OK…I have a few minutes so I just thought I would post some photos and videos from my recent trip with my girlfriend to San Antonio (and Austin), Texas.
And here are a couple of videos from the trip. This first one is of the Texas Cavaliers’ River Parade, which is held each year as part of San Antonio’s Fiesta.
The following video is a bit grainy, but about a minute into it, you will start seeing thousands of bats flying out from under their summer home underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin — a nightly ritual during the summer months.
Oppenheimer has a new CD, “Take the Whole Mid-Range and Boost It,” coming out soon. Below is the video for “Look Up” from the upcoming disc. Great stuff from the two boys from Belfast! Enjoy!
Found this video of “Poet of the Great Plains” from Christian Beach’s 2/2/08 show at Paul’s Tavern in Lake Como (formerly S. Belmar), NJ. I am rockin’ the tambourine and organ in this one (you won’t see me until about 1:03 into the clip).
Sorry…I need to post one more Peter Gabriel video. This one is a performance of “Secret World” from the “Secret World Live” tour that supported the “Us” album. I love this song (if you go to my MySpace Music site and listen to “The Greatest Love,” you may hear the influence) and experiencing it in concert is always a thrill for me. I don’t know…maybe it’s the combination of a great song, strobe lights and twirling.
I went to see one of the musical influences of my youth, Howard Jones, perform last Friday night at the Dennis Flyer Memorial Theatre on the Blackwood, N.J., campus of Camden County College. The venue seats about 600, but — disappointingly — it was only about half-filled. However, that did make for a very intimate performance.
HoJo, better known for his synthesizer-driven pop hits of the 1980s, played digital piano and was accompanied by long-time collaborator Robin “The Itch” Boult on acoustic guitar. I wound up buying a live CD from a show the pair recorded last year in the UK and had HoJo sign it after the show. I would have taken a picture of this brief meeting…except my camera batteries died and I forgot to bring extras with me. D’oh!
Anyway, I found this YouTube video of HoJo and Robin performing “Life in One Day” in Brisbane from a March 2007 show.
UPDATE…After I originally posted this, I found a couple of YouTube videos from the show I attended, plus one of HoJo and Robin performing “Life in One Day” at a March 2007 show in Brisbane.
Enjoy!
Howard Jones “Life in One Day” Live @ Brisbane, March 2007 This video starts out with HoJo telling a story about how the record company forced him to write it because the “suits” didn’t hear any hits on what would become his biggest-selling album (“Dream Into Action”)…and then there is a bit of a false start at the start of the song. But it’s all super fun!
Oppenheimer is a duo from Belfast, Ireland, who recently finished a U.S. tour opening for They Might Be Giants.
I know there are a lot of people out there who don’t care at all for opening acts, but I have had pretty good success at seeing openers who went on to bigger and better things. Actually, the first concert I ever went to was when my parents took me and my sister to what was then Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands for a Hall & Oates show. The opening act that night was a yet-to-hit-it-big band by the name of ‘Til Tuesday fronted by Aimee Mann. About a week later I saw their debut album, “Voices Carry” — on cassette — in a local store and bought it. A few weeks later, the album’s title track was all over the radio and on MTV.
So, anyway, I have had a pretty good history with seeing quality opening acts, especially in recent years. I saw Tegan and Sara open for Ben Folds at The College of New Jersey about five years ago and never heard of them before. Now, they seem to be all over the place. Then, I saw The Zutons and The Redwalls open for Keane a few years ago, the soon-to-be-all-over-the-place Nicole Atkins open for Mike Doughty, and the still-up-and-coming Dawn Landes open for Midlake just a few months ago.
And that leads me back to the point of this post: Oppenheimer has joined the list of opening acts I would certainly like to see and hear again…hopefully, as a headliner. They played a really strong set of synth-based, 2-to-3 minute pop songs, and their debut, self-titled album is more of the same.
And this quote from Oppenheimer’s Rocky O’Reilly reminds me of the days when my friend Christian Beach and I use to stand behind our array of synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and sequencers:
I could never imagine Oppenheimer being more than us Oppenheimers. We write and record all our own stuff, the creation is very studio based. It’s the two of us throwing our ideas back and forth at each other and seeing where it takes us. In that way I hope the live show reflects that process, that it is two people creating the sounds. On occasion people are upset that it’s not guitar/bass/drums, but that’s not really what we are about, it’s about pop/electronica and really it’s about having fun!
Here is dark, grainy YouTube video of Oppenheimer performing “This is Not a Test” during a recent CMJ show in New York City…
I saw Nicole Atkins open for Mike Doughty a couple of years ago (in fact, keyboardist Dan Chen left Mike Doughty’s Band to join Nicole Atkins & The Sea a few weeks earlier so the set had a bit of a reunion feel to it).
Anyway, I enjoyed what I heard that night and have kept an eye/ear on Nicole ever since. I downloaded her wonderful “Bleeding Diamonds” EP from iTunes some time ago and her recently released full-length album, “Neptune City,” has been garnering tremendous reviews. She has an incredible voice and is an amazingly gifted songwriter.
Nicole Atkins & The Sea made their network television debut Oct. 30 with a performance of “The Way It Is” on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” which you can see in the video above.
More importantly, Nicole is a fellow Jersey Shore native so I really would like to see her succeed. And I think she will. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 2008 is going to be THE year of Nicole Atkins.
I would really like one of these for Christmas…although the parachute landing is rather crude. I wonder if some kind of landing gear could be adapted for this…but I wouldn’t want to be the test pilot trying that out.
Brian Kelley 