Cat Power Sings Dylan

In 1966 when he performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Bob Dylan was the greatest songwriter of his (and my) generation. He was not, however, the greatest singer. Or even a very good singer. Nor did he seem to want to be. (He singing had much improved by the time he released Blood on the Tracks in 1974, if not before.) Cat Power (Chan Marshall) is a very good singer–a strong, throaty voice, jazz inflected with a rock base. So when Cat Power recreates Dylan’s ’66 concert, song by song, as she did at the Lobero on March 6, it is a marriage for rock history heaven.
The first half of Dylan’s set was performed acoustically and Cat followed suit, accompanied by a single guitar player and occasional harmonica. It opened with “She Belongs to Me” (‘She’s got everything she needs/ She’s an artist, she don’t look back…Bow down to her on Sunday/Salute her when her birthday comes’). By the time CP started meandering through “Visions of Johanna” my eyes were closed and I dreamed along. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” “Just Like A Woman” (‘But when we meet again, introduced as friends/Please don’t let on that you knew me when’) and finally the familiar refrain of Hey, “Mr. Tambourine Man.”  The second half, Dylan went electric, and Cat Power brought out drums, keyboard and electric guitars for the rest of the night. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (‘I started out on Burgundy/But soon hit the harder stuff’) and “Ballad of a Thin Man” (‘And something is happening here/But ya’ don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?’) were powerful, but nothing compared to the evening’s finale: “Like A Rolling Stone” brought the dedicated crowd to its feet, dancing and singing along. The best song of the ’60s is just as good today.

Turn-Off Songs

Most of my lists are songs I like. There are also songs I don’t like. And then there are songs–not necessarily bad songs–that grate like chalk on my personal blackboard (remember that cliche?) and lead me to change the station. In no particular order, this list includes…

Good Vibrations, Beach Boys. Yes, it’s a classic; yes it supposedly inspired the Beatles; yes it’s wildly overrated. The Beach Boys are the best when having “fun, fun, fun.” When Brian Wilson goes  operatic, with no danceable beat, no hummable melody, pretentiously silly lyrics (“she’s giving me excitations”) and runs on a minute longer than usual, I don’t get it.

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Eurhythmics. Sickly sweet cotton candy for the ear, this is rock’n’roll goo. Here Comes the Rain Again is basically the same song, with the same effect. Ick.

Ain’t No Sunshine, Bill Withers. Just the sound of Withers’s dreary voice sends me to the radio dial. This number is undoubtedly the one that bothers me the most, although I’m no friend of Lean On Me, either.

My Sharona, The Knack. Aural assault, with no redeeming qualities. How this reached #1 and was named top single of the year is beyond me, marking a fallow period (1979) for rock.

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Rolling Stones. Only slightly more melodic than My Sharona, with equally irrelevant lyrics, this shared the curse of being horribly overplayed; any initial joy was bludgeoned away the thousandth’s time you heard it, with a thousand more to come.

Hound Dog, Elvis Presley. What Sharona was in the ’70s and Satisfaction was in the ’60s, Hound Dog was in the ’50s. Recorded as a B-side joke, it became the King’s biggest-selling single. It has none of the authenticity of early Elvis, deserved Steve Allen’s famous mockery and does not improve upon multiple hearings.

Why Don’t We Get Drunk And Screw, Jimmy Buffett. Recorded as satire, but now played constantly on Radio Margaritaville, it’s no longer cute or funny. By using the Hawaiian Hula Girls to sing background, Jimmy tries to imply that it’s not offensive to women or children in the audience, without success. (Although trying to limit the list to one song per artist, I must add a special shout-out to the live performance of Changes in Latitudes that RM insists on playing. Buffett ruins the perfectly good song by shouting, off-key, the last word or each line, making the song literally unlistenable.)

Hey Jude, The Beatles. This song goes on and on…and on, for more than seven minutes. And unlike, say, Stairway to Heaven (eight minutes), it goes nowhere.

So Into You, Atlanta Rhythm Section. Threatens to put me to sleep before I can get to the channel. A minor drone.

