Dave Mancuso dot Com

The Internet is great for looking up information on just about anything, including old rock bands you used to see. Denise and I used to listen to a great band in State College called the Beaver Avenue Beggars. They played at the Phyrst for a while on Friday nights in the 1989-1991 timeframe, and we used to go up the Penn State on the weekends and catch them when we got into town.

I wondered where they were now, or if they even had a CD that I could get, so I did a Google search and found this webpage online. No CDs, but at least it had some detail about the band. This page detailed an earlier incarnation of the band, Trinity1296 (I think the 1296 represented the number of strings on their guitars, 12 and 6–I don’t know what the 9 was for). They later hooked up with Randy Hughes from Cartoon and called themselves Trinitoonity, but my favorite incarnation of their sound was the Beaver Avenue Beggars.

I’ve resisted writing the war stories down because they’ll take so long to write, and there are so many of them–but they demand to be told. Here’s a quick one to seed the garden.

In fall of 1984, my parents were in the process of moving from Philly to Canton, Ohio. They had plans to fly to Canton on a particular weekend, and my brother Joe approached me about having a party at the house while they were gone. I thought about it, but I just didn’t think it was a great idea. I told Joe “OK–if you had a party here, you’d have to be quiet. I mean really quiet. No one can know even in the neighborhood that you’re having a party.”

Joe actually decided he could handle that, and told me it was no problem, and went off to make preparations. Me, I worried. A lot.

The night of the party, I worked my shift at Denny’s (I was a waiter then) and after doing my sidework, drove home. As I pulled into the driveway, the house was dark and silent. I guessed that things didn’t work out for the party, or Joe had had second thoughts. I unlocked the front door and walked in. And tripped over something on the floor.

As my eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, I heard whisperings and mumblings in the dark. “Who is it?” “Shhhh!” “What’s going on?” “Hey, it’s OK–it’s Dave.” I began to make out shapes on the floor. On the couch. On the stairs. In fact, just about everywhere. Joe had been true to his word, and I was witness to the most laid back, quietest “party” I’ve ever seen. The next thing I knew, a dark form worked its way up to me, and said in my brother’s whispering voice “Hey Dave! Whaddya think? I kept it quiet just like we talked about!”

To this day it still weirds me out–in a funny, amazing kind of way. I mean, they even parked three blocks away to avoid detection. Talk about dedication to a cause…

Well, it looks like we’ve successfully moved our domain over to our new hosting company, Citadelhost. I think the DNS changes have propagated across the Internet, so www.mammothconcepts.com points to the new hosting server now instead of the old one. I republished this weblog to the new server–Radio choked a few times generating a year’s worth of weblog, but it made it eventually. Welcome to our new home!

The ride to day care this morning was accompanied by the full seven minute singalong rendition of the popular Beatles hit Hey Drew, replete with my 3 year old’s giggles (I think Drew fully believes it’s Hey Drew–I’ve “fooled” him completely).

Alyssa, however, spent the drive with her hands over her ears, scowling because Daddy wouldn’t let her spend the extra 45 minutes she apparently needed to find the “other jacket” (of questionable existence, if you ask me). She’s “very angry” at Daddy (and Daddy laughing because she’s so cute didn’t help, either).

I’m sure I’ll pay for all this in twenty years when the kids are in therapy reliving all my evils as a parent…

A mixed metaphor I use sometimes just for fun:

Well, the foot’s really in the other mouth now, isn’t it?

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is not actually one of my top albums, although it’s good (Abbey Road would actually be my top Beatles album, with a few others rounding out my top choices). It is, however, a landmark album that no one under 40 today can really appreciate. The Beatles entered a 60’s world that saw the single as the norm in the recording industry. They had a major part in changing the music field so that albums became the norm by the ’70s. The Beatles made an earthshaking move with the Pepper concept album in 1967, and nothing was ever really the same again. They initiated a huge paradigm shift in the production of the concept album, the studio album, and music techniques in general. Pepper made it clear that they couldn’t tour again–there was no way that they could duplicate these new sounds in a live arena. There was a whole world of difference between the Revolver album in ’66 and Pepper a year later.

To paraphrase a story I once read, “in 1967 at Christmastime we put Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the turntable and listened, amazed by the new world the Beatles opened up for us.”

This history makes things even more interesting now that new music services like Apple’s rumored 99 cent song downloads have appeared. Evidence appears strong that these kinds of services herald a shift back to singles after more than thirty years of album-centric music publishing.

So on Saturday we went to Tokyo Diner in Lancaster, a Beni Hana kind of place where they cook the food in front of you on a huge grill. Alyssa and Drew were spellbound the first time we went there, and this second time was no exception. Drew watched wide-eyed as the chef spun an egg around on his spatula and flipped it into his hat. Then Drew froze and got big-time scared when the chef set the grill on fire and a big mushroom of flame ballooned up to the ceiling.

The best part, though, is when the chef flipped pieces of shrimp into our mouths. Drew opened his mouth as instructed, but the chef couldn’t get the flip right. Then he turned the spatula around and fired the shrimp overhand into Drew’s mouth like a rocket. I only wish I had a camera to capture Drew’s expression. First we saw the shrimp blast into Drew’s mouth. Then Drew’s eyes bugged out–we thought for a moment that he was going to choke! Then we thought he was going to spit it out, but he just had no idea what to do. Then we told him to eat it. He looked at us and began to chew slowly and suspiciously. I don’t know if he’ll ever trust us again, but the look on his face was priceless.

There’s a cool site here with all kinds of information about the Beatles’ songs. I know a lot about the Beatles, but a lot of this stuff was new to me.