Even with the arrival of Fran McCaffery the Iowa Men's BB team continue to have defections, including the leader scorer from last year's 10-22 flop Aaron Fuller and Cody Larson decided that he didn't want to be part of the team and got out of his release as well as Ben Burst who we can now call Ben "the bust" Burst. This continues to be the ways and means of the former coach Todd Lickliter, to which ball players would quit and go elsewhere. Fuller getting homesick and Larson wants to play for a winner I guess but wants to have Iowa recuit him from the rumor wire. Perhaps if Cody Larson wanted to apply some effort he could have been the next Les Jepsen who came from South Dakota, was it North Dakota. In essence, Fran McCaffery can now start over and get some AAU ballplayers to come in and learn an uptempo game. Losing Fuller does hurt but then again he wasn't exactly the second coming of Kevin Gamble either, he was a work in progress and sometimes looked good but mostly looked out of place even in that boring half court offense that Lickliter was teaching them. Perhaps that's what Cory Larson or Ben Burst wanted, to play in a blah offense so they could throw up three point cinderblocks or just run in circles and trying to pick out what cheerleader they wanted to score with, if that was the only way they could score. I don't buy the logic that McCaffery was selling himself as the Anti Lickliter and if he did then shame on him. Lickliter did it the best way he could and now has taken the first installment of his buyout to return to Indiana and so did John Lickliter who everybody knew wasn't going to hang around. Perhaps Fran told Cory and Aaron that the new uptempo offense was going to require lots of running and more running and they jumped ship since they got used to run whenever you wanted to last season. But Fuller is no Tyler Smith nor Tony Freeman. Nothing wrong than getting homesick but Fuller I'm sure will be spending more time as a second stringer than a starting player for the Hawks next season.
So which means if Fran McCaffery is really serious of asking for input of former Hawkeyes on getting replacement players for the departed John Lickliter and Aaron Fuller and dreamers such as Ben Burst or Cody Larson, now is the time to search far and wide for that talent pool for he's going to need it right now. Even in that case I still have a feeling The Hawks will have a better record than last year. We'll see.
Delta Moon has released their fifth album since their inception and Hellbound Train continues the winning streak of great swamp rock blues that former Brains leader Tom Gray really doesn't have to rely on that moniker as "the former leader of The Brains". Gray has now slipped into a type of vocals that recalls JJ Cale at times. Hellbound Train is the second album that Gray has done without a female counterpoint vocalist and he knows his blues very well with a faithful reading of Fred McDowell's You Gotta Move but he excels with the swamp rocking title track and the R and B feel of Stuck In Carolina and the twin steel guitar solos of Gray and Mark Johnson remains to be heard to be believed. I could really do without the Plantation Song which closes out the album but I never argue with a great train song and Tom Gray has a thing for trains since he wrote two songs with trains in them. I've given up hope of Universal ever releasing The Brains two albums for Mercury but with Delta Moon they bypass the major label catch 22 in favor of self released or going with independent labels that love original music and Hellbound Train doesn't disappoint. And I was doubly amazed that I found that album at all thanks to Moondog Music in Dubuque who continues to support the independent labels. Unlike Best Buy.
And it was 30 years ago that I did buy The Brains first album on cassette and still think it's one of the best new wave albums ever made with Money Changes Everything being the best known hit. B side was Girl In The Magazine, which maybe one of the best songs about masterbations ever recorded. The Brains never had any of their albums issued on CD, a crime against humanity if you ask me so I dubbed my cassette version on a CD and life has been happy for me since then.
I do keep up on the latest events of the world via Twitter but I have unfollowed a few folks after them complaining about my observations of the world and chatting with my GF which is the only I can chat with her since MSN instant messenger took a shit from their damn updates. Too bad that MSN cannot leave things the way things are when they work. I don't need fourteen windows of other shit that I don't use or need. Or when I do try to talk to some of the followers they don't reply back which makes me wonder about if I'm interferring with their livelihood. So I grant them their release and unfollow them, just like they unfollow me when I'm talking with my girl. I'm one of those folk that do like to keep in touch with friends but after a while if I feel like talking to the walls would get a better reaction than I feel like I'm intruding in their space if I make a comment. I enjoy reading the antics of some of them when they add a new blog to their blogsite and one of them is so direct and funny about her failings of trying to find the right guy that she should consider making a pitch for her own reality show. It also show that perhaps she's either too high maintance or too self important to find a decent man. Sometimes I think she's attracted to the wrong kind but it's not for me to say anything about what I think. She'd probably be so pissed at me that she blog about the self serving music critic that butted in her business with his own observations. But if you only in it for the penis size and bank account, you're going to be one lonely woman spinster for the rest of your life. So it was written and so shall it be done.
And I'm sure this particular woman will get plenty more sex in a month then i will in my lifetime but that's all right. I've learn to wait it out. But I'm also thankful that I have gotten a very good woman in the one that I found that takes me for what I'm worth and who I am. Love isn't about big penis and big money, a true love is somebody toughing it out with you through good and bad times and for better or worse. Thank my lucky stars that I found that woman.
And finally, I finally recalled the band that I heard at Strictly Discs last month and was frantically searching for that album, they are The Volebeats and I gather they're based in Royal Oak Michigan. Unfortuly the album that I found at Moondogs wasn't the album played at Madison, this one was called Sky And The Ocean and the main songwriter is in Outrageous Cherry. Volebeats sound a lot like echofiled BoDeans or Long Ryders and one of the songs Annabel was later covered by local faves The 100's on Take The Gravel Home. I do tend to think I will get that elusive album since I've seen it listed via Amazon.com. And maybe a few more. I missed out on this band but I shall make that up in the coming weeks.
And so it goes.
Side note: Ben Burst had a successful career at Wisconsin, owning the record of made 3 pointers 235 for the UW. He's now part of the Go Empire Group in his after basketball career.
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