Blues Traveler: Canadian Rose
(purchase)
Confession time; whilst this post is, nominally, about a flower, I think I would be hard stretched to claim any link with Mothers day, and I'm not even going to try. Hell, it isn't even Mothering Sunday, as we call it, on this side of the pond, that was weeks ago, March 10th. I guess the deadline for using up surplus print and card for Hallmark depends upon which side of the atlantic you reside. Anyway I'm an orphan these days. So flowers was always going to be thinking of a flower and seeing what the i-pod can produce. Lilies, poppies or roses were my starters, with the express aim, as ever, being to see if I could find something slightly off the beaten track. Somebody once told me lilies were associated with death, so I skipped them, and most modern music equates poppies with drugs, that seeming too outre, albeit tempting. God old roses it was, and there are soooooo many available, from George Jones' Good Year for 'em to the New one of the Damned. Too too obvious.
I don't understand why Blues Traveler weren't bigger or better known. Going since the mid to late 80s, arising out of New Jersey, astonishingly, given their usual filing alongside southern states Jam bands, they play on to this day, with most recent record coming out last year. The centre point was always going to be the striking central figure of John Popper, harmonica player par excellence, with an astonishingly nimble style that ought to have had him in the top 3 best known players along with Stevie Wonder, the fella from J. Geils and, um, Bob Dylan. Instead of one of them. Maybe the look was wrong, and having to have a gastric band was never going to be rock and roll. But it matters not a jot. He can play like the clappers, over lively chugalug riffing, good tunes all round.
This video looks as if it comes from a film, and for all I know, it does, but not, I feel, a film that looks as if it would hold much appeal for me. Standard doomed teens, enacted by twenty-somethings, opposite side of the tracks, coming good at the end. Yeuch. No doubt I have, at a stroke, offended, if nobody else, the mothers of the two lead protagonists. Which, neatly, takes me full circle. So, ladies both, if I have offended you, have you both a wonderful mothers day. From me.
