Googaritaville

Coolness abounds. Yesterday I got an e-mail about the upcoming Jimmy Buffett tour. He's playing this year at a more convenient venue for me, the Sleep Train Pavilion, formerly Chronicle Pavilion, formerly Concord Pavilion, which is, in fact, in Concord.

One of the things the e-mail emphasized was that one could now track Buffett's tour using Google Earth. Today I get a blog update from a friend at Google highlighting not only the Buffett tour, but the tools for making your own.

I've not been a big Google Earth user, but I might have to be now, just to make y'all extra jealous of my next vacation! Since it's a dive trip, I'll have to see whether I can combine this tour thing with their new underwater maps.... Geek nirvana meets Margaritaville!

Growing Older But Not Up

The busy musical week continued last night with a Jimmy Buffett concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre. I don't like having to drive all the way down to Shoreline for a show, but it's always worth it to see Jimmy. [Though I must say that ticket prices are getting way out of hand; for mediocre seats in the back of the bowl, we paid something like $130 dollars plus the "convenience fee."]

Having just been to the Tower of Power 40th anniversary concert last weekend, it was fun to hear Jimmy thanking us for giving him a summer job for the last forty years. Nice way to rub in that we're all getting a bit older!

But as I've noted before, these "old" bands I like so much put on much better shows than most of the newer artists I've paid to hear.

One definite highlight was Jimmy's rendition of "Fruitcakes," a song he recorded about fifteen years ago (there's a line about "We're seven years from the millenium..."). Not only did he update some of the lyrics for the passage of time, but he filled the song with local references to the bay area. I couldn't tell whether he was reading those lyrics, but it didn't seem like it. It's remarkable to me that an artist could rework one of his old songs like that, more-or-less on the spot, and have it come out so well.

Another highlight came right after the intermission, when one of the members of the Coral Reefer Band, Mac McAnally, sang one of his older tunes that he says keeps coming to mind during this election year, called "The Ass and the Hole." It's pretty funny.

I guess another sign that we're getting older is that one of my friends brought his 10-year-old daughter to her first Buffett concert: our first parakeet! My daughter hasn't shown the interest in either Jimmy or concerts, so she might miss out.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to shell out a few bucks to keep Jimmy employed and entertaining me every summer. There are certainly worse ways to spend it.

Duke's on Sunday

Through the magic of the International Date Line, I find myself blogging again on Sunday, despite having flown a great long way overnight. I mean, we left Bali at 10:30 on Sunday night, and arrived in Honolulu at 5:40 on Sunday afternoon. Ah, well.

And as so often happens to me as I'm on a tropical island, I have a Jimmy Buffett tune bouncing through my brain. Entirely appropriate this time, as the tune in my head is "Duke's on Sunday," a tribute to the very beach we just walked past on our way to and from dinner. Duke's is named for Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer best known as the man who popularized surfing around the world.

So here I am, on Sunday, at Duke's. Cool.

We've moved across the street from our last hotel, to the Moana Surfrider, which is right on Waikiki Beach, and our room has a window that opens right out over Duke's beach, with a view of Diamond Head. It's great to open the window and listen to the surf, which should be very soothing to our jet-lagged selves.

We had another nice dinner at the Hau Tree Lanai, and Danny the sommelier gave us another fine wine recommendation and also a taste of his newest acquisition, a fruit-infused sake that is really yummy.

Tomorrow, we hope to hit the Waikiki Aquarium, which we always seem to just miss, then hop a flight back home. That'll be another short day, but work awaits on Tuesday, so go we must! Until then, Hawaii is a pretty gentle way to slip back into the U.S.

One little travel note I should include is that we had something like 25 minutes to make our plane connection in Guam overnight, and I was dreading that, because of having to clear immigration and customs. But hey, they've changed things since the last time I went through there. Yes, we all had to clear immigration, but that was just a matter of swiping the passports. Customs we didn't have to clear until we got to Honolulu. So it turned out to be no sweat to make it to our connecting flight. Yay!

Music that Makes Me Happy

Last night I had the roughly annual pleasure of seeing Jimmy Buffett live. This was the second time he's played at the historic Fillmore Auditorium (They no longer have their own website, darn it, so you'll have to settle for this Wikipedia article for now.), and the second time I've seen him there.

It was a good show, but it can't live up to the Really Awesome Show he put on the first time he played there in 2005. That was a terrific experience. He was obviously thrilled to be there, and had put together several special numbers with the band that resonated with the venue, covering tunes by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Neil Young in addition to his usual fare. Last night he managed to put in a few specials, but he mostly stuck to the set list he's been touring with.

I suppose the other "special" aspect of the first show, other than it being such a first, was that the show was a fund raiser to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans has a special place in Jimmy's heart, as he grew up on the Gulf coast, so it was pretty cool to help him try to help those folks.

