Last Band Standing: Game 4 Match-ups (and Game 3 Results)

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Janos Marton

Music tournament strategizing is in full swing this weekend.   Some coaches see the first round slipping away, others try to lock it down, and a few in the middle are trying to navigate wins without pitching their big guns.   It all makes for an entertaining tournament.   Listen to Game 4 match-ups here (by the way, does the “U” in Match-up look better capitalized or not in the headline?), and vote by commenting before 10pm (EST) on Tuesday.   Tuesday night gets a bonus hour, as I won’t be getting to the next update until after my weekly basketball pick-up game.  And now, Game 3 Results:

These Bones (Super Furry Animals) holds off It’s So Hard to Be a Saint in the City (live) (Bruce Springsteen), 94-88.  Even Boss fans expressed some disappointment here, and SFA jumps  to a surprising 2-1 lead.   Gmo is yet to call on any of the big dogs, though. Continue reading →

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Last Band Standing: Game 3 (and Game 2 results)

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Janos Marton

This is where it gets exciting, folks.   Coaches down 2-0 have to start fighting now to stay alive.    Those tied at 1-1 have to assess what worked and what didn’t heading into Game 3.   Listen to Game 3 match-ups here, and vote by commenting below before 9pm on Sunday.    Also stay tuned a big LTD announcement, coming Monday.  And now, Game 2 results:

Hello Sunshine (Super Furry Animals) defeat Out in the Street (Bruce Springsteen), 92-89.    The Super Furry Animals pick up their first LTD music tournament win, evening the score against the Boss.

Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones) slugs it out against Card Cheat (Clash), 130.1-108.7.   Midnight Mike turned to one of the Stones’ masterpieces to even the series.   Now both coaches turn to #1 hits to get the job done in Game 3.

Driftin’ Blues (Sam Cooke) stormed back very late to beat Suffragette City (David Bowie), 101-93.5.  As in every music tournament, every vote counts. Grant is not messing around with his Game 3 choice, by the way.

Song Remains the Same (Led Zeppelin) takes out Fade Away and Radiate (Blondie), 90-81.5.   Led Zeppelin leads the series 2-0.  Blondie has its back against the wall now, and is revving things up with Sunday Girl.

Game 3 Match-ups

These Bones (Super Furry Animals) vs. It’s So Hard to Be a Saint in the City (live) (Bruce Springsteen)

Should I Stay or Should I Go (Clash) vs. Paint It Black (Rolling Stones)

That’s Where It’s At (Sam Cooke) vs. Under Pressure (David Bowie)

Sunday Girl (Blondie) vs. Living Loving Maid (Led Zeppelin)

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Last Band Standing: Day 2 (and Day 1 results)

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Janos Marton

Past tournament participants will recall that we usually have a results post and match-ups post, but since I’m flying solo we’re going to combine the two.

When you’re trying to win a best of seven series, it’s poison to fall behind 2-0. You can definitely come back, but your margin for error drops to razor thin. It’s interesting to see what songs Day 1 losers brought out in their attempts to even the score.

Day 2 match-ups are posted below. You can listen to them here, and vote by commenting below before 9pm on Friday. Squeeze em’ in before the weekend. And now, here are the results of Day 1:

10th Avenue Freeze-Out (Bruce Springsteen) tops Keep the Cosmic Trigger Happy (Super Furry Animals), 96.5-85.5. Bruce Springsteen leads 1-0. Gmo looks to be playing it confident with a rather obscure track off The River for his second pick. Then again, Dem Adam’s entire band’s catalog is obscure. And I apparently had no idea how to spell ‘catalog.’ Thought there was a ‘ue’ at the end. What? Both spellings are correct. Damn you, WordPress.

Rudie Can’t Fail (Clash) crushes Loving Cup (Rolling Stones), 130.7-112.1. The Clash lead 1-0. Gimme Shelter v. Card Cheat is a second straight intense match-up.

