Hearing Aids

Recently we caught AC/DC on what will probably be their last tour.   A concert originally scheduled for March 2016 was postponed six months to September, and longtime vocalist Brian Johnson was replaced – for this tour – with infamous Guns N’Roses singer Axl Rose.  It turns out that Johnson, who had weathered 36 years of touring with AC/DC, lost his hearing not from touring, but from his side hobby racing cars.  D’oh!   Contrast that with Pete Townshend, whose hearing loss is directly related to those full power Marshall stacks behind him.

My hearing has always been subpar, even before we moved to Paris in 1979, and well before we started going to concerts (1984).   I’ve never seen The Who in concert – was never that much of a fan.   I’ve seen Motorhead a few times, but the loudest concert was actually Y&T at Jaxx in 2002 – that was actually painfully loud. 

Originally my ambition was to attend the US Military Academy, aka West Point, and become an Army officer.  Life had other plans:  my hearing was below military specifications.   This also disqualified me from ROTC, the National Guard – as a private – and even JAG (military lawyers) as the JAG recruiters refused to waive the hearing requirement even for a non-combat role.  

Eventually I wound up getting hearing aids, the newest set of which I finally got today.   This pair can be calibrated and tweaked by – guess what? – an app.  We’ll see how they work.  The prior set, also purchased from Costco, lasted about five years before the left one crapped out.

I recall one set which fit in the ear itself, filling up the entire space.   The next set went down inside, with a small antenna to pull them out.  The current format is behind the ear with a bud going into the ear canal, plus a small rubber earpiece. 

With eyesight, glasses or contact lenses will bring you back up to 20/20 vision.  Unfortunately, hearing aids are not the same.  They take  you from abysmal hearing just up to marginally less than bad.  However, they do make a big difference.   Listening to music, for one, is a remarkably more pleasant experience with them, as they pick up the higher frequencies I’d otherwise miss.  Without them, music is muddy and dull.    Plus hearing all the awful noises my car makes as it gets older is another benefit.  And of course, hearing people talk, especially if they’re not standing right in front of me. 

 

The other major necessity is being able to hear in court:  the judge, the witnesses and/or parties, and opposing counsel.  Lately more courts have hearing assisted devices (e.g. Fairfax and Loudoun), but unfortunately this is more the exception than the rule.  I had a trial in Loudoun County a few years ago and the device worked perfectly in a huge courtroom: I could hear the Judge, the witnesses, the attorneys, everyone.  Hopefully the new ones will help for those courts, the majority, which don’t.   We’ll have to see.

Never Say Die!

It’s not here because I only now discovered this album, or because I bought a new and amazing remaster that changes the game completely.  In fact, I stopped upgrading our original Paris (FNAC) purchased vinyl to 180 grain at Sabotage, so our vinyl version of this album is the one we bought in high school in the 1980s.  I do have a remastered CD (2004 Universal/Sanctuary).

I’m commenting on this because this was on my DP/LZ/BS queue and it came up to listen to.  It’s the last (#8) of the original slew of Black Sabbath albums with Ozzy Osbourne, and its tour was the last with Ozzy, Van Halen being the up and coming band opening for them.  My impression is that it’s generally held in bad repute by 1) non-fans who don’t really like Sabbath and only willing to say good things if the album, e.g. Paranoid, is so obviously musically significant that they would look like idiots if they ignored or criticized it; and 2) Black Sabbath fans who prefer Ronnie James Dio over Ozzy Osbourne.  For them, Heaven & Hell trumps any of the Ozzy albums, even Paranoid or Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath (my favorite).  Us Sabbath fans who do prefer Ozzy to Dio (like me) generally concede it’s a substandard album, but listening to it again, sober on the treadmill, I’ve come to some fresh conclusions.

First off, Bill is drumming like crazy here.  Moreover, the solos on even some of the otherwise less memorable songs is still blazing.  So whatever else might have been going badly for them at the time – e.g. Ozzy leaving and then coming back, refusing to sing any Dave Walker material – when it came time to press RECORD and PLAY THE MUSIC they stepped up and got the job done.  Were they coked up?  Strung out?  Hung over? Who knows.  Somehow they did it.

Actually, I should add a third category of NSD haters: the band itself.  Bill Ward seems to be the only one who defends it, and given his performance I’m not surprised.

Second, the prior albums were so good, that this album was doomed to suffer by comparison.  Only the Beatles seemed to rise to the occasion of consistently outdoing themselves – coming from a fan who prefers the White Album to Dr. Pepper (and I know others who prefer Abbey Road). 

