I've discussed my love for Sea Salt Eatery before, this is nothing new. But it can't be understated just how wonderful a summer evening in Minneapolis can be when you have fried squid, beer, music, friends and family, and a waterfall. This week Doug and I enjoyed some of the best calamari around, a Mexican seafood cocktail that was just okay, and a delicious crawfish po' boy with spicy mayo, along with a few cold ones, and then settled in the grass to listen to my coworker's band perform at the Minnehaha Falls pavilion. As the water audibly rushed over the rocky wall nearby, the Melvilles sang and kids licked ice cream cones and danced around soap bubbles floating listlessly about the crowd. It's no wonder Minnesotans go so crazy for summer – it's really short, but intensely beautiful.
The Jayhawks, one of my all-time favorite bands that just happens to hail from the Twin Cities, reunited this past weekend for three shows at First Avenue. I couldn't have been more excited to see them, until I heard that Romantica was opening for their Monday night show! Two of my favorites in one night, what could be better? I'll tell you what could be better, taking the next morning off from work to truly enjoy the fun!
To start off an evening of wonderful music, it never hurts to have wonderful food. We chose to eat tapas at Solera, only because I had a gift certificate. We both felt a little reluctant because while Solera is gorgeous, it hasn't really kept up with the times. The decor hasn't changed a bit in many years and, except for the perfect rooftop, people don't talk much about the place anymore. But they should. We chose to eat in the bar where we had four tapas and drinks and enjoyed them with the company of a good bartender who gave us a generous sample of some sherry and a fun size Kit Kat Bar. We ate my absolute favorite thing at Solera, the chorizo-stuffed dates with smoked bacon, and they were as good as ever. We also enjoyed some perfectly grilled asparagus with a thin slice of cured pork loin and a mahon cheese sauce. There was also a required pork belly small plate because pork belly is about as good as it gets, and finally a beautiful octopus ceviche dressed up in a terrine and sliced thinly to resemble stained glass. Everything went very well with my sangria, which is something I could drink every day all summer, but probably shouldn't. For dessert we shared the unbelievably delicate cinnamon-sugar churros (donut sticks) dipped in a thick hot chocolate called champurrado. Big fan here.
After dinner we headed over to First Avenue and met up with Sweet D and her friend Michelle and loved the snot out of Romantica and the Jayhawks. Romantica performed all of their usual songs that I adore, and then the Jayhawks took us back in time, singing tunes I hadn't heard in fifteen years but found I still knew all the words to. There were songs I missed that I wish they had sung, but overall I have no complaints because they performed great, unexpected covers as well as People in This Place on Every Side, the song that sucked me in to the Jayhawks in the first place so many years ago. After the show we had a final beer in the new bar owned by First Avenue just next door called the Depot Tavern, and we loved it. With a large, open garage door that provides airy patio drinking under cover, and a menu that includes Belgian fries that I'm dying to try, the place is the perfect little spot for pre- and post-show gatherings. It's the kind of place, and it was the kind of night, that really makes you appreciate all the beauty and fun that Minneapolis has to offer.
Another great show at the beautiful Varsity Theater in Dinkytown, Minnesota last week. Carrie Rodriguez, whom I've had the pleasure to see perform many times, delivered once again to a room full of fans and some amateur concert goers who did everything from talk through every song to rearrange furniture. Strange but true.
Carrie was touring to support her new record released last month, Love and Circumstance, and I'm already certain this is my favorite CD to date of hers. This is a compilation of somewhat obscure covers, from Townes Van Zandt to Ry Cooder, from Nick Lowe to Lucinda Williams. Carrie brings a new voice to Hank Williams' classic I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry and can nearly bring you to tears on her rendition of Merle Haggard's I Started Loving You Again. But she really shines when she sings a Spanish song once recorded by her great aunt called La Punalada Trapera, which loosely translates to "a terrible back stabbing." So it's not a happy song, but it is gorgeous, even if you don't understand the words. Take a chance on this record, you won't regret it.
Last night I had the great fortune to attend a show at the Cedar Cultural Center that was a part of the West Africa West Bank series there. Bassekou Kouyate and his ensemble, Ngoni Ba, performed a concert that blew me away. During my two wonderful, lengthy stays in West Africa I often heard it said that people visit East Africa for the animals and West Africa for the people and the music. I know firsthand this is true.
