Fall arrived with a whomp today. It peed with rain almost all day, sometimes pissing like a racehorse and sometimes dribbling like an old man with prostate difficulties, not the best weather for an outdoor concert. But there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. Tell that to me when I'm camping.
I drove--PLT bikes to work every day, and where he lives is not without rain and fog, though he's spared snow--and scampered to Target at lunch where I acquired two of those lawn-seat things, in which the weight of your body on the ground cushion braces the back support. They were quite comfy on the grass, especially since the concert area at the Botanic Gardens slopes considerable-like. We filled our backpacks with fleece and Gore-Tex and cheese and wine (and juice and cookies, because I am 5) and walked the mile or so thither.
The David Grisman quintet! Their site is too annoying to navigate, but the music too good for that to matter. Enrique Corea played a meticulous but expressive guitar. When they played "Grateful Dawg," he didn't twinkle as Jerry Garcia did, but he sounded a lot cleaner than Jerry ever did, without ever sounding clinical. There was an upright bass, possibly my favorite instrument; and a flutist who played both a regular and a bass flute. A bass flute? I had never heard of such a thing. But it was beautiful. A fourth musician played everything, fiddle and mandolin and both expected and found percussion (by which I mean bongos and a cardboard coffee cup, including the little corrugated waistcoat hot cups wear). And David Grisman on mandolin.
I had previously known Grisman only for his work with Jerry Garcia, Not for Kids Only and Shady Grove and the pizza tapes, but I liked his Dawg music very much. Their songs had overlays of swing, bluegrass, salsa, and whatever else they cared to improvise. At recent local bluegrass festival, a 14-year-old boy won a mandolin pick-off and was given a valuable instrument as a prize. The quintet had him on stage for a jam during "Grateful Dawg" and he was as composed as could be and riffed with them all, and played lead to Grisman's rhythm.
The rain had ceased by late afternoon and didn't start again until most of the way through the show. David began by greeting the audience, "It sure is nice to be out among all you...plants tonight." This struck my funny bone and I cackled the lisalaugh. If it was this pleasant during drizzle, with the nearly full moon occasionally peeking from among clouds, it's got to be wonderful on the more usual beautiful evenings. We'll go back.
Also I might be at the end of an era. After we bought the Grisman tickets, the Cowboy Junkies announced a date at the Fox Theater in Boulder last night. Their latest album, One Soul Now, despite the title's nod to The Grapes of Wrath, does not appeal to me. That's three ungood albums in a row, and this one, however ironically they mean its religious overtones, is too preachy in its lyrics, undistinguished in its sound, and as for Margo's voice...eh. Nor are we going to Keystone to see them tonight.
Once upon a time at the Bloom Boarding House, an earthquake shook up two people on a porchswing. Grandpa Bloom said, "Ethel[?], I think the country's shifting to the right again." The ground might rumble as I leap from the Junkies' bandwagon to Aimee Mann's. Aha, no: they're in armchairs and the line is, "Brace yourself, Bess." | Rumble | "The country's moving to the right again."
Tangentially, the beautiful thing about Jessie is that when I said, "Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but Lord, it wasn't good," she knew I was quoting Opus. I will blame today's explanation of my musical shift by way of Bloom County on her recently introducing us to Rosebud; however, I cannot blame on anyone but myself the urge to respond to the perennial question "Can I help?" with "Hose me down!" I'm lisa, and my cultural referents are 20 years old.
Another indication that fall is here: Blake was so dreadfully riled up by his seasonal hormones yesterday that the only punishment we could think of worse than our leaving him alone in the house was to bring him with us out into the dark 50-degree damp. He seems a little better today, but he's not just in a foul (fowl?) mood: today on the floor by his cage were two perfect feathers. Usually he loses tail feathers when he's very bad, since RDC's plucking a broken feather often humbles him, but otherwise he hangs on to his plumage. I have more of Percy's tail feathers, despite his living only 2.5 years and my gifting them away, than I have of Blake's at 9 years. And this is one of the two center, longest tail feathers. The second is a sexy crest feather, also the longest, but he has such a full crest that he doesn't look bald or badly barbered.