At the end of the book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, he makes a point about how radically our society has changed since the start of the 20th century. He does this by mentioning that at that time or a little before, 100% of the music people heard was live. Today it's less than one percent.
Which brings me to this post's point: More amazing live music within walking distance to my home (and some pretty good stuff right from the couch). As a previous post reported, Steve Earle did a great show at the Historic State Theater and at the time I figured it would be quite awhile before I experienced anything so fine. But there we were again, almost in the same seats just a month later, for a night with Billy Bragg, and we left with the same sense of awe and good fortune. You could say they are birds of a feather.
Bragg was inspiring, whimsical, topical, very British, and challenging. Politics have played a central role in his music over the years, and they were front and center at this show being just before the presidential election. And his music was mighty fine. Thanks to Dan Smalls for putting this show on. Here is a link to read what he thought of it and see Billy's performance of Woody Guthrie's "I ain't got no home in this world, anymore."
This past weekend our cake got some more icing when Ruttabaga Boogie brought Eilen Jewel to town with her band. Eilen writes some smooth songs, has a great selection of covers, plays a nice guitar and has a voice that goes so well with the styles of songs she does; but her band kills. Dropping jaws wherever he goes is Jerry Miller, whose been around awhile, and I'm glad he still is.
As for me, I'm going to grab the banjo now and keep my live to recorded music ratio up around 1:1. That's fifty percent for you struggling in Algebra this year.
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