Posted at 10:37 by Carly Carioli
We've heard that Paramore's Hayley Williams and Twilight star Robert Pattinson are in the market for a duet. Shame someone didn't check out A.A. Bondy's Daytrotter session earlier this year and assign them to cover "Oh The Vampyre," an as-yet-unreleased track from the former Verbena singer's solo ouerve. With vampires now trumping zombies and werewolves, this is about as slick a commercial move as Bondy's capable of -- which isn't very -- so if Hayley and Robert take a pass, can our HBO peeps see about the closing credits of True Blood? As promised, we took the cams to Bondy's recent Great Scott set and came back with a new, full-band version of the "Vampyre" song, plus a version of "Black Rain, Black Rain" from his fantastic solo debut American Hearts. Stay tuned, we're still in the editing room on another track from this session: an updating of the ancient American spiritual "John the Revelator," which we suspect he learned from the immortal Son House.
Posted at 07:39 by Jon Garelick
Okay, so we had to go to the Abbey on its final night -- after all, it's right around the corner. It was sold out, but of course Billly Ruane got us in. What else is new? We were in time for the Coffin Lids, and as they played "Welcome to Pussytown," I reflected, "It's nice that someone's still writing songs like this." We'd already listened to Muck and the Mires as we stood on the sidewalk, playing Kenne Highland's "Not Too Shabby at the Abbey" (a/k/a "Johnny B. Goode") clearly audible through the wall. The Konks played "Sex Bomb." Then they played "Sex Bomb" again. Then they invited some friends on stage and played "Sex Bomb." So it was nice too to see that Kurt Davis (a/k/a Yukki Gipe) was still into rock music as primal gestalt. The guitarist yelled over to the bar, "Hey Steve, where the fuck am I gonna go now?" They encouraged the crowd to smoke, and some people did. Steve Morse was there. The Boob was there. People on the sidewalk talked about other clubs that had closed from Storyville to and Jumpin' Jack Flash to, of course, the Rat. Over the "No Smoking" sign inside the door, someone had written "...except on drums." I'd never noticed that before. Triple Thick played "Love Comes in Spurts" and "Triple Thick Shake." After "10,000 Maggots," we went home.
Posted at 11:12 by webteam
Download: Lisa Bello, "Remix"
Unless you’re Mark Wahlberg, it’s tough being the younger sibling of a Boston song-and-dance dignitary. Still, Louie Bello’s kid sister Lisa is on a mission to lasso her brother’s loyal frosted-tip and visibly gellin’ following with an onslaught of dance-floor smokers that ring realer than cliché soul and hipster fare. On “Remix,” the Boston Music Awards nominee (her brother’s nominated too) gets bitchy over minimal but fabulous synth flutters that complement her tremendous pipes. Download it, vote for her, and check her out at the Alchemist on December 19. Her November show filled the place by 10 pm, so be sure to get there early. You can grab “Remix” above.
--Chris Faraone
Posted at 10:02 by Carly Carioli
10. PINK IS ONE OF THE GREATEST ARTISTS OF OUR TIME. At least according to noted musical-greatness expert Scott Weiland. "Performing 'Sober' . . ., " introduceth he -- the irony of which wasn't lost on us. Not the only reason everyone's wondering what the hell that dude's on.
09. KANYE v. 1: "I WANT TO BE ELVIS." Dude, we've heard 808s. You might start with wanting to be Kanye.
08. IT'S MILEY CYRUS'S BIRTHDAY: Apparently Miley's dad promised her two things for her Sweet Sixteen: a car, and permission to touch her boobies when she dances. Also, where can we buy those "blog headline" bodysuits?
07. WU-TANG CLAN CAN'T NAME A SINGLE JONAS BROTHER. But RZA admits to Kimmel that his daughter's got their poster on her wall. Kimmel: "I'll give you a hint: It's Joe, Nick, and Ghostface Kevin."
06. WEEZY IS A BETTER RAPPER THAN KANYE: Mr. West gives away his best rap male award to Mr. Carter. Which is what all us bloggers were going to demand anyway.
05. THE DREAM WANTS THEM DEAD: Apropos of nothing, The Dream walks onstage and tells the audience, "I wanted to choke the Jonas Brothers, but I'ma let it ride." Dream. On.