That’s It, I Quit, I’m Moving On (Sam Cooke) eeks out Janine (David Bowie), 98.4-91.6. Sam Cooke leads 1-0. Lindsay follows up with a slow, bluesy tune, while Grant amps up the energy.

Heartbreaker (Led Zeppelin) rips Rip Her to Shreds (Blondie) to shreds, 105.45-83.15. Led Zeppelin leads 1-0. The contrast between Song Remains the Same and Fade Away might be even greater than the Bowie/Cooke pairing. The people will have to make a choice.

Day 2 Match-Ups

Out in the Street (Bruce Springsteen) vs. Hello Sunshine (Super Furry Animals)

Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones) vs. Card Cheat (Clash)

Suffragette City (David Bowie) vs. Driftin’ Blues (Sam Cooke)

Song Remains the Same (Led Zeppelin) vs. Fade Away and Radiate (Blondie)

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Last Band Standing: Day 1

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Janos Marton

Welcome to the first round of Last Band Standing, an exciting music tournament that we’re trying for the first time, in which fans like you “coach” artists to victories in a series of Best of Seven series. For a more thorough explanation, check out Guillermo’s intro post.

Tonight we’ll post the first set of match-ups. For those who have participated in previous tournaments, the scoring system is identical- in the comment section, post your scores for each match-up on a ten-point scale (i.e., Song A – 8, Song B – 6). The song with the most total points wins the match-up. You can listen to all the tunes here, and vote until 9pm EST on Wednesday.

Thank you to all eight of our inaugural coaches- GMo (Bruce Springsteen), Dem Adam (Super Furry Animals), Midnight Mike (Rolling Stones), Cristina (The Clash), Grant (David Bowie), Lindsay (Sam Cooke), Adrock (Led Zeppelin), and Aiko (Blondie). One of you will coach the last band standing.

10th Avenue Freeze-Out (Bruce Springsteen) vs. Keep the Cosmic Trigger Happy (Super Furry Animals)

Loving Cup (Rolling Stones) vs. Rudie Can’t Fail (Clash)

Janine (David Bowie) vs. That’s It, I Quit, I’m Moving On (Sam Cooke)

Heartbreaker (Led Zeppelin) vs. Rip Her to Shreds (Blondie)

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HCS (I, 5): LSU Homecoming (Part 1- Ping-Pong and Desert Eagles)

Posted on February 19, 2012 by g-mo

The Project Lounge

LSU Homecoming
Part 1: Ping-Pong and Desert Eagles

“That was the last time I brought a bat to a gunfight.”
-Ron

This is how it all went down.

As a graduate of an institution with a less than impressive football team, Homecoming weekend at Dartmouth College was not an event based around a game. It was more a reason to drink more than we usually did. So when Ronnie pushed the idea of a group of Hurricane Campers heading out to Baton Rouge for the LSU homecoming game, it piqued interest a bit. Janos and I had been back at camp from our Dartmouth weekend for a week and a half but the time didn’t matter— there was another school, another event and another populace to which we could take our fraternity road trip mentality and indubitably make an adventure. I wasn’t even really sure I was going to go with them until I packed up a backpack 10 minutes before our 7 o’clock departure.

One of my reasons for hesitating was that the night before we left was the Night of the 25-Beer Debacle. That evening, a group of no less Continue reading →

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Last Band Standing- First Round Revealed!

Posted on February 18, 2012 by g-mo

So we’ve gotten a few months without returning to the hallowed structure that launched LTD popularity into the triple digits- the music tournament. I’m happy to announce that starting Monday, we will be launching our 4th tournament in history, and the first of 2012- Last Band Standing. Here is the general set-up, but think NBA Playoffs:

1) 8 artists/bands are coached by 8 independent LTDreamers
2) It’s a 3 round tournament, with each round being a Best of Seven (like the NBA Playoffs)
3) No artist or bands song can be featured more than once through the entire tournament.
4) Coaches alternate 2-3-2 for who goes first in choosing what song will compete in a match (since choosing second is a bit of an advantage)

