The Return of a Couple Things....

Hey.
How've you been?

What?
C'mon... it was just a couple weeks.

You already took me off your RSS reader?!?


Okay, so I have no excuses. Just like anything else, it became easier to put the blog aside with each day that I took off. But with this post, I intend to get back into full posting action (no guarantees here, though). After all the mundane tasks that went into making my year-end lists, some of the fun was sucked out of the music. And, frankly, I'm not going to post when I feel a little less than expired.

Spoon - Back To The Life
from Spoon's Daytrotter Session

In my defense, I have been somewhat pre-occupied in the evenings fixing up the old High School stomping grounds. We spent most of our youthful nights across the street from my current location in a converted garage that housed a pool table and endless amounts of beer.

Now with a friend back in the house, and a few more years under belts, the time has come for a little remodeling. The pool table has been re-felted, the beer boxes have all fallen off the ceiling, and the sound system/music library has received a much-needed overhaul. We wiped clean my old desktop computer, loaded with nothing but iTunes and a few thousand choice musical selections and wired it to a vintage but powerful receiver to pump the room full of aural goodness. Providing the bass in the room are the big speakers from an old ROCK-OLA 45" Jukebox. The ultimate goal is to fill it with record store gems, but until then the original speakers are doing just fine. No home bar in Texas would be complete without a State flag under spotlight and a semi-creepy portrait of The Duke. We also removed the stand from the back of the monitor and mounted it on a swivel so one can DJ from either side of the bar. Going through the uploaded tunes to make brand new playlists has allowed for an eye-opening musical review of the many songs I've picked up over the last couple years.


































Whiskeytown - Bar Lights
from The Freightwhaler Demos (1996)

The Replacements - Pool & Dive
from Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? (2006)

Cross Canadian Ragweed - 17
from Purple (2002)

The Belmont isn't complete yet, but the transformation is more than underway. And we've made the decision to never again decorate with cardboard.