Cover jam of the day, local record stores, and vinyl to mp3: The Karl Hendricks Trio / "Out On The Weekend" [Neil Young]

Hey Pittsburghers, in case you were blissfully/woefully unaware: Paul's CDs in Bloomfield is closing its doors forever in a few weeks, and it will be replaced by Sound Cat Records, operated by current employee and living indie rock legend Karl Hendricks. Kinda sad, but kinda interesting and hopeful news, I must say. As Paul's clears out their inventory to make room for Karl and his wares, they are having ever-increasing sales. Last I heard, everything is 50% off! The vinyl is kinda picked over, but there's still plenty left, so go check it out!

I went there last week to see what I could find, and walked out with a big stack of LPs and 7"s. Oh yeah, don't forget to peruse the 7" singles at the front counter. Factor that into your shopping time, and don't just give a percursory looksee as you wait at the register. There are some good finds in there. Case in point: I snagged 3 original Karl Hendricks Trio singles for $10, and by that I mean $5! And yes, that is the very same KH whose name I mentioned above, and he was there at the register as I paid and he thanked me for buying them. I mean, I don't think any money of the purchase was going to directly to him (or indirectly, even) and yet he still looked grateful that I was buying his music. Cool dude, that Karl. I said, "No problem, I enjoy it", and gave him a smile. It's the best I could think of at the time.

One of those singles I bought was "The Worst Coffee I've Ever Had, Part Two". I was literally buying all of the vinyls of his there, so I didn't look too carefully past the awesomely cartoonish artwork. A few days later, when I got down to playing all of them, I noticed that the B-side to this is "Out On The Weekend", a Neil Young tune from Harvest! I quickly pulled out my vinyl copy of that album, played track one, then skipped over to this tune for comparison. In a way, it is a "faithful" cover—same lyrics and attitude, no big reinvention of the song's melody—but it's decidedly Karl's own—decidedly more uptempo, fuzzy guitars, sweet rock solo in place of the harmonica. It's a truly great indie rock cover of a truly great and historic folk rock tune.

Here's the Karl Hendricks Trio version, as recorded from that vinyl single I bought straight to mp3 on my laptop via some fancy-shmancy software that came with my turntable. It's not actually that fancy, but it's kinda handy. I'll try to take advantage of it more because I've basically never used it and this version turned out rather nicely. I'll try to share some vinyl singles I have that don't exist elsewhere on the web, so stay tuned for that! So yeah, here's that tune:



And now, here is Neil Young's original version:

Kiva Han Countdown: 11, 10, 9, 8 days!

We're fast approaching the last week of Kiva Han! :-(

I've been stopping by mostly early evenings lately, grabbing a cappuccino and maybe a pastry and sitting and reading library books for an hour or two, enjoying the house music they decide to play here (a few days ago it was Blink 182 followed immediately by Daydream Nation, that was interesting) and people watching.

A few days ago, I walked in and found a friend of mine already sitting at a table with a half-eaten bowl of mac & cheese. It turns out she had never (!?) had mac & cheese before in her life, and got it here on my recommendation, only to discover she does not, in fact, like mac & cheese. For shame! Oh well, her loss.

I also finally crossed off another item from my KH bucket list this morning. I showed up right around 8:05 and was the 2nd customer of the day. I would have like to have been here right when the doors were unlocked and been the first coffee consumer of the day, but I'll take what I can get. I already had to do this on a weekend day so that it was 8:00 instead of 6:30 am, so, whatever. I've been parked here for several hours now, running on multiple cappuccinos and a yummy pumpkin muffin, banging out random writing projects, and people-watching, as usual. It's a different crowd in the morning. Folks pop in and out for a cup for the road. A family with two teenage children and a baby in one of those hand-held baskets (with scant protection from this extremely wintry cold, I might add!) came in and all got drinks to go. Other couples have come in to sit for a bit and then take off. For a while, there were no more then four or five people in the whole place, but now, close to noon, everything feels pretty bustly, a constant flow of people in and out, most tables occupied in some fashion. It's interesting to watch the dynamic play out over the course of the day. I wonder if the employees get caught up in it, feeling bored when the business is slow and getting excited when there's a crowd. Or maybe it's the other way around, and the line of customers just makes them tired. Who knows. I just know that I would wayyyyy over-caffeinate myself if I ever worked at a coffee place. I'd just be sipping espresso constantly.

