Stuck In Thee Garage #336: August 28, 2020

 It's a dumb year and getting dumber. Sometimes the best remedy for what ails you is to crank up something fun and dumb, like the classic hard rock I played in hour 2 of Stuck In Thee Garage today. No jean jacket required...although you may want to hide the zucchini.

This playlist goes to 11:

Hour 1

Artist - Song/Album

Happyness - Vegetable/Floatr

Lewis Del Mar - The Ceiling/August

No Joy - Kidder/Motherhood

Guided By Voices - Bunco Man/Mirrored Aztec

The Beths - Mars, God of War/Jump Rope Gazers

Chicano Batman - Moment of Joy/Invisible People

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - It Gets Easier/Reunions

Protomartyr - Modern Business Hymns/Ultimate Success Today

Candace - Still Phase/Ideal Corners

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - The Cool Change/Sideways to New Italy

Fake Names - All For Sale/Fake Names

Wylde Ratttz - I'm Not Screwin' Around/Wylde Ratttz

Built to Spill - Fake Records of Rock 'N Roll/Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston

NNAMDi - Everyone I Loved/Brat

Run the Jewels - Ooh La La (Ft. Greg Nice and DJ Premier)/RTJ4

Sleaford Mods - Tweet Tweet Tweet/All That Glue

Hour 2: Hard rock

UFO - Lights Out/Strangers in the Night

UFO - Doctor Doctor/Strangers in the Night

Ozzy Osbourne - Believer/Diary of a Madman

Spinal Tap - Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight/This Is Spinal Tap

Rainbow - Long Live Rock 'N' Roll/Long Live Rock 'N' Roll

Def Leppard - Rock Rock (Till You Drop)/Pyromania

David Lee Roth - Elephant Gun/Eat 'Em and Smile

Van Halen - D.O.A./Van Halen II

Motorhead - Dead Men Tell No Tales/Bomber

Black Sabbath - Electric Funeral/Paranoid

Thin Lizzy - Fighting My Way Back/Fighting

Blue Oyster Cult - The Red and the Black/Tyranny & Mutation

Judas Priest - Riding On the Wind/Screaming For Vengeance

Iron Maiden - Wasted Years/Somewhere In Time

Stuck In Thee Garage #335: August 21, 2020

The way the months have been flying by of late, it kind of feels like we're in a state of perpetual Smarch these days. Not so much the weather, but the confusion over what month and day it is. Calendars don't have much meaning anymore. Despite that, I played songs about months in hour 2 of Stuck In Thee Garage today. 

The playlist, if you will:

Hour 1

Artist - Song/Album

Teenage Wrist - Silverspoon/Single

IDLES - Model Village/Ultra Mono

Guided By Voices - Lip Curlers/Mirrored Aztec

Illuminati Hotties - freequent letdown/FREE I.H.: This Is Not the One You've Been Waiting For

Chicano Batman - Manuel's Story/Invisible People

Postcards - Fossilized/The Good Soldier

JARV IS... - Save the Whale/Beyond the Pale

The Psychedelic Furs - Wrong Train/Made of Rain

Protomartyr - Tranquilizer/Ultimate Success Today

Fontaines D.C. - A Lucid Dream/A Hero's Death

Jason Molina - Shadow Answers the Wall/Eight Gates

The Neverly Boys - Never Come Down/Dark Side of Everything

Coriky - Say Yes/Coriky

Used Cassettes - Sour Puss/Used Cassettes

No Age - War Dance/Goons Be Gone

Gateway Drugs - Bored/PSA

Jeff Rosenstock - Honeymoon Ashtray/NO DREAM

Hour 2: Monthly

Rubinoos - January/From Home

Foo Fighters - February Stars/The Colour and the Shape

Dead Stars - February Ghost/Never Not Here

Frightened Rabbit - Late March, Death March/Pedestrian Verse

Max Webster - April in Toledo/Universal Juveniles

Robert Plant - The May Queen/Carry Fire

Minutemen - June 16th/Double Nickels on the Dime

Jeff Rosenstock - June 21st/WORRY.

