REM played the Hollywood Bowl tonight!

Wow, REM played the Hollywood Bowl tonight.

I often rush out and grab tix for a major show at the Bowl. Love those event-class gigs like the “as close as you will ever get to seeing the Faces” appearance by Ron Wood which disrupted Rod Stewart’s ode to Cole Porter show there a few years back or the “I had 6th ROW tickets for the original tour but got MONO”/relive your high school years Roger Waters DSOTM extravaganza last year when he still had his pig. Not to mention the obligatory John Mellencamp shows for the wife (happy birthday, dear).

But I had no interest in this one.

Yeah, I hear the new record could be the best thing they’ve done since they left IRS but no matter how good it will be/is/was, it will NEVER be like the shows I saw “back in the day”: REM playing Six Flags over Mid-America to a totally bewildered crowd of clueless teens that surrounded a couple dozen die hard St. Louis hipsters before Murmur was even released. Then there was a memorable 1984 appearance during the Bicycle tour at Washington University’s Graham Chapel with the dB’s as special guests, and the ensuing night of partying which included a tour bus stop at Heartbreak Hotel (the bar I managed) to load up for the party at Stipe’s former bandmates house (he spent time in the STL) and culminated with Peter Buck’s 3:00 am attempt to disappear with the last 6 pack which was foiled by yours truly and my bandmate George.

Yeah, REM played the Hollywood Bowl tonight.

And instead of attempting to retrieve that youthful hipness and take a stroll down memory lane (while waiting for the stacked parking to empty out), I saw my daughter sing in a choir at her middle school. In 3 different languages.

Now, that ticket was worth something!

I feel so…renewed

well, that didn’t take too long!

spent a few hours this evening cleaning up the rtkmusic website and loosing the graphics that had been there since, hmmm, too long ago.  So, no more stars changing colors, no more guestbook, no more outdated name banner.  went the simple look.  cut down the links page, and will add more here on the blog and tumblrolls. 

Still have a few links to clean up, but I’ll get to those in a few days.  It’s a busy week: last night Ad Council met, then tonight was JK’s cub scout advancement, tomorrow night is GK’s choir concert (not to mention CK’s birthday!) and we finish things off Friday with JK’s tough little league playoff game against the Pirates on Friday. 

Musically, Mike V called today and hopefully we’ll get together soon.  I owe Doug Sparks a call (and a hundred bucks) - he is doing some fine songwriting with Melanie Bomar, who just KILLED the vocals on two of the songs Doug and I wrote.  You can check them out on Doug’s myspace page.

Hopefully, I’ll get into the studio this summer and start working on the next project, whatever that will be.  There is also talk of recording some of Faith UMC’s musical talent for a CD later this year. 

BTW, it’s been 25 years since a post-punk/pop act with diverse influences called Page Three debuted at St. Louis’ punk venue Billie Goat Hill on a hot summer night.  I am sure I’ll get all sentimental at some point and blog about that “page” in my history…no pun intended…really. REALLY!

So, where are they now?  Hmmm…

tumblr and twitter and wordpress, oh my

Back in my youth, I would simply walk down the street three houses to knock on the door to see if my friend was home.  On rainy days, I might have called ahead. 

Nowadays, we have so many communication tools, and I (and probably others) have so little patience!

So, I am attempting to simplify things:

A blog for my personal ramblings, musings, news, etc. (umm, this blog right here), a website specifically focused on my musical efforts (songwriting/performing) here, and a few limited amount of social networks for my musical and professional efforts: LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. 

A friend of mine introduced me to Naymz a few weeks ago, and within one click all my LinkedIn friends received invites. I instantly came to the realization that, although it seemed inocuous enough, this was one networking opportunity too many. While some of my contacts readily jumped into the Naymz fray, I got several responses indicating a less than enthusiastic stand on Naymz.

Next, via Third Day’s Mark Lee  and Twitter friends like Anthony I discovered Tumblr – wow, one place to rule them all.

Except that tumblr can’t find a way to take my RSS feed from Blogger (where this blog originated).  And WordPress, where I set up a mirror rtkmusic blog to feed Tumblr, can’t accept updates from Twitter.  So much for simplification. 

So, for the time being, tumblr will become my aggregator (via rtkmusic.com) from wordpress and twitter.  Got it?  I think I do…

And then there is FriendFeed, which might be valuable in promoting my music but I need to suss that out.  And Pownce or Jaiku, which compete with Twitter but might have better uptime than Twitter recently. 

Ah, choices…