Bassekou Kouyate was born forty-three years ago in Mali, a landlocked country home to the fabled city of Timbuktu, and has developed over time an enormous following there and in many parts of the world because of his mastery of the ngoni, an ancient instrument that looks like a simple, carved guitar. The music Bassekou Kouyate makes with his ngoni is, however, anything but simple. His band, Ngoni Ba, consists of four ngonis, plus percussion, and his singer wife, Amy Sacko, a gorgeous Malian woman with a voice to match. She is known as the Tina Turner of Mali. Together they are able to bring the house down with their infectious energy and obvious love for the music they are bringing to the world.
Bassekou Kouyate has played with some of the most famous musicians on the planet, a tribute to the respect they have for his ability with the ngoni. Here's a video of Mr. Kouyate performing in 2005 with the late Ali Farka Toure, another amazing Malian musician who uses his guitar to bring the blues to a whole new level. Notice just how much music Bassekou Kouyate can make come out of that little boat-shaped instrument with simple strings. It's pretty magical.
I scored the coveted four day weekend and took full advantage of practically every minute, filling them with friends and food and drink and fun. Just the way it should be.
Friday night included an art opening, then a stunning nighttime view from the Guthrie's famed Endless Bridge, a place I consider to be one of the most beautiful places to visit in the city and do so often, and finally dinner for the first time at Sea Change, Tim McKee's sustainable seafood restaurant inside the Guthrie along the river. While I drank cocktails with odd combinations of ingredients like Sambuca and muddled basil that somehow worked perfectly together, the chef sent out a number of small plates of his choosing. Oysters with roasted jalapeno mignonette, impossibly thin cut albacore tuna with lardo, soffrito crudo and apple cider vinegar, langostines with hot olive oil, chili and rosemary, and my favorite, a sous vide and grilled octopus with a texture that evoked beef rather than the usual octopus mouth feel. It was spectacular. There were lots of other plates and cocktails, but the details are blurry after so much of everything. Suffice it to say it was all some kind of wonderful.
Wonderful seafood continued into Saturday night when I had my gals, The Hags, over for copious amounts of seafood and drinks and music while my friend Doug prepared course after course of glorious, mostly Japanese food for all of us. The menu included oysters on the half shell with a traditional shallot mignonette, soup with Dungeness crab and crab claws, soba noodles with dipping sauce, Kobe beef with smoked sea salt, eel rolls with jewel-like red fish roe, freshly made Korean kimchi, seared tuna with a citrus/pepper/sesame crust, and lots of sashimi - salmon, yellowtail, hamachi, and albacore. I didn't think I appreciated large oysters, but that has all changed and I could have them every day with a simple mignonette and never get sick of them. The same goes for my friends, except not with the mignonette. What a great evening.
Along came Sunday and Joe Henry was singing at the Dakota Jazz Club downtown. I am no Joe Henry expert and have subsisted mostly on his earlier alt-country music, not as much his more current stuff that's closer to jazz and Tom Waits, but I loved almost everything he did last night. He told a funny story about collaborating with his sister-in-law Madonna (yes, that Madonna) on a song that they agreed to each publish their own versions of. Joe said he turned his version into a tango and she turned hers into a hit: Don't Tell Me. His version was beautiful. Just like this weekend.
You know you have a cool dad when you find yourself enjoying a cold 24-ounce Red Stripe beer with him at the sold out Avett Brothers show at First Avenue, right after sharing polenta fries and foie gras torchon at the Bradstreet Crafthouse. Awesome.
On Wednesday night when I stopped by Bernice's table at the Memory Care Unit to tease her about eating too little and to challenge her to a clean plate contest, she said something about probably not finishing her dinner because she had to get to the boat. I didn't think much of it, out-of-left-field statements being par for the course on Wednesday nights. But when I finished feeding Mary and Gudrun and I had received my first ever hug from Mattie, bestowed upon me as if she were greeting a long lost relative, I stopped in front of Clara as I put on my coat. Clara told me, as she pointed her finger down the long, ornately carpeted hall toward Bernice, that she was going to go see her sister, Christine. I told her that wasn't Christine, she was pointing at Bernice. She insisted I was wrong and continued to tell me that she was going to go spend some time with Christine. She got up and walked away as I took a couple of minutes to say goodbye to Leola and Lorraine.
