In my career at The Day, I’ve literally written hundreds of “humor” columns called Rick’s List. Are they in fact funny? You’re goddamned right they are!
Every year, The Day would submit a Rick’s List in the Best Humor Column category of one or another New England press association competition – and every year my column would lose to writers whose columns were about hijinks that happened during cupcake baking or being a chaperone at the middle school Harvest Dance. Crazy stuff!
Am I bitter about these disappointments?
You’re goddamned right I am.
Anyway, here are three genuinely random samples of columns for your perusal. I’d look a little harder through the archives to find the absolute best ones to include here, but I’m working on a new column about funny messages on Easter Eggs.
Rick’s List: Clickbait Edition
Mark Zuckerberg called me the other day, laughing. “Dude,” he said, “do you realize that, based on our information, YOU are a bigger sucker for clickbait than any other computer user in the world?”
It did surprise me, but only because I didn’t know the gambit was actually called “clickbait.” All I knew is that, whilst clumsily paddling the ’net — others might surf, but I awkwardly paddle like a 4-year-old trying to operate Harvard’s varsity shell — I am constantly derailed by what I now know is “clickbait.” Let’s say I’m reading a transcript of Clarence Darrow’s summation at the Loeb and Leopold trial — and I HAVE done that. And off to the right or at the bottom is an enticing photo and a sensationalist headline that says something like “10 Different Hooters Waitresses Who Each Have Held Justin Bieber’s Head Up While He Vomited” or “4 Chilling Photos of a Young Hitler Wearing Halloween Costumes That Should Have Let the World Know He’d Soon Be Up to No Good” or “7 Women With Hair Like Ronnie James Dio.”
I suppose other people can resist such things — but not me.
The thing is, these clickbait lists are set up so that you have to “click” to see each successive image. And it goes without saying that, invariably, the computer freezes about halfway through any given list. No individual engaged in “clickbaiting” has ever made it to Number One on any list, ever.
The worst thing, though, is that, while I like conspiracy plots and “inside” info on OD-happy celebrities and professional nudists as much as the next person, I’m also a hypochondriac. So the clickbait lists that I absolutely cannot ignore are the ones that warn “5 Seemingly Innocent Physical Symptoms That Nonetheless Indicate You Are Doomed.” I’ll bet you didn’t you know, for example, that:
- That forearm freckle you never noticed before? It very well indicated you have a previously unknown and viral hemorrhagic fever. You’re Typhoid Mary!
- That one wild nose hair that grows so quickly? This indicates your innate metabolism has gone berserk and your heart will explode in nine minutes (and counting).
- That speck of dust in your eye? It’s NOT dust, moron! It’s a tumor! By tomorrow, it’ll be the size of a hail-sized golf ball!
- The crow that’s always perched in the tree outside your house? No, he’s technically not a physical symptom, but he IS a an omen that you’ll perish soon in a fiery crash!
- Well, we’ll never know what 5 is. Computer froze.
Rick’s List: Vicious cold edition
Today’s edition of Rick’s List is being written in quarantine. I’m suffering from a cold so dastardly that it could only have been genetically incubated by a team consisting of rogue CDC epidemiologists working with a theorist called Satan.
Why they decided to test this new strain of cold on me is unknown, but I’m sad and I wish they hadn’t. It’s vicious, is what it is. Here are a few symptoms. (Editor’s note: while accurate, the following probably isn’t ideal “breakfast reading.”)
- Coughing.
A. The Sound of the Coughing — Imagine someone spears a 500-pound black bear with a harpoon. (“Imagine” is important. No bears were killed in the writing of this List.) Anyway, in its death throes, the bear decides to scat like Ella Fitzgerald.
B. The Sensation of the Coughing — I’m not much on anatomy, but I’m assuming there must be some type of insular coating on the interior walls of the lungs. I say that because, when I cough, if feels as though someone has used duct tape to rip said linings free. It’s sorta like when nurses pull bandages from a hair-covered area — only with napalm.