05. BOSTON'S MUSIC SCENE IS GOING DOWN THE SHITTER. So says Newscenter 5's scrolling news bug all night. Leaving aside 5-at-11's specious claim that the Boston music scene is in decline (what, did they start interviewing message boards or something?), do they think that anyone watching the AMAs gives a fuck? Whatever. It was nice to see the Abbey Lounge on television.
04. RIHANNA HARBORS A NOT-SO-SECRET CRUSH ON ROB HALFORD. Holy shit! Hell, as far as we can remember, even Halford never rocked an iPatch like that. More proof that pop music is increasingly more metal than metal.
03. WAIT, JESSE MCCARTNEY CO-WROTE "BLEEDING LOVE"? We're giving ourselves a late-pass on this one. Also, since the other co-writer was the guy from One Republic, this deep-sixes our it's-subliminally-about-menstruation theory. Damn.
02. THE JONAS BROTHERS CAN'T SING. At least Ashlee Simpson was kind enough to lip-synch.
01. FUCK YOU, THESE ARE STILL GOOD SONGS. <Gently weeps.>
Posted at 10:38 by Ryan Stewart
This is what the internet looked like when Chinese Democracy should have been released
Big week on the internet this week for music, as the last wave of high-profile 2008 releases are making their way to the masses.
First, Chinese Democracy is here. If you're reading this, chances are you know what Chinese Democracy is by now, which means you also know it has its origins in the 1990s. And it sounds like it. Had this album been released between 1997 and 2001, it would have sounded very much like a reflection of the prevailing trends in music, only with fewer passages of syncopated half-spoken vocals and with more pompous ballads. Had it been released between 2002 and 2006, it would have sounded like a desperate attempt at a late cash-in, catching the train as it's pulling out of the station.
But it's coming out in 2008, too soon for a retro revival, and too late to sound current. So instead, it just sounds like a representative of a time and place, the musical equivalent of digging up a time capsule you'd buried ten years ago, from a time when a lot of bands sounded like the weird cross between Korn and Primus that exists on "Shackler's Revenge." Or when this level of overproduction was the norm and not a gross display of excess.
It's not very good, of course, but it seems hard to imagine anyone expecting it to be. I do think a portion of listeners were hoping for "listenable," and it veers towards listenable at times ("Catcher in the Rye" is not awful). I suspect just as many were hoping for a massive trainwreck that could make for some guilty pleasure listening, and it isn't really that, either. It's just bad. Blandly, anachronistically, boringly bad.
808s and Heartbreaks, the latest from perennial music critic/pasty dude fave Kanye West, also has leaked. 808s is Kanye's breakup album, and it's also - again, as you may have heard - characterized by its difference from other Kanye albums: he doesn't rap on it or use his typical samples; instead every song is based on an 808 drumbeat and Kanye's voice filtered through a vocoder. This, in its way, is also an instantly-dated record, as anyone who revisits it down the line will instantly recognize it as reflecting the dominant sound of hip-hop in the last three or four years or so - and Kanye himself is also late to the party.
I'm not going to claim to have much insight into Kanye West's brain here, but 808s sounds like a genre exercise to me, so it's probably best to regard it as one. If that's the case, due credit to West for taking a sound we've all been inundated with the last few years and doing something somewhat interesting with it in spots. 808s gets a little tiresome over its full length, but in short spurts it's pretty fun, particularly the run of "Love Lockdown," "Paranoid," and "Robocop," the last of which features orchestration that reminds me of the music you hear on a merry-go-round. It's not for everyone, though, and it's a poor substitute for a "proper" Kanye release.
Posted at 04:03 by webteam
DOWNLOAD: Henry Gale, "Stay Warm"
We’re suckers for a good Lost reference, so when we stumbled across a band named Henry Gale while skipping through the fields of MySpace, we approached their music with the same cautious optimism any Lost fan accords another on first meeting. It paid off: these guys are good. Like many post-rock bands, Henry Gale (an instrumental four-piece specializing in post-rocky bombast à la Explosions in the Sky or our own Common Cold) just love guitars that veer between twinkling loopage and soaring textures. Unlike many post-rock bands, they don’t take forever getting to the part that rocks, they do it from the get-go. Catch the release party for their nifty new EP, Other Voices, at the Middle East downstairs on November 24, where they’ll be joined by Guillermo Sexo, City of Ships, and Doomstar. And in the meantime, grab the MP3 of “Stay Warm" above.
