Mark Grube's blog

For some reason, I wasn’t able to catch Madeleine Peyroux when she played the Rochester Jazz Festival in 2005, so I made the trip to see her a few weeks later in Toronto. My memory may be faulty but I’m pretty sure she was the opening act, which seemed odd since I'd never even heard of the headliner, someone named Lhasa. It didn’t seem odd for long. Madeleine was a bit rough, but charming. Her set seemed more like a rehearsal. The crowd was polite but then, when Lhasa came out, they exploded. It was a spellbinding show. Most of the songs were in Spanish or French and if I understood those languages I suppose I would’ve have been bawling, rather than just wiping a tear away now and then. The woman communicated.

I'm a sucker for this sound. It's The Felice Brothers. I'd recommend it for just the piano break alone, for the way it starts to tip over, but the lyrics are interesting too. There's a man drifting off to sleep in an "attic full of make believe" while carolers sing in the street. Later he watches a woman smile on TV and ends up "laying with last year's love, high as the moon above."

Loudon Wainwright III wrote a song for Bob Dylan a few years back. Part of it went like this…
 
Yeah, I got a deal, and so did John Prine, Steve Forbert and Springsteen, all in a line.
They were lookin' for you, signin' up others.
We were 'new Bob Dylans,' your dumb-ass kid brothers.

Radio sucks. That’s my conclusion after spending 11 hours driving back home from Chicago Sunday night into Monday morning. My fellow travelers were sleeping during most of the wee small hours. I stopped several times to top off the coffee but I was still having a few of those moments when the white dashes hypnotize and the rumble strips snap you out of it. I had the radio on and searched for something decent, ideally something to which I could sing along. Belting out the Beatles or AC/DC or Louis Armstrong kept my brain alert and occupied and in the moment, but only for three minutes at a time. Then they’d play dreck or a commercial and I’d be zipping up and down the dial again. I think I may have developed carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting the scan button so often.

It’s that time again. The Grassroots Festival starts Thursday in Trumansburg. I blogged about it last year, before and after, and can’t sum up my appreciation any better now. I was in Ithaca last week and as I drove back home past the festival site on Saturday it was exciting to see workers setting up the Infield Stage and the Dance Tent.