- Clogged head — Think of a pumpkin at the precise moment the stemmed-top of the gourd is severed by would-be jack-o’-lantern-carvers. You know those thick cobwebbed strands of orange goop in there? That’s what my head feels like.
- Sneezing — See “coughing,” above, with the bonus knowledge that, with each propulsed exhalation, fountains of germs explode from my mouth like fireworks. Literally: I can SEE the germs. They sparkle with evil.
- Runny nose — Do you know there aren’t just that many synonyms for “snot”? It’s not pleasant sounding, but let me just say that, as it applies to my condition, descriptions such as “riverine,” “whitewater” and “the relentlessly rising 1927 Mississippi River flood in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana” all apply.
As for my “quarantine,” what that means is my wife and dog — Eileen and Virgil, respectively — both fearful of exposure to the malady, have banished me to the ramshackle, damp, spider-clustered and unheated garage on the grounds at the rear of stately Koster Manor. At dawn and at sunset, Eileen and Virgil toss, through a slot on the padlocked door, aspirin, room temperature cans of peach soda, room temperature cans of Van Camp’s Wax Beans and Carrots medley, and a copy of Churchill’s “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” in the original French.
“Feel better soon!” Eileen chirps.
“Bark,” Virgil adds.
Rick’s List: Revisionist History Edition
To look at my face in the bathroom mirror each day has never been pleasant for me. As I grow older, though, it’s become the self-appraisal equivalent of marching the Trail of Tears.
The final, corrupted image of Dorian Gray has nothing on me.
It did occur to me, though, that, had I lived in other times, my grim countenance could at least have played any of a number of important roles in history.
- The Universal Law of Gravitation — Sir Isaac Newton woke up one day and decided he was overdue to start a relaxing little project wherein he would classify cubic plane curves. First, though, because he was hungry, Newton decided to stroll to an apple tree and eat a piece of fruit. “Maybe one will fall on my head,” he chuckled.
En route, though, he passed the village fool, though, a lout named Rick Koster. “Look at that poor fellow and how the porcine jowls of his face sag,” Newton thought. “I wonder why that happens?” And, just like that, the apple was forgotten. It struck Newton at once: Koster’s jowls sagged because of … GRAVITY!
- The Decline in Natural Jack-o’-Lantern Carving — A by-chance and extreme-close-up facial image of baseball fan Rick Koster’s age-punished head, blasted onto millions of television screens during an October playoff game at Fenway Park, subsequently went viral on social media platforms. Consensus was universal on message boards across the world: “That guy reminds me: Halloween’s coming. I hate how my carved pumpkin rots so quickly and then I have to slop it into a trash bag and soak up the putrid gunk on the porch with absorbent rags typically used by crime scene sanitizers. I think I’ll buy a plastic jack-o’-lantern this year — or at least order the kids to paint the face on instead of carving it.”
- Edgar Allen Poe and “The Masque of the Red Death” — Poe actually hallucinated the future, 60-year-old Rick during an opium binge. The next day, he wrote his immortal short story about plague, and the ending read, “And Darkness and Decay — also known as Rick — and, oh, yeah, also the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
Methinks he doth protest too much
10/07/2003
A FEW WEEKS AGO, IN A column for The Los Angeles Times that was reprinted in the Boston Globe, Ivy-clustered Yale professor Harold Bloom — The Man Who Would Be Falstaff — harrumphed his way through a scathing indictment of the National Book Foundation for its decision to bestow on Stephen King its 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters award.
In a series of descriptions that were just a few bus stops south of libel, Bloom ladled insults on King’s work like so much dung on a literary compost heap, and suggested that, hell, why not give the 2004 award to Danielle Steel and the Nobel Prize to Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling.
Bloom was waxing ironic, of course, and was telling us Plebes that the lionization of a commercially successful author noted primarily for horror and fantasy works, by an ostensibly aesthetic outfit that had previously honored the likes of John Updike, Eudora Welty and Toni Morrison, is only the latest in the massive dumbing-down of American culture.
And Bloom, who in his compelling book “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human” all but immodestly suggests he is the 21st century embodiment of Sir John Falstaff — to the extent that I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a Falstaff costume in his closet at home — has got a point.
