Compliments of E in an interview he gave. I tell ya, Shootenanny may just end up on that list of the Top 25 favorite albums of mine. I put that list together so y'all can get some musical edumacation. I'm up to 13 now and I added a couple last week and never bothered to tell ya cause I'm nice and I expect people to be touring every page every visit. Cause my website is your right and you demand it.

Or something.

Made up Band Name of the Day: Your Greatest Hits

With a statement like that, is it any wonder that these guys know how to rock? Be sure to check out this interview to get the full skinny on Shootenanny, quite possibly the album of 2003. It does not get much better than this folks.

It's been awhile since the last update, in fact, three hundred and sixty-five had come and went since that midnight run haulin hog... whoops, wrong band. So some of you may recall my 8/13/2003 update where I lamented the fact that the Eels did not get enough stage time (and apparently MC Honky felt like he needed more (8/8/2003)). Add to that the bad taste left in my mouth (some might say flaming) from the "headliner" of that show and my first Eels live experience, while great, could have been better. So when I found out that they were coming back thru Nashville, I counted down the days like NASA counts down a launch.

The show was held at the Mercy Lounge, which is now on my list of places that don't suck to see bands (or see bands that don't suck). Honky put on a set which, while interesting, is fairly mundane since he just smokes a pipe and spins records. I was ready to get my full on rock after he was done though. Little did I know I was not ready for the rock. E brought the rock to Nashville and Nashville got rocked. Hard. It's Monday night as I write this, and well, I'm still rocked. They band stepped out onto the stage in Devo-esque outfits, sans the hats, wearing red pants, red button up shirts and black t-shirts. They were hard to miss. They launched into the opening chords of All In A Day's Work, and kept repeating them over and over. I'm like, yeah, it's about time to rock dudes. And then, behold the light, glorious light, shining into the audience. A stage cart served as the chariot that brought E thru the crowd to the stage and carried... you guessed it... THE ROCK.

I don't have a setlist. Just know that they covered the bases and then some. All your favorite Eels songs. All rocking harder than you could ever imagine they could rock. Unfortunately, when it looked like E was about to pronounce it was "Rock o Clock", some jerk in the audience yelled out, "is it Rock O Clock time E?" That's OK though, all of us knew it was. And we were getting rocked. E got his preach on, informing us that Rock cannot change the world, but that rock can save your life cause it saved his. We bowed our head to "the rock" and got rocked even harder.

Just when we thought we were rocked, they came back out for an encore. And another. And other. Three encores in all. Each one better than the last. At the end of the second one MC Honky walked out on stage... right when the song ended he tried to get on the mic. Their was feedback and the next thing I knew E was hauling Honky offstage and there was a roady ready to assist. I'm not sure what the deal was, but I guess we'll find out on the Eels site if Honky has some sort of issue with performing in Nashville.

Of course, those that are in the know that just cause they played that third deserved encore (yelling for E on the first, Koool G for the second, and Puddin for the third) and the house lights came up does not mean that you leave. The Eels have the nerve (and I mean that in a good way) to come back out for another round. After making a faux pas or two (more below) sure enough, Puddin sits back down at his drums and starts laying down a beat on the snare. Hear it comes. With that, everyone else stepped out on stage. When everything was ready to go, the snare stopped and out of E's mouth came words I thought I'd never hear:

"Whiskey River Take My Mind".

That's right. As in the Willie Nelson song. Cause when you want to rock hard you drop a phat Willie song onto an already grooved crowd (well, what's in on the band and know's what to expect) and rock even harder.

I checked the discussion board, and apparently Puddin breakdancing was not a new thing, but it was cool none the less. E got some serious feedback kickin with his guitar. It was all good. Like I said, my rear is still rocked from this show. They're going to have to get back to Nashville again soon. I'm glad to see Jill who was a trooper and a good sport had a good time.

So about that faux pas. Yeah, call me stupid. So Intern Jen (what else should I call her?) ran up to me after the third encore and was like, this show was awesome. I'm like yeah, Naked Dave is not going to be happy when he hears about this show. And then I go, Jill, this is Angie, Angie, Jill. And Jen shoots me this look. I knew the minute I went for Jen's name I was going to blow it and boy, did I. Making matters worse is that Jen worked with an Angie when Jen was the intern. Jen was like, WTF? I'm like, I'm never going to hear the end of this. FWIW, Jen really looks like she should be an Angie, and I'm not saying that out of comparision to the Angie we both know. But I guess her name is really Jen, so I should probably call her that. Intern Jen, if you're reading this, I'm sorry. Please feel to call me any name of your choosing the next time we meet.

