iJamming.net

Driving down to New York City in the evening: a different experience than taking the bus in to Port Authority during the day
But the familiar New York lifestyle: one friend invites me to help him celebrate France’s unexpected win over Spain, another calls to flake out of joining me at The Streets show
I join the one friend to help him celebrate, talk the other into catching a second wind
End up bringing both to Webster Hall, where I’ve still got an ‘in’ thirteen years after giving up club promoting

It’s a while since I’ve just hung out in downtown New York of an early evening
Not just months, but years
Because when you live in New York, you’re always too busy to just kick back and be a tourist
But now I no longer live in New York City, so tonight I play tourist
At Toastie’s,
A deli on Union Square West, with tables out front.
That charges twice as much for a beer as any other deli, but that’s still only half as much as the poncy Coffee Shop bar next door
The view, of course, is the same
That of the streets
Which on a hot, humid, summer New York night
Are filled with beautiful people
Especially the women
Who move en masse into model mode when summer kicks in
But the women probably think the same about the men
Many of whom are wearing national colors in honor of a certain football tournament
New York is one of the greatest cities in which to follow the World Cup
A haven for immigrants from every nation
A place where people can wave their flags with pride
While still declaring themselves committed New Yorkers
There’s a bar for every game
And everyone can claim their roots – even the natural-born Americans
Though it’s amazing how many citizens suddenly declare themselves Brazilian
Then again New Yorkers (moving en masse into model mode for summer), instinctively know how to sport a fashion trend

Union Square itself is jammed, with hundreds of people doing nothing more than hanging out
When I first lived round these parts, all the parks were filled with junkies
Now they’re crammed with tourists
New York feels so damn safe that I leave my overnight bags and my laptop in my parked car
Do you remember the days when every resident had to put a sign in his car window that read:
“Nothing worth taking: everything stolen”
And would routinely suffer a broken window just for a junkie’s just-in-case?
I do, and though I miss that old sense of danger in the air
Now I’m older and wiser, and drive a car and own a laptop, I’m glad they’re behind us

I leave the Streets of New York behind to watch The Streets in New York
A long sold-out ticket at Webster Hall
No surprise at that: Mike Skinner’s cockney rhymes translate perfectly to Manhattan cool
And The Streets’ indie rock appeal ensures that Skinner is not consigned to Limey rapper status
I’d like to have seen fellow countrywoman Lady Sovereign open
Her ‘Ch-Ching’ single is a masterpiece: ongoing confirmation that the most innovative sounds always seems to come out of hip-hop
(Or that British mish-mash of hip-hop, garage and house, of which The Streets and Lady Sovereign represent)
But anyway, I didn’t drive down to town in time
And besides, one lady and her DJ
Doesn’t do it for me
Whereas The Streets, I recall from experience
Is a proper band (if your editor is American)/
Are a proper band (if your editor is British)
With a proper live show

The five-piece Streets with Leo on bass, Webster Hall, June 27

Which is just as well
Because the new album is a major step back
The Hardest Way To Earn An Easy Living
Is a typically clever title
An apt summary of the 24/7 focus needed to be a successful musicain
But as an artistic statement of such
Mike Skinner takes the easy way out
Offering a compilation of lyrical clichés that, worse of all, admit to being clichés but can’t be arsed to search for alternatives
Along with half-baked vocals that laugh at their own lack of melody
Hoping that this will excuse themselves for reviving rock’s most self-indulgent theme:
The pain of the pop star
And even a song that takes task with my favorite subject, our ‘Two Nations’ (divided by a common language)
Makes its initial point with the boring old “fags” joke
As if we’ve never heard that one before
While the beats and textures don’t move things forward from Original Pirate Material
Which is now all of four years old
And this is all the more disappointing given that 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free
Not only avoided the usual Sophomore Slump
(What do you call a sophomore slump in a country that doesn’t have sophomores?)
But told a streetwise story that played like a movie
Yet also stood alone as three-minute vignettes
Whereas The Hardest Way To Earn An Easy Living
Sounds like merely the germination of a good album that was rushed to release
Before it could be properly thought through
Though, then again, in Mike Skinners’ verbal hall of mirrors, he could maybe justify all this as speaking truth to justice
Or something like that

