Elf Sternberg

Omaha and I went to the Fleetwood Mac concert at the Tacoma Dome, and I had a very good time. We were on the floor, about halfway up from the stage, so the photograph isn't great. The crowd was a mix of people who've been listening since the 1970s and people who were younger than my first ISP account.

The replacement of Lindsey Buckingham by Neil Finn (former frontman for Crowded House and Mike Campbell, the lead guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers worked better than expected. Given Buckingham's penchant for melodrama, replacing him with two musicians who, together, add up to much more than his own talent and who bring some self-discipline and decorum to the show (and who are, together, probably working for less than what Buckingham would have demanded). Finn's voice is similar to Buckingham's, and Campbell's guitar playing is better.

Along with about every Fleetwood Mac song you probably already know, they played Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'," including a montage on the back screen of Petty's career, with several shots of Petty & Stevie Nicks working together, and Nick Finn & Stevie Nicks had a small, unplugged duet of the Crowded House hit "Don't Dream It's Over."

I did not know that Fleetwood Mac had started as a blues band, and that prior to the 1975 release of "Fleetwood Mac" (which had, grief, "Rhiannon," "Landslide," "Say You Love Me," and "Over My Head" on it), they had had two big hits with Peter Green's power-blues piece "Oh Well" and "Black Magic Woman," the piece most people know best from Santana.

Christine McVie is 75, Stevie Nicks is 70, John McVie is 72 and Mick Fleetwood is 71. Christine McVie looked and sounded a little tired but held up well during the performance. Stevie Nicks is still amazing, and Mick Fleetwood performed a 15 minute drum solo with a little assistance (but very little relief) from his drum set partner, Taku Hirano. Mick also introduced the touring members, the people in the back who aren't part of "The band" but who lend their support, which was delightful since often those people don't get much credit. You get the sense that Fleetwood Mac is Mick's band, and if you're very good you might get to play in it.

We had a lot of fun. The greatest emotional hit came from playing "Free Fallin'," and it's clear the band was still having fun on stage.

The playlist last night is below. There was no intermission.

• The Chain


• Little Lies


• Dreams


• Second Hand News


• Say You Love Me


• Black Magic Woman


• Everywhere


• Rhiannon


• I Don't Want To Know


• World Turning


• Gypsy


• Oh Well


• Don't Dream It's Over


• Landslide


• Isn't It Midnight


• Monday Morning


• You Make Loving Fun


• Gold Dust Woman


• Go Your Own Way


• Free Fallin'


• Don't Stop

So, while Omaha and I are dense-packing our lives, let me talk about going to see Blue Öyster Cult. They played the Emerald Queen Casino Showroom, to which Omaha and I have never been. I bought the tickets on a whim.

Now, you have to understand that the last time I'd seen BÖC, it had been in Orlando back in 1988, so that's, what, 27 years ago? They were touring just after the release of Imaginos, which was Al Bouchard's last work with BÖC. It was not a commercially successful album, although it is one of my favorites, mostly for it's Lovecraftian rock opera pretensions mixed with BÖC's solid instrumentals. Omaha and I saw them in a small bar, filled with people some of whom didn't even seem to know they were in the presence of rock greatness. (BÖC is credited with inventing the heavy metal umlaut, people!)

This time they were on stage, not too far away. The Emerald Queen is hardly what one would call an "arena," although it's definitely a well-sized ballroom. As it's a casino, it's technically on an Indian reservation so there was smoking and beer in copious amounts. Not that many people smoked, although somewhere through the middle of the concert someone very near Omaha and I lit up their joints, and that was a skunky experience.

I never before realized how much the band is really Buck Dharma's, and if you're very, very good, you might be allowed to play alongside him. For a 68 year old guy, he looks fantastic, and he still plays hard rock solos with an astonishing amount of verve and virtuoso talent. I need to know how he keeps those hands so functional night after night.

They played all the usual favorites, everything from Career of Evil, which means that there was nothing from later albums like Imaginos, but I guess that was okay. They were still hard rock. Eric Bloom is looking a little tired (not mention he's starting to look like the kind of guy I would date these days), and the other three members, who all joined around 2004 or so, were fine. The new guitarist is really talented, but he's not Buck.

Afterward, Omaha and I found a little bar called The Social, which surprised the hell out of us by having really excellent steaks and a potato bisque to die for. We made it home by midnight.

I hope I don't wait another 27 years to see a favorite band again.

