As the last of my 4 days off winds down, I realize that since I've done so much over these days that I just haven't had any time to write. After having never been to Los Angeles prior to Thanksgiving 2010, I've now been there 3 times in the short span of time since then. I just made the third of those trips this past weekend, as I drove there Friday night to go see Henry Rollins give a speaking performance at the same theater I saw Tim Minchin at a month earlier. And, as with Minchin, I was able to meet and talk with Rollins after the show for a bit, even giving him a business card for Unseen Films, knowing his love of film and unquenchable desire to see more. This was part of the 2 week "50" tour for Rollins, having performed nearly a week in New York City, followed by a show in Washington, D.C. on his 50th birthday (he was born and lived in D.C. until he was 20, when he joined Black Flag and his world changed completely), and then did a week of gigs in LA. And, also as with Minchin, I immediately got in the car after the meeting and drove all the way back home to Las Vegas again, making it in the door at 4AM. Another 600 mile round trip with a stop for a show in under 15 hours. I'll have to do a full story about this trip at some point, as the rainy weather I encountered for much of the drive, as well as meeting Rollins, was rather entertaining.
This was followed by going to see The Black Keys (with Cage The Elephant opening) at The Cosmopolitian here in Las Vegas on Saturday night. A friend of mine that used to work at the Post Office with me introduced me to The Black Keys about a year ago by showing me an incredible performance they gave one night on the Late Show With David Letterman. As with most things, it took me a bit to really get into it, but once I did, I got INTO it. I've since acquired all 6 of their albums, and they really are something terrific to listen to. Perhaps the best thing about them is the fact that with their sudden immense popularity, they've made the blues a trendy and viable art form again. The last time the blues was this popular of a musical genre was in the early 1980's with The Blues Brothers of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. I've been a fan of that type of music since about then (I must have been 11 or 12 the first time I saw The Blues Brothers movie, and to this day I enjoy it immensely both for the comedy and the music), and I have since become a great fan of artists such as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Albert King, The Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and The Doors, just to give a few examples of the many diverse talents that can one way or another be categorized as blues artists.
The fact that The Black Keys have gained the popularity and critical acclaim they have while performing what they wanted to play, and not catering to current trends, is something nice to see. Stick with what you like, don't worry about whether anyone else likes it or not. If it makes someone else happy, wonderful, but play it because you want to first. The friend that I went with to the show shares a lot of my musical taste, but is always looking for new stuff, and she likes The Black Keys so much that she now wants more blues music. The circle of life continues.
I then spent most of Sunday over at my Vegas adopted mom's house, helping her and her husband get their recently acquired iPhones set up with iTunes on their computer, showing them a good way to have multiple iPods and iPhones be able to plug into the same computer and work off of the same iTunes library. Even though I live alone, I have an iPhone and 3 different iPods all working off of the same iTunes library on my desktop computer. Only 1 iPod is capable of handling the entire media library I have, so everything else needs to be customized to make it fit. My iPhone has music only on it; no comedy or speaking of any kind. I leave that for the iPods. Even then, I still had to pick which music for the iPhone, as it's only a 32GB, and my library far exceeds that. So it's got stuff on it that I'm most likely not going to skip over, therefore I can go about my work day without having to worry about tracks coming on that I may not be that interested in hearing.
Over the course of this busy weekend, in addition to not writing, I'd also not been sleeping, so it was nice to go to bed early last night, and other than laundry, not do much else today. Seeing as how I've got to go back to a busy day of work tomorrow, I wanted at least one day of relaxing and not doing much. And I've enjoyed it very much, thank you.
I thought I was going to paste one of my Unseen Films pieces here to fill this out, but I see I've rambled on enough to make that unnecessary now. Maybe next time I don't have anything to say (good luck with that ever happening...).
Blog Post Soundtrack; The White Stripes (live), Jimi Hendrix, Audioslave, Bob Dylan, P.J. Harvey, Del Tha Funky Homosapien, Soulfly, The Datsuns, Judas Priest, At The Drive-In, Medeski Martin & Wood, Bad Radio, Danko Jones, The Doors (live), Glenn Miller, Fear (live)
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