Third, while I hear some jazzy stuff in there – particularly “Air Dance”, which is actually my favorite track, “Junior’s Eyes” being #2 – it still rocks.  In a sense, they wound up like Budgie, pushing in some non-rock directions to break up the monolithic mold of the prior doomy albums.  They recorded the album at Sounds Interchange in Toronto (the Canadian capital) and Rush Jr. aka Max Webster were recording Mutiny Up My Sleeve at the same time.  Kim Mitchell mentions this, though no one in the Black Sabbath camp seems to mention Max Webster.  Then again, Tony was also hanging out with Frank Zappa, who accompanied them on the tour, so perhaps yet another famous mustache-and-SG guitarist had his own influences which no one seems to acknowledge.  Frank Sabbath?  Perish the thought.

Fourth, listening to this not immediately after Technical Ecstasy (#7), but with the benefit of a few proto-Whitesnake albums by David Coverdale, returning to Sabbath was actually more of a relief and welcome rather than a disappointment.  So I may have been more predisposed to be favorable than previously.

The bottom line is that if you listen to it on its own, without trying to compare it to the prior or later albums, you might actually enjoy it.   

The Sword and Witchcraft

I’ve been trying to get my brother – who mostly shares my taste in music and is my most consistent concert companion - into stoner rock, but he’s been reluctant and indifferent.  Recently he articulated his major beef:  “all the bands sound like they’re ripping off Black Sabbath.  If I wanted to listen to Black Sabbath, I’d listen to Black Sabbath.”  Fair enough dispute, though after having listened to Pentagram and sHeavy, plus Witchcraft & The Sword, adding in some Obsessed, I’d say the more accurate critique would not be that they all sound like Black Sabbath, rather that they all sound like each other.

http://thehardtimes.net/news/innovative-stoner-metal-album-blends-influences-black-sabbath-black-sabbath/

Funny enough, let’s talk about Witchcraft.  They’re from Sweden, of all places, so add them to ABBA and Ace of Base, then add in Opeth and Ghost BC.   Supposedly they started as a de facto Pentagram tribute band, which are for their part Washington DC’s answer to – drum roll, please  - Black Sabbath.   I can hear that.  But I hear enough other stuff thrown in that it becomes a bit different.  Still heavy, still droning, still riffing, but different.   Why?  Because vocalist Magnus Pelander, instead of copying Ozzy Osbourne, as sHeavy vocalist Steve Hennessy does (while looking like early-era Whitesnake David Coverdale) – mind you, Hennessy is the only one who comes close to getting Ozzy’s voice down - or even copying Pentagram vocalist Bobby Liebling – who looks more like a long-haired Marty Friedman than Ozzy Osbourne – he’s actually copying The Sword vocalist John Cronise.   See?  Mixing it up by copying each other instead of Ozzy, Tony, Geezer or Bill.  

For that matter, I’ve yet to hear a stoner rock vocalist who sounds anything like Ronnie James Dio.  Then again, Hennessy is the only stoner rock vocalist I’ve heard who sounds like Ozzy.  But sHeavy sounds so much like Ozzy-era Sabbath that many of us thought their early track “Electric Sleep” was a long-lost Sabbath song.  Listen to it yourself and decide.

 

Incidentally, Pentagram won’t be touring much anymore these days, as Liebling is going to prison for beating up his mom.  Yeah.  Liebling has been a heroin addict for a while, but like most addicts swerves from periods of relatively clean stability where he has his s**t together, to other times when he’s more of a colossal screwup.  It’s sad because musically the albums, including the most recent, Curious Volume, are actually pretty good.  In fact, you’d never know what a colossal screwup Liebling was by his music.  They’ve been around since the early 70s, but attempts during that decade to get a record deal went south on two major occasions:  he turned off Gene Simmons & Paul Stanley (KISS, you know), and then Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman (Blue Oyster Cult, you know).  It wasn’t until the 1980s that Pentagram finally released an album.   I managed to catch them live at American University and then the Baltimore Soundstage, both times headlining.  Anyhow.

Back to Witchcraft.  They have five albums, Witchcraft, Firewood, The Alchemist, Legend, and Nucleus.   All of them are pretty much the same, of equal quality as well as sound, with no major departures.  There’s some softer interludes and change-ups which break the monotony, so you can listen to an entire album without getting bored – though a five album marathon might be pushing it.  I haven’t been able to see them live yet.  They’re from Sweden.  They need to ask Papa or Mikael Akerfeldt who does their visas, as neither Ghost nor Opeth seem to have any trouble getting into the US to tour. 