Omaha, Raen (OUAT "Kouryou-chan") and I went out to Beneroya Hall last Friday to hear a Beatles cover band called the Classical Mystery Tour; they do their schtick with the entire orchestra behind them providing the strings and orchestrations that we heard on all of the later Beatles albums, but were never able to perform live. Well, CMT gets to do it live.

The show was fun. Raen was grumpy; she hadn't wanted to get dragged to the greybeard thing, but as it turned out she knew most of the music and really enjoyed the show. There were three movements where they dressed first as in the early shows, then in the loud, psychedelic uniforms of the Sergeant Pepper era, and finally in the trippy, simpler outfits of the late 1960s, except for John who always wore the pure white suit. They even played a bit from John and Paul's post-Beatles' career, covering "Imagine" and "Live and Let Die."

Great evening. If you get the chance, highly recommended.

This weekend, Omaha and I took the girls to the Symphony. It was thematically "a celebration of Asian music," but the first piece of the first half was Debussy's Pagode, and the entire second half was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #1.

The Pagode was competently performed. The second piece, Tabuh-Tabuhan was a highly modern piece for two pianos-- meant somehow to simulate the Gamelan, although I don't see how-- and the modernity did not translate well. I don't know if their timing was off-- it was one of those pieces with highly demanding precision-- but it came across as a wall of noise rather than a piece of music.

The third piece, Suizen involved the shakuhachi, a Japanese wood flute. It was described by the conductor as "meditative." As modern as it gets-- it was composed last year-- while it was well-performed, I don't know if I would call the creepy soundtrack-informed "murky swamp" and "rampaging beasts" motifs entirely meditative. The motifs were blatantly Hollywood-- John Barry at his most obvious.

The fourth piece was by far the most interesting. Composed in the mid-1980s by L. Subrahamin and performed that night by his son, already a virtuoso violinist, it was lively and powerful. Ambi Subrahamin clearly practices every day on the Indian violin (a violin tuned to Indian scales and with internal drone strings added), and his passion and power were evident when he played. You could see a few of the violinists in the orchestra looking over with a "How does he do that?" look.

But by far the piece of the night was the second half-- Rachmaninoff's Concerto #1 for Piano. The soloist was Nobuyuki Tsujii. Blind from birth, he had to be led to the piano and looked awkward finding his way to the keyboard and the chair.

But when he started playing, for the first time in my life I understood what piano snobs are looking for. He made the piano come alive, he made it *growl* when it had to. There are several call-and-responses with the orchestra that he starts, and when the orchestra responded with less energy than he did his second call would be utterly, perfectly attuned to the strength of the musicians behind him. He performed with such singular excellence that I couldn't really do ought but listen. It was amazing.

When it was over, he insisted on doing a solo encore that was equally powerful. I swear, he must have traded his eyes to get those extra fingers; he made the piano trill like water, shout like a wolf, it was astounding. And I think if they'd let him, he'd have played on and on for the rest of the day.

Sadly, the kids were bored by it. Bored and cranky by the end. But Omaha and I had a good time, and we're determined to subject them to yet more culture in the future. We can't have yogurt be the only culture they're ever exposed to.

I'm not even sure where this album came from. It's been in my collection for years, but I've never really listened to it closely until recently. Now that I have, I know exactly what playlist it's going into.

When I first heard it, I described Civilizations to my wife as "a lost Jean Michel Jarre album." So, no surprise when I look at Intelligensia's home page and discover that they've both contributed to the Jarre Forever Project and that they consider this album something of an homage to Jarre and Gene Roddenberry. They've really tracked down every voice Jarre used, paralleled without plagiarizing many of Jarre's music tics and themes, and come up with a very coherent, thematically pleasing album.

If you like Jean Michel Jarre, this is the sort of thing you will like.

I recently said that Roger Waters' last studio album, Amused to Death was not aging well. Listening to it again, I listened to his song, "Watching TV," where he sings:

She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She's everybody's sister
She's symbolic of our failure
She's the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on TV

It's a song of hope in the middle of a world of tragedy: it's a sign that finally, finally, we see what governments do to other people, and finally we are moved to respond.

It doesn't seem to have made a difference. Here we are, twenty years after Amused to Death, and we can watch live human tragedy on YouTube or some other rebroadcast mechanism more or less at will. Torture from Syria, drive-by murder in Iran, soldiers shooting pregnant women in Palestine and rebels killing their former leaders in Libya and Iraq. If you want slightly less tragic, you can watch rubber bullets being used on students in Egypt, and American kids getting pepper spray in the face.