For let’s be honest, Skinner raps of doing crack
And of the fine art of ‘Hotel Expressionism’
And of drinking ‘Too Much Brandy,’
And past songs have been filled with tales of E
But the highlight of his current American tour has been acceptance into this November’s New York Marathon
(Did you know Mike Skinner lived in Manhattan for most of last year? Nor did I
Though I know that almost every British musician lives in New York City for at least one year of their life, so I am not surprised)
And Skinner is setting a new standard for tour non-debauchery
By running in almost every city
Depite the heat and humidity
Three hours in Little Rock, boasts his tour diary
(and even I’m impressed by that)
So when you see this skinny geezer on stage, his figure is no longer the result of the raver’s lifestyle
But that of the runner’s
And if this makes some of the show somewhat deceptive
It’s also evidence that The Hardest Way To Earn An Easy Living represents, for all its faults, the mark of a man growing up

Mike and Leo take the Limelight at Webster Hall

But tonight the show is about getting down
Getting down low
Skinner asks the crowd to trust him
To place faith in the wide boy come pop star
(As if you’d trust him in a bar
While he was trying to con you )
And the crowd does trust him
Because that’s why they pay their money: to trust an entertainer
So when, late in the set, he tells them to go down low
They do
Until the whole hall is in Animal House toga party floor-crawling mode
And when the drummer jumps up off his stool
The crowd jumps back on its feet
And pumps the air like it just don’t care
Mike and his verbal sparring partner Leo have clearly got the power
It’s impressive
And infectious
And so impossible not to enjoy
That they pull the move off twice more before show’s end
And somehow I can’t get a picture of it on either occasion
Because I’m too busy wondering if I’m the only person left standing

The show is not as raw as back at Mercury Lounge in 2002,
When Skinner and his band were hung over and in trouble for breaking equipment the previous night
And drinking heavily on stage and starting the whole process over again
It was clear we were dealing with something special back then
Something unpredictable
Whereas now…
Well. We still are dealing with something special
But the show is tight, the jokes rehearsed
And though the quick snippets of covers are cool – ‘I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor,’ ‘Don’t You Wish Your Boyfriend Was Hot Like Me,’ ‘Music Sounds Better With You,’ all of them directed at one girl near the front row – they’re clearly rehearsed and obviously used every night
It works. But it’s not spontaneous.

Plus, the sound is muddy and you can’t hear the words
Which is a shame given that The Streets’ music is almost all about the words
It’s not just the PA:
Mike is merely mumbling while his stage-front partner Leo is letting his lungs rip with twice the clarity and velocity
Proving that the tunelessness on record is harder to achieve than they make out
Just as I noted with former sparring partner Kevin Trail at the Mercury Lounge
Yet for all this, and even though I preferred the old mod bass player
And it looked more like a band on a smaller stage
Where as now it looks more like a couple of rappers with backing hands
It’s still a great show

Mike Skinner back at The Mercury Lounge in 2002: “Totally drunk”

Several geezers in front of me get through several pints each
And one of them sends a text on his cell
That says “I’m at Webster Hall, watching The Streets, getting fully baked”
And I figure that Mike Skinner would appreciate that
Given that his songs are often about getting baked – or pranged – and sending text messages in the process
And my mate is still somewhere up in the VIP lounge, celebrating France’s victory,
He accuses The Streets of not being proper Brits for touring during the World Cup
Though Skinner did open his set by asking the crowd, “Did you watch the football?”
And his web site tour diary is full of comments about watching the games in strange time zones
Besides, it makes sense to tour the States during the World Cup
(You’d hardly tour Europe)
Which is why so many British bands are doing just that right now
And we should sympathize: It’s hard to make an easy living, after all

