Thursday, June 12, 2014

DAVE: You have children. I do not. Do you ever worry about a school shooting?

JIM: It is a tough question. Not really, but it also seems naive to think it could never happen.

Monday, June 9, 2014

DAVE: When I was younger, I always liked Hall and Oates. What about you?

JIM: Yes. Me too.

Private Eyes was the first actual record album I ever bought. I remember I wanted to go to see them for my first concert. My parents told me I was too young, so then my grandparents said they would take me but by the time we tried to get tickets they were sold out. To this day, I've still never seen them in concert.

DAVE: I’ve always been a bit of a “wait for the Greatest Hits album” type of music buyer. So, when their record “History of Rock and Soul, Part 1” came out, I was all over it. And although I still have a good number of records from my youth in my bedroom closet (albeit with no record player on which to play them), I don’t think that album is among them. I don’t know what happened to it, but I do remember that it was a pretty great record. All the hits, baby.

JIM: Yeah. I might have that cassette tape. I'm not sure. All the hits. They are both from Philadelphia, you know.

Why the interest in Hall & Oates?

DAVE: I did know that they were from Philadelphia.

Last night [Saturday] during the second intermission of the hockey game, I was flipping through the HBO channels that my parents have, and on one of them, I came across a broadcast of the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony, and there were Hall and Oates playing “Rich Girl.” After that, they played “You Make My Dreams Come True,” and that was it. They probably played more songs before I tuned in. The audience seemed to be really into them. I think they were a major band for a lot of folks our age during our teenage years. Also, they are on my mind because there is a restaurant in Fox Chapel whose bar has a bunch of TVs for different sporting events that I sometimes go to for dinner and drinks. And on Fridays, they have a two-man band in the bar that does covers, and some of their songs are by Hall and Oates.