Kiva Han Countdown: 31 days

I've been sitting here at that nice table in the front for well over an hour. People have come and gone. A friend of mine was sitting in the other room and saw me here, so he came over and we chatted for a long time about anything and everything: the new Apple iBooks app and the iTunes university iPad app (that's a lot of s), the fact that almost all carousels in the United States rotate counter-clockwise (a.k.a. widdershins) except for one at Great Adventure in New Jersey, the fact that my former high school is one of only three locations in the United States where one can play Fives, the fact that some names are awesome (Pablo Bravo, Gunther Grass) and some are weird (William Williams), the ding ding dong song, and the following story I'm about to tell which is what I was thinking about on my walk over here from campus.

One time last summer, I was sitting in Kiva Han after teaching class. My headphones were plugged into my laptop and I was munching on a delicious Hangover Cure, KH's concoction of eggs, salsa, cheese, and hash browns in a burrito, smothered in hot sauce. It is scrumptious, and I've even tried making some homemade versions in my kitchen, with varying degrees of success. (Try it yourself!) A family of mother/father/daughter walked in and sat down with some cups of coffee and an order of food of some kind, I forget what. They looked very much, to me, like a high-schooler looking at colleges with her parents. (BTW when I told this story, my friend heard "daughter looking ecologists" instead of "daughter looking at colleges" and expressed confusion. Weird.) They kept looking over at me, and I assumed it was because I struck a sight with my long hair and beard scarfing down a breakfast burrito, but it was frequent enough that I eventually slipped off my headphones when I caught the mother looking at me. She smiled and said, "Sorry to bother you, but we're wondering what it is you're eating." I said "Oh, it's called a 'hangover cure'" and kinda chuckled along with them, then stated matter-of-factly, "…and it works!" They gave me a polit smile and laugh at that, and I slipped my headphones back on and that was that. I'm not sure what they thought of me after that, and I had intended it to be funny at the time, but in retrospect, I realize it might have sounded rather gruff or dismissive. So, sorry, random parents and daughter looking ecologists. I was just trying to be funny. I hope you got that.

What this got me thinking about, though, is a more general idea of what Kiva Han represents about Pittsburgh. Imagine you're a visitor to this city, perhaps looking for a school to attend for four years. You drive into the student section of Oakland, heading down Forbes Ave. through the U. Pitt area. What do you see? The looming Cathedral of Learning, of course, but what do you see on the street? Students bustling back and forth. Buses driving by. And some shops and restaurants. Panera. Dunkin Donuts. Caribou Coffee. The O. Primanti's. A brand name shoe store. A gas station. And so on. How many of those are local shops, Pittsburgh institutions, long-standing family businesses? Not many. Then you keep driving, navigate the one-way intersection properly (I once saw a lady drive into the middle of it the wrong way and try to back up instead of just turning, strangely), and head down Craig St. There's Quiznos. Subway. Starbucks. It deeply saddens me to think that across Pitt and CMU's stretch, the coffee shop selection is entirely populated by "big name" shops. Starbucks, Dunkin, Caribou, maybe a Crazy Mocha. That is not a fair representation of this city. One of the things I've grown to love about Pittsburgh is that a Beehive or a Quiet Storm or a Voluto or a Jitters can exist and succeed and thrive amongst some heavy-hitters, so to speak, that it represents something about the people who live here, that people are proud of what they do and what others do and want to support them in their ventures, that we won't just succumb and have cookie-cutter shopping plazas everywhere and pepper the city grid with equally-spaced out clones of the same big name store/shop/restaurant so that someone can satisfy that Starbucks/Subway/KFC/McD's fix no matter where they find themselves during the day. That's one of the things I find myself hating about other cities; not to say that this phenomenon is widespread everywhere else, but when I see that kind of trend, I get upset. Where is it all headed? Hegemony of choices, force-feeding the public the same crap everywhere and all the time. I'm getting a little too ranty now, but I hope you see my point: Pittsburgh is different. Pittsburgh is special to me. I don't want to see that happen here, not even a little bit, because it will be too hard to stop once it starts. Do we really want visitors to this high-traffic university area to see only brand name coffee shops and think that this is a microcosm of the city, that they'd find this everywhere else? I don't. I hate to think that visitors leave thinking that this city is just like every other city because it's not. Kudos to CMU for employing only local coffee shops in their academic buildings (Tazza D'Oro in Gates, La Prima in Wean, maybe others) but that only goes so far. I really hope something special moves in here in Kiva Han's absence, that some other local business can thrive and keep going with the understandably high rent for this major area of foot and auto traffic. Come on Pittsburgh. We can do this.

Alright, time for more coffee.