So here I am, back from a long weekend in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany, where I went to attend a wedding. Nothing particularly noteworthy to share in the music department, other than to say: you think American wedding bands are bad? Try dancing to a German one, Jack! (Side note/confession: I did in fact boogie down to a medley of Boney M’s finest hits.)
Anyway, I write to discuss a revelatory experience that struck me as having relevance to the world of Rock, and it’s this that I want to briefly describe to Townsman Great48 and the rest of you.
See, I knew going in to this wedding that the bride’s family was a.) very happy to see their wonderful daughter married; and b.) on the upper end of the economic scale — but I didn’t realize the family would pay to have the whole weekend catered by a Michelin two-star restaurant. And so it was that I was served jellied this, served in a reduction of that, next to stone-roasted the other thing, for two solid days. Pretty amazing.
But my last meal — in a beer hall in Zurich the night before I flew home — was the one that really knocked me on my keister: a huge plate of braised pig’s knuckle, home-made sauerkraut and boiled potato. Nothing fancy — at all — but I washed it down with first a Swiss lager, then a crazy good Dunkel, and I was astonished at how much more satisfying this meal was for me. And I’m a snob about these things!
As I sat there wolfing this down, I thought: there must be interesting analogs to my Swiss food experience in the collective brain trust known as Rock Town Hall. I mean, I feel certain that without thinking too hard, G48 and the rest of you can share stories about otherwise delicious, rich, complex Rock *that you loved hearing* in the same way that I loved every minute of fancy foodiness over the wedding weekend — that suddenly paled in comparison to the simple gustatory delights found in a slab of hard-charging Rock meatloaf, once you weaned yourself off the fancy stuff.
Am I making sense here, or is my jet lag forcing me to stretch things a bit too far?
I want reports!
HVB
Whoops – just got back from our show and saw that this link wasn’t working. No wonder there were no responses to this excellent question that Hrrundi asked (and welcome back, my friend).
I once spent a weekend in Nantucket in the company of friends with an awesome stereo system, listening to nothing but Prince and ELO. The final night, as I drove home, a local radio station was playing a 1978 King Biscuit Flour Hour concert by ZZ Top. The simple delights provided by those fat, hairy Texans capped off a weekend preceded by the finest in Prock construction. It felt good to chomp on a bag of pork rinds, so to speak, and wash them down with a can of Natty Bo.
Excellent! You may laugh, but pork rinds are in fact the world’s greatest road food treats. I found a “salt-n-vinegar” variant in a gas station in rural Virginia recently, and just about died.
I’ve never been a big pork rinds guy, but I still think about the unwrapped discs of beef jerky we bought loose from a plastic container in the middle of Ohio. To me, that was the greatest road food I’ve ever had.
Anyhow, I couldn’t resist starting off the comments with my loving joke in tribute to your Holy Trinity of Rock. To answer your question from my own true experiences, I’m here in work listening to heady stuff like an album of Spanish-style guitar music written by Terry Riley, and then Bryan Ferry’s version of “The Price of Love” comes up on my iPod and I’m taken back to my first style of musical love.
Interesting. Somehow I never pegged Bryan Ferry as a pig’s knuckle artist. I suppose for me the ultimate pig’s knuckle band is AC/DC. I can be listening to any old pointy-headed, beard-stroke rock — and enjoying it immensely — but if my brandy snifter reveries are interrupted by the opening chords to, oh, anything off of “Highway to Hell,” I’m outta there.
In addition to the salt-n-vinegar pork rinds, I ca,e across some amazing hot link summer sausages in B-F Minnesota last summer, and they livlied up my existence more than a little.
A pig’s knuckle can be relative for the listener, no? That’s why I took at guess that you had ZZ Top in mind – to make sure we got that out of the way and allowed for our own pork rinds, or free-style beef jerky discs, in my case. Sure, usually Ferry’s FAR from this category, but as you and others have heard me and Andyr say countless times, Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together album is up there with the best of the Rockpile crew for chunky, driving, white-boy pinky rock.
That’s sort of the story of my life. the older I get, the less complex the music I love seems to get. I kind of had the opposite thing happen to me recently, though. I was a t a friend’s and we were listening to T Model Ford, Bob Log and other unknown old blues guys or one or two man bands and after a few hours, getting in my car to head home, the Black Mountain cd I had in sounded wonderfully lush and big. Sort of like having the All You Can Eat Pig’s Knuckles Buffet, with Tira Misu for dessert.
Same thing happened to me, except instead of Black Mountain it was Department of Eagles