Elvis Ate Dynamite

Good-Bye Elvis

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Lawyer, legal editor, mediocre guitar player, aging punk rocker.

  • The Mavericks Are Back

    Last December, Raul Malo, the lead singer and songwriter for the Mavericks, passed away from a particularly aggressive type of brain cancer. He was just 60 years old. Shortly after his death, I posted a brief tribute to him, but my words can never do justice to a legend like Raul.

    The Mavericks were the greatest American band you never heard of. For 35 years, they blended country, roots music, rock ‘n roll, and, most importantly, Latin music into an inimitable sound that sparked pure joy. And the capstone of that sound was Raul Malo’s peerless voice. When you think of the greatest singers in the history of pop music – Aretha Franklin, Freddie Mercury, Al Green, Roy Orbison – Raul Malo was right up there with the best of them.

    Like all great bands, the Mavericks were at their peak when they played live. My wife and I first saw them at a small club in the Chicago suburbs called FitzGerald’s way back in 1994 when they were quickly ascending the country music charts with their third album, What a Crying Shame. After the band took a hiatus and we started a family (meaning, we largely checked out of pop culture for a good decade), we next saw them at Thalia Hall in Chicago in 2015. From then on, we saw them nearly every year through 2025. They effectively bookended the dark days of the pandemic for us, in that we saw Raul’s solo show at SPACE in Evanston, Illinois, in early March 2000 and the full band at Thalia Hall in May 2022, when life was slowly getting back to normal.

    The last time we saw the Mavericks was at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee in March of last year. Raul and the band were in fine form, but we knew, as did everyone in the venue, that it could have been the last time we saw him play.

    Sadly, we were right. Raul passed away on December 8.

    It felt strange to head into a new year without looking forward to another Mavericks show. Every one was the highlight of our year. I can’t quite articulate the sheer joy you felt seeing them live. Aside from Bruce Springsteen, I’m not sure a more life-affirming concert experience ever existed.

    The thought of never seeing them again was truly depressing.

    And then, we got the news we were waiting for. The Mavericks are back.

    This week, the band announced a new tour dubbed The Music Lives On, featuring special guests like James Otto and Emily West to fill Raul’s formidable shoes. Both Otto and West performed at two amazing Mavericks shows at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium last December, just days before Raul Malo passed. While nobody’s Raul Malo, they will not let you down.

    And the Mavericks and friends are coming back to the Pabst Theater in November. You better believe we’ll be there.

    When the band announced The Music Lives On tour this week, saxophonist Max Abrams posted a very touching piece on a Facebook group called Mavericks Fans Unite in which he acknowledged that some fans might not approve. But, as he said, “The closest we can get to Raul’s genius in person is through the music.”

    Amen, brother. Can’t wait to see you again out on the road.

  • Dad

    *Bill Murray from Groundhog Day voice* “It’s Monday. Again.”

    This weekend flew by, as all weekends do, but it was a good one. Our youngest daughter and her boyfriend visited, driving up from downstate Illinois to celebrate my birthday. They’re kind enough to come up often, but it never seems like enough time.

    How did we all get so old?

    Speaking of getting older, today marks 32 years since my father passed away. Last week, I turned 64. He’s been gone half of my life.

    He was a good one. Imperfect, for sure. We all are. But he survived the Great Depression, served with the US Army in northwestern France during World War II, and came home to raise raise a family, get his PhD, and teach psychology at Loyola University in Chicago for three decades. And in between all that, he found time to draft our village’s and our local school district’s first diversity and inclusion policies. That was 54 years ago.

    Our town, Oak Park, Illinois, was imperfect too, but it was pretty good place to grow up. Thanks to the work of my parents and other good people in the village, Oak Park became a beacon of hope in the dark days of redlining, white flight, and the painfully slow process of open housing and school desegregation. Not that they didn’t meet resistance. Oh, yes they did. But we had just enough people of good faith to move the needle, albeit slowly, towards justice. And I’ll always be proud of my parents for playing a significant role in that.

    I’m also proud of my dad’s World War II service, though he never talked about it much. I still have his dog tags, Infantryman’s badge, collar insignia, and the shoulder patch from his uniform. He was in the US Army’s 66th Infantry Division, known as the Black Panther Division, and I’ve always loved that patch:

    Last year, for my 63rd birthday, I got a tattoo of that image on my right arm in honor of my dad’s service and the 80th anniversary of VE Day:

    Pretty damn cool.

    The funny thing is, my dad was solidly anti-war for most of his life. He opposed Vietnam before most people did, and he would never have supported America’s 21st century wars.