When I finally made my way down the long hall, I turned the corner and found Clara pushing Bernice in her wheelchair, away from Bernice's room. I asked Clara what they were doing and she told me, very matter-of-factly, that she was taking her sister Christine for a walk. Worried that she wasn't fully on board with this plan, I asked Bernice what she was doing, and if she wanted to go back to her room. She looked up at me from her wheelchair and tears started pouring from her eyes as she said, "I need to get to the boat, I'm going to miss the boat." I'd never heard Bernice sound so much like someone with dementia, as weird as that might sound considering where I was. But Bernice always seemed to me that she was on the wrong ward. I sometimes thought that maybe she just forgot to turn off the stove once in awhile, or maybe she had trouble remembering where she set down her keys from time to time. This was the first time I really saw that her brain was not doing what it was supposed to do. "Please, take me to the boat," she pleaded, as Clara insisted they keep moving to her room where she and her sister Christine could talk.
"Hey, Clara, why don't you turn around and head toward Bernice's room, she's not feeling well," I asked Clara. "No, Christine and I are just going to go talk for awhile, I'll take care of her," she responded. I was finally able to persuade Clara to allow Bernice to push herself to her room, but Clara followed closely behind, promising she'd talk to Christine and be with her to make her feel better. As we got to the narrow doorway of Bernice's room, she refused to go in. "Bernice, you'll feel better if you go into your room and get some rest," I offered. But Bernice wouldn't have it, she cried harder and said, "That's not my room." I assured her it was, telling her there was a picture of her in there and her green Care Bear and the calendar I gave her last week. But she just cried harder that she was going to miss the boat, that she had to get to the boat. Kollie the nurse came into the room and tried to calm her down, but it was difficult because Clara was there, insisting that Christine should calm down and they could talk, which only confused Bernice more. I left, having nothing to offer in the way of helping, knowing Kollie could handle it much better than I ever could.
I sure would like it if Clara's sister Christine could actually be there with her, and I wish Bernice could really tell everyone to kiss her ass, she bought a boat, she's going out to sea.
I know I posted the trailer from Crazy Heart previously, but here's the Golden Globe-winning song from the film, The Weary Kind, in its entirety as sung by its writer, Ryan Bingham. I saw the movie today and loved it every bit as much as I thought I would, and it didn't hurt that Mr. Bingham has a minor role in it. It's not a perfect film, but it's damn good. And I can't believe how much I'm still in love with Jeff Bridges. I remember seeing him in Starman in 1984 like it was yesterday. I was on a first date and I was so nervous but I forgot all about it watching Jeff Bridges play an alien pretending to be a dead man that night. Whenever I watch him, I always forget it's him, which is the biggest compliment I can give an actor. Go see Crazy Heart.
Sometimes it's all a person can do to get from one day to the next. People need something to motivate themselves to keep going on, to have a reason to get up in the morning and to keep doing what they have to do to make this life into something real. For me, currently, that motivating something is the upcoming film Crazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal. While it has opened in the important cities on the coastal fringes of our great nation, flyover country will have to wait till January 15. It's less than two weeks away but feels like a million.
I bide my time waiting by watching the Crazy Heart movie trailer endlessly. The theme song, The Weary Kind, was written by none other than Mr. Ryan Bingham, whom I last wrote about in July after his show with the Dead Horses at the Varsity, and co-written by the well-known T-Bone Burnett. I hope after this movie comes out and Ryan wins any number of awards for the song including, I predict, an Oscar, Ryan won't be selling his own t-shirts to his fans like he did at First Ave not that long ago and, instead, will be well-known in his own right.
Another fantastic Romantica show for the books. Friday night they appeared at the Dakota Jazz Club downtown, a venue that I visited for the first time in its twenty-five year existence this week. It's a really nice club with good cocktails and a fine-looking menu, but with too many "smooth jazz" acts for my taste. However, now that I've been there, I will endeavor to return. The sound system is top notch, even if the table service during the music is distracting.
