Radie Harris, our Broadway correspondent. Like Hank Grant she was a throwback from the days of columnists like Walter Winchell or Louella Parsons. You could sense her status as a relic by the title of her column—“Broadway Ballyhoo.” (Ballyhoo! There’s a word that’s ripe for a comeback.) All I knew about Radie was that she had lost a leg at some point, and I cracked up the newsroom one day when I intoned, in my best Henny Youngman voice, “So I turned to Radie Harris and I said, ‘Peg . . .’”

Anyway, on this day Radie called with a big scoop. “Betty Buckley has been cast as the lead in That’s!” she rasped, in a voice that sounded like it enjoyed more than a nodding acquaintance with cigarettes.

The connection wasn’t very good and I wasn’t sure what she had said. I knew That’s was a stupid name for a Broadway show. “Could you spell it, please?” I asked.

“How many ways can you spell ‘That’s’?” she growled indignantly.

“Just one, I guess,” I replied, and I filed the story. Turned out she said “Cats.” She was furious when the story appeared in print, ruining her scoop, but no one in the office seemed to care.

I was also the obituaries editor. One day the receptionists buzzed me because a man had arrived with an obituary about his acting teacher. I went out to meet him. He had a long Old Testament Prophet beard. He handed me the write up and looked at me quizzically, as though he expected some kind of reaction. I just thanked him and had the receptionists buzz me back into the office. Only after I read the obit did I realize who the bearded man was—it was Kent McCord, from TV’s Adam 12!

Another time I noticed one of the reporters in the newsroom talking to a small man with a briefcase. After he left she came over. “Guess who that was,” she said. I confessed my ignorance. “That was Bill Griffith, the guy who created Zippy the Pinhead!” Being a huge Zippy fan, I was very disappointed not to have met him.

I had another brush with underground comics greatness while working at the Reporter. I had found a comic book called Reid Fleming: World’s Toughest Milkman at some bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard. The comic, by a Canadian named David Boswell, was brilliant stuff and an unending fount of great catch phrases. “I thought I told you to shut up!” “78 cents or I piss on your flowers!” “Make him drink coffee ’til it runs out his ears!” “He drinks, you know.” Reid was one tough mailman, that’s for sure. He kept his truck stocked with a case of rye, which he swilled straight from the bottle as he made his deliveries. One day at work I called Boswell up. I can’t remember why. Maybe he had called the paper and I intercepted the message. We chatted and he told me some Hollywood types had approached him about a possible movie adaptation and he had no idea what to ask or expect. Could I use my connections to find out for him? “Absolutely!” I said. “Glad to.” And then I hung up the phone and never called him back. I was as ignorant about things as he was.

It’s too bad they never made a movie. I read that Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis were interested at one point. Peter Boyle would have made a perfect Reid Fleming, too.

Everyone on the staff got to write reviews. I reviewed a lot of plays because there were Actor’s Equity productions all over town. One of my first reviews was for a thing called Monsieur Le Duck, which starred Dick Wilson, the man who played Mr. Whipple in the Charmin commercials.

Another time I reviewed a local production of Grease, which starred Eve Plumb from The Brady Bunch and included supporting appearances by Jerry Mathers (the Beaver!) and Gary Lewis of Gary Lewis and the Playboys fame (and son of Jerry—Lewis, not Mathers). The producer of the play called me several times to make sure I was going to be there. I got two tickets so I invited my friend Steve—who worked on The Dukes of Hazzard as a stunt man—to come with me. Before the show we unwound with a bunch of beers, so I was pretty well lubricated when I arrived at the performance—to find the producer waiting at the door to greet all the reviewers personally. “Hi, I’m Fran Drescher,” she said, in the nasally Long Island accent that would later cause animals to flee the room whenever The Nanny played on television. “We talked on the phone.” At that point I really couldn’t remember, and I told her so. Little did I know that one day she would play Spinal Tap’s Bobbi Fleckman. It was a brush with, if not greatness, at least something. But despite her personal attention I panned the production, writing that poor Eve Plumb had all the stage presence of a brick.