    I always respected and admired his anti-war views. That, however, takes nothing away from what he did in World War II. He showed up, just like he showed up for his family, his students, and his community.

    I can’t say I always followed his example, but I’d like to think I learned the main lesson of his life, which is this: you can always make a difference, even in the worst times. We often expect influential public figures – politicians, artists, activists – to make change happen. My dad didn’t wait around for that.

    We can’t wait around for that, either.

  • Season of Loss

    It was 37º Fahrenheit when we went for our morning walk today. I’m sitting in my office now, with the heat on, wearing a flannel shirt. It’s May 1st, and, in Chicago, this is not unusual. This is what passes for Spring.

    Spring is an odd time of year for another reason. In my family, we go from the anniversary of my brother John’s death in early April to my late brother Tom’s birthday on May 1 to the anniversary of my father’s passing on May 4. It’s a season of loss.

    I’ve mentioned before that Tom was a brilliant guitar player. He was the reason I picked up the guitar late in life, and while I’ll never have one-tenth of his talent, banging away on it makes me feel close to him. Playing music, as it turns out, is for everyone, not just the virtuosos among us. I think Tom would agree. Play because you love playing, not because you think you’re going to be the next Jimi Hendrix or Duane Allman (two of Tom’s favorites).

    We lost Tom to lung cancer in 2009.

    Every year on Tom’s birthday, I make a point of playing Steve Earle’s “Someday” on the guitar. As you might have guessed, I’m a big Steve Earle fan, and, yes, Tom is the one who introduced me to his music back in the mid 1980s.

    “Someday” has always reminded me of Tom. Even though we grew up just outside Chicago, the song captures Tom’s restlessness and desire to, well … get out of town. At about age 18, he took off for the Pacific Northwest, then ended up in Georgia working at a filing station on the interstate, as the song says. Later in life, he moved to Nashville in the hopes of making it as a singer-songwriter.

    But he ended up back here in the Chicago area, with a wife and daughter and a union job. I like to say he started out in a Steve Earle song and ended up in a Bruce Springsteen song. Which is not a bad progression, all things considered.

    This year, maybe I’ll take a stab at playing “Someday” on the Irish bouzouki. I think he’d like that.

    Miss you, brother.

  • An Irish Goodbye

    Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap has made a lot of waves in their relatively short existence. From their provocative name to rapping in the Irish language to their vocal support for Palestinian rights, they leapt from obscurity to international celebrity status in just a few years. So I did not expect the band to take a very different turn this week.

    The story begins with a song called “Mam,” which band member Móglaí Bap, whose real name is Naoise Iarla Ó Cairealláin, wrote for his mother in 2020. In a statement he released on Instagram and in a recent story in the Irish Times, he explained:

    “She was sick at the time with depression. The idea I had in my head with Mam was, if I wrote it, she’d hear it, and maybe she’d feel her worth, because when you suffer from depression, you can’t see your own value. 

    “At that time, we went for a walk, and I told her I had written a song for her, but that it wasn’t completely finished yet, so I’d wait until the next day to play it for her. But by then it was too late.”

    Before he could play her the song, his mother, Aoife Ní Riain, died by suicide.

    When I read Móglaí Bap’s Instagram post earlier this week, it hit hard. It’s beautifully written, deeply emotional, and incredibly brave. In the post, he also mentions that he wrote a new song called “Irish Goodbye” for the band’s 2026 release, Fenian, addressing the enormous burden and the unique grief you feel when someone close to you dies by their own hand. The band also put out a short film to accompany the song, and it’s just as powerful as Móglaí Bap’s words.

    Móglaí Bap’s post, the song “Irish Goodbye,” and the film released a torrent of feelings I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with.

    When I recently posted a video about my brother John’s love for the Clash on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his passing, I consciously omitted the circumstances of his death. I did this partly out of respect for his and my family’s privacy, and partly because I want to remember the brother I knew and bonded with for the first three decades of my life. But Móglaí Bap’s statement was so profound and so important, I felt like it needed whatever amplification I could give it.

    It’s a hard subject to talk about. For me, it’s the hardest subject to talk about. Yet, not talking about it is a huge part of the problem. In the “Irish Goodbye” film, a grieving mother, says, “We’re never going to have any answers,” and she’s right. Thirty-five years later, I can attest to this fact. We’re never going to have any answers.

    But we have the right, and maybe the obligation, to be honest about what we went through and what other people are going through. We can’t bring back the ones we lost, but if we can do anything to help the living, then we’ve got to be as brave as Móglaí Bap.

  • Adding a New Instrument to My Repertoire

    Presenting the Irish bouzouki, my latest obsession.

