“The church door’s thrown open, I can hear the organ’s song. But the congregation’s gone.”

Even though I didn’t personally know anyone affected by the attacks five years ago on September 11th, it was personal. I grieved that morning as I woke up early to a phone call and stared in disbelief at the TV, as if I knew each person killed or trapped, burning or jumping. I watched the first tower fall, then the second, and all I could think about was all the firefighters and police officers who had rushed in to save people they didn’t even know. As I watched the towers fall and the massive dust clouds rise, I felt like I was going to throw up in the face of such unabashed evil.

Ten days later all the major U.S. television networks aired the America: A Tribute To Heroes telethon to raise money for those left behind in the wake of the attacks. It had some stellar, simple, heartfelt musical performances that touched me, and today I wanted to share.

My City Of Ruins – Bruce Springsteen
This was the first song of the program, and for me it just cracked open wide all the emotions that many of us were feeling in the days following the event. As many times as I listen to this song, which Bruce penned in the year before 9/11 about the deterioration of Asbury Park, New Jersey but that fits unbelievably well in this context, it still gets me. There are few who can pen a lyric of loss like Springsteen. In addition to the haunting imagery of the words in the title of this post, there’s also this line, which comes after a wheezing, lonesome, wrenching harmonica solo: “Now there’s tears on the pillow, darlin’ where we slept. And you took my heart when you left . . . “ The simple chord progression there on the last six words is heartbreaking — how do I explain that? Just listen.

As Bruce performs this, he stares off into nothing as if seeing the images from the last week and a half play over in his mind. At times his lips curl in an angry defiance, a rebellion against the destruction. And I’ve always thought that the way he furiously sings “Come on, rise up” over and over almost seems as if he is willing the dead to come back, the towers to rise. It reminds me of the futility of the lyrics in the U2 song “Wake Up Dead Man.” As Bruce nears the end of the song, his determined pleas to rise up take on an air of resignation as he stares off into the blackness of the studio.

This song turned up the following year on Springsteen’s stunning disc The Rising, along with many other songs he penned about the losses on 9/11. Hands down the other track on there that is the most devastating is “You’re Missing,” about a house and a family waiting for someone to come home (who will never come home). Lyrics like, “Coffee cup’s on the counter, jacket’s on the chair, paper’s on the doorstep, but you’re not there” and this, the clincher: “Morning is morning, the evening falls, I have / too much room in my bed, too many phone calls . . .”

Peace On Earth/Walk On – U2 (VIDEO)
I was deeply touched by the show of solidarity and understanding from Irish boys U2 to their American friends with this song. The whole All That You Can’t Leave Behind album makes me think of the period following 9/11, probably due in part to this performance. I just watched it again tonight on DVD and my eyes well up when the gospel salvation of the “Halle-halle-lujah, halle-halle-lujah” addition kicks in, and then the tears tend to spill over when Bono starts shouting, “See you when I get home! I’ll see you when I get home, sister!” I also appreciated Bono’s confidence in delivering the lyrics about what they can’t steal from us.

There Will Come A Day – Faith Hill (VIDEO)
Whether you like country or not, you have to listen to this because it ain’t country, it’s some gooood gospel. I love this song as Hill performs it, with a full, enthusiastic backing gospel choir. The video always strikes me moreso than listening because it is hard to stay blue when you see the choir wiggling and shaking their arms in unison, jumping on their tiptoes in anticipation as the song nears it’s moment: “Song will ring out down those golden streets, the voices of earth with the angels will sing (pause) – HALLELUJAH!” Chill-inducing.

Imagine – Neil Young (VIDEO)
Young sits in front of the grand piano with his cowboy hat and sets into Lennon’s chords that somehow always evoke this sense of sadness and a weight of longing in me. Even though I’ve always found the utopian/socialistic lyrics of this landmark tune to honestly be a bit stupid (if there’s nothing that you feel is worth dying for, then what of value do you really have?), that melody always gets me, and Young turns in an impassioned and delicate performance here.

The Long Road – Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready & Neil Young (VIDEO)
This is such a simple song, and so lovely, really. From Pearl Jam’s Merkinball EP (1995), I love the different melodies and harmonies that Vedder rotates each time he approaches the refrain “I have wished for so long, how I wish for you today.” Neil only comes in vocally on the final refrain and response, “We all walk the long road.”

Finally, two songs that were not on the telethon but that could have been if I were programming it:

My Blue Manhattan – Ryan Adams
(from Love Is Hell, check out rbally’s live R.A. post)

America The Beautiful – Ray Charles


Walk on.

