Can't Think of a Title for a Return after several weeks of no posts

Damn, I know I've been away from here for awhile, but I had no idea it's been about a month! It figures that a burst of activity is followed by a burst of INactivity. But I was keeping sort of busy writing in other places. Both Mike Nesmith and the ICP Orchestra are coming to town in another 10 days or so, and I wrote about them for Pittsburgh City Paper (coming in next week's issue). There were a bunch of JazzTimes reviews too, including Pat Metheny's latest, which is something fairly out of character for me.

And then there's Blurt. Poor ol' Blurt. Something always seems to happen to happen to Fred and co., right around the time of South by Southwest. A few years ago it was the demise of Blurt's forerunner, Harp. This time the website got pretty badly hacked and infected with malware. The process is underway to get it cleaned up, luckily.

Last week the Pittsburgh Record Fair happened at Belvedere's. I didn't sell this time because I didn't feel like hauling all those crates of albums again. I bought a few things, nothing over $5 either. One of the happiest purchases of the night was a copy of School's Out by Alice Cooper. This was an album I owned from about second grade on. I think I got it for Christmas that year and I pretty much wore it out. I do remember that the desk part of the cover got a little ripped. Eventually I think it wound up in the giveaway box at the Record Recycler some time around 8th grade. The copy I got was almost the same as the one from back then. It didn't have the song titles on the back (my first copy did) and it didn't have the panties (luckily, my first didn't either). But the cover was in beautiful shape and it had the olive green Warner Brothers label, which always makes the heart beat faster. I still know every single note to that album. If I had a dollar for every time that me and my friend Eric put on the 55-second "Street Fight" and pretended to fight in my basement.... I'd be doing pretty well.