    It’s basically just a bouzouki (or Greek bouzouki) but tuned differently. It has four pairs of strings tuned together. From top to bottom, they are tuned to GDAD. An alternate tuning for the Irish bouzouki is GDAE, as explained below.

    Have a great day!

  • Breathe

    Quite a stressful weekend, huh?

    I’m not going to delve into all the political implications of what happened Saturday night, nor am I going to jump to conclusions about what did or didn’t happen. If you’ve spent any time on social media over the past 24 hours or so, you’ve likely seen every possible angle, and, frankly, I’ve got nothing to add.

    I will say this, though. I’ve lived through a lot of bad things in my life. As a kid, I saw images of Vietnam on the nightly news. I was just shy of six years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I grew up with the fear that my older brothers would get drafted. I remember Kent State like it was yesterday. And all of that happened before I reached middle school. But despite all that, and everything that’s happened since, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like what we’re living through now.

    It’s not that we haven’t been worse in the past; of course we have. Some people argue that where we are today is the natural result of all our broken promises. What else did we expect if we failed, time after time, to live up to our own values. And maybe they’re right.

    Still, despite 250 years of broken promises, I’ve seen some progress in my day, albeit halting and uneven. What I haven’t seen is the kind of regression we’ve experienced over the past 10 years. It’s been a decade not of broken promises but of outright reversal of progress.

    And yet, we all had to roll out of bed and face the start of the new week. It seems almost callous to go about the day like everything is normal when everything is anything but normal. But here we are.

    The fact is, we can’t fight everything every single day of our lives. We can’t shoulder that burden every instant of every day. Some days, we just have to breathe.

    I hope you have a chance to do that today.

    We all have our own ways of coping. Me? I’m going to make some time to pick up the guitar and bang out a few Clash songs, which is one way I deal with all this stress. It gives me some space to breathe.

    And it reminds me that good people have always been out there, fighting to make the world a better place. Find some joy and positivity in that. Breathe. Then get back into the fight.

  • Is It Spring Yet?

    Since I mentioned TS Eliot yesterday, this time of year always reminds me of the opening lines from “The Waste Land”:

    April is the cruellest month, breeding

    Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

    Memory and desire, stirring

    Dull roots with spring rain.

    I have other reasons to think of April’s cruelty, not the least of which was losing my brother John 35 years ago this month, but, more broadly, I think Eliot was talking about the fickleness of this time of year – warm one day, bitter cold the next, always frustrating your expectations.

    Around here, we go from 70+ degree temperatures to ferocious thunderstorms to occasional blizzards in April, and it’s not nearly as much fun as you’d imagine it to be.

    I can’t really complain today, given that it was a balmy 50º Fahrenheit when my wife and I went for our morning walk (and it’s supposed to hit 78º this afternoon!), but it would be nice if was a little … greener around here. The trees seem to be jealously guarding their leaves.

    Which – speaking of memories – reminds me of our first trip to Ireland four years ago. We spent a week in Dublin in late April to celebrate my 60th birthday (I highly recommend this), and what immediately struck us as we headed out of Shannon Airport was how green it was. Yes, it’s cliché, but spring in Ireland is spring, if you know what I mean. Coming from the Chicago area, we felt like Dorothy landing in Oz for the first time

    A quick look at St. Stephen’s Green in late April confirms this:

    But whatever counts for spring here comes only begrudgingly. And then, in an instant, it turns into oppressively hot summer.

    So, I guess I’ll take what I can. 78º in the third week of April will have to do. Even if the trees are still skeletal and bare. And who knows. We may be shoveling snow next week.

  • Ah, Wednesday

    … that brief transit where the dreams cross, to quote legendary Chicago DJ Lin Brehmer quoting TS Eliot.

    Two days down and three to go.

    Lately, I’ve found a bit more time to pick up the guitar, working on some songs I’m familiar with and some songs I’m playing for the first time. A couple of Steve Earle classics (“The Revolution Starts Now” and “The Devil’s Right Hand”), an old Pogues song I never played before (“Tuesday Morning”), and some Springsteen and Clash tunes I’m learning on a new instrument (“The Promised Land,” “Youngstown,” and “Career Opportunities”) … but more about that later.

    I’m not sure the new cats appreciate it (and I know my wife and son don’t!), but everyone needs something to distract them from, well … *waves in all directions*.

    Our formerly feral cats – two kittens and their mom – enjoying the afternoon sun.

    Hope you’re surviving the week.

  • Power Pop Is Back. Power Pop Never Went Anywhere

    Screenshot

    Unless you came of age in the Chicago area in the late 1970s or early 1980s, you probably can’t appreciate this, but it’s true. Chicago once was the center of the power pop universe. Or so it seemed.