Those are the basics. Confused? It’ll become clearer as the match goes on, but here’s an example. Continue reading →

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Fall-Out in Vancouver, by Nate Senge

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Janos Marton

You’re a thousand miles from home and you’re out of gas and the sun is not shining but a slight rain is settling down on your shoulders and tinging through your clothes and all you can think about is that goddamn good melody that Lady Gaga just put down on a song the producer wrote the chorus for and then it went to shit and you can’t believe they gave the Superbowl Halftime to Madonna as if she didn’t have enough chances and she is fifty-five and propped up on plastic and there’s still Lady Gaga out there making her next music video in the third smallest pool of a Hollywood estate where the last time rain fell was 1933 when Jack Nicholson was fighting crime and fighting blondes.

“Gastown. You’ve gotta go to Gastown,” Charles was saying. I snapped to.
“Gastown is a yuppie’s swamp,” his wife said.
“Only corners of it. Go to Gastown. You’ll see what I mean. Just go.” Continue reading →

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Mitt, I am your father: The real George Romney

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Janos Marton

Father and son at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City (run by Robert Moses)

Call me sadomasochistic, but I watched Mitt Romney’s loser speech in Colorado last night. Romney’s speeches lack the amusing chicken-little quality of a Santorum or Gingrich barn-burner. Our very civilization is not at stake.  I was just about to the TV off when Mitt began speaking about his father, something he does not often do.

We all know that elite politicians, who mostly come from middle class comfort at the least, and more typically the upper echelons of society, like to parade around their more hard-scrabble relatives to humanize themselves, from Gephardt’s milk truck driving father to Santorum’s coal-mining grandfather. Even President Obama, who has a pretty compelling story on his own, referred to his PHD father as a “goat herder” in his 2004 convention speech. Continue reading →

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HCS (I, 4): Halloween

Posted on February 6, 2012 by g-mo

Near the end of October, Dingo announced at a community dinner meeting that we were going to go “reverse trick-or-treating.” The reality of the suggestion hit home. At this point in time, there was still no power in much of East Biloxi, peninsular target of a twenty-foot storm surge that it was. When the sun fell, the streets went to black; the sort of resulting ambiance was in the least degree, troubling, and at a further degree, completely foreign. There was one night that I accompanied my friend Gretchen out to the Vietnamese church on Oak Street as the sun was setting after work. She went inside to speak to a minister about doing remediation work in the facility. I sat out on the curb and smoked a cigarette. As the sun fell, the city fell concordant, in a way I’ve barely experienced in developed areas. Besides the generator-driven illumination from the Buddhist temple volunteers next door, the side streets became dark, dark shadows of their former barren wreckage. Continue reading →

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HCS (I, 3): The Beginning Of Termite

Posted on January 27, 2012 by g-mo

Taking a break- look closely. Yours truly in the red bandana on left, Nos in back by truck.

“WHO’S THE HELL KATRINA?”

-Graffiti on Division Street home, Biloxi, MS, Fall 2005

The singular origin of the Colony is up for debate, but a general agreement is that the two that first put tents out in the field behind the church were Hambone Matt and Polesaw Pete. Hambone was an M.F.A. fiction candidate living on Lake Charles in western Lousiana and teaching introductory English classes at a school on the shore out there. Polesaw Pete was an engineer from the I-66 corridor west of Washington D.C. I didn’t discover either of these facts for weeks because when you spend all day cutting down trees and ripping out drywall you don’t want to talk about things that take energy to think about. You want to drink beers, pass a pipe around a campfire, and listen to Owen play “Country Roads” and “Wagon Wheel,” smilingly content with the southern stars and the smell of wood smoke in your hair. And we all left our pasts behind us for the first couple weeks. There wasn’t a history, only the present of East Biloxi.

It wasn’t all stars and smiles though…the colony had a sense of elitism towards short-termers and always did. It did toward me as well until a couple weeks in, and then Continue reading →

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