On that note, I'm getting rocked by Shootenanny as I write this.

Made up Band Name of the Day: Much Ado About Something

Whoa, flames. That just about sums up things at Casa de RIMBoy shortly after hitting submit on last week's post. Yes, things got a little tense round 1 RIMBoy.com way. That furnace we talked about firing up? Well, yeah. It did. So shortly after jinxing myself with that post, Jen turned on the furnace. I summed things up in this email I sent to a couple of people, so I'll repost it here (with a little editing).

Well, for the first time in my life (that I can recall) I got to pull the little tab on the red cylinder that when you pull the trigger spews forth what I can only describe as some of the most acrid tasting stuff you'll ever have the occasion of tasting. I was looking for a comparison but there is none.

That's right, we had a little fire at 1 RIMBoy.com way. I've had the occasion to call 911 twice for fires, once on the 4th of July when some tard left a candle burning in his apt. and the candle burnt down to the base. The other was the infamous (at least Dave knows about it) fire at the building that used to sit at the corner at 11th Industrial / Division (across from the old Javanco). It was right across from CRS and it was a total loss. Most likely started by a bum.

Thankfully a little knowledge of how furnances work and because of a tard in our electrical shop class, my first move was to cut the power on the furnace before reaching for an extinguisher. Nothing like trying to fight a fire with an ample fuel source. It's a gas furnace. By killing the power it shut off the electrically operated valve that controls the gas. Likewise, if anything shorted out it would remove the short. I then kicked in the full on fire suppression. Stuff sprayed everywhere in the garage powdering everything in a fine coat of white, including my mouth and lungs. Though technically by law I'm supposed to call the fire dept (I think, if not it should be), it was quickly under control and the waking of the neighbors avoided.

Of course, the kicker is that the unit is less than a year old and was recently "inspected" (more on that below). I dunno if I'd want Rick's crap arse furnace from the cabin at this point. Damn thing would not fail inspection and worked half the time, but at least it don't be bursting into flames.

Anyway, we're now having to air out the house, between the smoke, burnt metal smell, and the extinguisher; the complete opposite of what we really wanted to do. Which is to stay warm. Lovely, eh?

We also found out that Frasier is no Lassie... he just sat there and watched us run around despite being line of sight to the events at hand. I would have hoped an orange ball of fire would have gotten his attention but that was not the case. Or the extinguisher. Hrm. Tell me again why the Queen prefers Welsh Corgis?

As with anything, I washed down the bad taste with Pepsi. It helped a little. Now I get to freeze my nards off tonight. At least it's not like last year when we had to have the furnace replaced.

Now, here's the part that was not part of that email since I wrote it the night of the fire. We immediately called the furnace company (who shall remain nameless) and told them we had a fire. They told us that there was really nothing they could do at that time of night, which was true. It was not the coldest night of the year, so we piled on some blankets and slept until awoken by the call from the company the next morning.

Morning arrived all too soon with the phone call. No more than 5 minutes after hanging up the phone NES decided we needed a power outage on the order of an hour or so. I got to see first hand how well my Dayton bargain UPS's would hold up. They did quite well. Anyway, the tech shows up, opens up the furnace and immediately exclaims DAMMIT! I don't believe they did that. He then turns to us and says, I'll be stepping outside, I've got a phone call to make. I'm like, hrm, this should be interesting. A couple minutes later he comes back in and says, we'll have a crew out here at 3pm today to replace this. We're very sorry, but when our tech did the inspection he failed to replace the plug where the gas pressure meter he uses hooks up. That plug is on the other side of the valve so gas did not leak, but the minute the valve opened up it started spewing gas all into the furnace. The minute the burners kicked in then that's when things started getting interesting. It burnt a vacuum motor up and a vacuum sensor. We caught it before it had a chance to do any more damage. Thankfully they were not going to try to fix it, I would have pitched a fit. You could see where the tech left his allen wrench and the plug. He just never replaced the plug and probably never missed the allen wrench.