    Material Issue. Shoes. Off Broadway. The Slugs. Pezband. And, of course, honorary Chicagoans-by-way-of-Rockford, Cheap Trick. Power pop ruled the local music scene for a good decade or more.

    Yes, of course, power pop circled the globe. Nick Lowe. Dave Edmunds. The Records. The Babys. Bram Tchaikovski. The Hoodoo Gurus. And US cities outside Chicago produced their own power pop legends, like the Producers from Atlanta, Micheal Penn from New York, and Matthew Sweet from Lincoln, Nebraska. 

    But I’m not sure any city’s local music scene was so heavily invested in power pop as Chicago’s in the ’70s and ’80s. It was everywhere. 

    It was both a reaction against dense, overly produced prog-rock and an extension of the American Midwest’s love affair with the Beatles — by which I mean, the early, pre-Revolver, pre-Sgt. Pepper Beatles. The “She Loves You”/“Hard Day’s Night” Beatles, the Beatles who channeled Buddy Holly and put out skiffle-influenced covers of Chuck Berry, the Isley Brothers, and the Marvelettes. 

    Power pop looked forward but was steeped in nostalgia. It blew a hole in the radio when it hadn’t sounded good all week, to quote Joe Strummer. But it couldn’t last forever. It got absorbed into punk and new wave, and maybe that’s how it should have been.

    So, power pop is no more, right?

    Enter Anthony Calderisi and the Band Calderisi. 

    I came across Calderisi’s music a few weeks ago by accident. I posted something on Threads that implied, if not outright said, that power pop was just a fine memory today, and someone responded: “May I present the Band Calderisi.” So, I took their advice and downloaded the band’s 2018 album, Songs for the Years Gone By, and … good God, it’s the real deal. Great melodies, sharp lyrics, crisp guitar tracks. 

    This is what I’ve been looking for for ages. They’ve reinvigorated my love of music that represents a particular time and place, and I’m so glad a random commenter on Al Gore’s internet brought them to my attention.

    Nostalgia is a goddamned liar. Times never were that good or that bad. But between the lies and the half-truths, between the material misrepresentations and omissions, there are little gems of truth. And if there’s any point to remembering, it’s to find them. 

    Anyway, I can’t recommend the Band Calderisi enough. Check out their website, buy their music, and if you have a chance, see them live.

  • Happy Monday

    Well, that was some weekend. Between the apocalyptic storms Friday night and the flooded streets and sidewalks on Saturday, I think the universe was trying to tell us something. And we hardly got the worst of it. We may have had biblical thunderstorms and gale-force winds, but at least we dodged the tornadoes.

    It’s been an active spring here in Illinois.

    But it’s Monday, so I’m back at work. Work being my home office where I occasionally take a break and play guitar or post on my blog. (For the record, it’s only 8:21 a.m. at the moment, so I’m not stealing the company’s time.)

    It’s been, shall we say, a little hectic at work lately, so I haven’t been on here much. Unfortunately, that means I missed the opportunity to remember one of the greatest punk artists of all time, Joey Ramone. Last week marked 25 years since his untimely death, and while I wasn’t able to cobble together a blog post, the anniversary of his passing didn’t go unnoticed.

    I only saw the Ramones once, as a college sophomore at the University of Illinois in 1981, but that one experience provided 45 years of indelible memories … and counting. It’s one thing to listen to the Ramones’ recorded music, but it was quite another to see them live. Not that their records weren’t amazing. Their catalog stands up against any punk or hard rock band around. But the energy of their live shows was indescribable. Raw, fast, furious, relentless. And the crowd, especially back in the early days, was as animated as I’ve ever seen.

    More than anything, though, the Ramones created this incredible sense of belonging, especially for the freaks and outcasts they attracted. A couple of years after that show at U of I, they released the Subterranean Jungle LP, which included a song called “Outsider,” a two minute, ten second anthem that succinctly summarized their appeal:

    I’m an outsider, outside of everything
    I’m an outsider, outside of everything
    I’m an outsider, outside of everything
    Everything you know, everything you know
    It disturbs me so
    Everybody tried to push me, push me around
    Everybody tried to put me, try to put me down
    All messed up, hey everyone I’ve already had
    All my fun, more troubles are gonna come
    I’ve already had all my fun
    I’m an outsider, outside of everything
    I’m an outsider, outside of everything
    I’m an outsider, outside of everything
    Everything you know, everything you know
    It disturbs me so

    Yeah, Joey. We knew just what you meant.

    Anyway, back to work.