To be continued…

She & Him; Brett Dennen

Took flyers on back-to-back live shows by singers I’d heard, but not seen: She & Him at the Arlington, Brett Dennen at the Lobero. “She” is Zooey Deschanel, and from  “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”  her voice was shrill and over-mic’ed, unpleasant to listen to from the seventh row. As there was nothing going on besides her voice, it became a long night very early. M. Ward, the “Him” of the team, played a jazzy guitar accompaniment but remained in the shadow. Not as much as the background singers and musicians, who were 20 feet behind Zooey and poorly. She ran though a collection of Christmas standards listlessly, perhaps recognizing that Christmas was still a long 23 days away. After a short on-stage interlude that passed for conversation, She & Him shifted to their “catalogue,” which was bouncier and seemingly of greater interest to the performers. The voice was still hard to take, which was a problem, as Zooey’s voice, and persona as a chanteuse, is all that was on sale. Perhaps to avoid unfavorable comparison, the opening act, comedian Pete Lee, didn’t sing at all.

The opening act at the Lobero managed to top Zooey for loud and shrill, and since she didn’t believe in melody either we waited out her set on the plaza. Brett Dennen, finally, came on with some personality, and the vocal Lobero audience kept a fun conversation going. He played by himself, which muted some of his songs, but his lyrics were clear, his tunes catchy and his rhythms engagingly syncopated. I like the three or four songs they play on the radio, and they sounded good live. Everything he sang was at least “good,” although there was little that made me want to go home and start streaming. Mostly, I enjoyed his engaged storytelling; and the fact that he lives in Ventura and had a lot of friends in the crowd made it a pleasantly relaxed evening.

The Wallflowers

Jakob Dylan was frustrated that the Lobero crowd was responding appreciatively but politely to his group, the Wallflowers. “We’re a rock’n’roll band!,” he pleaded. Finally, before launching into “One Headlight,” his biggest, if not only, hit, he pointedly commented, “It must be awfully tiring just sitting in those seats,” and on cue the crowd rose as one and started gyrating along with the music, and we stayed on our feet for one more song and two encores. Was it masks that kept the excitement level down, the mature age of the audience, the stately character of the theater, or the good-but-not-great quality of the music? When the Wallflowers’ appearance in Santa Barbara was first advertised, I bought a ticket and started listening to their new album, ” Exit Wounds,” which I thought surprisingly good. “Surprising,” because it had been 25 years since their breakthrough album, “Bringing Down the Horse,” and I hadn’t heard or thought much about them since then. One-third of their concert featured songs from “Exit Wounds,” including my favorites, of the album and of the night: “Roots and Wings,” “The Dive Bar in My Heart,” “I’ll Let You Down (But Will Not Give You Up),” “I Hear the Ocean (When I Wanna Hear Trains),” although the harmony of Shelby Lynne that lights up the record was missing from the performance. It was good rock’n’roll, but it didn’t bring back enough memories or cause enough chills. And Dylan himself seemed stuck in an off-base persona–not really Bob, but not really something different. I guess in the end, the audience was a reflection of his enthusiasm.
The opening act was a band called Ragged Glory, which, I learned from the program, reconvenes once a year to recreate Neil Young’s songs from 1969-79–”Hello Cowgirl in the Sand,” etc. I loved their songs, although they never matched the originals; but what I loved most was the fact that here in 2021, musicians were paying homage to music, my music, from a half-century ago. Two days later I was back at the Lobero for music from 55 years ago, and it was quite a contrast. Jan and Dean’s Beach Party featured 81-year-old Dean Torrence (Jan having died) and four replacement/studio musicians who, we were told, regularly play with the Beach Boys’ various touring groups. This was strictly an “oldies” show, with canned patter, rote performances and more repetition than conviction. The songs–more Beach Boys than Jan and Dean, as was appropriate, with a couple of strays–were of course memorable; but the quality of play and lack of inspiration or imagination left a lot to be desired. They made me appreciate Ragged Glory, who tried to make it their own, not just copy what someone else had done.

