“Two Majestic Nights”
After our two misfires on getting our fourth booster shot, Diana called Walgreens on Monday to see if they had anyone available to give us shots. “Come on in and we’ll get you taken care of right away,” said the pharmacist. We did – and are now fully boosted again – quick and easy. After that I took care of several catch up activities from being gone for two months – a haircut at the Boardroom, and car registration and wash.
I enjoyed the NCAA “March Madness” final game on Monday night – that was until the tornado sirens started going off. No tornados, but we did have some very heavy rain, with flooding in McKinney making the national news.
Diana had a sore arm and shoulder, and was very tired from the shot on Tuesday. Fortunately I didn’t have any side effects this time around. I cheered her up with a couple of episodes of the new series of Bridgerton on Netflix. She did make it out to get her hair coloured and cut after two months.
Bryce, the piano tuner, made his annual visit on Wednesday and that was pretty much the highlight for the day. I was busy consuming all my potions to prepare for my colonoscopy screening on Thursday. Nothing to eat all day made me hungry and grumpy by the time evening came.
The colonoscopy was quick and easy on Thursday morning. I did not appreciate having to awaken at 2:30am to take the last of the options. D was surprised when I didn’t want to go for tacos when she picked me up after the procedure. I was tired and didn’t feel hungry – just wanted to go home and relax.
Kenny and Kara drove to Dallas from New Orleans early on Friday morning. They had invited us to join them for the Lyle Lovett concert on Friday and Saturday evenings. The concerts this weekend were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the gorgeous Majestic theater in downtown Dallas. This wonderful Renaissance revival style concert venue is located amongst all the modern high rise buildings.
I enjoyed seeing Thanksgiving Tower nearby – this is where I worked when I first started with EDS in 1989. That was back in the days when I had to wear a dark suit, white shirt, tie, and wingtip shoes to work every day. Things have changed so much in the almost 35 years since those days.
We checked into the Indigo hotel, a few hundred yards from the Majestic, and met up with Kenny and Kara. I suggested walking over to Deep Ellum, a funky neighbourhood of bars, restaurants, and shops just on the other side of Interstate 75. We walked over and enjoyed a drink on the lovely patio at the Twilite lounge, and a light dinner at Postino. I highly recommend Postino for a quick and tasty bite in the Deep Ellum area.
We walked back to the Majestic to watch Hayes Carll open the Friday night show for Lyle Lovett. He came on right on the nose of 7:30pm and gave us an excellent opening set – all quiet and thoughtful songs – none of the usual rockers that we are used to from his livestream shows. Here’s my favourite – “Beaumont”:
Lyle Lovett and band followed that up with an excellent two and a half hour set. Here’s a write up on the band members:
Viktor Krauss had to attend a funeral and so a substitute bass player was arranged at the last minute – Lovett mentioning that he had just met him that morning – he did an excellent job. The other band members were equally exceptional – I loved Josh Swift on the Dobro. Here are some samples from the first night:
I think that last one, North Dakota, was my favourite of the evening. A close second was this cover of Guy Clark’s “LA Freeway” with Hayes Carll joining in:
We’re not used to being out and about after 11pm, and so were quickly asleep after the short walk to the hotel.
I was looking for a nice cup of coffee on Saturday morning, and found this great place a short walk from the hotel. I chuckled at the Tucan card I was given so that they could find me with my coffee. The shop is designed to feel like a tropical rainforest – very unique.
Kara and Kenny joined us for brunch at the Standard Pour on McKinney Avenue – what a great spot to relax on the patio and enjoy some good conversation. Here are Kara and Diana posing by the Margaret Hunt bridge mural on the wall of the restaurant.
From the Standard Pour, I drove over to the Wild Detectives book store in the Bishop Arts district of Oak Cliff. We perused the books and enjoyed a drink on the back patio – it was such a lovely day. We walked down Bishop Street after that, browsing through some stores before happening upon the Revelers Hall Band playing at their namesake bar. What a nice langiappe:
That’s as close as we come to New Orleans in Dallas. After a coffee, we drove back over to Deep Ellum to check out some stores that the group had liked the day before. Nothing much doing and a lot busier on Saturday afternoon, so we drove to the Velvet Taco for a snack prior to the second night of Lyle Lovett.
We arrived early to check out the 100th anniversary exhibit. The most interesting thing I read was that the owner of the theater contributed $5 million to help Walt Disney get started, when nobody else would give him any funding.
We were seated on the Mezzanine this night, rather than the orchestra section from Friday night. This gave even better views of the beauty of the theater, and I think provided for better sound. The sound on both nights was amazingly pristine, with every instrument and voice heard perfectly.
The Old 97s, a famous local Dallas rock band, opened on Saturday. In contrast to Hayes Carll, they did not quieten down their set much – full on rock ‘n roll. Kara is a big fan of the lead singer, Rhett Miller, and was happy to see him hamming it up. She had a big smile on her face during the entire set.
The Lyle Lovett set was pretty much the same as the previous evening, and I enjoyed it even more, able to really focus in on the instrumental pieces that I had enjoyed the night before. The quality of the band really can’t be over-stated. Rhett Miller joined the band to sing a cover of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Made me think of Mum in Rothesay, dancing down the street and singing that song. Apparently a Dallas local, B.J. Thomas, recorded the song in 1969 for the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. That version reached number 1 in 1970 and he performed it at the Academy Awards.
