The Force Is With Him

You could be Barack Obama. You could be the president of the United States, the most powerful leader in the world. You could be smooth, cool, charismatic and intelligent. You could be talented, wise and successful. You could be playful, too, known for your lively sense of humour and willingness to have fun at a moment’s notice.

Or you could be the guy in the background.

iTunes Update

I installed iTunes 9 last week, but it wasn’t until today that I really took a look at the results.

First, some background: At one time, I owned rooms full of CDs, LPs and cassettes. This was largely because I was a newspaper music writer, so I was sent every new release by every label for about 15 years. These things tend to stack up. I bought an MP3 player around 2002 or so, a 64-meg jobbie called an MPio or something like that, but it wasn’t until I bought my first iPod that I realized the convenience of incorporeal media.

I spent a long time adding my favourite CDs to iTunes (to be honest, many of my CDs were never even taken out of the plastic). But that first iPod, which is still working, held only 20 gigs, so I couldn’t put the whole collection on it.

In 2005, when everything imploded, I gave away several thousand CDs and put the ones that mattered in storage in my father-in-law’s barn. He isn’t my father-in-law anymore, and I suspect those CDs are long gone. But I kept the music. Over the years, those 20 gigs worth of songs have been transferred from that iPod to a computer, back to iPods, back to computers, over and over again.

Over the past few years, I have, now and again, deleted songs from iTunes to make my library fit onto that old iPod. This meant songs went missing inside my labyrinth of storage. When we bought a new computer last fall, I continued to synch my iPod with my old laptop, because I am lazy.

I was given a new 120-meg iPod for Christmas, and decided to move all my music and video to the new computer’s monster hard drive and synch there. But I never got around to it. It wasn’t until iTunes 9 came out last week that I dumped all my digital content into one place and plugged in the iPod.

This results in some weird effects, something iTunes 9 has made clear. I have all kinds of weirdly distorted file names, and I can’t change them, so I have to download an ID3 editor. For some reason, this new iTunes is coding some artists’s songs individually, so when I scroll through my iPod I find 100 entries for the Dandy Warhols under “artist.” Also, I have several Bon Jovi songs. I didn’t know that.

So I’m culling. The kids have outgrown all the children’s songs I have, and really, I’m never going to listen to the audiobooks I borrowed from the library and copied all those years ago. I don’t need this Bloodhound Gang album. And why do I have seven copies of The Fixx’s One Thing Leads To Another?

Sometimes I miss CDs, but then I look around at the hundreds that have stacked up in my house over the past two years — discs that have never made it to iTunes — and I realize I’d still rather keep it all in my pocket. Except for the Bloodhound Gang.

So, We Were Chatting With Suzie Plakson …

I’m a sucker for redheads. Two of my favourite people in the world have red hair, and one of them is my mom.

We interviewed Suzie Plakson, who played four different characters on three different Star Trek series, on the latest Starbase 66. Listen to it after this, but I wanted to say something that I didn’t get to on the show.

Talking to Suzie was fun. She’s an actress, as you probably know, but she’s also a wicked cool singer and sculptor. Most of all, she’s a celebrity … and that made me nervous.

It shouldn’t have. I’ve been interviewing famous people since I was a teenager. I’ve had coffee with a prime minister. I’ve partied with rock stars. I’ve sat in William Shatner’s office chair, for Kirk’s sake. For years, I asked celebrities questions they might not have wanted to answer, questions aimed at informing readers. “Suzie, you had a great death scene, but you left us with a terrible legacy, so please tell us how it felt to give birth to a horrible Klingon child with a giant spiky head, played by that annoying kid from Family Ties?” I didn’t ask that question. But I wanted to.

I don’t know why I was nervous about doing this, but it didn’t last, because Suzie is the kind of cool I’ve known all my life, an arts professional who dances to her own drum and has never fallen into the machine. Still, I went into this (with all my weirdisms) with an Eeyore cloud over my head.

It turned out to be a non-issue. We had a blast, and Suzie Plakson is a riot of cool.

Which brings me to my point: She doesn’t like science fiction. And she told us that from the start. She likes science fiction fans, but the genre itself does nothing for her. This is all right, because it made for an excellent conversation. And this is all right, because I suspect a lot of actors pretend to be geekier than they are in order to please their fans, and Suzie doesn’t do that. She has plenty of geeky qualities, as she says on the show, but spaceships and aliens are not among them.

I love that. She is 100 percent without pretense. She never fell into the machine.

She is who she is, she’s a lot of fun, and she’s funny as hell. I like her music, too; it’s smoky and cool and not all that country. The Admiral used some of it on the show.

Listen to it here.

I sound like a dork on this episode because I was a little twitchy. This happens to me around redheads.

This is Suzie’s website. You should also IMDB her, because she’s been in a lot of things you’ve seen besides Star Trek.

How To Rock A Bar

The BoDeans were never as big as they might have probably should have been, but I liked what they did. The problem, as has affected more bands than I have grey hairs, is this: they were not built for the studio.

Some bands thrive in the studio, but leak weiner juice live. Ever seen a Guns ‘n’ Roses concert? I have. Ever seen a Guns ‘n’ Roses concert sober? I have. Horrible. On the converse, one of the best live shows I have ever seen was Def Leppard, and that was less about the music than about the showmanship.

The BoDeans were an American rock band, a talented duo with diverse influences who combined to create something we had not yet heard. It should have been a big deal. It was not. You know why? No single. No studio presence. The albums were fine, some good radio-ready rock, but they didn’t get airplay. The closest they got was Closer to Free. You’d remember it if you heard it.

But give them the chance to play for a live crowd (plus some Lettermanisms, and that Canadian guy on keys), and you got this:

That’s a kickass performance from the BoDeans (who were really just two guys, Kurt Neumann and Sammy Llamas). I went searching for the video for that song, and stopped when I found this Letterman performance. Killer. Sammy’s mullet is also very, very cool.

The best live band I have ever seen was called Vic and the Meat Kings. It was a nine-piece ska/shuffle/punk/jazz/rock band in the 90s. Nothing can compare to what they did. It’s okay if you’ve never heard of them, because that’s the way music works. Live power does not mean instant record sales. You have to be able to lip-synch and pose and participate in the latest Kanye West scandal to get that kind of fame.

Another great live band: Thomas Trio and the Red Albino. This was amazing music, and I wore out their CD. The Scott B. Sympathy was another one. Fantastic music. No airplay. My great friend Hank and his body of work. No airplay. This all happened at a place I love, and it was once perfectly captured here.

Meanwhile, the Jonas Brothers and their “backing musicians” are the latest taste.

Here’s my point: you may someday become rich and famous because of your music, but it isn’t likely. In the meantime, pay attention to that BoDeans video and understand that it’s all about pleasing the people right in front of you. It’s about pumping up that energy. Forget fame. Forget fortune. Rock the house and rock the bar, and if you do it right, the rest will come.

Well, I guess it might not. But someone will write a stupid blog post about you someday.