Having absorbed their repertoire with much appreciation and satisfaction, I’m now swerving back to The Sword, who are from Austin, Texas.  Although I’ve yet to catch Witchcraft in concert, I’ve been lucky enough to see The Sword a few times:  the (new) 9:30 Club in DC in 2010, opening for Kyuss Lives at the Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore (2011), headlining the R’N’Roll Hotel in DC in 2015, then opening for Opeth at the Fillmore Silver Spring in 2016.  Not particularly energetic or exciting live, though: more of a band that just comes out and plays their music.  Now they have six albums, plus a live album:  Age of Winters (2006), Gods of the Earth (2008), Warp Riders (2010), Apocryphon (2012), High Country (2015), and an acoustic version of that album, Low Country (2016).  The Sword are somewhat faster than Witchcraft, but share this deal where every album sounds pretty much the same, making a multiple disc marathon somewhat dull. 

Song Length.  Black Sabbath songs are relatively short, with “The Warning” from the first album being the longest studio track and the extended “Wicked World” from Live At Last being the longest live track.  Witchcraft have several 10-15 minute songs.  The Sword songs are about 5-7 minutes long.  And The Obsessed scarcely tax your patience, with songs which are 3-5 minutes long, fairly brief and intense.   Though if Wino’s on it, be it The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, or Spirit Caravan, we’re talking some measure of doom involved.

Then you have Earthless.  They’re coming around on tour next spring, so I decided to listen to them again to determine if I wanted to see them for the first time in concert.  I only have two of their albums, the split with Harsh Toke and Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky.  Here we’re talking 15 minute instrumental jams.  But it’s not mellow and laid back like the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers, rather it’s intense soloing like Deep Purple’s “Child In Time” or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”.  You kind of have to be in the mood for that kind of thing.  But it’s clearly different than Black Sabbath.

Even bands which sound like each other, like Fu Manchu and Nebula (thanks to Eddie Glass, a common member), there’s subtle distinctions.  FM are more straight ahead and even somewhat punk oriented, with shorter songs and subject matter about skateboarding or vans, whereas Nebula have longer songs and are space-oriented.  Bottom line is that you have to have the patience and inclination to really listen to the music before you can begin to distinguish them from each other – and from Black Sabbath – but the differences are there.  Black Sabbath obviously serves as the starting point, but each of these bands take slightly different directions.   For some, Pink Floyd is the opposite end they’re going for; for others it’s the Misfits or Ramones.

As for the overall resemblance to Black Sabbath?  As it is, they have 9 studio albums with Ozzy Osbourne, three with Dio + the Heaven & Hell album (The Devil You Know), 5 with Tony Martin, and one each from Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes.  Is that really enough?  

Colin Firth

Writer’s blog up to Thursday night, and then – thanks to a movie! – the subject presents itself quite logically:  British actor COLIN FIRTH.  I'll stick to the films I've seen, as anyone with a brain and the Interweb can access IMDB.

The movie in question is Magic in the Moonlight, a recent film with Emma Stoned as the female love interest.  CF plays a Houdini-type character, a professional magician who crusades to expose mystics and psychics as fakes.  It takes place in 1928 in Berlin (briefly) then mainly in the south of France.  He meets his match in a cute American girl (Stone), Sophie, who seems to pull up all sorts of privy information which she normally would not know.   Despite his inclinations he still falls in love with her, and remains in love with her even after uncovering the truth (pool halls are TROUBLE in River City!).   Well done!

My first exposure to him – movie-wise that is – was Fever Pitch, a light romantic comedy about a London school teacher who is obsessed with local Premier League soccer team Arsenal.   Note: I REFUSE to see the Jimmy Fallon US version about the Boston Red Sox (ZZZ).   He falls in love with a fellow teacher.  Ironically, he thinks she views him as a “yob” (lower class scumbag) for his Arsenal passion, while in fact she sees him as bourgeois, using his Arsenal passion to pretend to be a yob.   Anyhow.  Mark Strong plays his best friend.

Most recently he was in the Kingsman movies.   He’s steering away from a James Bond role in that regard, cultivating his own style.   Well done.  [And Mark Strong is back.  But no mentions of Arsenal.  Too bad.]

Earlier he won praise for The King’s Speech, in which he plays George VI, the King between “abdicate to screw the American woman” Edward VIII and our current Queen Elizabeth II.   G6 had a bad stutter, which he had to overcome with the help of a speech therapist played by Geoffrey Rush, probably better known from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films opposite Johnny Depp.  In particular the speech was expressly intended to warn everyone about Hitler, at a time which the Make Germany Great crowd – and their admirers in England – were inclined to overlook the Austrian’s minor totalitarian issues because he was an acceptable foil to Stalin.  How about this:  neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia are acceptable models for a decent country?