Soundgarden - 4th of July/Superunknown

Horse Jumper of Love - July 5th/Horse Jumper of Love

Kristin Hersh - August/Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

Big Star - September Gurls/Radio City

Beaches - September/Second of Spring

Spoon - Do You/They Want My Soul

The National - Mr. November/Alligator

The Lemonheads - December/The Lemonheads

Teenage Fanclub - December/Bandwagonesque

Long Slow Goodbye

It's been quite the week. I mean, it's been quite the year, but you knew that already. On Monday, I drove Hannah up to Montreal to begin her first year at McGill University. Actually, she has to first quarantine for two weeks in a hotel before she can move into her dorm. Canada has been pretty strict about limiting visitors, especially those from our COVID-ridden country. Because H and I are both Canadian citizens, we were able to get in, although I had to promise the border agent I would drop Hannah off and leave the country immediately, not getting out of my car at any point before I left the confines of the Great White North. 

Here we are in 2003 and 17 years later, just before we left for Montreal:

 

It's a big life moment, sending your kid off to college. It didn't happen the way we would have liked. Ideally, we would have gone up earlier in the summer (Lily was supposed to take a summer course at McGill) to set Hannah up with a bank account and stuff like that, and then we would have taken her to school in late August and helped her move everything into her dorm. But thanks to COVID-19 and the supremely shitty way the U.S. has handled (or not handled) it, Canada has closed its border to non-essential travel from the U.S. Classes are being done remotely and many international students are being denied entry. The dorms are still open (mostly for first-year students) and we wanted Hannah to have some semblance of a freshman year, so we decided to send her up there anyway. 

We were a little concerned about how the border crossing would go, because we had read that some parents weren't allowed to cross the border with their kids and had to call a car service to take them the rest of the way. I felt like being a Canadian citizen and having no plans to stay up there, I'd be allowed to drop her off, but you never know. I had the number of a car service in my phone just in case. We got to the border around 2:45 on Monday and there were no other cars there. It took only seven minutes to get through. H had filled out a travel plan using a Canadian government app, so the agent had that and looked at our citizenship documents and U.S. passports, but he spent most of the time going over the quarantine requirements and the penalties for violating them. 

From the border, it was another hour to downtown Montreal and Hannah's hotel. I had to circle a few times before I could get a parking spot out front. I got all of her bags loaded onto a luggage cart and then it was time to say goodbye. It was still tough to drive away from the hotel, but I was quickly distracted by having to figure out how to get back to the highway out of the city. Eventually I did, and then I had five hours of solo driving to think about how much I'd miss the kid. 

It's not like we were attached at the hip anymore like in that first photo. She's 18 and very independent, and she very much enjoys spending time alone reading/watching TV/online/listening to music. Reminds me of someone else I know. Although she still would go through phases where she'd just come out and hang out with us to watch a show or just be goofy. If there's one good thing about the last five months, it's that I got to spend a lot more time with her than I probably would have normally.

This is Day 6 of her quarantine. I'm sure she's bored out of her mind, but she's been reading, watching TV and FaceTiming with us and her friends. It's very strange to get up in the morning and not see her snoozing in her room across the hall. Lily took very little time to clear out their shared bedroom of everything Hannah-related (we're turning our guest room into her room for when she's home), but she definitely misses her big sister. We're adjusting to life without Hannah. We probably won't see her again until sometime around Christmas, but at least we're connected via technology. When I went to college, I would call home once a week just to check in, but I would only go home once a month (I was only half an hour away from home, so it was easy) to work and make some money. I was happy to be out of the house, especially considering things were not so great there at the time. Hannah's happy to be out of the country, but at the same time, she misses us and her friends and also is sort of in this weird stasis period where she is literally stuck in a room for 14 days. Normally, she would have made a bunch of new friends and gone to see the city, but that will have to wait until the 24th. 

And so our partially empty nest situation has begun. We've got Lily for two more years and then she's off (and she can't wait). That will be REALLY weird. But this is weird enough for now.

Stuck In Thee Garage #334: August 14, 2020

 First impressions are important. So it makes sense that the first song on an album should be a grabber. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played great album openers in hour 2. They'll get you pumped up. And remember, there's always money in the banana stand. Not really relevant to the point at hand, but important to note regardless.