’60s Top Tens

For my college 50th reunion, a four-person panel reviewed songs that had charted during our four years, September ’64 through May ’68, and came up with a list of 30 nominees to be voted on for a Class Top Ten. The songs selected had to 1)be personal favorites of at least two of us; 2)have been a popular hit – preferably charting at #5 or above, even better at #1; and 3)contribute to genre diversity – including no two songs by the same performer. What follows here are four lists: the list of 30, a consensus of our panel; the Class Top Ten, as voted by 100 or so classmates at the reunion; my personal top ten, from the list of 30; and a personal list of fifteen favorite songs that made our initial roster of 130 songs but not the final 30.

Top 30, 64-68, in chronological order:

  • Zombies, She’s Not There
  • Martha & Vandellas, Dancing in the Street
  • Roy Orbison, Oh Pretty Woman
  • Righteous Brothers, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’
  • Petula Clark, Downtown
  • Temptations, My Girl
  • Supremes, Stop! In the Name of Love
  • Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone
  • Wilson Pickett, Midnight Hour
    Rolling Stones, Satisfaction
    Lovin’ Spoonful, Do You Believe in Magic
  • Animals, We Gotta Get Out of This Place
  • Simon & Garfunkel, Sound of Silence 
    Rascals, Good Lovin’
    Percy Sledge, When A Man Loves A Woman 
  • Beach Boys, Wouldn’t It Be Nice
    Left Banke, Walk Away Renee
    Spencer Davis Group, Gimme Some Lovin’
  • Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth
  • Aretha Franklin, Respect
  • Doors, Light My Fire
    Beatles, A Day in the Life
  • Procol Harum, Whiter Shade of Pale
    Van Morrison, Brown-eyed Girl
  • Sam & Dave, Soul Man
    Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze
  • Stone Poneys, Different Drum
    Monkees, Daydream Believer
    Otis Redding, Dock of the Bay
  • Sly & Family Stone, Dance to the Music

Class of ’68 Top Ten

  1. Aretha Franklin, Respect
  2. Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone
  3. Rolling Stones, Satisfaction
  4. Otis Redding, Dock of the Bay
  5. Simon & Garfunkel, Sound of Silence
  6. Temptations, My Girl
  7. Doors, Light My Fire
  8. Righteous Brothers, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’
  9. Percy Sledge, When A Man Loves A Woman
  10. Wilson Pickett, Midnight Hour

Bob’s Top Ten

  1. Temptations, My Girl
  2. Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone
  3. Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth
  4. Procol Harum, Whiter Shade of Pale
  5. Supremes, Stop! In the Name of Love
  6. Left Banke, Walk Away Renee
  7. Lovin’ Spoonful, Do You Believe in Magic
  8. Righteous Brothers, You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’
  9. Petula Clark, Downtown
  10. Otis Redding, Dock of the Bay

Personal Favorites beyond the Top 30

  • Beau Brummels, Just A Little
  • We Five, You Were On My Mind
  • Turtles, You Baby
  • B.J. Thomas, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
  • Tremeloes, Silence Is Golden
  • BeeGees, I Can’t See Nobody
  • Jimmy Ruffin, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted
  • Casinos, Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye
  • Buckinghams, Kind of a Drag
  • Miracles, Tracks of My Tears
  • Swinging Medallions, Double Shot
  • Shades of Blue, Oh How Happy
  • Bob Lind, Elusive Butterfly
  • Herman’s Hermits, There’s A Kind of Hush
  • Outsiders, Time Won’t Let Me

 

Eight ’60s Songs

For one evening’s entertainment at my Harvard 50th Reunion, four of us presented 30 songs to be voted on by our classmates in order to arrive at a Class of ’68 Top Ten (see “’60s Top Tens,” above). Each of us took seven or eight songs to champion. Here are the ones I put into nomination:

Like A Rolling Stone  I’m humbled to be able to talk about the #1 all-time greatest song in rock history, according to Rolling Stone Magazine. (Maybe the name had something to do with it?) Bob Dylan is without question the greatest songwriter of the pre-Bruce Springsteen era, and Like A Rolling Stone is his unquestioned masterpiece. It marks the transition of Dylan from folk singer – at which he was pretty good – to rock star. Just as significant it broke the three-minute barrier for songs on the radio. I remember being in Elsie’s, picking up roast beef sandwiches for the Crimson editors, when this song came on the air. I couldn’t leave, for six minutes. This paved the path for long songs to come, from Light My Fire to MacArthur Park to Stairway to Heaven.

