Hot asphalt is the Devil’s straight edge
Le roof, c’est fini! No idea what the French word for roof is. But it’ll come to me. And I’d need the plural, because in fact two roofs are done, garage and porch. Rolled on the former, shingles on the latter. Big fat hairy pain in the ass, but one that is now done. A little more caulking and a small patch to the actual house roof (oh, yes, it’s leaking!) and this roof nonsense is all done. Which is a good thing, because there’s a serious shortage of good roof songs to put on a CD. Okay, there’s Parliament’s “Give Up The Funk (Tear the Roof Off The Sucker)”, and the Bloodhound Gang’s terrific riff on that, “Fire Water Burn.” There are 107 bad jazz tunes involving some combination of “tin,” “roof,” and “blues,” and while I love nearly all forms of music I will chance alienating readers by allowing as I just don’t get jazz, and I especially don’t get it when they call something the blues and it’s just not, it’s jazz. And there are an equal number of covers of “Up On The Roof,” but I can’t get excited about any of them.
So, my roof CD was a shortish one. But one of the upsides of long, laborious home improvement projects is that I get to play my construction CDs. There are some discs I pretty much only play during painting and the like. Tom Petty falls into that category, and a couple of soundtracks. The Heads album, which was the Talking Heads without David Byrne — it doesn’t suck, but it’s not any good, either. The “Private Parts” soundtrack. All music best suited for construction work.
Yes, I could explain the title. I had to cut a lot of shingles. I used the factory-perfect edges of other shingles to guide my unerring hand in making perfect straight cuts. But the shingles were hot in the sun, oh so hot! And as I burned my fingers over and over, I thought, “Hot asphalt is the Devil’s straight edge!”
Hmm, that would make me Lucifer. Yeah, that fits.
Speaking of people who understood the Devil’s straight edge, by now everyone knows that Warren Zevon died on Sunday. His death seemed to bring the media recognition that his life and career never quite did; I don’t know if that’s good or not. He seemed happy with his career, and he was able to put out album after album despite a complete lack of radio or TV support. It’s irksome that he’s getting all this attention now, though, when a little bit of media support might have brought his music to more people when he was alive. Or perhaps he was just a niche player, and I’m in his niche. Like everyone, of course, I knew “Werewolves of London” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” when they came out, and was impressed with someone who could invest such wit in such good songs. But I didn’t pay him much more attention, until about seven or eight years ago when I picked up “Learning to Flinch,” a live CD that had uneven production values, a high price (then) and an incredible set of performances. From then on I was hooked. And while his dark, sardonic stuff is in a class by itself, he infuses his sweeter stuff with an openness and honesty that I think can only come from someone who spends time on the dark side. And he made me love a Stevie Winwood song that I hated in its original form, “Back in the High Life.” Zevon’s version can bring tears to the eyes.
John and George, Joey Ramone, Zevon . . . all gone. I just hope Elvis is healthy.
Also gone unnoticed because I’ve been among the roofing is that the Vuelta a Espana began on Saturday. Haven’t been able to see any of it, as OLN is only playing it during the day (hey, guys, enough with the bull riding already!), but I hear that Alessandro Petacchi took a stage, making him only the third rider to win stages in the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta in the same year. Pretty impressive. He sprints like the wind.