I did music reviews, too, despite my often stunning ignorance of the bands I wrote about. After I reviewed Split Enz at the Greek Theater I received a polite letter from a fan who pointed out that the band was from New Zealand, not Australia, and that their best known song was called “I Got You,” not “Sometimes I Get Frightened.” At least I gave them a good review. I also reviewed Sammy Hagar (with Quarterflash), Heart (with John Cougar), John Waite, and others of that ilk. And I reviewed a big arena show at Angel Stadium headlined by Foreigner, Loverboy, and Iron Maiden. Unfortunately, I got stuck in traffic and missed the opening act, the Scorpions, which was the band the music editor sent me to review. She was not pleased.

There were two highlights to that show, neither of which involved the bands. The first took place as I was walking through the stadium and a college-age kid suddenly burst through the crowd, with a couple of burly cops clinging to him like wolves trying to bring down a moose. He slammed to the ground in front of me and the impact knocked something loose from his hand. It was a glass vial filled with white powder—laundry detergent perhaps—and I watched as it rolled across the floor to gently bump against my foot. Then the cops swooped down and grabbed it before hauling the kid away in handcuffs.

The second thing took place between bands. I went to the show with a metalhead named Mark, who was living in the same group house that summer. He was a good guy but had such terrible taste in music that he was excited about the day’s lineup. We were standing down on the playing field when all of a sudden Mark whipped around like a ninja and raised his hands. Whump! Just in time he caught a grapefruit that someone had hurled from the upper decks, stopping the big citrus missile just inches before it smacked into his skull. It was an amazing display of reflexes. As for the music? Not so amazing. I didn’t even remember that Foreigner and Iron Maiden were on the bill until just now when I looked it up on the web.

I worked at the Hollywood Reporter through the last semester of my senior year. After I graduated I simply started coming in five days a week and filled out my time card accordingly. “Are you working full time now?” the editor asked me one day.

“Yes,” I said. And that was that. I have no idea how I got away with it. Looking back it seems an act of extraordinary chutzpah, but it seemed like the logical thing to do at the time.

I did almost get fired once. I had a truly nasty cold or flu, so I called in sick. But I also had a pass for an advance screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart, so I went to the film that night, bottle of cough medicine in hand, and returned to my sick-bed. The next morning the editor’s assistant called me at home. “You aren’t sick,” she said. “I saw you at the movie last night.” “I am sick,” I replied. “I was guzzling cough medicine straight from the bottle the whole time.” When I went in the next morning she pulled me aside. “I told the editor you were at the movie and he said, ‘Well, fire him then,’ but I stood up for you.” In other words, after she put the knife in my back she was kind enough to extricate it.

Other people did get fired. I was there as Hank Grant was being ushered out, not without acrimony. The editor became furious whenever Hank used his column to give a birthday greeting to someone who was no longer among the living. Hank resented the criticisms. At one point they had a screaming match in the newsroom with Hank saying disparaging things about the editor’s ability. “Well, at least I don’t say happy birthday to dead people!” the editor yelled back.

I’m sure Hank realized he was on his way out. When he was on vacation, the man who filled in was one of the paper’s reviewers, a guy named Robert Osborne (no relation to Ozzy). He was not only a good reviewer, but when he subbed for Hank he filled his columns with genuine news and avoided salutations to the non-living. Eventually Hank Grant did retire and Osborne took over his column. Today he’s the host of Turner Classic Movies. I always found him to be a very pleasant man. He even expressed amazement—real or feigned I don’t know, but it seemed genuine—that I was able to do my job at the Reporter while being a full-time student.