The set list is perfectly paced: opening with ‘Prangin Out,’ following up with ‘Don’t Mug Yourself,’ hitting hard in the middle with ‘When You Wasn’t Famous,’ ‘Never Went To Church,’ ‘War Of The Sexes’ and ‘Two Nations’ from the new album, and closing strong with ‘Has It Come To This,’ ‘Weak Become Heroes,’ and the last album’s “sad song” anthem ‘Dry Your Eyes,’ which has a few in the crowd lifting their lighters.

The encore is then exactly what you’d expect: the Blur-like American hit crossover ‘Fit But You Know It,’ for which Mike and Leo strip off their shirts (two of the group follow suit), and Skinner chants “I Love Rock’n’Roll” before crowd-surfing his way to the night’s conclusion.
In doing so he proves that trust is a two-way street….

…And that while you can indeed con an honest john by issuing a dud third album, a great live show will earn you respect, forgiveness, a loyal following – and the ongoing right to run your life as hard as you want, just as you know fit.

No reason, no rhyme, no real beginning or end. Random connected dots.

1) Steve Brookes’ bookKeeping the Flame, about growing up with his schoolmate Paul Weller, about forming The Jam with Paul Weller, and about dropping out before The Jam became the power trio we all loved them for. Brookes seems to have been as much in awe of Paul when he was a kid as the rest of us were when… when we were kids. The book is neither as badly written as you’d fear nor as well written as you’d hope; what I’ve digested is purely anecdotal with the occasional touch of florid prose. But what comes across most clearly from the early pages is Paul’s total dedication to a musical career from a pre-teen age: the endless rehearsals, the constant performances… and the ceaseless chainsmoking.

2) Dennis Munday is writing a book about The Jam. How many books on The Jam is too many?

3) John Peel’s autobiography Margrave of The Marshes: the second half, as written posthumously by his wife, Sheila. She talks about the Peel sessions, how the confines of recording four songs in eight hours in the BBC studios brought the best out of most bands.

4) The iPod: set, as usual, on shuffle. The Jam’s ‘Saturday’s Kids’ comes on, and I’m immediately struck by the power of this version and the clarity of Weller’s vocals. I know I only have the one Jam studio album on the iPod (This Is The Modern World) and so, equally, I know this rendition must be from the Jam at The BBC CD(s), and that this must be the Peel session recorded round the time of ‘Setting Sons.’ I’m so impressed by the power and clarity of this one performance that I listen through the rest of the session, featuring ‘Thick As Thieves,’ ‘Eton Rifles’ and ‘When You’re Young,’ two of which are among my most treasured songs of all. This was the Jam at their power trio peak.

5) The Jam at The BBC CD, which I now listen to in entirety. Regardless of tracking, regardless of mix, regardless of instrumentation (which, on brass-accompanied tracks from the later years, is bloody awful at times), Paul and Bruce’s voices are routinely, resolutely, spot on solid. In early years The Jam took some stick for being so gruff, but however rough Weller’s voice, they always sang in tune.

6) Paul Weller: Live at Braehead. My friend Uncle Rock lends me the DVD. Doesn’t know my connection to the Jam. Just thinks I should see it. His voice is amazing, he says, the kind of voice you can only get from 30 years of tea and fags.

7) Paul Weller: Catch-Flame!. How many live Paul Weller albums and videos is too many?

8) All Mod Cons: The Deluxe Edition. How many Jam reissues are too many?

9) The answer? As long as we show interest…

That percussive sound you can hear all over the Catskills right now – like a rapidly brushed snare drum accompanied by a lightly flexed ride cymbal as played by an orchestra of thousands – is not the tent caterpillars going about their business. Not any more. (They’re all drying up, dying up or busy turning into moths.) It’s the sound of several days’ rain-water pouring off the mountains, filling up the creeks, and furiously following gravity’s pull. The question round these parts is simple, and it is this: will the rain waters reach the Hudson River in time, or will the banks burst like they did last spring, when hundreds of local homes were flooded and dozens completely destroyed?

