I Know What I Wrote About Last Summer
From Torrey, Utah to West Yellowstone, Montana
I’ve been sitting on this entry for almost a year, never quite feeling it was finished. I read through today and was moderately entertained by it, cleaned some stuff up, added a couple bad jokes.And…voila…here is a list, in numbers, of some things I saw last summer.
SOME THINGS I SAW LAST SUMMER (A LIST)
1
Confederate flag.
On the drive back home after playing Fort Desolation Fest in Southern Utah. On the previous year’s drive, I spotted four. Why fewer? I don’t know. Maybe their owners were hiding them or getting them dry-cleaned so they’d be sparkly new for the election later last fall or using them at a rally somewhere else.
3/4
of a Cory Mon set.
My friend Cory Mon and his band (also known as Cory Mon, it’s not that deep, as the kids say) played the Main Stage at Fort Desolation. Their set was interrupted by lightning strikes wherein they and the rest of the festival sought cover. I worried that they weren’t gonna get to finish due to the rest of the night’s artists needing to stay on schedule, which may not sound like a big deal, but it is, if you’ve ever wanted to play a Main Stage set at a festival and your time finally comes and then the lightning comes too and shuts it down, dream drenched and dead. BUT! They emerged about 20-30 minutes later when the lightning stopped and got to play a couple songs and it was lovely to see my friends live out their dream. Cheers to dreams, drenched or not.
3
Mountain goats.
I went on a foolhardily-too-long hike in Capitol Reef at the worst possible time of day (literally high noon). I had provisions for maybe a 3-miler and embarked on a 9-miler instead. Brilliant act of hubris. Honestly? It got a little scary and more than a little sunburnt and exhausted and dehydrated, to the point where, somewhere in the middle of it all, I got strangely panicked and disoriented for a bit, not knowing where the last cairn (or person) I’d seen was. It was right around this point that I saw the three mountain goats. Unless they were a hallucination, which isn’t off the table.
4
Times I wondered if I might not make it back to my car
As I mentioned, I got in over my head on an ill-timed, ill-advised hike. I’m not the spontaneous young strapping buck I once was, apparently. Parched, disoriented, legs cramping, skin sizzling, and no other humans in sight, doubt crept in.
1
Blue sky view from the Fremont River
Grateful to have survived (dramatic much?) my hike, I reclined all the way into the blessed Fremont River. And the river lived up to its transformative, healing billing in all the songs and poems about rivers, soothing my spazzing legs and glazey sunburnt everything else. I looked up with gratitude at the giant open blue sky that, minutes before, seemed like it might actually kill me.
8,000,000
Gallons of water I wanted to drink when I was done with my death march, er, hike.
2
cheeseburgers from Capitol Burger food truck
The Fort Desolation festival food trucks boasted an elite burger. Literally boasted. When I ordered my first, the guy running the register asked if I’d ever had one. I said no. He quickly offered up, “Get ready for the best burger of your life.” That kind of brash confidence is called “leading with your chin” and immediately triggers my Skeptical Prove It To Me reflex. But, in spite of an inexplicable and unnecessary surplus of lettuce, it was good. Good enough to order another one (with less lettuce) the next day? Yes. Best burger of my life?1 Let’s pump the brakes here.
1
California burrito from El Charro Negro.
In downtown Torrey, next to the drive-thru coffee shop, there’s a Mexican food truck with an utterly fantastic burrito. My first year at Fort Desolation, I went twice. Best burrito of my life? In the conversation2. Just the right balance of ingredients, the perfect amount of saltiness and seasoning, not too dry and not too drippy either.
4
Nineties albums I listened to during my northward Torrey to SLC drive.
Tiny Music…Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop3- Stone Temple Pilots
White Ladder4- David Gray
Surfacing5- Sarah Mclachlan6
Humming7- Duncan Sheik
I don’t usually go that 90s, especially consecutively. I guess I was in a nostalgic mood.
6/5
Songs on my Fort Desolation setlist.
I wrote down five songs, worried about an expressly stringent 30-minute time limit. (The sound guy on the Second Stage—where I was playing—had manually faded the act before me, who had gone over their time, so that the MainStage act could start on time.) So when Debra & I finished singing our planned closer, a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and the sound guy informed me that we had five more minutes (efficiency!), I wasn’t totally prepared. We “encored” with my original song “You’re The Song” as our sixth unexpected tune8.