Miller joined the band again for the final encore, a Townes Van Zandt cover:
We met Kenny and Kara for coffee on Sunday morning, and then drove back home via Taco Deli. I tried their migas royale platter – so yummy, and I still have some in the fridge for later.
I’m enjoying watching the final round of the Masters golf tournament while finishing up this post. Scheffler is still in the lead by 4 shots, with Smith and McIlroy trying to catch him.
I loved my book this week – “The Storyteller” by Dave Grohl. He was the drummer with Nirvana when they changed music forever with the “Nevermind” album, and then went on to found the Foo Fighters band. This a wonderful collection of varied stories from Grohl’s youth discovering music, almost to the present day. It’s sad to hear him write about the depth of his friendship with Taylor Hawkins, the Foo Fighters drummer who passed away in the last few weeks, causing them to cancel their tour, including a New Orleans jazzfest appearance.
How Grohl’s Mom encouraged his early love of music:
“A tiny old club on Pennsylvania Avenue just outside of Georgetown, One Step Down not only was a hotspot for established touring acts but also hosted a jazz workshop every weekend where the house band (led by DC jazz legend Lawrence Wheatley) would perform a few sets to the dark, crowded room and then invite up-and-coming musicians up to jam with them onstage. When I was a teenager in the eighties, those workshops became a Sunday ritual for my mother and me. We would sit at a small table ordering drinks and appetizers while watching these musical masters play for hours, reeling in the gorgeous, improvisational freedom of traditional jazz.”
On getting the call to join Nirvana:
“And then I read the five words that changed my life forever: “Have You Ever Heard of Nirvana?”
On a phone call with an old friend who had grown up with the guys from Nirvana in the tiny town of Aberdeen, Washington, I was informed that they were in between drummers at the time and had seen Scream perform just weeks before on our ill-fated tour. Apparently, they were impressed with my playing, and I was given their phone numbers to call.”
“I packed up my duffel bag, my sleeping bag, and my drum set into a cardboard moving box and headed up to Seattle, a town I had only visited once and where I knew virtually no one, leaving one life behind to start another one. I felt a loss that I had never experienced before. I missed my home. I missed my friends. I missed my family. I was now truly on my own, back to square one, starting over.”
Writing about a particularly rowdy show as Nirvana was just blowing up in popularity. Trees nightclub is directly opposite the Twilite lounge that we visited on Friday afternoon, and there was a tour bus parked in front:
“Welcome to the fall of 1991.
Trees nightclub in the Deep Ellum district of downtown Dallas, Texas, was just another stop on the North American leg of our “Nevermind” tour, which boasted a streamlined itinerary of thirty exhausting shows in a short forty days. With a max capacity of around six hundred people, this relatively new club was similar to most of the other venues that were booked for that tour: cramped, a low stage, limited PA and lights, and a small dressing room in the back to prepare for (and recover from) another cathartic performance.”
On the genesis of the band name, “Foo Fighters”:
“In a chapter about unidentified craft over Europe and the Pacific during World War II, I found a term that the military used as a nickname for these unexplained glowing balls of light and thought it was just mysterious enough for me. Not only did it sound like a group of people, it almost sounded like a gang: Foo Fighters.”
One of my favourite stories – about a dinner after the Grammy awards:
“We reserved a table at a restaurant called Faith and Flower just a few blocks from the venue and planned to meet for dinner and drinks away from the hubbub after the show. Paul McCartney was in town as well and inquired what we were planning on doing afterward, so we gladly invited him and his wife Nancy along, adding two more chairs to our growing table. Take it from me, any night with Paul is a good night, so this was shaping up to be an epic evening. Apparently, Paul bumped into AC/DC at the hotel, and when asked what was going on afterward, he said he was having dinner with us, with led to my life’s most surreal test.
Pause. Reflect.
A few days before the show, I received another text, from my good friend Ben Jaffe of New Orleans’s legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band, notifying me that he was also in town form the Grammys and looking for a party.
While filming our documentary series “Sonic Highways” in 2014, Foo Fighters had the honor of spending a week filming in Preservation Hall itself, a tavern that dates back to 1803. We all became fast friends. By the end of that week, I had decided that New Orleans is an American treasure, and that we all indeed need to preserve its rich culture steeped in European, Caribbean, and Cajun history. There is nowhere on earth filled with the pure magic that New Orleans has to offer. It is, without doubt, my favorite city in the world.
“Dude…we’re having dinner with Paul McCartney AND AC/DC!” I exclaimed to Ben. “You wanna come along?” I knew Ben would most definitely appreciate the enormity of such an incredible chance encounter. “Can I bring all the guys with me?” he asked. I paused and did the math. The band consisted of seven musicians, which realistically meant at least ten more people. “Uh, let me check,” afraid that the restaurant would decline our request for another ten chairs. But then Ben sealed the deal:
“How about we all come marching down the street playing in a second line, into the restaurant, straight to the table, and perform a set for you right there?”
There was absolutely no refusing this incredibly generous offer.”
I loved this book and highly recommend it to any music fans.
Here’s the original studio version of “North Dakota”, my favourite from the shows this weekend. The performances and production on this are just excellent:
Something from the Old 97s:
And my favourite from the Old 97s set:
Finally, a great Foo Fighters song from the Sonic Highways album:
Stay safe, patient and kind with everyone!