Driving home last night, I saw work crews checking the water depth at the bridge in Phoenicia, clearly trying to measure the scale of any impending calamity; I saw several side roads blocked off, and as I headed up Rte 214, occasionally stopping to take pictures of nature’s torrents (though I’d have been better off sampling the sound), I saw entire creek-side plains completely flooded. It’s astounding what just a few days rain can do to a mountain-base community.

Being that it was our wedding anniversary, I was also served a reminder just how mercurial nature can be: on June 26, 1993, the sun was shining, temperatures were pushing into the 90s, the air conditioning could not keep up with demand, and the many older people who attended were in extreme discomfort. Those who got married this past mid-summer weekend will have memories instead of umbrellas and galoshes and official photographs reluctantly taken indoors.

But in the midst of such inconsiderate storms, we should be grateful for small mercies: Bunny Wailer and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry may find it impossible to bury the hatchet (except in each other’s heads), but in provoking the cancellation of Sunday’s Reggae CariFest at Hunter Mountain, they did their fans a small service. After all, the performance of such sunny music on the steep slopes of a ski mountain in the midst of several days’ unrelenting rain would have guaranteed not ‘one love,’ but communal misery all round. Sometimes things happen for a reason.

My good friend McCutcheon has always had his priorities right, as the title of his short stories collection, Sex Drugs And Rock’n'roll Never Goes Out of Style, surely confirms. These last few weeks, McCutcheon’s web site has been rightly devoted to daily reports of the World Cup. Except that, unlike most of us who’ve chosen to view a match here and there, McCutcheon has worked overtime with the Tivo, and appears to have watched – and reviewed – every single World Cup game. That is, every single World Cup game. I have a headache just thinking about it.

Fortunately, McCutcheon has kept his priorities true to character while watching the TV coverage, as per this review of the England-Ecuador game. I had been thinking much the same thing myself:

What I want to know is who was that blonde sitting with Posh. Wowza! Posh better watch out who she hangs with because this lady could steal her thunder, or man. I better step in. I will take this lovely lady out. And when we have kids we will not be naming him Brooklyn. Hell no, if it’s a boy The Bronx, Queens if it is a girl or a gay boy and Staten & Island if we have twins.

What, no Man Hattan McCutcheon?

Between the Playstation FIFA 2006 game and the World Cup, Campbell has discovered a love of the Beautiful Game. He’s even asked for us to get a net up in the garden. Here he is attempting to teach Noel the finer points of the dribble.

Today’s my wedding anniversary: I’ve been married thirteen years. If you’d posited that prediction to a 25-year old Tony back in February 1990, when he met his future wife Posie, he’d probably have keeled over in shock. I’m not the kind of person who imagined himself taking the two-kids-and-a-cat and a house-in-the-country route in life, but that’s the beauty of this journey we take: all the unexpected turns, bumps in the road, mountains and valleys – and the occasional bouts of high-speed highway cruising with the top down that makes it all worthwhile.

I’ve often said I married Posie because she was the only woman I could find who would put up with me, but obviously that’s doing her a disservice. (Though it’s still a part of the story!) I’m amazingly fortunate to have found someone so special to journey through life with: to have kids with, to go to gigs with, to DJ with, to run with, swim with and yeah, all the rest with. In the words of Richard Ashcroft and a song that had not been written at the time of our wedding, I’m a lucky man, with fire in my hands, gotta love that will never die.

Here’s a photo of the happy couple on the big day: back when they both had more hair!

And here’s the end result of that love: Noel and Campbell entertaining each other at a local Italian restaurant last night while we were trying to have a peaceful, celebratory dinner.