2
Bald eagles on the Fourth of July
Regally soaring over Hebgen Lake. We summoned them with a four-part harmony rendition of Toby Keith’s jingoist anthem “Courtesy of the Red White And Blue.” No, we didn’t. The eagles just showed up. And it was wild and majestic and a little surreal. But, unlike the mountain goats on my near-death hike, I have witnesses to corroborate that the bald eagles were real.
0
Fireworks on the Fourth of July
I confess: I don’t care for fireworks. Most of the time9 they’re underwhelming. They often involve a cloggy and claustrophobic mass of people and finding a parking spot and finding a picnic spot and waiting and sweating profusely, none of which are my favorites and all of which can prick my anxiety. So, being in Montana where the endless fields are dry and the fire danger is high, there’s some relief when I can just point, with my best sincere regret face, to the roadside sign “FIREWORKS PROHIBITED” when my kids ask “why can’t we do fireworks, Dad?” Then I pull up some videos on my phone to show them YouTube clips of fireworks gone wrong and, sometimes, they forget about it anyway.
In no order, a list of memorable burgers:
The Burger Joint, not-that-secretly-hidden in the Parker Meridien in midtown NYC. Just the right amount of greasy. The not-that-secretly-hidden part adds a layer of mystique.
Lucky Strike, in SoHo NYC, a fantastic burger served on an English muffin.
TK Burger in Huntington Beach. No frills, beachside, and I was single at the time and the waitstaff was entirely comprised of dreamy surfer girls. Of course it was memorable.
On the right day, a Western Big H from Hires (that flour-y bun!) or a Jr. Crown from Crown Burger (pastrami + fry sauce!) is just the right thing.
In no order, a list of truly memorable burritos:
The chicken/black beans burrito at Taqueria Cancun in San Francisco might still be the unfussy GOAT. It’s a perfect SF-style burrito. Eternal thanks to my friend Pat who first recommended it. It lives up to his high praise every time.
The al pastor burrito (not smothered) at Chunga’s in Salt Lake is elite too, especially with extra creamy green sauce.
The shredded beef chimichanga (a fried burrito, right?) at Rosa’s in Provo is something that I find myself craving about once a year. Which is both impressive and tragic, given that I haven’t eaten one since the restaurant closed 20 years ago.
When I was a Boys Ranch counselor, on our 3-day hikes, we’d often bring tortillas and refried beans for one of the night’s dinners and, after all day hiking, it tasted like filet mignon. Camping/hiking messes with your tastebuds that way.
This one’s interesting. I’ve already mentioned how I think STP get the shaft when it comes to critical evaluation of 90’s alt rock. And this is the album where they shed most of the residual grunge in their system and you hear far more Beatles (Lady Picture Show) and Bowie/T-Rex (Big Bang Baby) and Iggy & The Stooges (Pop’s Love Suicide) and even Pixies (Art School Girl) or Pink Floyd (Adhesive) in there.
It’s not wall-to-wall bangers, but this is a solid album. A handful of top-tier songs (Please Forgive Me, Babylon, Say Hello Wave Goodbye, White Ladder, This Year’s Love) and some other quite good to very good songs (Sail Away, Silver Lining, My Oh My).
One of my favorite concert memories ever was seeing David Gray on the White Ladder Tour out at Saltair. When they played “Please Forgive Me” he sat at the piano, singing and playing his part. And then, when the sorta techno part kicks in at the end, the stage lights started strobing and Gray stood up on top of the piano, pumping his fist ecstatically to the beat, a giant smile crowding his face. It looked and felt like a moment of catharsis for a guy who had toiled in obscurity for a long time and was not about to take his capital-M Moment for granted.
I often tend to love The Album After THE Album more than THE Album. By “THE Album” I mean: the ubiquitous one, the unavoidable one, the runaway favorite. In this case, THE Album would be Mclachlan’s breakout hit and fan favorite Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (the 30th anniversary of which Mclachlan celebrated last summer by touring and playing the whole thing), which means the Album After would be? Surfacing. The ballads are all so good, except maybe “I Love You” which is perhaps a little overwrought with its reference to Mclachlan’s “island of hope.” Speaking of which, the one nitpicky thing that jumped out at me this time around was that the lyrics felt more hit and miss for me. She traffics in some really solid imagery. Like when she’s taking on our carefully-constructed facades and insecurities in “Building A Mystery”:
You come out at night
That's when the energy comes
And the dark side's light
And the vampires roam
You strut your rasta wear
And your suicide poem
And a cross from a faith
That died before Jesus came
You’re building a mystery
(Extra points for getting “rasta wear” in there and me not knowing it for decades.)