The lyrics also broke ground: far from the usual love song, it’s a vicious revenge song, telling the saga of a princess on a steeple who falls and is on her own, with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.  Books have been written about just this song, and tomorrow you can get a taste of a Harvard course on Bob Dylan. He turned rock’n’roll into an intellectual art form, and here’s where he did it.

My Girl  Whereas it took Beethoven four notes to write the most famous introduction in classical music – ba-ba-ba, bum – it took the Temptations only three notes to produce the sweetest, most tantalizing, most recognizable introduction in rock: ba, bum-bum. Then the song absolutely soars with a perfect opening line: “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day. When it’s cold outside I’ve got the month of May.” How can you not be happy when you hear this song? The great Smokey Robinson wrote lyrics of unalloyed happiness: “I’ve got all the riches one man can claim.” The Temptations were smoothness personified in their dance steps while they sang – or lip-synched – and the horns played a trumpet fanfare that makes the nerves tingle. My Girl was a #1 hit in the spring of our freshman year, and it captures the innocence of that time.

Do You Believe In Magic  This is simply the happiest, most hopeful song of our era. It hooks you from the opening note and races along without a letup. Perhaps best of all, it’s a paean to rock’n’roll. For some reason, every song that has the words “rock’n’roll” in its lyrics is a good one – the same is true for “rain” and “bells.” Not so much the word “groovy” – that dates this song; but the rest is magical: “the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me, yeah.” John Sebastian and the Spoonful grew out of the Greenwich Village folk scene and went on to have the record for most consecutive top ten hits in the ‘60s, but nothing would top this song that virtually exploded off the radio into your mind, in a feelgood way.

The Sound of Silence  Named the “quintessential folk-rock” song, Sound of Silence has a special connection to the coffee-house scene we discovered when we arrived at Harvard. Released as an acoustic number in 1964 it bombed. Then a late-night DJ at WBZ started playing it and listeners at Harvard and Tufts started calling for it. Sensing its potential, the record producer that helped Dylan go electric added electric guitars and drums – without Simon & Garfunkel’s knowledge – and the new version went to #1 in Boston before sweeping the country. It also helped establish Paul Simon as the second great Rock Poet, after Dylan. “People talking without speaking; People hearing without listening” – hello, t.s.eliot.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice  Everyone loves the Beach Boys, the soundtrack of growing up in the ‘60s. They glamorized surfing, cars, love and California. Wouldn’t It Be Nice, though, was something different from their macho teenage posturing; it was both more mature and more innocent. The trademark harmonies were there, but the composition and instrumentation were more sophisticated, more orchestral, more haunting. The lyrics perfectly captured the fantasies of my parietals-bound sophomore mind: “You know it’s gonna make it that much better/ When we can say goodnight and stay together.”  A year later, when the Rolling Stones sang “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” it sounded more like sexual assault. The Beach Boys instead offered a magical dream of mutual consent: “We could be married/ And then we’d be happy/ Wouldn’t it be nice?”

Walk Away Renee  Teenage heartbreak. What an empty feeling, a pit in the stomach, when you break up with a girlfriend – or worse, when she leaves you. And what comfort a good rock song, plaintive in a minor key, can provide, solace for the afflicted, balm for the broken heart. Walk Away Renee captured this feeling. The strings, the haunting flute, the images: “your name and mine, inside a heart upon a wall.” In My Fair Lady Freddie sings in rapture about The Street Where You Live. Here, the Left Banke sings, “The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same.” I cry inside when I hear this song. It captured my feelings perfectly – except I never dated a girl named Renee.

Whiter Shade of Pale  From those opening chords, we’re back in the Summer of Love, 1967, when we were self-important about-to-be seniors. The group’s name sounded Latin, the melody was lifted from Bach, the Miller’s Tale came from Chaucer, and the sonorous organ was more serious than guitar and sax. Here was the start of Progressive Rock – bands like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues that would soon play with symphony orchestras.  The lyrics were sheer poetry: meaningless but endlessly evocative. It was said you had to be stoned for them to make sense. But what images: “the ceiling flew away,” “sixteen vestal virgins,” and best of all: “her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.” Huh?

