Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I had the old, wrong, dead link for Peter's Power Pop over there on the side -- it's fixed now. But speaking of which, go here and listen to Brian Hoffer, who humbly suggests maybe you just need psychoanalysis.
Hat tip to Whiteray over at Echoes in the Wind, who pointed me to The Goat 540, an album-rock Am station that streams on the web -- and might just represent the finest ideals of album rock, which I thought had died decades ago.
"Meet me at that place. Down the block. The one that shouldn't be open but is."
So I did. I drove there.
New to Los Angeles, not caring that no one thought my crappy French car was cool, not caring what trendy cars the bottled blondes drove.
On the street were six Suzuki Samurais, all driven by newly blonde actress wannabes carrying plastic water bottles and yoga mats.
Five years later, they'd be driving some other trendy car. Then another one. Then New Beetles and Mini Coopers.
At the place where we met, she ate something organic. I tried a bite. It was disgusting.
"Why aren't the streets glistening?" she asked. "They always glisten in the movies."
I looked down the hallway, which was painted to look like a Japanese Pagoda. Now it looked like a hallway with peeling Pagoda paint. The bored vaguely Asian waitstaff scurried about, heating sake for the exclusively White patrons.
"I don't know that they're always glistening," I said.
She smiled. "Always. There's never been a movie where it's not raining in Los Angeles."
She wanted me to argue, to be logical. But I didn't want to. I was tired.
"It's like someone waved a magic wand at Los Angeles and made it rain. But only in the movies." She looked far off into the distance. "I wish I could make it rain here."
She finished her meal. I couldn't stomach mine.
Then she asked if I wanted any gluten-free chocolate cake. I didn't. I was tired of trendy food. "I've got an idea," I said. "Let's go somewhere and have real chocolate cake. Made with sugar and flour and eggs and chocolate."
She scowled at me. "That's disgusting."
I shrugged as she poured water from the bottle into her glass.
"I just wanted something real."
She stared around the room at all the women with fake breasts and said nothing.
"You know," I said, "Evian spelled backwards is 'naive.'"
She shook her head, looked at me across the table, and said the words every man in Los Angeles hates to hear: "I signed up for an acting class."
We said nothing for a very long time.
The French car outlived the relationship, but not by much. I got an equally untrendy but more reliable car.
In the restaurant, the paint continued to peel. The fake breasted women pushed food around their plates and eventually left. The newly arrived blondes went off to yoga in their cute cars.
Some of the details changed (the make of the cute car, the container used for designer water, the hairstyle), but the essence was the same. The same old thing that you saw 12 seconds ago.
And certainly no one remembers why he's on horseback.
But late one night, Gina and I were walking on the lawn.
And we were talking about her problems. (She had a lot of problems, so this was not the first or the last time we talked about them.)
We stopped by the statue and I could sense that her personal cosmology and belief systems, which ebbed and flowed like mountain springs, were due for another radical change of course. "I'd die for you, you know," she said.
And I said something about how that would not be necessary. Because I didn't want the responsibility. Didn't want her even thinking that way.
And she bent down, picked up an empty bottle of beer someone had thrown onto the lawn.
She smiled. "It's not that big a deal. I've died a thousand times before. I've got a few thousand times to go still."
And she broke the bottle against the base of the statue.
I spun around, thinking someone would have heard us, somewhere security or the police, or a neighbor would come running out and we'd get in trouble.
But no one came.
"It's 3 am," Gina said as I turned back to face her. "No one cares. This is the one time of day when we can be honest with each other."
And she ran her finger across the jagged edges of the broken glass before continuing. "And I'm sure you'd die for me, too."
I looked deep into her eyes and realized this was no small request. She may not have wanted me to die right then and there, but she wanted to know that she could call on me to die whenever she chose.
I knew I wouldn't do that. Much as I cared for her, I wasn't going there. Not that night and not in the future.
I took the broken glass from her hand. And she must have seen the deep-seated fear in me, because she quickly backtracked, claiming she'd never hurt herself for anyone and would never want anyone else to die for her.
She laughed, insisted I'd misunderstood, and tried to play the whole thing off as a joke.
But I knew better.
And anyone else who'd been there knew better too.
But I had no one to share this insight with -- except for the statue. And he (like Gina) wasn't in the mood to listen.
Longtime readers may be interested to know that this song was always targeted for inclusion on my never-went-anywhere Codependency's Greatest Hits collection.
Interrupting the summer doldrums for two versions of a song I've always loved (which seems appropriate since today is Ringo Starr's birthday).
Come for the great horn arrangements (and instrumental tracks played by most of Badfinger), stay for the goofy scenes of pianos in the snow, Ringo skiing poorly, and several snowmachine accidents waiting to happen.
There were rumors from the beginning that Ringo could not have possibly written this song (a huge step up from his previous ditties like "Octopus's Garden"). Decades later, a demo version surfaced with a George Harrison guide vocal (as well as a few extraneous "Hari Krishnas" that were buried in the final mix), raising questions about exactly how much of the song Harrison had written himself.
But as cool as the Harrison version is, there's something I've always loved about Ringo's vocal that Harrison didn't quite match.
Note: I'm reasonably sure it's a coincidence that I kept thinking of the last song in this post after watching cable news coverage of politicians and political pundits...
Originally Published May 2009
After the Rutles album came out, there was a lot of talk about how similar the songs were to Beatles songs (including this article, which proves that scholarly study of humor will almost immediately spiral into self-parody).
Unfortunately, the owners of the Beatles publishing (but not the Beatles themselves) decided that the Rutle songs were too close to Beatle songs and sued. In the process, Innes lost all the publishing and songwriting royalties for all the songs from the first Rutles album (and was so disgusted with the music business that he dropped out of music for several years). Add in legal squabbling with Eric Idle about legal ownership of the idea of the Rutles, and you've got enough to make you want to smash everything in sight. (And blame it on society.)
But the universe does have a way of showing that there is such thing as Karma, even if it takes longer than we want. In the mid-1990s, Oasis, a band whose music is often ignored while people focus on their influences and frequent fistfights, released a song called "Whatever" which -- and I'm not sure how to put this delicately -- sounds exactly like the Neil Innes song "How Sweet to Be an Idiot."
And, perhaps in part to make up for mistreating him financially with the Rutles, the universe awarded Innes royalties and co-writing credit on "Whatever."
I got a call from a friend back East. He was baking. It was a million degrees. He wanted to hear about the lack of humidity. About the cool ocean breezes. About the way the sun didn't bake us here the same way it was baking them there.
So we talked about snow.
About ice.
About the bone-chilling feeling of cold wet wind when the snow wouldn't stop falling.
About the feeling of wind chill on exposed skin, how it flowed through your core.
And about the feeling of shaking from the cold.
At the end of the call, I asked if it helped.
"Not really," he said. "But I'm going to go lie down in the bathtub for a while... and see if that helps."
The Weepies are two married singer/songwriters who had separate careers and met one night at a folk club in Cambridge, Mass.
They've had hundreds of songs placed in TV shows and movies, hitting the twee bullseye nearly every time.
After the Rutles album came out, there was a lot of talk about how similar the songs were to Beatles songs (including 
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