…just good music.

there are few things i enjoy more in life than getting to watch and listen to good musicians enjoying the time they have making music and jamming out together. albums like Jimmy Smith’s The Sermon, Buddy Miles’ Live ’71, Grateful Dead (name any live bootleg), Keith Jarrett Trio (any live album) – these all make me smile because you can feel the energy the musicians have together – and they’re GOOD!

and tonight, the red hot chili peppers got added to that list.

their albums are good – no doubt. but there are bands who can’t translate from the studio to a live setting very well. there are other bands who translate it TOO well and create over-produced, over-choreographed, waay-too-slick concerts that i would have been better off just staying home and listening to the CD. i fear both of these things when it comes to live shows.

so: gnarls barkley opens the show – interesting set. pretty straightforward – good reproduction of the CD – took 15 people on stage to reproduce it but it was cool.

and then. the peppers. holy. crap.

nothing fancy. the huge displays were the only special effects. no backup singers. just a dude playing percussion off to the side on some songs. they launched into a nice set of tunes during which i thought, “crap – they’re just reproducing the CD note for note…”

and then they shut me up.

suddenly, flea and john are the only ones up on stage and they’re doing this sweet jam. and they jam. and they jam some more. and this happened frequently through the rest of the show, eventually ending with the two of them bringing the house down during the encore.

i was surprised, but i wouldn’t have been if i had read up on the RHCP concert experience a bit. Wikipedia’s RHCP article includes the following:

Improvisation has always been a major part of the signature style of the band. Early shows were composed almost entirely of improvisations. As well, many solos recorded on the current albums by guitarist John Frusciante are improvised, and his live solos are almost invariably improvised, as are Flea’s bass solos. The band has, for the better part of the last decade, opened the show with a short improvisation, always on the same key as the initial song. Sometimes the beginnings, middle sections and/or endings of the songs are long extended by improvisations, such as Give it Away.

all this to say: i’d been familiar with the peppers since high school (they started waaay back in 1983) and bought bloodsugarsexmagik when it hit back in the early 90′s, but i didn’t realize what a fantastic, ass-kicking group of musicians they were!

awesome time tonight. hanging out with my friend scott, good dinner with friends of his at Betta’s, great show by the RHCP – good way to spend a saturday night.

GONE!

i’ve always had fun putting together web sites for youth ministries – waaay back in the day (like, 1995) i had put together a webpage containing only pictures of the youth group that almost no one could view (because no one had the internet at home). the next church lise and i were at, the other dude we did the ministry with put together a website with me – i had maintained that for probably 5 years or so. when we came to the last church we did ministry at, i put together www.dunamisyouth.com – we had maintained that for about 3 years by the time we finally left there. i had paid for several years on the domain name and offered to give it to the church / youth group but was told, “no thanks – you can keep it.” so i put a page up saying it was no longer the website for the group, etc. blah blah blah and there it sat for 10 months or so.

fast forward to october 2006. i receive an email from a guy out in california who is working with his church’s youth ministry – their youth group name is DUNAMIS and they were hoping to have a website with that in it to use for information, etc. – would i be interested in selling them the site and the name?

woo-woo! after all that time i can finally do something good with the website again! i was so happy! it was nice to be able to just give it to them knowing it would continue on being a tool for youth ministry.

so when you get a minute (assuming you care or perhaps remember the old dunamis site) check it out.

www.dunamisyouth.com

wanna take a guess who’s gonna be sitting pretty in the club seats at the red hot chili peppers concert here in cincinnati on january 20?

oh, yeah, baby. a birthday present from my bud matt.

now here’s a scary thing: matt and i have known each other since high school – the year before we got out of high school, who released their first album?

um, yeah. RHCP!! woo! still kicking butt after all this time.

the next scary thing? waay back in the day, the RHCP would perform wearing only a single strategically placed tube sock. my suggestion to matt?

i think we ought to go dressed accordingly.

i don’t think he thought i was being serious…