--Michael Brodeur
Posted at 10:23 by Ryan Stewart
They don't even look different now than they did ten years ago!
Recently mainstream emo-punkers Jimmy Eat World announced a tour to honor the tenth anniversary of Clarity, in which they will play the album in its entirety. My immediate reaction: "seriously, guys?"
I'm not knocking Clarity. I used to listen to it quite a bit back when it first came out - particularly during my first two years of college - and I'll still revisit it every now and again for a pleasant nostalgia trip. It gets a little overwrought at times, a little too syrupy and corny at others, but there are some really good songs on there, particularly if you're measuring within its genre - "Crush," "10," the title track, and "Believe in What You Want" come to mind. Certainly Jimmy Eat World will likely not record an album to equal it; they haven't been able to so far.
But this still feels like a stretch. Leaving aside the hubris necessary to suggest that Clarity is somehow by association now on the level with other albums that have gotten the top-to-bottom treatment, like Daydream Nation, Vs., or Spiderland, I'm just not sure who is clamoring for this. If the idea is that Clarity somehow inspired the generation of inferior, drippy, schmoopy mall punk that we've suffered through for the last ten years, then I guess that's fine. If Jimmy Eat World wants to take credit for, say, Plain White Ts or Say Anything then I guess I shouldn't want to stop them. But the connection seems dubious - coincidental as much as anything. Yes, Clarity came out ten years ago and these bands starting sprouting up shortly thereafter. But Jimmy Eat World were one of, like, fifty bands doing something similar at the time. I'm not sure how anyone can separate out their influence from anyone else's. Are the Promise Ring and Braid going to tour together and play, respectively, Nothing Feels Good and Frame and Canvas in their entireties now, too?
What's even weirder is that Jimmy Eat World never went away or anything; they didn't break up or go on hiatus. They released an album in 2006 and toured behind it. And on that tour, they played songs from Clarity. So why are they doing this again?
Of course, all that said, I'm still interested in checking it out. So maybe there's less to this than you think: maybe they're just trying to get people talking about them again. Whatever works, I guess.
Posted at 12:17 by Carly Carioli
We've been privately gushing over former Verbena frontman Scott AA Bondy's solo record American Hearts (Fat Possum) for about a year now -- we doubt that he'd consider it a compliment to hear us compare it to anything as cliche as Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker or the first Velvet Underground album, but that's unironic high praise in this cube. Roots music in 2008 is all about lumberjack beards and creaky falsettos, which we love as much as the next Horse Feathers fan, but Bondy's mostly-alone-with-a-guitar phase is firmly pre-indiefolk-revival, with its insistence on rasp and clear-eyed mumble and even the occasional no-bullshit protest song. In any other year (say, even 2007, when it was released), the title track's plea for a distinction between heartfelt patriotism and blind nationalism would've sounded like just another coffeehouse pipe dream; the closer we got to November 5, though, the more we found ourselves revisiting it as an anthem for a new era. "Killed myself when I was young," he sings on a song by that name, "with my finger on the poison gun," and by all accounts he nearly did during the Verbena years, which most people who remember them at all will remember for the Dave Grohl-produced album the band put out after Bondy had apparently developed an unhealthy obsession with Kurt Cobain. American Hearts reminded us, though, how much we loved Verbena's 1997 debut Souls for Sale, an album that squirreled away the best parts of the Stones Sticky Fingers and the Stooges Raw Power, but also contained a fucked-up love ballad so gorgeous that they pre-emptively titled it "The Song That Ended Your Career," presumably to ward off the indie-cred goons of the era.
American Hearts is older and darker and maybe even wiser, verging on spooky, especially on the handclaps-as-thunderclap-as-gunshot percussion on "How Will You Meet Your End," a song with lyrics as stark and bleak as a Flannery O'Connor story and a crackling fingerpicked melody that seems to have crawled out of the same earth that Doc Boggs used to tread. Lord knows what kind of deal a man's got to strike to be able to summon up those spirits. But we're stoked to finally get a glimpse up close when Bondy takes the stage tonight at Great Scott. If you can't make it, you'll regret it -- but w'e'll have the OTD cameras there and some live footage up next week. In the meantime...