Firth is also Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones films (Renee Zellweger).   The original BJD film is a plot-wise ripoff of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice”.   Well before another “Pirates of the Caribbean” alumni, Keira Knightly, came around, there was a BBC production putting Colin Firth as Darcy.  The BJD people were so impressed with Firth in that role that they basically had him update the character to modern day London for the Zellweger films.  Needless to say he does all of them very well.

Those of you who like ABBA musicals might recognize him as one of Meryl Streep’s three suitors (Harry) – along with Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard – in Mamma Mia!  

Mom

Recently I eulogized my father, who died way back in 2004.  My  mom is still alive, although she’s now 83 and not getting any younger.  Since my brother has three children and my sister two, my mom is a grandmother to five grandchildren.  The oldest, Zoe, is 17 and since we’re no longer in the Middle Ages when people died at 32, no one – least of all my brother – is pressuring Zoe to go out, get married, and have children before she’s even graduated high school.   So great-grandchildren will have to wait. 

Also, I just been to three funerals in rapid succession, two of them being mother-in-law and daughter-in-law (Aunt Lorraine followed by cousin Gail).  They were all well-attended by caring relatives, who had nice things to say about the dearly departed.  No nasty surprises there. 

The sad thing about funerals is that the deceased aren’t in a position to observe the outpouring of sorrow and remorse on their behalf.  I dare say all of us will eventually learn if that’s possible, but right now – while I’m alive – I can do no more than speculate, which I won’t.

One advantage of a funeral homage is that with the person’s death, their life is conclusively capped.  We know how it ended and what they accomplished (if anything) during their lifetimes, however long or short that might have been.  With regard to very old people, I might argue that the marginal cost of pre-emptively summarizing a person’s life while they’re still alive is offset by the marginal benefit of showing love and respect to someone still alive to enjoy it.   So here goes, Mom.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1934, the second to last of 9 children.  Aunt Irene [oldest sibling] was a teenager when she was born.   My maternal grandparents were very busy.  Did I mention they were Catholic?   Anyhow.  She went to college at Boston College.   Recall that bombing at the Boston Marathon a few  years back?  That location was where she would arrive in Boston from Worcester.  By now I’ve been to Worcester and Boston a few times, and we visited our grandparents home awhile back.  Mom still has a slight accent from Massachusetts. 

US Navy, Lieutenant Commander (LCDR).   The equivalent of Major.  Retired, by now.  Her Navy status gave us access to US military PX shopping and health care until we turned 23.  In fact, I was born at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1969, just days before Nixon took office (thus the kind tribute from the First Lady). 

Nurse.   She started with Kennedy in 1961, but was in Washington, DC when JFK was shot in Dallas (so no, she’s not a suspect – she has an alibi).   When LBJ became President, she became his nurse as well.  She has fond memories of him.   This business of LBJ whipping his Johnson out she says was nonsense; the worst he would do is continue a conversation on the toilet without shutting the door (as shown in the recent biopic with Bryan “Walter White” Cranston as #36, which we watched together: "Say my name" "Lyndon Baines Johnson").

 

Retired.  She retired when I was born.  (Sorry).  Then came my brother Matt in 1970, followed by my sister Sarah in 1975. 

Mom’s Job.   I suppose I’m somewhat old-fashioned.   Generally the Dad’s job is to make money and keep discipline so the kids don’t graduate to prison (boys) or brothels (girls).  The Mom’s job is to complement the father’s discipline with love and compassion so the kids aren’t growing up in a boot camp.  But my dad was also very warm and funny, so in a sense he took over both jobs.  He also cooked, so this marginalized my mom even further.  To make matters worse, he didn’t teach us how to do the things he did, but accepted the duty to do them for us during his lifetime.  If he taught, it was by indirect example rather than direct, explicit instruction, teaching character rather than skills.   I’m nowhere near as handy around the house as my father was, but I did learn how to work on cars, which I understood and did far better than he did.  Our role as offspring is not to directly copy and emulate our parents – except royal heirs continuing a dynasty – rather to make optimal use of our parents’ material and non-material resources to build our own independent, and hopefully successful, lives.   On one hand, my sister is also a nurse; on the other,  I am an attorney, and my brother is a computer programmer.  So two out of three of us are pursuing careers different than our parents.   While my sister isn’t looking after #45 (maybe a good thing) as an ER nurse she is helping far more people directly than she would if she were in the White House. 

Having said that, Mom did her job 100% and still does so today, which is to remain caring and compassionate and offer financial assistance as necessary, by way of redirecting her own Navy pension and my father’s Dept. of Commerce pension to us where the situation warrants or permits.    I would prefer if my legal practice were more lucrative, but I haven’t given up on that, even now. 

Thanks, Mom!