Ours is a society rushing like a roller coaster to stupidity, and Bloom’s implications — that the conglomerates that own the publishing industry (and, by extension, the television and motion picture and music industries) are sacrificing quality for lowest-common-denominator profit – are as accurate as they are obvious.
Regarding King, though, who is as much a symbol to Bloom as he is a target in the harangue:
Hey, Big Steve himself has written or said on many occasions that he’s a storyteller and an entertainer, and he’d probably add that anything overtly “literary” sneaking into his process could well have been an accident. He’s been happily cranking out entertainment fiction — similar stuff, it might be added, to the pulp mysteries Bertrand Russell devoured religiously.
Truth be told, though, despite King’s humble protestations of craft and though Bloom would never admit (or even recognize) it, King has written some great stuff and some of it absolutely has literary merit. His short story “The Man in the Black Suit” first published in The New Yorker, won the O.Henry Award.
And I suggest that “Pet Sematary” and “Bag of Bones,” for example, in addition to being addictive reads, uniquely explore a contemporary landscape of grief with depth and insight in these unprecedented times. I’m not sure who put the cart before the horse, here, but that King chronicles a society populated, in Bloom’s eyes, by a singular generation of dullards, is just as valuable as Gogol’s “Dead Souls” commentaries on 19th-century Russian serfs.
But I suspect none of this means anything to Bloom.
Truth be told, Bloom loves the Foundation’s award to King — because it allows him to trumpet, ever more stridently, just how much smarter he and his dwindling cabal of Truly Large Thinkers are than the rest of us. Bloom needs the Stephen Kings of the world. Otherwise, how else would he remind us that writers he digests easy as oatmeal — Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis — are, like, really hard for the rest of us.
Bloom also pooh-poohs the idea that a child turned on to reading through J.K. Rowling would ever attempt Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book,” or that someone who enjoys King might ever dare to try something a bit headier — though I guarantee you it happens every day.
God forbid that someone like me, a fan of King, might have dared grow up and teach literature.
At which time, in the evening, after the doors were locked in the dusty English department and I was forced to go home, I’d have nothing else to do but dress in my Sir John Falstaff suit and amuse the Little Lady with some choice and throaty recitations from ”Henry IV, Part I.”
Concert Reviews
When people learn that I’ve been a music writer for almost 30 years – frequently reviewing performances for which I receive free and really good seats – they say, “You have the greatest job in the world!”
And it is a pretty cool job. But those envious folks rarely stop to think that my job definition requires that I see plenty of concerts that I would never go to if it wasn’t part of the gig. I’ve reviewed Yanni, Slayer, Barry Manilow, Anthrax, Tool, Bob Dylan, Yes, Shania Twain, Kanye West, Motley Crue, Art Garfunkel, Kiss, Britney Spears, Imagine Dragons, Styx, Phish, Bruce Springsteen, Herbie Hancock, Parliament/Funkadelic, Jethro Tull, Arlo Guthrie, Alicia Keys, Roger Hodgson, Aerosmith, Macey Gray, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Susan Tedeschi, Bruce Willis (!), Squeeze, Willie Nelson, Robert Cray, Crowded House, Jeff Beck, Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin, Alan Jackson, Eric Clapton, the Neville Brothers, Merle Haggard, the Killers, Kendrick Lamar, Julian Lage, Mavis Staples, Steve Winwood, Van Morrison, Bob Seger, Toby Keith, Asia, the Fixx, Green Day, Jason Isbell, MUSE, the Alan Parsons Project, Coldplay, James Taylor, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, John Tesh, Brian Wilson and on and on and on and on.
Now, all of the above concerts were well attended – by people who wanted to see that specific act. But if you told the Yanni fan, for example, that the next night he or she would have to go see an Anthrax concert, and the night after that Jethro Tull – well, maybe the overall concept loses a bit of sparkle.
Fortunately, I like a ridiculously broad range of music and decided early on – back in my own days as a musician – that a useful attitude might be: almost every artist is doing something I can appreciate – and if they’re delivering quality to their fan base, that’s worthy of my respect.