She also gets right down to it with spare simplicity that I admire:
And I have the sense to recognize that
I don't know how to let you go
But… also sometimes stumbles into stuff that feels more thesauruscore second-year poetry major:
What ravages of spirit
Conjured this tempestuous rage
(For what it’s worth, I LOVED this lyric in 1998 and would’ve given anything to write a single line with this kind of prose. Tastes change.)
I’ll say it again, though: “Sweet Surrender” is a friggin’ masterpiece, top to bottom, writing to production. Honestly. The background vocals are up there with some of the best stuff Brian Wilson or the Beatles ever did, with iconic countermelodies and creative undulations.
It bothers me inordinately when people spell her last name McLaughlin. Like, it’s right there, on the album cover or in Spotify. I can’t defend my overreaction. Probably a good indicator of some OCD in there.
Of all the albums I listened to on the trip, this one aged the worst. I was an above-average Duncan Sheik fan, especially his breakthrough self-titled album. At the time, I loved his follow-up album Humming and even dragged a couple of skeptical friends to see him when he came to the Zephyr Club on that tour. I probably would’ve called Humming one of my 10 favorite albums of 1998!
Listening last summer with some distance, I still think it has some musical charms (particularly the atmospheric guitar playing of Gerry Leonard). But sometimes the lyrics and, maybe most of all, his vocal delivery kind of grated on me.
Like:
…it's gonna sound like I'm agreeing
With the most ultra-boring ideas
Of pop psychological western gurus
Who haven't gotten lucky in years
and
yes I've heard the world has conspired
To steal away your god-given right
To a happy home and comfortable children
Next you'll sue them for abandoning you!!!
And Mr. Lennon, so quiet, knows better
...or so I've been told
(Would anyone call John Lennon “quiet”?)
No shade to Mr. Sheik. His first two albums spoke to me as I was trying to figure out how to have meaningful romantic relationships and mostly failing. The number of times I sat down at the piano and sadly banged out “Out Of Order” is off the charts….oh, and his song “Reasons for Living” was a serious influence on a song I wrote at the time called “Tossing Pennies” especially the phrasing…and “Wishful Thinking” (with its Stingcore fingerpicked guitar intro) still gets me when it lifts to the chorus and his tag at the end “…and it GETS ME OVER!!” is everything you want an outro ad lib to be.
The full setlist for all the Madison Army devotees on setlist.fm:
Western Skies
Don’t Mind Me (new-ish)
Criminal (Fiona Apple cover, Debra sang)
Masks (new)
Brokedown Palace (Grateful Dead cover)
You’re The Song
In no order, a list of memorable, in a positive way, fireworks:
The first time Holly and I kissed, walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan on a balmy June night in 2004, the sky erupted with—I kid you not—inexplicable fireworks. It wasn’t a holiday. There was no Big Game ending in victory. But we kissed and then the fireworks went off. This is neither a hacky poetic metaphor nor a mountain-goat-like hallucination. It was all real.
As we sang the final encore of “Hey Jude” at the first Rooftop tribute show, after playing Abbey Road front to back, fireworks unexpectedly went off. At the time, I thought it was a coincidence and it felt unbelievably magical and serendipitous and surreal. I later found out that the organizers had planned it without telling me, which dims the magic slightly, but—if I close my eyes—I can still feel the childlike surprise and elation of hearing a whole crowd of people singing the iconic “Nah, nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-nah”s, hearing a crack in the sky, and looking behind me to see fireworks exploding. Chills…
The Fourth of July 2010. My friends Ryan & Emily celebrate the date as an anniversary of sorts so I swallowed my default bah-humbug attitude towards fireworks and we took our family to meet theirs at Sugarhouse Park. We camped out on the hillside for the day, with snacks and beverages and conversations probably about Springsteen or Pearl Jam or Joe Henry or the injustices of not being widely considered ultra-revered songwriters. Once the sun went down, we all laid back and watched the fireworks. And, with Penny being a baby and Leo a toddler, I got to re-see fireworks through their lens, reliving that initial wonder and awe through their wide eyes and genuine oohs and ahhs, if just for a moment.
Loved reading this ! You are the wonder and the wild.