Romantica appeared there with another favorite of mine, Austin, Texas' powerhouse voice in a cute, teensy body, Carrie Rodriguez. She brought her fiddle and her highest declaration of love and respect for the Romantica boys and together they made our subzero temperatures seem like just a distant bad memory. Each act did separate sets and, like in concerts past, they did some songs together. The song I always wait for is a gorgeous ballad called Big Kiss that Carrie sings solo on her record, Seven Angels on a Bicycle. It's an amazing song sung individually, but it's kicked up a notch when she and Ben Kyle perform it as a duet. And they ended the show in style with a cover of Merle Haggard's Today I Started Loving You Again that made all of my dark thoughts about the winter chill fade away.
My cousin Megan and I have seen these two perform together at the Varsity in Dinkytown and again at tiny Steve's Guitars in Carbondale, Colorado, and now at the Dakota. I don't tire of hearing them, how could you ever tire of beautifully crafted songs sung in perfect voices?
First Avenue, the former bus terminal turned iconic rock venue best known for being the backdrop of Prince's movie Purple Rain, became a whole new place Friday night when Lucinda Williams performed some of her oldest hits and then got married on stage.
My cousin and I bought tickets to her show, something we do for all her local appearances, many weeks ago and only recently got wind that Lucinda had decided to marry her man onstage, just like her idol Hank Williams had married a million years ago. Imagine our surprise when the somewhat dirty club was spiffed up with small vases of roses everywhere, staff wearing formal outfits (rather than filthy First Ave t-shirts adorned with words like "SLAVE" on the backs), and perhaps the biggest shock, a bathroom attendant passing out real cloth towels! This was not the same First Ave I was once, long ago, carried out of after one too many Jagermeister shots.
Lucinda started early for her, she's usually fashionably late, so we missed the first couple of songs. The place was packed with well-dressed people, some of whom had access to a corner of the upstairs where only wedding guests could go. We were definitely not on that list. I couldn't even hazard a guess as to how many times I've seen Lucinda perform live, but in some ways this was the best show yet. She was dressed all in black, including a tight, knee-length skirt, and left her usual straw cowboy hat at home for the night. She looked really pretty and sang all of her old stuff that made me fall in love with her in 1990 when I was living briefly in New York City and never went anywhere without my Sony Walkman and Lucinda's Passionate Kisses cassette tape playing in my ears.
After her regular set, unusually well-dressed staff members asked the audience to kindly pipe down as the vows were going to begin. Lucinda's father is famous poet Miller Williams, though I would be lying if I said I've ever heard of him outside of his relationship to her. Mr. Williams came out and did a reading and then several folks, the wedding party, came up onstage along with the couple of the hour. A religious figure of some sort in white flowing robes (sorry, not sure what denomination he was) came up last and the short ceremony commenced. We couldn't hear much of what was going on, but we were pretty certain when they were pronounced husband and wife because the whole place erupted in an unexpected flurry of confetti and streamers from the ceiling. Lucinda then performed her encore and it was all over except the late night Buffalo wings and beers down the street at Runyon's. It's exactly the celebration Lucinda would want us to have for her.
There are few things better than an outdoor concert on a Minnesota summer evening, when it's unseasonably cool so the mosquitos are staying on the down low, and the band is Spamtown's own iconic Gear Daddies. Add to the mix a great group of cousins, several beers, and several poor but delicious food choices, and you have an evening to remember.
The Gear Daddies have been a part of the lives of many Minnesotans since the late 80's when they melted our hearts in bars all over the state singing their trademark alt-country songs about girls and alienation and getting out of their small towns before they can't. They even appeared on David Letterman once, and their song (I Wanna Drive a) Zamboni is well known in hockey circles, but they never became the super group I think we all expected they would. So now that adorable lead singer Marty Zellar lives in central Mexico with his family, the Gear Daddies only perform for a very few select engagements throughout the year. The Minnesota Zoo has to be one of the best places to see them.
We're all older now, the audience populated with folks in their 30's and 40's, the band members dragging their kids around with them. But when the Gear Daddies play She's Happy, we're all a bunch of kids again ourselves, thrilled to relive a time of our lives when the future was unknown and anything was possible.
Another awesome show at the Varsity. Super hot Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses brought good ol' real alt-country to town on the back of their steel horses and rocked the prettily lit house. A surprise delight was the opening act, Jesse Dayton, whom I'd never heard of before that night. It was all rockabilly all the time, but he laced it with story songs spun with a mild essence of hip hop. You could tell he enjoyed every minute up there in front of the crowd that was hungry for Ryan but thinking Jesse sounded pretty damn good, too. And the $2.50 Pabst cans pretty much made it all perfect.