It really hasn't made that much difference. A scary number of people treat this as entertainment. Some even Rule 34 the stuff. And the toture, suffering, and death goes on.

Many moons ago, when I was seriously into space rock, I remember buying The Secret Machines first album, Now Here is Nowhere. It was good enough, especially the opening track, "First Wave Intact," as well as "Light's On" and "Pharoah's Daughter", to earn my buying the second album, Ten Silver Drops.

I remember disliking it. The intensity of the original album was gone, replaced with overwrought vocals and grasps at some silver ring of respectability.

I guess, as we get older, respectability becomes less underrated. Because it came around on the MP3 player today and I kinda like it now. "Alone, Jealous and Stoned" has some thought behind it, as does "1,000 seconds." Brandon Kurtis' voice is still the raspy, range-bound thing it ever was, and I don't miss the lack of big-rock beats that characterized the first album. Oh, don't get me wrong, "First Wave Intact" is still the rockin'est thing they've done, but rockin' isn't the be-all and end-all of space rock. Thinkin' is.

Our date night was to attend Falling In Love Again and For A Look or a Touch, two very different musical presentations about life before and during the Nazi era in Germany.

Falling In Love Again featured the full chorus behind an on-stage orchestra, while in front dancers from Spectrum Dance Theater performed the Tango and other provocative dancers. They sang many popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s, including "Mack the Knife," "Love For Sale," and "Falling In Love Again," some in the original German, some in the English versions known to have been popular in Berlin at the time. The settings was, of course, a gay cabaret in the 1930s, and the story conveyed was about the vibrancy of Berlin's nightlife prior to the coming of the Nazi party.

All in all, this was the kind of song-and-dance that the Seattle Men's Chorus is known for, with small singing groups, brief solos, a wide variety of music, effective use of the chorus as visual effect, and lots of ribald humor

For a Look or a Touch was a "musical drama" about two real men, Gad and Manfred. Gad lived until the late 1990s; Manfred died in a concentration camp in 1942. They had both been 19, and in love, in 1942, when the Nazis came and took Manfreds's family away. Manfred was given a choice: to run away with Gad, or to go with his family as they all went to the camp. Manfred chose his family. Gad survived, but homosexuality remained a criminal offense after the war and he was unable to ever speak about his guilt until very late in life. Because he was unable to speak about it, he refused to revisit it, and it wasn't until late in life that he learned just how horrific the camps had been.

The Seattle Men's Chorus was again a major component of the piece, especially as Manfred's ghost recounts the horrors of the camp. It was neither gratuitous nor maudlin, but it was especially harsh, in an appropriate way. Dressed in prison rags, the chorus provided voice and counterpoint to the orchestra (now down in the orchestral pit), as Manfred and Gad sang and spoke their way through Gad's guilt and redemption.

Omaha went to read the exhibits in the foyer after the performance, but I went to talk to some of the chorus. I had to ask, "Why was there smoke?" Because there was a very light smoke in the theater. Both said it was to give the scene that otherworldly, fantasy feel of a ghost visitation story. It was so light, however, that I kept wondering if something was wrong with my new prescription, now only a week old.

I learned that one special effect failed due to a burned-out stage light, but the piece about how the Nazis had "improved" upon crucifixion with the mechanical crane, and used it exclusively on those who wore the pink triangle, in which a member of the chorus was slowly hoisted and silhoutted in a side-light, was especially horrifying and effective.

For a Look or a Touch isn't a nice piece, but it is about redemption, the complicated kind of redemption that comes with survivors' guilt, with acceptance of your survival. It's very sensitively mixed in with that gay-tinged adulation of one's glory days, when, as the libretto went, "night was for more than just sleeping," and for how the ones who died young will always be young in our hearts. Beautiful boys, surrendered old men, and a shared sense that life could have been better, but failed. It's very effective, and if you have a chance to see it, please do.

I must give jwz credit for turning me on to Vigilant Citizen and its analysis of the Russian pop band Vintazh and it's song Mikkie. While I was watching, I developed severe envy for the control platform the male musician-cum-DJ was using.

Apparently, it's real.

Via Joe. My. God., who also gives us this thought: ( May not be safe for uptight readers )

The last man to be here was never heard from again
He won't be back this way 'til two thousand ten
Why me?

— The Planet P Project, Why Me? (1983)