Day Sixty Eight (Year Two)

So, I was chatting with a regular customer the other day. He's been coming in for the last three years. We've talked music that entire time, and so I was shocked to hear the other day that he had never heard one of my favorite albums of all time, Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. He came in all excited about the record, and the live stuff from the Fillmore (which I didn't have) and the live stuff from the Johnny Cash Show (which I also didn't have). He told me he'd burn me the other stuff, and he did. So now I've got that, and while I haven't listened to it yet, just having it in the house makes me want to go back and dive into my blues playing. I miss the blues playing.

Oh, finding the balance between recording and listening and playing, how difficult you can be!

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Day Two Hundred Twenty Seven (Year Two)

So, the new Springsteen disc is amazing. There's enough of a mixture of his upbeat rockers, his ballads, and his message songs to make this his best record since The Rising . And speaking of that record... Buying The Boss the day it comes out always takes me back to a specific moment in life. It was July 30th, 2002, the year after 9/11, the year after someone on the streets of New York told Springsteen "we need you now." I had driven to Oshkosh, WI to visit some friends, when I remembered that Springsteen's disc was scheduled to come out that day. I drove downtown to The Exclusive Company, but had to park a few blocks back. At the time, there wasn't much going on downtown, but when I got out of the car, I could hear this music coming from up the block somewhere. The closer I got to Exclusive, the more it began to dawn on me, they had set up a giant set of speakers in their upstairs windows, and were blasting the new album out into the streets....

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"Muse" - ings on Rock & Life

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