This April the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame inducted the first five singles from performers not in the Hall into its pantheon. There was Louie, Louie; Born to Be Wild; and Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale.

Daydream Believer

By the spring of ’68 the era of top-40 rock as we knew it was coming to an end. There was psychedelia, ProgRock, the advent of FM radio, revolution and Vietnam – teenage love songs just didn’t cut it. The Monkees’ final #1 hit, Daydream Believer, is a melancholy epitaph, a postgraduate look at life. Instead of excitement at getting the girl into bed, the singer is now being woken up by the 6 a.m. alarm and having to shave. The romance is still there – “you once thought of me as a white knight on a steed” – but now it’s relegated to a daydream belief.

Recruited to play a band like the Beatles on a TV show, the four Monkees turned out to have musical chops of their own, and they graced us with an upbeat catalog of pleasant hits our last two years at Harvard.

Hall of Fame?

Although not averse to visiting should I get to Cleveland, I have never considered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be a meaningful institution. The only “hall of fame” that means much to me is Major League Baseball’s, the oldest and by far the hardest to get into. Although imprecise, there are also established criteria by which candidates are judged: the number of wins for a pitcher, home runs or batting average for a hitter, etc. How do you rate musical performers? Popularity? Originality? Influence? Musical ability? Longevity? Equally mysterious, at least to the layman, is the identity, or qualifications, of the 600 “rock experts” who decide who is inducted. Almost every year someone is inducted who befuddles me, and this year, no exception, it is Joan Baez. She’s a wonderful singer, an admirable political activist and, see my review, a delightful performer. But did she have, as the judges supposedly require, “influence and significance to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll”? Come on!

To begin with, Joan Baez is not a rock’n’roller, which she admitted following yesterday’s announcement. She is a folk singer. Her principal pop music credits are cover versions of songs by Bob Dylan and The Band. So much for her “influence.” Is she the least qualified member of the RAFHOF? I think so, although a glance at the list of Hall members suggests some competition, mainly from Bobby Darin (1990), who, after the very minor pop classic “Splish Splash,” never sang another rock ‘n’ roll song in his life.

Very few performers can or ever will live up to the inaugural Hall class (1986) of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, James Brown and, although we’re already slipping a little, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis. The following year saw the entry of clearly second-tier, but still very influential, performers like Bo Diddley and Bill Haley; but the inclusion of Eddie Cochran established that a singer need not have more than one “hit” to reach the Hall. Sam and Dave had two hits, but they made the grade in 1992. Janis Joplin must have been chosen in ’95 for her persona, as her music, take away “A Little Piece of My Heart,” is hardly memorable and barely listenable (my conclusion after seeing the movie “Blue”). The Young Rascals (1997) were a fine pop group in the late ’60s, but their songs hardly stand out from the work of a dozen other bands. 1999 saw the induction of both Del Shannon and Bruce Springsteen. If I were Bruce I would’ve felt insulted. Bonnie Raitt (2000) is a hard-working industry favorite but not much of a rock ‘n’ roller or commercial success. Ditto for Laura Nyro (2012) and Bill Withers (2015). In fact, those are three singers who routinely prompt me to change the channel. Leonard Cohen (2008) fits in the Joan Baez wing of the Hall, although he at least wrote his own music, and a lot of it. When you examine the output, however, of Ritchie Valens (2001) – “La Bamba” and “Donna,” that’s it – you suspect the voters are weighing diversity as a criterion.

The Sex Pistols (2006) refused to attend their induction ceremony, calling the Hall a “piss stain,” which of course fits their character like Dylan’s snubbing the Nobel proceedings, but I won’t argue. How much the Hall of Fame has now become a commercial product, with a need to have acts justifying the HBO telecast, I don’t know. This year’s other winners – and I’m thinking of Yes, ELO, and Journey, not Pearl Jam – had a signature song and a couple good records each, but it’s hard to distinguish them from, or rate them above, the ones that didn’t make it: the Cars, Zombies, J. Geils Band and Steppenwolf. All of them are a far cry from past inductees who would constitute a meaningful Hall of Fame: the Rolling Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, John Mellencamp, the Four Seasons, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Eric Clapton. Then again, it’s possible that this year Tim Raines will get into the real Hall of Fame.

