Chit-Chat Check-In #111 Transcript

Hello, this is your Captain speaking. Happy Valentine's Day, however Valentine's Day came to be. I don't know. Probably some corporate boondoggle in the pocket of Big Rose. I don't know.

But I'm not going to be a bummer, I'm just going to say happy Valentine's Day. Love is for love, people should be for love. I'm all for love. So if we're going to have a holiday celebrating people being loving towards other humans, let's do that. Let's have that.

Crystal: Better than President's Day.

Better than Presiden't Day. That was Crystal, by the way, pointing out that cogent observation. I love all the people in this room, I'll say that. I just got a rose. That's maybe the first rose that anybody's ever given me.

Anyway, Susie, if you've listened this far--which I doubt that you have--I love you. Happy Valentine's Day. This song is one of many I've written for Susie. It's pretty romantic. I keep trying, because I don't think I'll really ever succeed in capturing all of the feelings I have about what Susie has done for me and my life. And not just for me. When we're talking about the broader idea of love, I think that introduces the idea, the concept, of community, and family ... and, I don't know. Not just for me, but for the city of Chicago, Susie was a beacon of love for bands for so long at Lounge Ax. And that's where I fell in love with her. I'm surprised everybody didn't fall in love with her. I think maybe they all did. But I’m the one that got lucky.

But it was teaching me, at that point in time, that it's really valuable to have a group of people that love and support each other. I don't know if I'd ever had that behavior modeled for me in quite the way that Susie was able to. It still resonates today in the city of Chicago. People who run clubs here, I think a lot of them are modeled on the sense of community and love that Susie displayed in how she operated her business, and booked her bands, and treated her bands.

That's a little bit outside the idea, the notion of romantic love. But I think that this holiday should expand beyond the notion of romantic love. Because let's face it, romantic love is complicated and can be pretty hard for a lot of people. So let's just say that there's a lot of love, and a lot of types of love.

I was thinking about this a lot because Susie's been working a lot on Lounge Ax archives and thinking about what she wants to do with all of the information she has accumulated over the years. About ... I don't know, she saved all the booking information, all of that. I don't know, there's so much stuff. All the demo tapes anyone ever sent her.

You want to talk about love--she understood that each one of those represented an act of love. She might not have expressed it like that, but I would say that she treated them like that, because we still have all of them. Every demo tape that anybody ever sent my wife. She respected it to the point that we did not get rid of any of them. We listened to all of them. Susie and Mark, in a lot of cases, listened to all of them. Wrote down their feelings about them. And we have all of that information also. So if you ever sent Susie a demo tape, she might not have had room for you on the calendar. But she did listen to it. And she did treat it with respect.

Having said all of that, I am not Susie. I haven't learned to love to that extent. So please do not send me demo tapes of any sort. I'm not allowed to listen to them, contractually. I've been advised of that for a long time, that if you use a common chord progression, you're going to end up ... whatever.

I've really gone off the rails. Happy Valentine's Day. Fuck. Jesus Christ. This is ... what are we going to do? This is too long and insane.

Crystal: Is it still going?

I am still going. I don't know how to get out of it. I don't know how to end it ... should I ...

Carry on.