Waterloo means music

Live music at Waterloo Records is a "Summer of Jay" staple, and Waterloo is keeping their end of the bargain with a steady schedule of performances. These shows are not just summer events for the store, but it seems like they have a busier lineup this time of year. Plus, it's a whole lot easier for me to get to 6th and Lamar at 5:00 when I'm out of school. There may not be much structure to my schedule on a daily basis, but I'll build my afternoons around getting there.

Everybody likes Matt the Electrician, and he shows up in the audience when his friends are playing their gigs. He seems like the kind of guy that would pay a cover charge to support other musicians, rather than get comped at the door. His song-writing is full of bouncy melodies and standard ballads. He played with a full band that included Scrappy Jud Newcomb, and a female singer that really helped round out the songs. Matt plays multiple instruments, including the banjolele in the picture, but he really benefits from having a backing band that fills out the songs without stepping on the lyrics.

Matt is pretty well known for his cover of Journey's "Faithfully." People kind of giggle when they hear him start it for the first time, but he plays it totally straight. The result is sweet and sincere, not a bit campy, and a reminder that an over-played, sappy love song can still be a damn fine song. I was going to link to a YouTube video, but I'm having techo-problems. Do it yourself, if you are interested, and watch or skip to the end, where the audience sings along.

Hey, look. Google/Blogspot fixed the glitch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umO1uxi82VQ

While trying to solve those problems, I lost my picture of Foster and Lloyd, and could only re-post it at the top of this entry.

Foster and Lloyd had a little success in the 1980's as a country duo, and then broke up, with Radney Foster gaining some acclaim as a solo artist, and Bill Lloyd falling off the face of the earth. Foster still has a terrifically smooth voice, and is more of a showman than Lloyd, who played lead guitar while his partner did most of the vocal heavy lifting.

Their new songs felt pretty tied down to a Nashville formula, and I was left wondering why they've gotten back together. I think they are both really talented, and capable of writing smarter songs (although they did manage to rhyme "innuendo" with "comprendo"), but the results are not greater than the sum of their parts.
Here's a video from their first career:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAGncA1BlQ8

This entry was written a couple of days ago, but The Blog Company was experencing difficulties, which appear to have been fixed. Yea.

Peace,

JS4

P.S. It appears that the tech problem was largely Blogspot's, and that my incompetence was overestimated, but based on a reliable history of techno-incompetence.