When I read this morning that the legendary master of the blues guitar, Mr. B.B. King, had passed away overnight at the age of 89, I found myself trying to recall when and where I first became acquainted with his work. Not surprisingly, for me anyhow, it was in a movie.

Now, I had some familiarity with blues music by my early twenties. Like a lot of people — maybe even most people — of my general age, I was introduced to the form by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, first with their Blues Brothers sketches on Saturday Night Live, and then through the feature film spun off from those. And I’d had an epiphany at some point that much of the rock music I enjoyed was heavily rooted in the blues. (Led Zeppelin took on a whole new dimension for me once I understood that a huge chunk of the oeuvre was simply blues cranked up to 11.) But somehow I remained only vaguely aware of actual blues music.

And then in 1991, I bought the soundtrack for Thelma & Louise, the Susan Sarandon/Geena Davis buddy-adventure movie that had turned out to be an unexpected hit… and unexpectedly controversial. (I never did fully get the gender-based controversy surrounding that film, personally; in spite of what a lot of people were saying, I didn’t think it was hostile to men. On the contrary, I loved it… it remains one of my favorites from that era.) Whatever else you might think of that movie, though, it had a great soundtrack… and one of my favorite tracks on it was “Better Not Look Down” by the King of the Blues himself, B.B. King. I liked it so well, I started exploring the rest of B.B. King’s oeuvre, as well as the rest of the blues genre. And while rock will always be my first love, I soon learned the dividing line between the two is very thin, and there’s a lot of listening pleasure to be found in the blues as well.

This song isn’t what you probably imagine when you think of “the blues.” It’s upbeat and relentlessly optimistic in outlook, without any mention of cheatin’ women or hard times… but I soon learned that there’s a lot more to the blues than just those cliched cries of pain. It is possible to play “happy blues,” for lack of a better word. B.B. King could play both kinds — any kind — with equal grace and mastery.

This version of the song isn’t the exact one that appeared in the film, which I assume was an album track. Instead, this is a live performance from 1983, and while it doesn’t feature much in the way of guitar pyrotechnics, it does show how effortless B.B. made it look, and what a warm, gentlemanly presence he had on stage:

Anne and I had the privilege of seeing him perform live twice, both incredible concerts. Not the raucous, arena-rock spectacles I’m usually drawn to, more like old-fashioned road shows from an earlier time. We had a third opportunity to see him as well, but for reasons I no longer remember, we didn’t make it happen. It seems like there was something else around the same time competing for our attention or our dollars, and I said something brilliant like “We’ve seen him before, we can catch him another time…”

The early ’90s was a frustrating time for me, musically speaking. (Also on a number of other fronts, but hey, we’re talking about music now.)

The debut of those depressing mopes Nirvana and the other Seattle bands — a.k.a. grunge music — had alienated me from what was going on in rock circles; hip-hop had never appealed to me in any way, so its increasing ascendancy and far-reaching influence annoyed me; and between the boy bands and the rise of a certain kind of male balladeer I can only describe as “whiny,” pop music had gone completely to hell. But I wasn’t yet ready to lock my tastes in amber and content myself with listening exclusively to the oldies, so I found myself casting about for… something… anything I could call “my music.” I even dabbled a bit with country, if you can believe it. I found I enjoyed a lot of older stuff from that genre, notably the 1970s “outlaw” acts like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. But Garth Brooks and other contemporary country stars — in particular, Brooks and Dunn and their damn “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” one of the most irritating (and thus, naturally, catchy) songs I’ve ever been subjected to — were dragging that genre toward a sort of phony sound that was absolutely intolerable to me, so I quickly dropped my explorations there.

It was getting pretty depressing scanning around my radio dial vainly searching for a sound I liked. And then one day I stumbled across a new station called “The Mountain” (I can still remember the call letters: KUMT, 105.7 on the FM dial). According to the scant handful of references I’ve been able to find online, The Mountain’s format was something called “adult album alternative,” a mixture of classic rock from the genre’s earliest days up through the ’80s, with some blues and folk and soul thrown in for good measure. There were deep album cuts from artists I knew for only one or two songs, and stuff by artists I knew but never heard anywhere else on the radio, like the Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffett. The Mountain was the station that finally identified Marc Cohn as the singer of “Walking in Memphis,” a mystery I’d been trying to solve for at least a year at that point, and it was the station where I first heard Shawn Colvin and Keb’ Mo’ and Sheryl Crow and Melissa Etheridge. The Mountain reminded me very much of the fictional KBHR radio on the television series Northern Exposure, if the comparison means anything to you. It was just plain good music. Naturally it was doomed.