For the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see two incredible musical artists--in this case, Carrie Rodriguez and Romantica--play together on a tiny stage at a little guitar shop in a friendly, hippy mountain town.
Why doesn't the world appreciate Tim Easton? His music, haunting and beautiful and happy and sad, tells common stories that anyone could relate to. He's open and friendly and creates an intimate atmosphere with his audience. Of course, it's easy to have intimacy in a bar with just dozens of people around. I was hoping last winter's Easton concert was a fluke, the few people in attendance a tragic result of the brutal cold. But this week it was just a little rainy out, nothing worth missing a great show for, and there weren't many more folks at the 400. Even though he didn't sing my favorite song of his, Hummingbird, he gave us a show with lots of heart and great new songs. Hopefully the next time he's in town from his home base in Joshua Tree he'll sing Hummingbird, and hopefully more people will be there to enjoy it.
Why are my ears bleeding? Oh yes, because I watched Little Irvy (starring my friend Aaron) perform at Grumpy's yesterday for a benefit to buy former bartender Hank a new peg leg. I'm not making that part up, it's for his refurbished prosthesis.
Methinks the venue was perhaps a little small for the likes of a band with as much sound as Little Irvy, named for the iconic frozen whale that disappointed child after child on the Midway every August at the Minnesota State Fair. We'd pay the cover charge as kids, something measly but still a lot for us, and go inside to see the supposedly giant and real sea creature and it was nothing but a big frozen fish. The disappointment was palpable.
Not even a delightful Neko Case show at the State Theater after Little Irvy's performance at Grumpy's could stop the blood from flowing from my hearing canals. But unlike the frozen Little Irvy of my childhood, I'm willing to give live musical Little Irvy another chance. Just not anytime real soon.
Romantica, a local alt-country band with roots in Ireland and a bass player from Minneapolis (Grumpy's bartender Tony Zaccardi), shared the stage at the Varsity Theater last night with Austin, Texas fiddler Carrie Rodriguez. Romantica has been a favorite of mine for a few years but this is only the second time I've seen them perform live, and it was enchanting. Lead singer Ben Kyle, with his Irish brogue and hunching guitar playing style, could easily exceed Ryan Adams or Jay Farrar's success and I can't help but think it's just a matter of time till that happens.
Carrie Rodriguez sang her heart out, a mix of country bumpkin and sophistication that was incredibly endearing and fun to watch. But when Carrie and Ben joined together to perform a duet of her song Big Kiss from her Seven Angels on a Bicycle record, it sent a chill down my spine. I could have watched them sing it ten more times in a row. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to Ben Kyle and Romantica down the road.
Admittedly, I did not attend Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple - The Musical About Love in order to meet a guy (Note: going forward, this blog will be referred to as Deb Ellis Presents I Love Nachos Too Much - A Blog About Stupid Stuff). But while I was enjoying the splendid music and phenomenal voices in the show, I couldn't help but notice that the men attending the musical fell into one of two camps: 1) Men seemingly dragged against their will by their wives to the show and 2) Men who like other men. With the possible exception of a nursing home, the Ordway Theater on Friday night may have topped the list of worst places to experience the human mating ritual.
Guns n' Roses made some awesome music back in the day, but still I've never purchased a CD or even a single track of their catalog. The radio and TV always seemed to provide enough of their music to quench my Guns n' Roses thirst. So it is with some surprise that I have found I LOVE a local Guns n' Roses tribute band called Dust n' Bones. Dust n' Bones performed at half time during the Minnesota Rollergirls roller derby bout at Roy Wilkins last night. Our pal, Nickie (a.k.a. Lil Hellion), is a member of the Garda Belts team and her boyfriend, Erick, is the Axl Rose of Dust n' Bones. The bout was exciting and fun from our rinkside seats, and then we watched as Axl changed costumes several times during the performance and listened to Erick's voice, eerily close to the real thing. After the bout we returned to Station 4, the official bar of the Minnesota Rollergirls, for a longer performance by fantastic Dust n' Bones. It feels weird, but I'm a reformed Guns n' Roses fan!
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