This playlist is like cash money:

Hour 1

Artist - Song/Album

The Psychedelic Furs - The Boy Who Invented Rock & Roll/Made of Rain

Wye Oak - AEIOU/No Horizon EP

Emerald Comets - Swoon/Strangelands

Pillow Queens - Handsome Wife/In Waiting

Crack Cloud - Tunnel Vision/Pain Olympics

The Beths - Acrid/Jump Rope Gazers

Illuminati Hotties - free ppls/FREE I.H.: This Is Not the One You've Been Waiting For

Alice Bag - Breadcrumbs/Sister Dynamite

Cloud Nothings - The Mess Is Permanent/The Black Hole Understands

Blitzen Trapper - Masonic Temple Microdose #1/Holy Smokes Future Jokes

My Morning Jacket - Wasted/The Waterfall II

Fontaines D.C. - I Was Not Born/A Hero's Death

The Budos Band - Long In the Tooth/Long In the Tooth

Richard Dawson - Two Halves/2020

Hour 2: Album openers

Living Colour - Time's Up/Time's Up

Drive Like Jehu - Here Come the Rome Plows/Yank Crime

Helmet - Wilma's Rainbow/Betty

The Stooges - Down On the Street/Fun House

Pavement - Stereo/Brighten the Corners

Ben Folds Five - One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces/Whatever and Ever Amen

The Cure - In Between Days/The Head on the Door

Metric - Help I'm Alive/Fantasies

The Pretenders - Precious/Pretenders

Dinosaur Jr. - The Wagon/Green Mind

The Posies - Dream All Day/Frosting On the Beater

Girls Against Boys - Park Avenue/Freak*On*Ica

Rocket From the Crypt - Middle/Scream, Dracula, Scream!

New Bomb Turks - Id Slips In/Information Highway Revisited

Queens of the Stone Age - You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar But I Feel Like a Millionaire/Songs For the Deaf

Rancid - Maxwell Murder/...And Out Come the Wolves

Masters of Reality - The Candy Song/Masters of Reality

Stuck In Thee Garage #333: August 7, 2020

Let's face it, in these insane times, even 2005 looks kinda good in comparison. At the time, it was kind of a shitshow, what with the Gulf War, Hurricane Katrina and the incompetent bumbling of a president who now looks like a genius compared to the current occupant of the position. Today on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from 2005 in hour 2 and it's a pretty strong collection of indie rock goodness. Well, you could still go on dates back then, so that's a plus.

This playlist is single and loving it:

Hour 1

Artist - Song/Album

Fontaines D.C. - Televised Mind/A Hero's Death

Plague Vendor - SPF/Night Sweats

Dehd - Haha/Flower of Devotion

Illuminati Hotties - b yr own b/FREE I.H.: This Is Not the One You've Been Waiting For

The Beths - Don't Go Away/Jump Rope Gazers

Fake Names - This Is Nothing/Fake Names

Protomartyr - Michigan Hammers/Ultimate Success Today

Wolfhounds - Pointless Killing/Electric Music

The Asteroid No. 4 - The After Glow/Single

 Swervedriver - Juggernaut Rides/Petroleum Spirit Daze

JARV IS... - Sometimes I Am Pharoah/Beyond the Pale

The Dears - I Know What You're Thinking and It's Awful/Lovers Rock

John K. Samson - Fantasy Baseball and the End of the World/Single

Run the Jewels - Pulling the Pin (feat. Mavis Staples and Josh Homme)/RTJ4

Emerald Comets - Knock the Thoughts/Strangelands

Pottery - Down in the Dumps/Welcome to Bobby's Motel

 

Hour 2: 2005

LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing at My House/LCD Soundsystem

Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc./Demon Days

The White Stripes - My Doorbell/Get Behind Me Satan

Art Brut - Formed a Band/Bang Bang Rock & Roll

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict a Riot/Employment

Bloc Party - Helicopter/Silent Alarm

Greg Dulli - So Tight/Amber Headlights

Queens of the Stone Age - In My Head/Lullabies to Paralyze

Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds/With Teeth

Black Mountain - No Satisfaction/Black Mountain

Sleater-Kinney - Jumpers/The Woods

Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline)/Broken Social Scene

Wolf Parade - You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son/Apologies to the Queen Mary

Spoon - I Put My Camera On/Gimme Fiction

The Hold Steady - Cattle and the Creeping Things/Separation Sunday