DOWNLOAD: AA Bondy,"There's A Reason" (mp3)
Posted at 09:33 by webteam
DOWNLOAD: ViceVersah, "Man Vs. Wild"
Over the past year, ViceVersah has been spotted grinding in New York, outside Boston Phoenix headquarters, and on bills with hardcore street rappers whom he can easily hang with despite, well, being white. This week, after a pair of expertly executed mixtapes, the Greater Boston native turned North American wanderer drops his James and the Giant Beats debut. “Man vs. Wild” attests not only to Vice’s beastly abilities (“I’ll invite you in for dinner but not for your entertainment”) but also to producer the Arcitype’s ability to upgrade contemporary hip-hop while staying true to boom-bap basics. For real rap fans only — hipsters beware. You can catch Vice at Harpers Ferry on November 15 and grab the MP3 here.
Posted at 03:47 by Carly Carioli
Less than 24 hours after Barack Obama ended his historic victory speech with a rhetorical flourish riffing on the life of 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper -- a life thatspanned black suffering, black suffrage, and now black presidency -- Cooper's grandson, Lawrence D. Bobo, who is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, was scheduled to introduce Michael Eric Dyson, the preeminent black intellectual, at Harvard's DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research in Cambridge. "The family knew that Barack was going to mention my grandmother," Larry Bobo said. "But no one had any idea that the last 10 miunutes would be seeing the world through my grandmother's eyes."
"Few have carried on the legacy of Du Bois's of public intellectualism as well, or with as much verve, or quite as much rhymin', as Professor Dyson," said Bobo, perhaps understating the case. Earlier this year, Dyson had been invited to deliver the annual Du Bois Lectures at Harvard, and had decided to give three talks on a cultural figure whose works are not universally celebrated by his colleagues, under the quintessentially Dysonesque title "From Homer to 'Hova: Hustling, Religion, and Guerilla Literacy in the Pavement Poetry of Jay-Z." (Larry Bobo is a notable exception: he knows from Sean Carter, though perhaps not as much as does his wife, Marcyliena Morgan, the global hip-hop academic and founder/director/curator of the Hip-Hop Archive, who is also on the Harvard faculty.)
Alas, Jigga's DuBois debut was not to be. Instead, as Henry Louis Gates announced, "Michael's decided that maybe, as interesting as Jay-Z is, he decided he wants to talk about Barack Obama." The crowd, which had spilled out of the wood-paneled Thompson Room and into an adjacent cafeteria, erupted in delight. "The Du Bois Lectures are published by Harvard University Press," Gates grinned, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson walked in and snagged the last front-row seat. "And our editor over there is my friend [executive editor for the humanities] Lindsay Waters. You should have SEEN the smile on his face! He could just hear, 'Ka-CHING'!"Dyson, who moves as easily between the lexicon of academia and the vernacular of the corner as he does between the podium and the Today Show green room (he'd been interviewed by Matt Lauer that very morning), spent 15 minutes delivering shout-outs to his colleagues in the audience and teasing Gates, his mentor and occasional intellectual rival. And then, working without notes, he dropped a sermon-like 90 minutes of freestyle academic science and blew the doors off the hall.
It's a remarkable performance: celebratory, incantatory, revelatory. Even our attempts at bullet-point paraphrasing are turning into essays, so we'll just tell you to download and listen for yourself. Then read Orlando Patterson's recent Op-Ed in the Times (published the Friday of Dyson's third lecture), and then take a breeze through New Yorker editor David Remnick's 15-page essay on "Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama" (it appeared a week after Dyson's lectures but was likely written before them, although they follow some eerily similar threads). This month's election immediately opened the floodgates for a new discipline: Obama studies. And when the textbooks are written, they will probably begin right . . . here.
THE 2008 W.E.B. DUBOIS LECTURES
DOWNLOAD: Michael Eric Dyson, "Obama and Race" (November 5, 2008) [mp3]
DOWNLOAD: Michael Eric Dyson, "Obama and America" (November 6, 2008) [mp3]
DOWNLOAD: Michael Eric Dyson, "Obama and Rap" (November 7, 2008) [mp3]
The Phoenix is posting these files with the permission of, and in cooperation with, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. Special thanks to Vera Grant and Dell Hamilton for their help in making this possible.
