Ep. 19 - Dear Young Rocker
This newsletter edition eschews previous practices
Chelsea Ursin and the power of rock
Listen to our latest episode here. Or listen somewhere else. I’m not your mom or your boss or your mom’s boss.
I can never do umlauts on a regular keyboard. They’re easy on a phone but not on a computer. Maybe there’s an easy way to do it but I don’t know that way so for me it’s all impossible.
So just imagine umlauts all over the place, denoting rocking on and such.
Lemmy put in a video here.
This week’s episode is not an interview with Lemmy Kilmister. He’s too dead. It’s with Chelsea Ursin of the band Banana and podcast Dear Young Rocker.
Here’s not one of Chelsea’s songs with Banana:
Shit, you guys, I barely slept. This edition of the newsletter might be long on videos and short on IMPORTANT SENSITIVE MENTAL HEALTH CONTENT.
I said MENTAL health, not METAL health. Everyone knows that metal health, caused by banging your head, will drive you mad.
So Chelsea Ursin. Who I kept calling Hannah. I don’t know why.
I like her a lot and I think she had a lot of trenchant things to say. I am proud, so proud, that I never brought up that I am also in a band.
Because honestly, what could be more awful than hearing a younger woman talk about her music and then have an older man pivot the whole thing back to his dumb sad world and try to put himself on the same field. GROSS.
That was fun. Dave Chappelle really can’t sing very well. But he does anyway, huh?
Something something something follow your heart something.
Speaking of Foo Fighters, seen this?
Also hooray wonderful. And the Bee-Gees, yes, wonderful.
WHY DID THEY SING SO HIGH?
It’s fine, it’s great, of course, I’m sorry for everyone turning against disco, but WHY THOUGH?
Are you trying to say that other people sang high or that I’m an old man? Aw, shaddup Substack.
When my brother Rick was in his teens and working at the airport and getting high almost constantly whilst cleaning airplanes, he had occasion to work on the crew that was to unload the Bee-Gees tour plane. I believe this was for the Spirits Having Flown tour.
He and his buddy Pete waited for the Gibbs to get off the plane so they could clean it or unload it or something. Rick says they took a while and when they deplaned onto the tarmac, they took some time shaking hands with fans, schmoozing, doing whatever. And Barry took a moment to smile and wave to Rick and Pete.
At this, Pete said “Don’t smile at me. If I had a rock I’d throw it at you.”
To this, Barry looked startled and got into a limo.
This might not have ever happened. Rick made stuff up all the time and, as I mentioned, he was always high. And Pete was higher than Rick. Maybe they just talked about it. They hated disco, you see. A lot of people did, which was a low key racist thing that happened back then.
Read this: Why 'Disco sucks!' sucked
And I laughed at that story for years because I was dumb and because I admired my older brother even as he piled up reasons not to. But then, way too late, I pivoted. Fuck Pete. Fuck Rick, too. Barry Gibb is a genius who wants to make people happy.
There’s nothing not beautiful about this:
I still don’t understand that high range, though.
I am feeling mentally downtrodden today.
This has manifested for you in my being unable/unwilling to do much more than let my mind wander to hopefully amusing places.
Here’s a baby monkey being friends with baby ducks.
Here’s to the future.