The internet blows my mind. Twenty years ago who’d have believed that almost anything you wanted to know, listen to, or view was only a click or two away? Good thing that’s the case, because otherwise I wouldn’t have revisited David Dye’s recent World Café conversation with Jackson Browne.
I used to listen often to WXPN’s afternoon broadcast of the Café, when I was desk-bound at work in the outskirts of Center City Philadelphia. Great radio show with pretty long tentacles, showcasing music and musicians from hardly the whole world, but a fairly sizeable chunk of the planet. Since leaving that desk and my career in 2009, though, World Café hasn’t been on my radar screen too often. Running errands recently I luckily caught the tail end of the Browne segment on my car radio, and the next day listened to the full episode online. Jackson Browne is one impressive person. Beyond the fact that he’s a wonderful singer and songwriter, and on my list of all-time favorite musicians, he is really smart and perceptive. Clearly, here’s a guy who has given plenty of thought to his life and his place in the world. And musically he is not stuck in the past, a prisoner of the songs he wrote in his younger days. For proof, give a listen to his 2014 album Standing InThe Breach, a top-notch record.
The Browne interview, interspersed with excellent full-band Browne performances recorded last year in Philadelphia, is for all to hear on NPR’s website. In the final minutes of the conversation, David Dye, who is in his 60s, as is Browne, grows wistful and asks Jackson “are we just boring as we get older?” Jackson lets out some handsome chuckles, and then answers point-on. To beat back the ravages of time, he prescribes music, as do I. “As you age,” he says, “you look for ways in which to sustain yourself . . . Music is restorative, the act of doing it, the act of listening to it. Man, it’s good for you. It can really make the difference in how the rest of your life goes, and especially how you feel physically.” To add a few more notes to these ideas, I think that music likewise is good for you at pretty much any stage of your life, from age five or so onward, let’s say. The emotional release that music can produce, the way it unlocks inner doors and allows the sunshine in, are good for just about everyone.
Each morning I combine these three ground coffees. I don’t use an excess of water. The result is a very good brew.
Returning home from a restaurant where my wife, as expected, had consumed a disappointing cup of coffee to end our dinner, I uttered those words to her for the first time, about eight years ago. Myself, I had eschewed restaurant coffee some years before, having learned that most restaurants serve a timid brew. My wife, though, remained the always hopeful coffee seeker, and still is. I added, not particularly facetiously, that the above quote would be an appropriate inscription, as good as any, on my tombstone. It would give viewers of my grave something to think about, probably along the lines of “Huh? What was that guy all about?”
Coffee is a constant in the lives of half the planet’s population. Mine included. But I became a coffee person only when I reached my early 30s. Growing up, my parents didn’t offer coffee to me, even as I entered my teens, and I didn’t naturally gravitate to the dark brew. It’s not that coffee was absent from our house; my father drank it fairly regularly. My mother stuck to tea. I liked coffee, though, on the one occasion I can recall having it during my youth. That was in 1965 or ’66 in a Brazilian food pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. I was 17 or 18 at the time. I must have felt adventurous ordering a cup there, and I recall thinking that it was delicious. Yet, that fine cup didn’t jumpstart my desire or need for coffee. The habit began years later, when I started ordering a morning java from a food truck that parked outside the office building where I worked, in Philadelphia’s Germantown section.
Fast forward a couple of decades. My wife and I are vacationing in Paris in 1995. Our small hotel serves a modest but pretty perfect breakfast. Good rolls, pastries and fruit, and coffee that stuns us with its vitality. We’d never had coffee like this before. We realized that the coffee we drank in the States, both in and outside our house, was a very poor cousin of this French version. The American coffee revolution, with Starbucks leading the charge, had begun by this time but was in its early stages, and my wife and I were unaware of it. But, soon after returning to the USA, we began brewing strong coffee at home. Since then, we like it no other way.
These days, needless to say, rich coffee is easily found in much of our country. Starbucks outlets are almost everywhere, and independent coffee cafes are aplenty too. But regular restaurants leave me shaking my head, and that’s why I uttered the words that might decorate my tombstone. For accuracy’s sake, though, what I really should have said was: “If you want a good cup of coffee, go to Starbucks or the like, or stay home and brew it yourself. Forget about ordering joe in restaurants.”
But why do so few restaurants, from diners to pricey joints, choose to serve up a robust cup? Why has the coffee revolution bypassed most of them? Wish I knew. Brewing flavorful coffee isn’t too hard. The problem, I’ve come to realize, is simply that not enough ground coffee is used in proportion to water. The result is a weakish drink, even with the finest of beans. Duh, indeed. Hey, restaurateurs — up the bean count!
Dislikers of strong coffee should pay no attention to what I’ve written.