An archival article from 1999 says that “KUMT had never been focused enough in the overloaded Wasatch Front radio market” — that lack of focus being what made it interesting, in my opinion — “and also never attracted a sizable audience.” So overnight, The Mountain switched to 1970s soft rock in the vein of Bread, and thereafter went through a succession of other formats that were progressively less appealing before finally ending up as a right-wing blabfest hosting Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, and others of that ilk. The world moved on.

But every so often… on a night like this one, when the rain is dripping from the eaves outside and the house is growing cool around me… a night when I can’t help remembering the sultry dreams I used to have of living in places a lot more colorful than Salt Lake where I would dance the night away with girls in skintight jeans and sip beer from long-neck bottles beneath the red and blue light of neon signs… I remember The Mountain and the music that expanded my repertoire beyond the hair metal and ’80s pop I still love, but can’t listen to constantly. Music like this song here, by a cat named Sonny Landreth:

That’s not an official video — as far as I can determine, Landreth doesn’t make videos. And I honestly don’t know a lot about him, other than he’s an acknowledged master of slide guitar and has worked with Jimmy Buffett, among others. But I know I love that sound. And I know this is what I used to call good music, back in the day when it didn’t seem like there was a lot of that to be found…

Well, I imagine my Loyal Readers are probably wondering how the eye surgery went. I intend to write in detail about the procedure, as well as the experience of being able to see without spectacles again for the first time in 21 years, but for now I’ll just say everything seems to have gone very satisfactorily. At my post-op examination this morning, my optometrist said I’m seeing at 20/20 in both eyes, although that will fluctuate a bit over the next couple of months before finally settling into whatever it’s going to be permanently. The biggest problem thus far has been all the eye drops I’m required to administer; seems like all I’ve been doing for nearly 24 hours is putting drops in my eyes. But that’s a small price to pay in exchange for the experience I had yesterday of glancing out my kitchen window when I got home and finding myself able to read the billboard in the back of the old pickup parked up the street, which one of the neighbors uses to advertise his window-installation business. That was almost as big a revelation as that moment 21 years ago when I first noticed the trees on the ridgeline.

In any event, I’ve got the day off work today and I’m just taking it easy, lounging around the house and doing my eyedrops every couple of hours, as instructed. Given the circumstances, I can’t think of any video selection more fitting than this one:

I first came across this video during the big online outpouring of love and grief at Leonard Nimoy’s passing back in February, but I decided not to post it then because this blog was threatening to turn into “all Leonard, all the time.” I’m informed by fairly reliable sources (i.e., my lovely Anne) that this song by Bruno Mars — appropriately called “The Lazy Song” — was very popular a few years ago, but honestly (and probably not at all surprising to my Loyal Readers) I can’t recall ever hearing it before. As it happens, I kinda dig it… it’s cute, in a hipster-slacker kind of way. And the video absolutely cracks me up, and makes me miss Leonard — the friend I never really knew, the neighbor I never actually had — all over again.

As to how a respected elder celebrity like Nimoy ended up peeing in the sink and all those other terrible things that ran so counter to his public image (which is largely why this video is so funny after all), he explained it in another video clip that can be found on Facebook, but the short version is this:

His step-son Aaron Bay Schuck (whose father is the actor John Schuck, who appeared in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which Leonard directed) is a record-label executive who works with Bruno Mars. Bruno wanted Leonard in his video and asked Aaron if that was a possibility. A couple of phone calls later, and voila! It’s all about who you know, as they say.

Hope you all enjoyed it, and hope you all have a great weekend. I’m going to spend some time looking out the window at things I couldn’t see without aid before yesterday…

It wasn’t too long ago that I was waxing nostalgic for Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” a song that’s always had a lot of meaning for me, and lamenting that he never comes to my hometown when he’s touring. Not long after that, you may recall that I included him on my “fantasy list” of musical artists that I’d like to see in concert, but probably never will because they are “semi-retired, unlikely to ever come to Utah, or really expensive/difficult to get [tickets for].”

