Chad Smith

Note: This isn’t exactly timely, but I’m over the pain enough now to post this. Yeah, that’s right. Fuck off.

I was in a friend’s van on the way back from a spring near DeLand years ago when I first heard The Smiths. After I got home that night I started downloading the band’s more popular numbers. Some time later a friend made me a mix CD of Smiths and Morrissey songs, and we wore it the hell out driving to and fro wherever we went in those days, testing the limits of the shitty factory speakers in my 1993 Chevrolet Cavalier. I’ve believed ever since.

I wouldn’t get to see the man in the flesh until 2007, when I went to two shows in three days. If there was a ranking of the best moments of my life, that second concert would be included in the top five, possibly top three. That night, the band debuted “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris” and I got handshakes during two of my favorite Smiths songs, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” a song that was rarely played on that tour.

But, as if to punish me for having too grand an experience, Moz has let me down time after time after time since.

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On the plane to England we watched “European Vacation.” Now in France, it’s easy to wonder whether the French-speaking waiters, shop clerks and hotel receptionists are saying the same things to us they said to the Griswold clan. That said, we haven’t experienced a lot of the oft-discussed French rudeness. At least that we’re aware of.

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Spent a few days in Austin last week and…

ate a Texas-sized (because everything is Texas-sized in Texas) burrito

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Orlando date canceled; Jacksonville date postponed:

3/1 – Orlando, Fla. – Hard Rock Live
3/3 – Jacksonville, Fla. – Florida Theatre
3/7 – Atlanta – Variety Playhouse
3/9 – Asheville, N.C. – The Orange Peel
4/12 – Austin, Texas – Bass Concert Hall
5/11 – London – Royal Albert Hall

A brick in the small of the back again…

Texas date added:

3/1 – Orlando, Fla. – Hard Rock Live
3/3 – Jacksonville, Fla. – Florida Theatre
3/7 – Atlanta – Variety Playhouse
3/9 – Asheville, N.C. – The Orange Peel
4/12 – Austin, Texas – Bass Concert Hall
5/11 – London – Royal Albert Hall

I will see you in far-off places…

Descending a ramp to get the hell out of the Florida Citrus Bowl, “The Victors” made its way through the bowels of the old stadium and into my pissed-off ears. Michigan, which had been beaten by a Division I-AA team a mere four months earlier, had just beaten my beloved school by six points, and I was in no mood for any Big 10 revelry. It was about 4 p.m. on Jan. 1, 2008, and my year was off to a shitty start.

Lucky for me, 2008 was a leap year, so I still had 365 days to turn it around. And indeed I did, but not solely by my own volition. The following helped:

The Alligator staff and the hours we spent at budget meetings, on deadline, playing trash-can basketball, putting out newspapers, etc., etc.; the fleeting moments I got to see my girlfriend in between all of the aforementioned madness; graduating; getting a job; The Gaslight Anthem; “Wall-E”; Florida 49, Georgia 10; Florida 45, Florida State 15; Florida 31, Alabama 20; indulging myself with a MacBook and a bathrobe; covering an Obama rally on the eve of Election Day; and the West Coast: Disneyland, the Moz homestead, and driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, celebrities’ beachfront Malibu homes on one side and the Santa Monica Mountains on the other.

Onward and upward, to England, a trophy made of Waterford Crystal, a haircut — a year of downright refusal…

All over this town, yes, a low wind may blow.

3/1 – Orlando, Fla. – Hard Rock Live
3/3 – Jacksonville, Fla. – Florida Theatre
3/7 – Atlanta – Variety Playhouse
3/9 – Asheville, N.C. – The Orange Peel
5/11 – London – Royal Albert Hall