Here are a few concert reviews I’ve written that I’m proud of:
Glen Campbell Bids a Graceful Farewell
February 24, 2012
The big, Elephant in the Room question hanging over the Glen Campbell Goodbye Tour, which came to a mostly full Mohegan Sun Arena Friday night, is pretty obvious:
Given the singer’s diagnosis last year of Alzheimer’s disease, does an 80-plus date schedule indicate a certain greed by, well, somebody, to put him out on the road one last time despite the debilitating progression of his illness?
Here’s the answer: Decidedly, no.
Now 54 shows into a circuit that started in August, Campbell, one of the most successful and popular pop-country performers of all time, is clearly having a blast.
He’s in the relatively early stages of Alzheimer’s — that part where he still knows what’s happening and what will happen — and despite the knowledge that, onstage, there will be minor lapses with lyrics, guitar parts and between-song banter, the amalgamation isn’t so severe that it detracts from the overall presentation.
In fact, not to trivialize a horrible disease, there was a certain charm to Campbell’s onstage miscues in the Sun. Since he was so cheerful and able to poke a bit of self-effacing fun at his occasional confusion, he put the whole crowd at ease. He’s clearly treasuring this opportunity.
It also helped that his spectacular band is a) led by his longtime pianist and close friend T.J. Kuenster, and b) comprises the fine roots outfit Instant People — which includes three of Campbell’s children, daugher Ashley (banjo/keys/vocals), and sons Cal (drums) and Shannon (guitar/vocals).
The obvious love and tenderness displayed by these folks made the whole evening a family affair in the finest context of support. “Dad! No capo on this song,” Ashley said gently at one point. Glen caught himself and laughed, saying, “Oh, did I almost do that?,” removing the capo from the neck of his guitar before he would have started a tune in the wrong key.
Otherwise, Campbell was pretty spectacular. He can still hit most of the notes with that yearning voice, and his guitar playing — never forget he was a top L.A. studio wizard for years — still contains plenty of mercury-flash, even if he flubbed a few notes.
Then there’s the catalog — the nonstop array of hits and the still-bright colors of the respective memories they recall, such as “Gentle On My Mind,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Country Boy (You’ve Got Your Feet in L.A.),” “Southern Nights,” and “True Grit.”
Campbell and Ashley did a fun take on “Dueling Banjos” and he offered up the Ray Charles classic “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” There were selections from his lovely, bittersweet farewell studio album, last year’s “Ghost On the Canvas,” including “It’s Your Amazing Grace” and the final encore tune, the wistful but certain “A Better Place.”
Naturally, there were the immortal tunes by Campbell’s court composer, Jimmy Webb, including “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston,” “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and “Wichita Lineman.” Stunning.
And then, after 75 mostly smooth and totally appreciated minutes, Campbell was gone, off to the next show — positioned by time and fate to the backroads of our memories, ever smiling, ever gentle.
King Crimson show delivers royal treatment to fans
September 20, 2014
Imagine a Battle of the Bands. Only, instead of weekend rockers vying to win a case of Bud Light and a chance to open for Loverboy at the county fair, it’s an event where competitors are trying to perform musical invocations to raise Satan.
You’d have your devil metal folks, of course, with their bear-howl vocals and corpse-paint makeup and guitars shaped like medieval battle axes. And there’d be the leering Marilyn Manson types, with the butt-cheek cut-out leather pants, their Anton LaVey endorsements, and absinthe-fueled cabaret songs disguised as rock anthems.
Well, forget it, charlatans.
I’m pretty sure that, if any band in the world could literally summon a dark god, that band would be the latest calibration of King Crimson.
On Thursday night in New York City, for the first of four sold-out shows at the Best Buy Theater, King Crimson Mark VIII put on a two-hour demonstration of such majesty and creative vision that, indeed, the solid foundations of empirical reality seemed to blur and sway.