Another argument for that expanded $79.99 cable TV package

The Sundance Channel and Grey Goose Entertainment (I wasn’t aware that Grey Goose offered entertainment other than their vodka) announced six of the pairings for this season of “Iconoclasts,” their hour-long TV program (produced by Robert Redford) which pairs two “leading innovators” from different fields who come together to discuss their passions and creative processes. I’ve never seen the show, oh me of cheapie basic cable, but the idea sounds interesting.

Participants for Season Two are Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton; dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and chef Alice Waters; filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and singer/songwriter Fiona Apple; actress Isabella Rossellini and inventor Dean Kamen; music great Paul Simon and producer Lorne Michaels; and comedian Dave Chappelle and poet Maya Angelou.

Broadcast schedule here, as well as excerpts from Season One (including the episode with Redford and my favorite Old-Guy-Who-Used-To-Be-Really-Really-Hot, Paul Newman).

Don’t need a helmet, got a hard, hard head

This made me smile today because it reminds me of something that near happened to me once in Edinburgh (minus the army helmet). Plus, it is a good segue into a few more covers & live tracks from the 2006 Pearl Jam tour thus far that are begging to be shared:

From the expanded Vedder interview in Rolling Stone

Vedder: “I went through this f*cking yearlong period where I wore helmets all the time. It was like army helmets that I’d find, or just like whatever. It was this kind of analogy, like I need a helmet…I felt like…it’s just funny looking…sleeping in a f*cking army helmet.

I remember one day after a Lollapalooza gig, I woke up in a hotel in an army helmet and a T-shirt. And, I heard a live band playing. I thought it was a live band. So I went out the door to see if it was live. I had to know — was that a real stand-up bass? Or were they just playing music in the atrium or whatever? So I pushed the door open, went to look, you know, and I looked back and the door just went [makes a clicking sound].

So I’m standing in the hotel, in this atrium thing and I’ve got an army helmet on and a T-shirt.

RS: In like your underwear? Nothing?

Vedder: “Nothing; army helmet and a T-shirt. I was thinking, ‘Aww, this is really bad.’ And so I go down to the maids, but they won’t let me in. I don’t know anybody else’s room number. Everyone’s got a pseudonym. I don’t know who’s what. And, so I take the T-shirt off, wrap it around the back, put the army helmet over the front, go down in this glass elevator, it’s Easter Sunday — this all starts to hit me — it’s Easter Sunday, there’s all these people in their Easter [best]. It was somewhere in the Midwest like Milwaukee or something. I had to walk through the people, and parents were hiding their kids from this freaky guy. It must have been like a real apparition. Then — sorry I got into this story; I’ll just finish it — but the funny thing is that I actually waited in line. There was a line at the front desk. I actually waited in line behind two other people. It was kind of a Tarzan goes to Vietnam look or something. And then of course you get to the lady, tell her your problem, locked out of your room and, of course, she asks for an ID. That’s when I lost it.”

TUNES:

Beast of Burden – 5/10/06
(Stones cover) Loose like the one from Brixton Academy 7/14/93. Only been played live maybe 3 times.

Save It For Later – 5/17/06
(English Beat cover)

Around The Bend – 5/19/06
Lovely little gem from No Code, rarely played live

Can’t Explain – 5/19/06
(The Who cover) This was played live by PJ for the first time at the 11/7/95 San Diego show that I was at. This version is acoustic; the crowd enthusiastically sings along.

Dead Man Walking – 5/19/06
The first PJ song I ever saw performed live, at the pre-show opener, San Jose 11/4/95. The website is wrong, says the first time it was played was 1998 (and that it has only been played 4 times live) – maybe they don’t count solo pre-sets with just Vedder.

Hard to Imagine – 5/19/06
A great unreleased song, only been played a few dozen times live.

Kick Out The Jams – 5/22/06
(MC5 cover)

Forever Young – 5/24/06
(Dylan cover for Bob’s birthday) First time ever played live.

Just indulge me for one sec – a few more Vedder items (and some music)

Okay, while every one is busy talking about that other new famous baby and the pics on the internet (even my SISTER sent me the links this morning; it’s like the Baby Jesus all over again, except there were no cameras then) — here’s one I’ll bet you missed altogether.

Yep, that’s Ed Vedder throwing out the first pitch at a recent Cubs game with daughter Olivia Vedder, 2. Pretty dang cute, I must say. Okay, wait, what is this, Hello! Magazine? Here’s some music. Apologies:

June 3, 2006 PJ Show
Continental Arena, East Rutherford, New Jersey

No Surrender (Springsteen cover) – Ed Vedder, solo, pre-show
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite covers EVER that they do.

It Makes No Difference – My Morning Jacket & Ed Vedder
Ed then stays out for the first song of the MMJ set. Nice.