Well, things can change very quickly sometimes, and opportunities you never imagined would happen can come out of nowhere. Which is a roundabout way of announcing that tonight I’m going to cross another entry off my wishlist (I refuse to call it a “Bucket List,” for reasons I won’t get into here) by seeing Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band at Salt Lake City’s own Energy Solutions Arena. As far as I know, this is the first time he’s ever played Salt Lake, or at least the first time since I’ve been paying attention to such things (which has been a very long time, considering I went to my first rock concert in 1981, when I was 12!). Also, this is rumored to be his final tour — he’s 69 and has said in recent interviews that he “doesn’t want to overstay his welcome” — so this one feels pretty momentous. Needless to say, I am just a wee bit excited.

To mark the occasion, I thought I’d post a track from Bob’s latest album, Ride Out. It’s his first release of new material in eight years, and his best album (in my opinion) since Like a Rock back in 1986, in part because of his unexpected willingness to risk alienating his core fanbase (which tends to skew to the political right) with songs about climate change, income inequality, and gun violence. (Bob explains his newfound social consciousness as “wanting [his children] to have a future and a good place to live” and says he’s going to be 70 soon and this may be his last album, so “better late than never.”) Don’t misunderstand, though, this album is not a grim political screed; it includes plenty of the rootsy rock-and-roll storytelling that is Bob’s trademark. Like, for instance, the single “Detroit Made.” It’s classic Seger, a celebration of the chromed-and-befinned marvels that once poured out of the factories in his hometown, Detroit, and the wholly American lifestyle they enabled. There is an element of melancholy in the video if you want to see it that way; with its nostalgic color filter and artificial scratches that make the images look like they come from an old Super-8 home movie, it reminds us that the days of classic Detroit-steel muscle machines are long gone, and the days of the carefree driving around on cheap, plentiful gasoline are fading fast. But the song itself is so relentlessly upbeat, so, well, driven, if you’ll forgiven the quasi-pun, that you can’t dwell too long on the negative. It’s a song that make you want to slip behind the wheel and roll on out… just like I’m about to do, with my Bic lighter in my pocket, ready to flick during the ballads:

Have a great night, kids!

[UPDATE: Turns out Bob has been to Salt Lake before; I’ve learned he played here on May 9, 1980. At that point, I would’ve been more obsessed with The Empire Strikes Back than rock and roll…]

A year ago last month, The Girlfriend bought herself a new car, and along with that, she received a free one-year subscription to SiriusXM satellite radio. At first, we scorned this value-add as an unnecessary luxury, but we both quickly became rather fond of it. The lack of commercials is a big attraction, of course, but what really won us over was the variety and depth of the programming. The stations are categorized by decade and genre — e.g., classic rock, country, 1980s, etc. — which sounds as if it would be extremely constrictive, but in practice, there’s a mind-boggling number of categories to choose from, far more variety, in fact, than you find on over-the-air broadcast radio. Also, the satellite channels tend to dig much more deeply into the back catalog. We’ve both heard songs we’d forgotten we ever liked, as well as a lot of things we’d just plain forgotten… or never knew at all.

Case in point: this little ditty by a band called The Flirts, which I heard one afternoon while Anne was listening to “First Wave,” the so-called “classic alternative” channel:

I don’t remember ever hearing this one back in the day, but I’ve been unable to get it out of my head for the past couple months. A little research reveals that The Flirts were not a band in the traditional sense of the word, or rather, the girls you see in this video weren’t the ones actually singing the song. They were models and actresses hired by a guy named Bobby Orlando to be the faces for music that he himself wrote, played, and produced. The vocals were recorded by professional session singers, and then the “performers” lip-synced the tracks during “live” appearances and in music videos — exactly what Milli Vanilli were excoriated for in 1990.

The Flirts had better luck that Rob and Fab, though. I don’t know if maybe the band’s phoniness was an open secret, or if nobody cared about that sort of thing in the early ’80s, as opposed to the more uptight latter half of the decade, but The Flirts had quite a successful ten-year run that included six studio albums, 12 singles that charted in either the U.S. or Europe, or both, and even a number of international tours. This song was their first hit, landing at number 28 on Billboard‘s U.S. dance charts in 1982. In addition, the video got heavy rotation in the early days of MTV… not at all surprising, given the attractiveness of the band’s “faces.”

Incidentally, when I wax nostalgic for the fashions of the ’80s, this is the sort of thing I’m thinking of, not the heavy shoulder pads and ratted-up hair that reached such ridiculous extremes by the end of the decade. My vision of the ’80s is a lot closer to the ’70s than what most people apparently think of…