Posted at 01:52 by webteam
The Fatal Flaw are a new pop-punk combo comprising recently transplanted bassist and singer Joel Reader (Mr. T Experience, the Avengers), guitarist Zack Wells (the Information), drummer Jason Seaver (the Vershok), and guitarist Matt Goldman (Steel Train). Local girlfriends who specialize in harshing all over their boyfriends’ respective rock bands might not appreciate the familiar bro-before-ho moral at the heart of their stunning new “The Great Indoors” — that settling down equals giving up, and that girls just don’t get it — but that shouldn’t stop them from eating up the song’s sugar-sweet pop-rock choppage. Catch the Flaw live at the Middle East upstairs on November 15 as they release their debut, We Are What We Pretend To Be (Lunch Records), and inspire a whole new generation of young people to be passive-aggressive dicks to their significant others. And get there early for the Lie Society, Harris, and Taxpayer. In the meantime, show your iPod who wears the tight pants in your house by grabbing “The Great Indoors."
DOWNLOAD: The Fatal Flaw, “The Great Indoors”
Posted at 03:21 by Caitlin E. Curran
Juliana Hatfield was released today from an eating disorder treatment center, where she went to face down anorexia, according to Stereogum via Hatfield's personal blog. Yesterday, the 41-year-old Boston rocker/author/former Blake Baby wrote an extensive blog post from the treatment center:
"For the most part I have not ever been inclined to escape with drugs and alcohol. In the drugs-and-alcohol sense I am and have always been very straight. My coping mechanism — or one of them; the one that kicked into high gear again most recently — has been restricting food.
...I am having to come to terms with the fact that at age 41, I found myself unraveling. Or, rather, I unraveled. I wasn’t fully conscious of it. Others around me noticed it before I did. A good friend forced me to confront the fact that I was in serious trouble. “You need to get well” were his words.
...They tell me here at the E.D. treatment center that people have been hospitalized for being as low (at my height) as I was when I came here. (I found that kind of alarmist and hard to believe — I was still skeptical and in a little bit of denial, like everyone is when they first come in for treatment for anything anywhere — but it scared me anyway.) In this environment they shorten “eating disorders” — the name of our problem — to “E.D.,” and say it like a man’s name (“Ed”), like he is a bad man; an evil man whom we need to cast out of our lives, our psyches.
Before computers you never would have found me blabbing (blogging [blogging is blabbing]) so openly like this about this. This is me being modern."
Hatfield goes on to describe the experience of being at an E.D. treatment center, which - as you might expect - is fascinating, yet sad. Read the full blog post here.
Previously:"Baby fights the blues," by James Parker"Windows: An excerpt from Juliana Hatfield's memoir," by Juliana Hatfield
Posted at 02:57 by Carly Carioli
The Abbey Lounge, Union Square's venerable garage/indie/punk dive, has lost its battle with this shitty economy. According to club employees, the Abbey's last day will be November 28. In addition, Abbey booking agent Mike Fuedale (a/k/a the Coffin Lids' Skinny Mike) confirmed this afternoon that the Abbey's final show will be November 26 -- bands are still TBA.
Back in September, when the Phoenix reported on a "last ditch" attempt to save the club with a series of benefit shows, Fuedale spelled out the financial problems afflicting the Abbey:
"We're saddled with debt from renovations that were made a few years ago," says Abbey booking agent, Mike Fuedale. Feudale — better known as "Skinny Mike "of the Coffin Lids — says the renovations included removing a wall between the bar and the performance area and building a separate wine bar next door . . . But debt isn't the only issue affecting the venerable venue. While clubs everywhere are hurting as a result of a disastrous economy, the Abbey's usual regulars are also growing older. "Priorities change," says Skinny Mike. "I don't see a lot of the familiar faces."
"We're saddled with debt from renovations that were made a few years ago," says Abbey booking agent, Mike Fuedale. Feudale — better known as "Skinny Mike "of the Coffin Lids — says the renovations included removing a wall between the bar and the performance area and building a separate wine bar next door . . .
But debt isn't the only issue affecting the venerable venue. While clubs everywhere are hurting as a result of a disastrous economy, the Abbey's usual regulars are also growing older. "Priorities change," says Skinny Mike. "I don't see a lot of the familiar faces."