I should have pointed this out before, but didja know that Pearl Jam is selling all of the shows from their current tour on their website, practically immediately following the actual performance? Replacing the discs and discs and discs for sale of tours past, now you just download it and it’s that simple. Very cool & egalitarian, and forward-thinking of them in terms of harnessing the power of the internet to reach the fans.

One other neat feature of their site is that they log every single song Pearl Jam has done/performed/recorded in a searchable database. And you thought I just KNEW that the last time they played Leash was 4/11/94.

Mike Watt: Ball-Hog or Tugboat?

I rocked this album probably hundreds of times in high school. All I knew is that it featured some of my favorite artists, which truthfully is why I bought it. I didn’t really know at the time the imitable punk-rock legend that Mike Watt (of the Minutemen and fIREHOSE) actually is. But it was a great introduction.

Released in 1995, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? wins for the most eclectic & confounding title in my collection. 17 tracks, Watt plays thud-staff (bass) on all of them and wrote 14 of the tracks. His steady, bumping presence is complemented by Ed Vedder, Evan Dando, Dave Pirner, Frank Black, Adam Horovitz, Mike D., Flea, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, Krist Novoselic, Joe Baiza, J Mascis, Thurston Moore, Henry Rollins, Mark Lanegan . . . it’s just madness is what it is.

The thing that I like best about this album is its diversity. You have every type of song on here from classic pleasing (rocking) pop songs to hardcore rock, and punk, and jazzy funk, and Henry Rollins (angry! angry!). There are also great stories told throughout the songs, such as “Drove Up From Pedro,” which tells of Watt discovering punk at a Germs show in Los Angeles.

Here are three of my favorite cuts, but you gotta just buy the album because there are so many great tracks I didn’t post. I somehow got the big massively tall version (above) of the CD case, but it also comes in a nice square blue cover as well. Which would be easier to file in the ole IKEA CD cabinet.

Piss-Bottle Man – Evan Dando on vocals (golden)

Chinese Firedrill – Frank Black on vocals (*gorgeous* acoustic guitar )

E-Ticket Ride – with Mike D. and Flea (and the baby of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore & Kim Gordon providing, uh, background vocals)

Other songs I like that I left off here are “Big Train” (little double entendre lyrical content with Dave Grohl, Ed Vedder, and J Mascis), “Against the ’70s” (with Ed Vedder, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl – and didn’t that track get some radio play too?), “Sidemouse Advice” (swingin jazz with Carla Bozulich and Flea), and the title “Intense Song for Madonna to Sing” (and indeed it would be) always makes me laugh.

Mike Watt was instrumental in the Southern California post-punk movement of the ’80s, along with his band the Minutemen, and later fIREHOSE. He began playing music in his early teens, along with friend D. Boon, who would be a co-founder of the Minutemen. From his innocent beginnings (“I didn’t know what the bass was,” Watt says. “In arenas you couldn’t really hear it. But we saw on album covers that every band had a bass player, except the Doors and the Seeds. So we knew it was a big part of the band. In the pictures it looked like a guitar that had four strings. I didn’t know they were bigger. I didn’t know it was lower.”) Watt grew into a kickass & well-respected bassist.

Watt and Boon were in on the very beginnings of the Southern California punk scene, and the way it slowly began to change the face of music. Watt was there as bass became more of a crucial element in the music that he loved to make. “Before punk, bass was kind of where you put your retarded friend,” Watt theorizes. “Left field. It was a real inferiority complex dumped on me because of the bass guitar. But with punk, you had everyone lame, so all of a sudden the bass player was elevated and everybody was brought down. It was a lot more equal, and the bass drove the songs more. They were all learning, they were all beginning.”

The Minutemen released 5 albums before D. Boon’s death in 1985 in a car crash. Watt then went on with fIREHOSE to release more music (Watt says that he got the name fIREHOSE “from watching a film short of Bob Dylan doing Subterranean Homesick Blues using cue cards for the lyrics. I thought that it was funny when he held up the card that said ‘firehose’.” So there you have it.). Watt has jammed both solo and as a temporary member of bands such as Porno for Pyros, J. Mascis’ band Fog, and, most recently Iggy Pop & The Stooges. Not too shabby.

Turns out this is also a timely post because there is a wonderful documentary out about the Minutemen and their influence on the punk-rock movement. Titled “We Jam Econo — The Story of the Minutemen,” the film premiered last year in San Pedro, California, and is still making the rounds to cool venues across the U.S.

Tomorrow night (the 15th) it is playing at the Art Institute in San Francisco, and there are about a dozen other screenings worldwide in the next few months. Watt is on tour this Spring both solo and with Iggy Pop. Check out something of a punk-rock legend if he comes to your town.