Long-idled blast furnaces, the backdrop to Blast Furnace Blues festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Ah, my first post. The “About” page notes that the blog will focus on the interests that I’ve loved all of my adult life: Music, movies, food and beverage, art, traveling, theater. That list isn’t exclusive. There is room to expand. For my first post, though, I’ll stick to the list and review a recent musical day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
I’ve been to quite a few places over the years, and there are many more I’d like to visit. On the other hand, there are places I’ve given little thought to, and have no plans to visit. I’ll scratch one of those no-plans places off my list now, though, because not long ago I was in Bethlehem, PA with my wife. Turns out that this small city is a mere 40 miles from where I live. Who knew?
It was a web-surfing spree a few weeks ago that brought Bethlehem from darkness into light. During that spree, Cape Cod lover that I am, I looked over the website of the Cape’s Payomet Performing Arts Center. On it I saw that a musician named Carolyn Wonderland was on the schedule. What a name! No way I’d not check out her website. And there I noticed that Wonderland, a blues/rock troubadour from Texas, would be at Blast Furnace Blues, a three day music festival in Bethlehem. The lineup on the Blast Furnace website looked excellent for the final festival day, March 29. It included Wonderland and Shemekia Copeland, one of the greatest blues singers alive. March 29 arrived, off we went, and we are very glad that we did.
Bethlehem’s main claim to fame was, and likely still is, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. That company, now defunct, had nationwide facilities. The heart of its operation was in Bethlehem itself, where steel production ended 20 years ago. Parts of the former Bethlehem site are well on their way to looking like Roman ruins. But much of the grounds have been reclaimed. By Sands Casino Resort, for one. And by ArtsQuest Center, a large and spiffy year-round home to concerts, films and such, and to special events like Blast Furnace Blues. Blast Furnace’s organizers gave the festival the correct name. Rusting monolithic blast furnaces that once produced thousands of tons of iron daily are the backdrop to the musicians in the center’s third floor music room. The furnaces are fully visible through huge glass windows.
No acoustic country blues on the Blast Furnace menu. Loud and driving electric blues and rock instead, exactly what the crowd came out to hear. Music roared in two rooms, on separate floors, but my wife and I stuck to the third floor. The schedule there was hard to beat. We took in a lot of music, four acts spread out over six hours. The crowd grew as the afternoon and evening deepened. When Shemekia Copeland hit the stage around 6:30, 400 or more blues-crazed and partying folks filled the room. Now, all four bands were hot, but Shemekia and her mates were the best, as I figured they would be. The only performer on the bill whom I had seen before, I knew her to be fabulous, and once again she was. What a voice. Pretty incomparable, really. And the four guys backing her up were ferocious, Stones-y as can be at times, deeper than deep in the blues at others. Got to name these gentlemen: Arthur Neilson and Ken Scandlyn on guitars; Kevin Jenkins on bass; the amazing Robin Gould on drums. If you’ve never seen Shemekia and company, do yourself a favor.
Lots of good things to say about the other acts. I’m sometimes not a big fan of white boys singing the blues, but Chris O’Leary, of his namesake band, was authentic. A strong, clean vocal delivery, no cringe-worthy Muddy Waters-like imitations, except his occasional blues growl. I’ll forgive him for that. What’s the blues without some growling, right? O’Leary’s rich mouth harp storytelling, and Pete Kanaris’s searing guitar lines, led the band’s instrumental charge through raw Chicago-style blues, talking blues, and New Orleans syncopations. O’Leary is a veteran of the late Levon Helm’s Barn Burners. Somehow he was new to me. Praise to Blast Furnace Blues for bringing him in.
The Freddie King Reunion Band in action
Freddie King, a blues giant on electric guitar and vocally, passed away in 1976. Benny Turner, King’s younger brother, played electric bass guitar with King for many years. All these decades later, Turner decided to celebrate his brother by bringing together other King band alumni, and one red-hot guitarist, Texas Slim, who loves King’s music but never played with him. The Freddie King Reunion Band thus was born a couple of months ago, and Blast Furnace was only its third or fourth appearance. Like Turner said from the bandstand, musically it was as though the guys hadn’t been apart at all in the 39 years since King’s passing. With Benny on bass and most of the lead vocals, these fellas played with power, smoking a repertoire of the down and dirty as if in a bygone and sweaty Chicago blues club.
And what about Carolyn Wonderland, who led me to Bethlehem in the first place? She owns good pipes (like those of a more rugged Bonnie Raitt), writes good songs, and is right at home playing blues, country-tinged rock, and gospel tunes. And she slings a tough guitar. Even in 2015, it’s not common seeing a lady tear into the strings. At Blast Furnace, she and her band gripped the music hard and didn’t let go. The girl’s got it.
Yeah, Another Blogger 