Music, art, culture and other crap from the mind numbing, wide open spaces of the prairie.
If you like what you hear or see in the posting, click "Dig this!!!" at the bottom of the post, or, if you want to be more specific about something (let's say an error that needs corrected in my research), leave a comment or email me at shaftindustries@yahoo.com. Thanks.
I admitted to the Lady of the Manor....
I got a thing for Mary Huff....
She understands...
Wow...what a time!
Rick Miller, Mary Huff and Dave Hartman can put on a great show.
Throwing in old favorites, such as "Nitty Gritty", "Camel Walk" and (one of the most exciting parts of the concert) "Eight Piece Box", SCOTS can bring the groove, get the boogie and officiate over a good time.
The Lady of the Manor and myself had a great time and thank SCOTS for the show.
Rick Miller, Dave Hartman and Mary Huff are
Southern Culture on the Skids
This weekend, one of my favorite bands is coming to the prairie.
Southern Culture on the Skids (a.k.a SCOTS) are a band from the musically fertile Chapel Hill, North Carolina region.
Consisting of Rick Miller (guitar, vocals), Mary Huff (bass, vocals) and Dave Hartman (drums), SCOTS plays an excellent mix of rockabilly, surf, country and R&B with a little of everything in between thrown in and a great sense of humor.
I've had the pleasure of seeing this band a couple of times, including once before here in the prairie capital, and the shows are not only a musical experience, but a "cultural" experience as well.
So, if you're anywhere near the prairie capital on Saturday, head to the Hoogeland, throw your hard earned money down and get ready to boogie.
This week's playlist consists of some of my favorite SCOTS tunes.
This past week, one of the great American songwriters celebrated his 70th birthday.
Robert Zimmerman was born on May 24th, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota.
After enrolling at the University of Minnesota, Zimmerman began playing at local folk music clubs and eventually took up the moniker of 'Bob Dylan', partly due to his admiration of the poet Dylan Thomas. About two decades later, Dylan explained the name switch by saying....
"You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free."
Dylan became an icon in the early 1960's folk movement, but became disillusioned soon thereafter.
At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival on Sunday, July 25th, Dylan, along with a band that included members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, took the stage with electric instruments, forever changing Dylan's role in modern popular music (this despite the fact that Dylan had been recording electric since the beginning of his career. For example, listen to the song Mixed Up Confusion, featured on the compilation Biograph).
Our playlist this week is filled with tunes from (what I consider) one of the greatest periods of Dylan's career, from the beginning of the electric period, 1965 to the end of 1969. It was during this period that Dylan recorded with music greats such as Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Johnny Cash, Charlie Daniels and, more famously, the Band.
I haven't been on this little marble in the sky for very long (in relative terms), but I've heard of more than one idea, over time, that the world was coming to an end.
Maybe it's because I grew up in a part of the world that has a particularly harsh brand of religiosity, but....I digress.
From what I can tell, this iteration of the "apocalypse" stems from someone with lots of money, an FCC license and a penchant for proclaiming the end.
I really shouldn't get started on professional preachers, the way they prey on people and the real problems that are obfuscated by illogical mystical beliefs.
...anyway...
Some tunes about the end of it all...whatever that may be.
Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a 36 year old self-made millionaire who gets bored with the "establishment". Crown masterminds a bank robbery, hiring five men, who never meet until at the job, to steal $2.6 million from a bank in Boston.
Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen)
during the pickup.
Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) begins
working on her suspect.
With no leads, the police and the bank's insurance company begin working with Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), a slightly amoral insurance investigator who will stop at nothing to get her man.
As Crown and Anderson begin to come closer together, they begin playing a cat and mouse game with each other. Crown has begun planning and implementing another heist, with Anderson striving to catch Crown red-handed.
Thomas Crown comtemplates his next move against
Vicki Anderson while playing chess.
As the relationship grows, questions of loyalty, love and crime come to the forefront, blurring the lines between careers, truth and consequences.
Vicki Anderson already knows her next move against
Thomas Crown while playing chess.
Stylishly shot and containing a steamy chess scene (bet you never thought you'd ever hear those words together), the original Thomas Crown Affair is a film you should check out! (WP)(AMG)(IMDB)(RT)
Film director Jim Jarmusch (holding cheese slice) tries to
coax a shark to the surface for actor & musician
John Lurie (holding gun) to shoot. This is not a
recommended way of catching fish, but it will work.
John Lurie is a musician (founding a band called the Lounge Lizards), an actor (starring in Stranger than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch for example) and an artist (whose work has been shown in New York, Amsterdam and Moscow, where his work Bear Surprise became a sensation), who has some interesting friends.
In 1991, Lurie decided to combine his eccentric friends, including Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Defoe and Dennis Hopper, with his total blissful ignorance of fishing to bring this six episode television show from the Independent Film Channel.
With episodes that include hunting shark off Montauk, New York & meeting up with a mystical jungle fisherman in the wilds of Costa Rica who shows the sportsmen an ancient fishing dance, Fishing with John is not a show if you are looking for tips on how to catch fish.
However, if you are into the absurd and enjoy the interaction between extremely creative people, then Fishing with John is a show for you.
At my place of work, we are in (to steal a term from NASCAR) the "silly season".
That means long days, long nights, working seven days a week and lots of cranky people.
A vast majority of us go into this time of the year with the best of all possible attitudes (to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson), only to have them worn down slowly, in a grinding kind of way until the finale.
In order to help us through this crazy time at work, I'm throwing out this playlist dedicated to the weekend, a time that many of us haven't seen in a while and that all of us will see again (soon).