This is a band many fans believed would never tour again. Guitarist Robert Fripp, the sole original member and leader, has for years seemed indifferent to the idea of KC – for recording or touring purposes. It was a delightful surprise, then, when a new incarnation was announced late last year – and the musicians spanned and represented all aspects of the group’s kaleidoscopic history.
Along with Fripp, there are Tony Levin (bass/vocals), Jakko Jakszyk (vocals/guitar), Mel Collins (woodwinds) and drummers Gavin Harrison, Pat Mastelotto and Bill Rieflin.
The two-tiered set-up had the percussion squad and their three kits on the lip of the stage; the remaining musicians were backlined with Fripp seated (as always) at the far right. All were dressed in Savile Row finery as though to add even more dignity to an already heavyweight occasion. (Between tunes, archival recordings of goofy band radio interviews demonstrated the band’s underappreciated sense of humor.)
As for the music, the members finessed churning, shifting arrangements of career-spanning material with mesmeric precision. It was rather like watching (and hearing) musical spinal surgery. The songs built and evoked a twirling, brooding, almost suffocating sense of anguish, dark power, seething energy and frenetic tension that, in a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts context, gradually produced a crescendo effect of wonder and awe.
When they want to, King Crimson can be the heaviest band in the world; ask folks like Tool or Opeth. At the same time, they deliver moments of delicate beauty that lend nobility and grace to the idea of melancholy. It was all on display Thursday through “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic” (parts I and II), “Red” and “One More Red Nightmare,” “Pictures of a City,” “VROOM,” “The Letters” and “Sailor’s Tale,” “The ConstruKction of Light,” “Starless” and the iconic closer, “Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man.”
Raise the devil? Maybe King Crimson pulled off a greater feat simply by resurrecting themselves.
Shania: Slick, sexy and oh, so superficial
Concert review, The Day, Oct. 17, 2003
In an industrial accident Wednesday night at the Mohegan Sun Arena, I fell into the cotton candy machine called the Shania Twain “Up!” tour and emerged two hours later a gooey mess of critical proportion.
With her Contrivance-o-Meter spot-welded on 11, the 38-year-old leader of a nine-piece boy band manipulated an all-but-sold-out crowd with about two dozen songs of formulae-calculated pop music heretofore rendered “country” because Nashville marketing wizards have told us it was/is.
Make no mistake: Twain was every bit the perfection her all-ages fans dream about. She emerged wearing a Connecticut Suns basketball jersey, parachute pants and some sort of anti-gravity boots and, as a bouncy Pied Piper, strolled about her two-tiered, stage-in-the-round fiefdom with all the easy self-confidence of a Chautauqua tent chanteuse.
Of course, Twain looked perfect: astonishing in an overall ability to be sexy to adults and big sisterly to the dozens of kiddos who clustered about the lip of the stage (and were rewarded with hugs, handshakes, and autographs. Shania misses no trick including plenty of giant sparklers exploding and a segment where Twain and a guitarist snuck into the crowd to sing a tune amongst the common folk.)
As for her scientifically selected band, the performances were note-perfect. Each artfully costumed band member smiled as though auditioning for the “after” shots in a dental cosmetic ad. Representing various aspects of MTV-style history — there was the Dennis Rodman drummer, the Aussie punk guitarist and the hunkie blonde surfer guitarist, the “Shaggy from ‘Scoobie Doo’ “pedal steel guy, and three fiddlers: Asian Muscle Boy, the lumberjack-hatted chick Phish fan, and a “That ’70s Show” guy in a Who baseball shirt. And trust me: they all sashayed and hopped through their choreography as though following Day-Glo dance footprints glued to the stage by the authors of “The Big ‘Star Search’ How to Rock” textbook.
Shameless.
I do applaud Twain’s routine of inviting local high school drum corps — in this case from Norwich Free Academy — to sit in on a tune. But their assignments were rudimentary at best and in the end it seemed like another gimmick. Good for the kids but sort of painful for the rest of us to watch.
Oh, yes, there was the music. Well, Twain sang as though pure spring sunshine were running into her veins, and the tunes were beautifully Xeroxed within an inch of their radio-crafted lives.