Joan Baez

What a privilege to spend 90 minutes listening to Joan Baez from the second row of the Arlington Theater (thank you, UCSB Arts & Lectures)! With appropriate song and still-beautiful voice and brief but intimate introductions, she took us back to 1959 coffee houses in Harvard Square and before, up through the draft-resistance and anti-war movement and into the present with her black T-shirt that read “Nasty Woman” on the front and “No DAPL” [Dakota Access Pipeline] on the back. The musical itinerary covered Paul Robeson and a Marian Anderson spiritual; Pete Seeger and a Woody Guthrie anthem relevant today (“Deportees”); her own Prison Trilogy and Diamonds and Rust, both also still relevant; nods to modern songwriters Tom Waits, Richard Thompson and, less successful, Josh Ritter; classics she has made her own, House of the Rising Sun and The Boxer; and never far away, Bob Dylan, here in It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, With God on Our Side and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. Just imagine all we have seen and all she has lived through, a person of principle never far from the action, injecting grace and art into sordidness, not least the campaign season we are suffering through.

In person she was charming, with her good looks aging but attractive, her trademark-sexy pixie haircut in place and, despite 75 years, the ability to stand and sing with nary a break and only an occasional sip of tea. Her retinue could not have been more down-home and honest: her “co-singer” was her personal assistant, short and heavy, underdressed; her roadie was a young woman in flats and a complementary white “Nasty Woman” T; her band, the “Bad Hombres,” consisted of her middle-aged son Gabe on percussion and a wizard instrumentalist who played banjo, mandolin, guitar, fiddle, accordion and piano with equal virtuosity. He also happened to be the stepson of Joan Hartman, who is running for 3rd District Supervisor in Santa Barbara County; his request for our votes made the political subtext of the concert that much more real.

Baez’s voice has inevitably lost range from the days of her early ballads, but she knows better than to push it. She left guitar theatrics to her sideman but handled her own accompaniment, starting with the opening Love Is a Four-Letter Word, with remarkable ease. She was always comfortable with what she was singing and she made us comfortable, and more.

Buffett at the Bowl

[fusion_text]It doesn’t seem fair or nice to describe a Jimmy Buffett concert as “ho-hum,” but that is the word that comes to mind as I look back on his appearance at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Thursday night (10/15/15). Jimmy is so ebullient and appears to be having such a good time, you can’t help but sing, and when appropriate dance, along. As a longtime Buffett fan and regular listener to Radio Margaritaville on Sirius-XM, though, I felt I had heard the concert many times before – as, indeed, I had. It was not just that the songs were familiar, it was the arrangements, too. Whereas Jackson Browne made his old songs sound new, Jimmy’s old songs sounded the same.

It’s not his fault: most concertgoers would feel cheated if they didn’t hear Come Monday and Margaritaville. There were also plenty of adherents of A Pirate Looks at Forty and One Particular Harbor, although I am sort of tired of the latter. Five of my top ten Buffett songs were omitted, although I’m not sure how much difference The Weather is Here and Boat Drinks would have made. I suppose each of us could prepare our ideal Jimmy Buffett set, but I suspect Jimmy knows how to please the most people most of the time. New songs aren’t the answer. Workin’ n Playin’, his latest, and Blue Guitar, from 2002, were the only two I didn’t know, and neither had the magic of Fins, Cheeseburger in Paradise or Last Mango in Paris.

I should add that the video accompanying the concert was far and away the best I’ve seen. Three huge screens showed closeups of the performers and the audience that let me put away my opera glasses. Best of all were the shots of lapping waves and boats cruising the harbor that provided the perfect island feel for Jimmy’s songs. We could almost taste the Caribbean trip we’re taking in January. There were also a few shots of Santa Barbara which, along with Jimmy’s local references between songs, made the evening more personal.

In short, I love Jimmy’s persona and I love his music; it’s just that I didn’t love any of it any more after the concert than I did before.

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