Updates and conversation are ongoing over at the Lemmingtrail board.
Posted at 11:29 by webteam
DOWNLOAD: Amadeus the Stampede, featuring Reks, “Deadly Toxins”
When the highly mobile Lawrence MC Reks returned to Mass before his Grey Hairs release party this past August, he blessed a mess of Boston affiliates with doses of his recently revamped dynamic slickery. Among his fortunate collaborators were Illin’ P, DL, Black Madeen, and Greater Good mic menace Amadeus the Stampede, whose full-length non-mixtape debut, House of Broken Mirrors, is set to drop early next year. On “Deadly Toxins,” Amadeus chases a nimble Reks burner with three dense minutes about Percocet abuse, blurred vision, and the gang of monkeys on his back. Whammy-bar dramatics and frenetic piano stabs courtesy of Guns-N-Butter producer J. Scrilla.
Posted at 01:23 by Chris Faraone
As I walked down the Paradise corridor toward the Murs show last night I worried that the joint might not be stuffed to the balconies. It’s not like I expected a riotous sell out, but considering that Lil Wayne and Jay-Z packed the biggest room in Boston one night earlier, it would have been extra disheartening if hip-hop’s most important major label artist couldn’t draw a serious crowd.
Refreshingly, my fears were squashed by a venue full of young white college kids. Most rappers will tell you: if not for privileged English and psychology majors who puff herb, there would be no feasible enlightened rap scene. There were hardly any girls in sight, but I’m not complaining so long as we can keep attracting acts like these to town. I’ll take what I can get – fill the place with Young Republicans for all I care.
Due to time constraints and my looming influenza, I only caught the middle of the show. That is to say I regrettably arrived near the end of Big Pooh (Little Brother) and Joe Scudda’s set, then stayed through Kidz In The Hall (KITH) and for 45 minutes of Murs. I just want to keep it honest; there are way too many critics who lazily bounce before encores, and I’m not usually one of them.
KITH has been gigging relentlessly, and, as a result, have developed theatrics that guarantee fans a good time. With DJ Double-O smacking down his drum machine and MC Naledge exhaling semi-didactic swagger, the Ivy Leaguers rocked with commendable competence and confidence. As a kicker, they delivered a hilarious live skit in which Double-O sang through an Auto-Tune processor a la T-Pain just to show how easy that shit really is.
That said – and this was my problem with the KITH album – their bangers are few and far between. I mean this respectfully, as I believe that these guys can ultimately help steal the torch from trite phonies such as Kanye West, but they’re at their best when interpolating Tribe tracks and familiar Native Tongue aesthetics. And one more thing on KITH: I’m feeling them and all, but I’m not sure they’re established enough to douse crowds with Poland Spring.
Until last year, Murs always hung out around his merch table. As he noted at the show: at least on the East Coast, he’s for-a-minute been the guy opening for El-P, Mr. Lif, and Aesop Rock. But even though his exceedingly excellent new disc, Murs for President, is on a major label, Murs is hardly allergic to his fans; before his set he strolled through the club and stood up front to read the crowd. The DJ cut in “Better Than The Best,” and he jumped on stage to corroborate the hook: “The best that ever did it / Murs is better than your favorite rapper admit it.”
From there he ripped “H-U-S-T-L-E” – a track that every aspiring MC and so-called hustler needs to internalize – and moved on through new album cuts, more 9th Wonder gems including “Bad Man,” and even his Def Jux repertoire. I dare someone to show me a more entertaining solo performer in all of hip-hop; in addition to there not being a single dud in his canon, Murs does the running man through his whole set and pulls that move where you grab an ankle and jump through with the other leg. For good measure homeboy and his hype man even covered Sublime’s “Date Rape.”
I hope this major label stint is working for Murs; fuck knows he doesn’t need the money considering his Paid Dues tour paper and various other hustles. Naïve as this assumption may sound to anyone who prejudicially believes that all rappers are materialistic nihilists: I’m sure that Murs didn’t sign with Warner for the cash, but instead to reach and influence larger audiences. I’m certain that he could have done last night’s numbers without an evil empire behind him, but I could be wrong; and if one person at The Paradise would have missed out if he stayed independent, then I suppose it’s all worthwhile. Plus he got a pretty sweet tour bus out of it.