All periods of her sensationally successful career were represented, and it’s odd how incredibly generic the songs become when trotted out in streamlined succession.
To be sure, there are some really catchy tunes in her catalog, and “C’est La Vie,” “Forever and For Always” and “(If You’re Not In It For Love) I’m Outta Here” were dutifully trotted out.
Ditto for the “country” stuff such as “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under” and “The Woman In Me Needs the Man In You.”
But too many — “From This Moment On,” for example — were transparent beyond measure. You could almost imagine Twain and her husband/producer/songwriting partner, Mutt Lange, thinking, “OK, let’s write one and imagine it’s for an animated Disney film about a kindly leopard who, at great personal danger, leads an injured child through the jungle to safety.”
So what’s wrong with any of this? Doesn’t it sound like Twain & Company gave their fans what they wanted?
Precisely. And that’s what scares me.
Ex-Beach Boy’s birthday concert brings tears to sold-out room
June 21, 1999
Mohegan — Brian Wilson turned 57 Sunday, and a sold-out crowd at the Mohegan Sun Events Center sang a heartfelt rendition of “Happy Birthday” as a giant cake was wheeled onstage. He returned the compliment with 75 minutes of terrific selections from his overwhelmingly great canon.
In a show that can only be described as a most unlikely and highly emotional experience for any true rock fan, the ex-Beach Boy, whose visionary songwriting raised the bar for hundreds of composers, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, took the stage under extremely odd circumstances. A noted recluse whose creativity had dwindled over the years due to the psychological wounds of suspected parental abuse and years of alcohol and drug reliance, Wilson’s return to the concert stage carried not only the expectations of his greatness, but also the sideshow trappings of his own sordid history.
Despite his legions of ardent admirers, the bottom-line question in everyone’s mind was simply: could he pull it off?
The cruel among us might observe that Wilson sat behind his front-and-center keyboard like a nervous, trained bear waiting to be walked through an array of convoluted tricks of his own devising. The sheer, plutonium density of the tragedy and madness that suffuse the Wilson persona makes him a decidedly sympathetic character in the hearts of his fans — the Old Yeller of rock — and to watch him tentatively but gamely work through a set of awe-inspiring material was like watching an Olivier try “King Lear” after a debilitating stroke: you want him to succeed so bad it’s almost painful to watch.
Or it would be, if he didn’t still Have It.
No, he can’t reach all the notes anymore, and occasionally his tired voice — he complained during an afternoon soundcheck that he was losing it — simply faded out. But just when you started to feel bad for him, Wilson would hit a most unlikely line with perfection, sending shocks of pleasure bouncing around the hall like lightning bolts.
Wilson was backed by a superb 12-piece band, which included the LA band the Wondermints, guitarist/vocalist Jeff Foskett, and keyboardist/vocalist Joe Thomas, who co-produced Wilson’s 1998 solo CD, “Imagination.” With tasteful lights and sound, Wilson stayed true to his melodies and parts even as younger, stronger singers (particularly Foskett) carried the weight of that awesome falsetto. It was no big thing: Just to hear the whole band effortlessly weave Wilson’s brain-melting great harmonic clusters was to remember just how far ahead of his time he was.
Songs such as “California Girls,” “In My Room,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Kiss Me Baby,” “Sloop John B” and “Good Vibrations” were tapestries of pure nostalgia — rendered timeless by their brilliance. More obscure cuts, such as the instrumental “Let’s Go Away For Awhile” (from “Pet Sounds”) and “Add Some Music to Your Day,” or material off the new album, “Your Imagination” and “Lay Down Burden,” brought a depth and richness to a set criminally shortened to conform with standard casino guidelines.
And when Wilson nailed “God Only Knows” — arguably the most gorgeous song in rock history — tears were free-falling throughout the room. As the evening wore on, the singer clearly grew more comfortable and confident. After each song, he clapped along with the crowd like a happy little kid, voicing his appreciation with tender and genuine affection.
During the final encore, “Love and Mercy,” Wilson sang “Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight.”
Right back at you, Bri.