yeah, right!
Damn, this looks to be a real good season for Austin City Limits. I really wanted to go to their little music festival last month, but I had to buy and move into a new house instead. Anyway, here’s this year’s schedule.
Some highlights: The Flaming Lips, The Shins, The Pixies, Wilco. It doesn’t really get any better.
The wife and I had a busy, but fun weekend hosting a baby shower for our friends Johnny and Darolyn. It wasn’t a traditional baby shower, since we had a keg. I guess something about an impending birth makes people really excited (and thirsty for beer).
It inspired me to write a haiku:
baby shower drunks
decide to talk politics
later feel stupid
Today a big ol’ jet airliner is going to take Magnapop over to the Netherlands for a brief tour of Belgium and Holland. I won’t be on it.
I’ve decided that as much as I love it, I can’t devote the time and energy it takes to play drums in 2 different bands. Something had to give. And since Magnapop is getting ready to drop a new album early next year, I decided that they were in need of a drummer who didn’t have a full-time job with a monster commute, another band, wife, dogs, cat, mortgage payment, freelance career, exercise regimen, very little free time and the need to veg the fuck out from time to time. They need someone who can bring the rock consistently and often. That’s not me anymore.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve been gallantly attempting to juggle all the things that are going on in my life. All of them are good things, but too much of a good thing gets to be a major drag when you don’t have time to wind your watch or tie your shoes or simply relax on the back deck of your house with a whiskey and a cigar.
So, about 6 months ago I started trying to learn how to say no. It was hard at first (n…n..nn…ah, fuck it, let’s rock!), but I quickly got the hang of it and my life is getting far less stressful every day because of it. Yes, it’s hard to say no to the opportunity to do some really cool things, but it’s also really fun to play fetch with your dog or go see a movie with your wife.
So, there’s a new Magnapop album coming out next year with my drums holding down the beat. It’s just that I won’t be touring to support it. Everyone in the band has been really supportive of my decision–I can’t overstate how cool they’ve been to play music with and how understanding they were when I broke the news.
I played my last show with them in Athens a few weeks ago and it was super fun. There were some Athens celebs in the audience (I spotted M Stipe, M Mills, Scott McCaughey (in town rehearsing for the REM tour), John Keane, and members of Macha, Elf Power, Widespread Panic and I’m sure many more) and I couldn’t think of a more fitting place to play my final show with Magnapop–the place where they started playing so many years ago as Homemade Sister. I’m going to miss the hell out of playing drums for Magnapop, but I got some really cool memories and lifelong friends out of the deal too.
So, good luck, Linda, Ruthie and Scott, I’m going to miss playing with you. If you need me, I’ll be in my back yard playing fetch with Charlie.
Google keeps on improving and refining their amazing service:
Good news!
I just read in the AJC that Air America Radio will be available in Atlanta this week. Tune in to AM 1690 to listen.
Instead of linking to the article (the AJC forces you to create an account to view any online content), I’m cutting and pasting it here:
Air America, the left-leaning national talk radio network, has landed a home on an Atlanta radio station — on the far right end of the AM dial.
The voices of Chuck D., Randi Rhodes, Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo will be heard at AM 1690 sometime next week once technical issues are resolved, said Air America president Jon Sinton, who is based in Atlanta.
The 1690 spot on the dial recently was running classic country music but is now playing nothing as station owner Intermart Broadcasting prepares for the Air America launch. Current call letters are WSWK-AM but Sinton said the owners plan to change that to WWAA-AM.
Air America, which began six months ago as a counterpoint to conservative talk radio, enters a crowded Atlanta market for gab. There are at least eight other talk radio stations in town, from powerhouse 750/WSB-AM to black talk 1380/WAOK-AM to Real Radio 105.3 on the FM side.
But most Atlanta talk stations are populated with conservative talkers such as Rush Limbaugh on 640/WGST-AM and Laura Ingraham on 920/WGKA-AM.
“As far as I know, the last really liberal talk show host on a major Atlanta station was me,” said Mike Malloy, a metro Atlanta-based veteran talker who left WSB-AM in 1997 after two stints. He recently joined Air America with a 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. show. “I think metro Atlanta has a huge potential audience. Air America is proving in market after market the audience is there.”
Eric Seidel, a media consultant and former WGST-AM station manager, disagreed: “It will never be a factor in this market. There isn’t a large enough audience for this type of talk to make it economically viable.”
The modest signal doesn’t help. With 10,000 watts during the day from a tower in Dekalb County near Decatur, Air America will have city-grade strength for about a 20-mile radius, according to www.radio-locator.com. At night, with 1,000 watts, the coverage area is smaller.
This means most anybody outside the Perimeter with a low tolerance for static will have to catch Air America on the Internet or the two subscription-based satellite radio networks, XM and Sirius.
Nationally, Air America has weathered a rocky start which included financial problems and management turnover. It is now in about 30 cities. “We’re 150 days in and we’re already in half the top 20 markets,” Sinton said. “We’ve shown tremendous growth.”
In his almost 20 year career, (Kerry) has sponsored (667) and co-sponsored (4117) a total of 4784 bills and amendments. By comparison, during the same years, John McCain only was associated with a total of 4247.
Okay, this gets my vote for most interesting story I read today:
Make sure you read the whole article so you can get to the part where a group identifying itself as the “Perforating Mexicans” takes credit for the whole thing.
The Perforating Mexicans. That’s sooo the name of my next band.
I spent pretty much the entire weekend in Grant Park for the second annual Summer Shade Festival put on by Adams Realtors. The wife had a booth at the festival, my band Luigi played and I ran a 5k race. It was an exhausting but fun weekend.
The highlight of my weekend (and so far this year) was seeing the Fort McPherson Army band play “Hey Ya” by Outkast as they closed out the festival on Sunday. Yes, I’m serious. Freakin’ hilarious.
I’ve been taking specific steps to lessen my mental load recently, but as of right now Michael pretty much sums it up for me.
