Brew City Brawler

Remembering Ronnie Reagan and Joey Ramone

Dark End of the Street -- pick your favorite version

Myself, I go with James Carr.

Big Star -- thirteen

I saw Jeff Tweedy sing this solo years and years ago. He did a pretty good job.

Anyway, the Brawler suggests that you go see Alex Chilton and Grant Hart (formerly of Husker Du) tonight at Turner Hall.

Songs for hard times

No question about it: we're suffering through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Now, some smart folks are suggesting we're going to face the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Hard times already have struck a number of people close to the Brawler.  As some small measure of solace, some musical reminders that people have suffered through hard times before ...and came out on the other side.

Skip James' endlessly haunting' "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" -- economic devastation as a sort of hell. "People are drifting from door to door/can't find no heaven, I don't care where you go."

Stephen Foster's Hard Times Come Around No More as performed by Bob Dylan:

Jimmie Rodgers celebrates labor mobility in Waiting for a Train:

The Circle Jerks provided their subtle take on the Reagan-era recession with "When the Shit Hits the Fan." Doopity doo wop say what yeah."

The right no doubt will be trying to assert the prerogatives of capital as we try to figure out a way through this thing and fight to ensure security for working people. Woody Guthrie reminds them whose country this is.

The Clash reminds us we're facing the prospect of a global recession in Straight to Hell:

What the hell, might as well include a Springsteen song:

And Pete Seeger says: Solidarity Now!

With apologies to Rick Esenberg.

Bob Dylan set list, Milwaukee, November 6

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Riverside Theater November 6, 2008

1.	Thunder On The Mountain
2.	Love Minus Zero/No Limit
3.	Lonesome Day Blues
4.	A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
5.	Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
6.	Girl Of The North Country
7.	High Water (For Charley Patton)
8.	Workingman's Blues #2
9.	Just Like A Woman
10.	Tangled Up In Blue
11.	Love Sick
12.	Highway 61 Revisited
13.	Ain't Talkin'
14.	Summer Days
15.	Like A Rolling Stone
	(encore)
16.	All Along The Watchtower
17.	Blowin' In The Wind

via Boblinks.

Good show. High points, for me,would include Love Minus Zero, Hard Rain, Girl of the North Country, Workingman's Blues, Just Like a Woman, Highway 61 and Ain't Talkin'.

Unrepentant left wing blogger Folkbum was there as well. As was, I believe, Bill Christofferson. Dave Tianen's review here. Much of what he says is, of course, wrong.

My Bloody Valentine -- When You Sleep

The Brawler will be traveling to Chicago tonight to shoe gaze with My Bloody Valentine and definitely will be packing ear plugs.

Ladies and gentlemen, Milwaukee is floating in space

J Spaceman brings Spiritualized to Turner Hall tonight.

Spiritualized -- Electricity

Hold Steady -- Sequestered in Memphis

Sweet Gesu, the new Hold Steady "album" is amazing

Because the Brawler is of that age demographic/mind frame that needs his music packaged in physical form, he picked up the Hold Steadys' latest see-dee "Stay Positive" and oh my lord is it awesome. It's not "Separation Sunday" -- that is a very (a bad adjective in this case justified) special album of which there are few -- but after 1.9 listenings, it is a fab album. Singalongs, invocations of 7 Seconds, some stretching beyond their trademark reliable Husker Du by way of the E Street Band sound (banjo by J Mascis! Theremin!) and meditations upon growing old, murder, guilt and other Craig Finn (a hedgehog, not a fox) obsessions,it is a fabulous piece of work. Hold Steady have produced as solid a body of music in their four full-length "albums" as anyone over these past several years. And Minneapolis suburb boy Craig Finn has grown into the sharp, smart, vernacular lyricist that Paul Westerberg always wanted to be. "So I mostly just pray she won't die"? Yow. That's from "Lord I'm Discouraged" (with the tuneful singalong refrain "excuses and half truths and fortified wine":

The guy shredding the Jimmy Page double ax is Janesville's own Tad Kubler. Bassist Galen Polivka would be Whitefish Bay's Phil Lynott if Phil Lynott had been of Eastern European descent as opposed to Black (literally) Irish.

And here's some Auld Steady:

M.I.A. coming to Milwaukee May 12

Turner Hall. Be there.