You usually have to go to Harvard Square to get such public displays of hippiedom, but this is the second time I’ve happened upon The Second Line Social Aid Pleasure Society Brass Band belting something out and parading around in the Davis Square T environs.

I had walked home from Porter Square and stopped at Mike’s (yes, Mike’s) to wallow in lack-of-Terri-ness by revisiting the site of some early T&E Show adventures. While they have Harpoon now, I haven’t really been missing much by not going there for years, and the whole adventure would have been better with the Dubstress. Heading out to wash it down with a cold caffeinated somethin’ somethin’ from the Someday, it was hard not to hear these guys. (I do have to give some credit to the earnest acoustic guitar guy who continued to play, undeterred though inaudible in the center of the Square).

Seems they were playing at Johnny D’s at a(nother) hurricane benefit:

The evening will kick-off with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, a 14-piece “raucous, stomp-your-foot-and-belt-out-the-choruses” (so says the Boston Globe) Cambridge-based street band, whose motto is “we aim to please if the cause is true and the time is right.” . Proceeds will go the the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic

There’s video: it seemed like a good time to try out the video features of the new camera (I’ll go into that later perhaps). Warning: the video is a big file, it’s .avi, it’s coming from the home server via cable modem, I didn’t even try to compress it, Mac users may need the VLC media player, and lastly and most importantly, there is Country Joe and the Fish content. You have been warned. If you are undeterred, well, Whoopee! we’re all gonna die [85MB, 3:54]. If you stick it out to the the end, it gets especially charming as a girl from the crowd rushes in and succeeds in getting a bunch of people dancing. I also found the kid with the camera phone charming.

[In case you missed them, here are Welcome to Somerville part 1 and part 2]

PS: Terri, I wish you would have been there. If you watch the video, note the socks on the hippie girl with the green bag; you would have been envious.

I love this story about John Densmore refusing to let Doors songs be used in ads.

“Everyone wanted him to do it,” said John Branca, an attorney who worked on the Cadillac proposal. “I told him that, really, people don’t frown on this anymore. It’s considered a branding exercise for the music. He told me he just couldn’t sell a song to a company that was polluting the world.”

…

But his stance against commercialization has won a chorus of support from the true believers of rock. In the Nation, Tom Waits wrote a letter in praise of Densmore: Corporations “suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product. Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos.”

Waits has since learned that holding out isn’t necessarily effective: He is suing General Motors for using what he describes as a Waits sound-alike in its European car commercials. …

There’s also some michegas about Ray Manzerek and the other guy touring under the name “The Doors”, to which Densmore said:

“I would love to play with the Doors and play those songs again. I would. And I will play again as the Doors. Just as soon as Jim shows up.”

It really is always the drummer who can’t let go, isn’t it?

If you’re as pathetic as me, you’re counting down the days until Ikea Stoughton opens. Novermber 9, kids. Gotta replace that Onkel unit I bought in Pittsburgh in 1995 with some better shelving. Need cheap tea lights! Need meatballs!

A while ago I mentioned in passing the big anti-gun billboard that faces Mass Pike near Fenway Park. (I totally misunderstood its message at the time, thinking it was a “yay, Massachusetts” message.)

Anyway, from the attention-grabbing, highly confrontational and emotional messages that that billboard usually features, you’d think the sponsor would be a militant anti-gun group. Not really. The Dig has the scoop:

“We need a nationwide membership group to engage reasonable gun owners who don’t think there should be unrestricted access to guns for kids, criminals and terrorists, and that’s what the NRA thinks. We’re going to set the record straight—you can be for gun rights and for violence prevention. It’s just common sense to lock your gun, require background checks and not sell 50-caliber assault rifles with no questions asked to any fanatic, terrorist and criminal.”