The editor was the next to go. He saw the writing on the wall when a new guy showed up in the newsroom, serving as some kind of editorial advisor. You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way that wind was blowing. The editor knew his days were numbered. One day he forgot to include the ending for an article that was supposed to jump from page one to the back. For a week or so the forgotten paragraphs remained pinned to the cork board where we tacked up items that didn’t make the paper. One afternoon the editor decided to use it. “Let’s jump that story we forgot,” he said. The assistant editor looked at him oddly “Just add,” the editor said, “‘continued from page 1, July 22’.” And that’s the way it appeared in the paper the next day. Before long the advisor had become the editor.

The new editor didn’t seem like a bad guy, actually, but I sensed my days were numbered, too. Summer was winding down, I needed to find a new place to stay, and my brother was getting married that fall back in Maine, so I figured it was time to pull up stakes and head back east. I had always felt like a fish out of water in California—a dour New England Puritan in the land of excess. The Golden State was strange and exotic—even the sunlight felt different—but it wasn’t where I belonged. So at the end of the summer I gave notice, packed all my things into my Celica, and headed east into the rising sun.

The song that convinced me to spend the rest of the morning walk listening to George Jones was “The Grand Tour.” In that piece of musical misery, the heartbroken narrator shows folks around his house while pointing out all the things he associates with his wife, who has just up and left, taking only the baby with her. (He doesn’t tell us why she suddenly hit the road, but I suspect the co-respondent in this case might have been a whiskey bottle.) 

I never had this album, but I admire the cover art. I think this is what you see in your rear-view mirror when you have the DTs.

Jones is particularly adept at that form of passive-aggressive country and western. Take, for instance, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The reason he stopped loving her is (SPOILER ALERT) because he’s dead. Now he’s lying in his coffin with a smile finally on his lips, and I figure that smile is there in part because his last thought was, “Now she’ll understand what she’s done to me.” And how about those love letters from his past, on which he’s underlined every “I love you” in red? Then there’s “She Thinks I Still Care,” where the humble narrator insists that he doesn’t care at all, but you can tell he wants everyone to know how much he’s hurting. Don’t mind me, I’ll just sit here alone with my whiskey and cry quietly to myself until I pass out on the floor. Wouldn’t want to be a bother. 

These songs could have been maudlin tear jerkers, except it’s George Jones who sings them. The man’s voice is an absolutely unique instrument. It cries and chokes and sobs and soars and just packs a whole lot of tortured humanity into the tales of woe that Jones relates. Years ago Frank Sinatra said that George Jones was the second best singer in America (I think he reserved the top slot for Jerry Garcia), and Frank was on to something. He might have also recognized a kindred spirit. He and George both specialized in songs that are best appreciated when one slumps over a bar and gazes dismally into a glass full of a potent beverage. It’s a pity that Frank and George never recorded a duet. Picture the two of them together on “My Way,” or “I Gotta Get Drunk.” 

Jones also sings what is probably my favorite country song of all time, “These Days I Barely Get By.” It’s a classic, mainly because in this one I get the sense that George is poking fun at his own moroseness. “I woke up this morning aching with pain,” he begins, and it’s all downhill from there. His dog died, he’s going to lose his job, and the horse on which he bet his last two bucks lost by a nose. Not only did his wife leave him, she first placed all the unpaid bills on the desk in the hall. Now that’s cold. 

Of course, Jones himself knew a lot about barely getting by. I read some biographies of him some time ago and boy, oh, boy, he was out there—shooting out TVs, arguing with himself in a weird Donald Duck voice, and earning a reputation for skipping performances that got him the nickname “No Show Jones.” The absolute topper is the story of how then-wife Tammy Wynette once took his car keys to keep him from going out and boozing, so George just drove down to the local liquor store on his riding lawnmower. That’s hardcore! 

I understand that Mr. Jones has cleaned up his act since then, but he’s left traces of his wild years behind in all his songs. I walked around the neighborhood listening to his stories of misery and heartache, and by the time I got home I felt pretty good.