Being in a smaller venue (I believe the Fillmore holds something like 1200 people) means the concert is a much more intimate experience than the ones in the big barns with 15,000 people. It makes it possible to watch the faces and interactions of the band members, which is fun. And it lets you just space off with the music. Toward the end of the show, he played the song "One Particular Harbour," which always transports me:

And there's that one particular harbour
Sheltered from the wind
Where the children play on the shore each day
And all are safe within

I remember quite vividly seeing my one particular harbour on my first trip to Palau. It was our "honeymoon" (a year before the wedding), and we went past this absolutely perfect, gorgeous little spot on one of the islands. I later found out that's where one of the Palauan chiefs lives (or one of his places, anyway). Just a small, simple house with a beach, surrounded by palm trees in the tropical sun. Nice.

But I digress....

Anyway, Jimmy did some fun stuff. In place of his traditional "Why Don't We Get Drunk?" song, he commemorated the 21st birthday of one of the attendees with a serenade from Bob Dylan, which I never knew was called "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35." But the crowd all seemed to know the chorus really well. And he kicked off the second half of the show by performing "God's Own Drunk," which he rarely does any more. That's a fine old bit (originally by Lord Buckley), featuring a moonshiner, a still, and a bear. Doesn't get much better than that.

Except they followed it with a solo number by one of the long-time backup singers for the band, Nadirah Shakoor. She covered one of Buffett's older, less well-known songs, "Wonder Why We Ever Go Home," and I must say, it sounds quite a bit different when she does it. Quite nice.

Oh, and if you want to know what a professional thought of the show, here's the review from the San Jose Mercury News. See? it wasn't just me! It was a great show.

27 Years of Beer

One of the things I like about Jimmy Buffett is that fairly often, for no reason I can fathom, one of his lyrics or tunes pops into my head. I was just shutting down the computer for the night when I realized I was humming one of his old, clever tunes:

And across from the bar is a pile of beer cans,
Been there twenty-seven years.
Imagine all the heartaches and tears
In twenty-seven years of beer.

That's from "Ringling, Ringling," and I still have no idea how it got in my head this evening. Doesn't seem to have much to do with debugging browser compatibility issues in my Ajax code.

I suppose it could be somehow related to me picking up my framed poster from last year's concert at the Fillmore Auditorium (by local mosaic portrait artist Jason Mecier) today. It looks very nice, and I can't wait to hang it in my office. Let's see if I can convince Blogger to show you what it looks like...

Of course, he didn't sing that song at that show. And I don't recall drinking 27 years of beer, either. Go figure.

An Evening in Margaritaville

Gosh, roughly 24 hours since I got back from seeing Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band at Shoreline Amphitheatre, and it's hard to believe I haven't said anything about it yet. [Possibly it's harder to believe that I've been blogging for the better part of a month, and haven't mentioned Mr. Buffett before!]

First, I guess I'd better come clean: I'm something of a Parrothead. I don't belong to any club, but I have lost count of the number of Buffett concerts I've attended, and I am known to wear colorful Hawaiian-style attire.

So, about last night: good show. I rather enjoy when Buffett tours when he's not promoting a new album, because he generally chooses to play some fun, older songs that might get aced out by something new and forgettable. Last night had a couple of fun covers: a version of the John Phillips/Mamas and Papas tune "California Dreamin'" and (because Bill Payne of Little Feat was sitting in) a delightful rendition of "Dixie Chicken."

Obviously, the show couldn't measure up to last October's hurricane-relief concert at the historic Fillmore Auditorium (where I was one of about 1200 people attending...awesome!). I'm still hoping Jimmy will put out a recording of that show. He covered tunes by Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews, Jimi Hendrix, and Neil Young that night in addition to some of his own classics (and a couple of Grateful Dead tunes, of course). Truly a memorable night.

Only real downside to this show last night was that the current edition of the Coral Reefer Band doesn't have a horn section. I think the horns add a lot to the sound, but the set list didn't include many tunes that truly need horns, so I guess that's how he justifies it. But A Pirate Looks at Forty just isn't the same without Amy Lee's soulful alto sax solo.

On the plus side, however, this was probably the best Buffett crowd I'd ever seen at Shoreline. The last time we went, the crowd was apathetic and sat through much of the show. Last night's crowd was up all night, dancing and singing. That was really good. It also helps that the staff and administration at Shoreline seem to have lightened up a bit, making the whole scene more pleasant.

And oddly enough, as I fell asleep last night, I was singing to myself a song that they didn't even play in the concert, a Mac McAnally tune called "Semi-True Story":

It's a semi-true story
Believe it or not
I made up a few things
And there's some I forgot.
But the life and the tellin'
Are both real to me
And they all run together and turn out to be
A semi-true story.

Which pretty much sums up any explanation of a concert you didn't attend.