The crew replacing the furnace finally asked what happened. The installer was like, I'm surprised you did not call 911 and run out of the house. I'm like, well, it was contained to the furnace, I had several exit options available and extinguishers at hand to put the fire out. If the extinguishers had not done their job then yeah, a call to 911 was in store.

We got really lucky. $10 extinguishers were the difference between having a furnace replaced and having to replace a house. It's weird to think that in this day and age a simple little plug could create such a massive problem. It's the companies job to know what they're doing and ensure stuff like this does not happen. Maybe it's the liberal in me, but it seems that the human factor could be ruled out with a little invention. Probably could even be something off the shelf. I'm surprised there's not something self sealing. It's a problem, the tech that came out that next morning admitted as much. I guess the furnace industry hedges their bets and cuts their losses over items such as these. Still, a $2 part could make a few more people sleep better at night. I know I would if I was in their line of work.

Did a CD bender in Tower Saturday night. Clerk behind the counter informed me that they were losing money on the deal they were running (which in the big scheme of things was not a deal, but there were some good CD's as you'll see for $9.99). I'm like, why should this bother me that you're losing money? If anything you should be complaining to the RIAA. So to add to their losses, I charged the transaction to my debit card (stores lose a couple of percentage points per sale to credit card companies for reasoning that only credit card companies can justify). Anyway, I picked up The Very Best of KISS, From the PBS Blues series (which was hit or miss) Muddy Waters and Son House, Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, Phair's Exile in Guyville, "R" from Queens of the Stone Age, Loud,Fast from the Ramones, and finally Ben Harper's Welcome to the Cruel World and The Will To Live. Good stuff indeed.

Made up Band Name of the Day: Prefunctory Functions

Dr. Teeth is celebrating nearly one year of the newest member of his band. That was when I finally broke down and bought a real monitor for him. It's hard to believe it's only been a year, but it's been worth it. Now if I'd ever get off my rear and finally build the new Dr. Teeth complete with DVI I could enjoy this monitor in all of its glory.

I looked thru some of my old postings tonight trying to figure out what's happened in the past year or so and futher, two years back. The furnace I wrote about in 2001 was replaced and is itching to get fired up with these rapidly dropping temps. Rick's Jukebox is almost back up and available... it seems just as soon as he got a static IP address something else happened that's made his jukebox MIA. Once it's back up we'll return the Rick's RDTJ song of the update feature we used to run (Rick is cringing now hearing the refrains of Three Is A Magic Number). VH-1 has found new ways to suck which is not surprising. The one redeeming quality of Spike, the former TNN, is apparently not enough for Comcrap in our area. As a result, I'll have to go elsewhere to get my Ren and Stimpy fix since they've seen fit to drop Spike and replace it with some other country music video channel that's not CMT. Like TNN has been a country channel in what, 2 or 3 years? I did get the cluster running (which of course, needs work again) and I did get a RDTJ running myself, though not at the house. My disdain for Volvo's continues even though Aaron of the Cold North is now driving one of these safety posters.

I wrote at length at the general suckertude that was pervailing in music. For the most part this continues, though I have posted some highlights over the past year. 2003 has been good despite losing Zevon (not a fan but I'd be remiss not to point him out), Cash's, Palmer, and I'm sure a few others I'm missing. The Eels have continued to impress, putting out the wonderful Shootenanny. I need to get tickets to see them headline here in Nashville in a week. At least this time I won't have to put up with fans from the overrated Flaming Lips this time around. As much as I lamented a year ago that we need a next big thing, I think we've got a couple of groups up and coming that should make a difference. At least until the music industry gets their meat hooks into them and runs them thru the crap factory.

Less than a year after I set foot into Slowbar the place ups and closes. Though they apparently did book some good bands (I only went that one time) it was only a matter of time before they became a victim of their own PBR scene. That area has developed and serves beers other than PBR. Unfortunately in this day and age of computers one of the resturants over there lives by the Bosco's rule of bills: The more people in your party the less chance for the bill to be split. I don't understand with the prevalence of debit cards and fancy computer systems why resturants think they should not have to split a bill. It's come to the point where we won't go to these places simply for this reason. In the case of this other place, I simply did not eat (was not too hungry). It was easier to loiter at their place than it was to be a paying customer. There's something wrong with that picture.

Unfortunately my goal of getting Stag Beer to be the hip drink has not yet taken hold in Nashville. Or is that Natchville?

Made up Band Name of the Day: Most of the Dime