Grammy Night

The Grammy Awards took place last night. Back in the 1980s, I would never have missed such an event. I would've read Billboard and other trade magazines to know who was nominated for all the major awards. Many of the nominees would've been in my LP or CD collection. I would've had favorites, and I would've cared if my favorites won or lost.

But that was back in the 1980s.

This morning I awoke to NPR (sorry, Mark) to find that Amy Winehouse had won five Grammy awards on Sunday night. Amy Winehouse? Less surprising than the fact that I've never heard Amy Winehouse was the fact that I'd never heard of Amy Winehouse. To my knowledge, the name never entered my ear before this morning, and yet she won five awards. And yet when the radio folks played a little of Winehouse's "Rehab," I found it surprising and interesting.

(By the way, in addition to winning most of the delegates in Saturday's primaries and caucuses, Barack Obama topped off the weekend with a Grammy win for best spoken word album—his reading of his book The Audacity of Hope.)

So where was I during the awards? I was in Asheville, North Carolina, where my wife and I joined a couple of good Cherokee friends to enjoy Dougie MacLean's solo concert at the Diana Wortham Theatre.

At 3:40, I slipped out of a Cherokee Leadership Council meeting and went outside to meet my wife in the parking lot. We drove to Erwin and met our friends and then headed over the mountain.

In Asheville, we took a chance on Kubo's, a downtown Japanese restaurant featuring sushi and hibachi menus. We did both! We started with Dynamite Rolls, Philadelphia Rolls, Eel Cucumber Rolls and California Rolls. I had Kirin, a decent Japanese beer to go with the sushi and my steak and scallops. Directly across the street from Kubo's, between us and the Diana Wortham, a Marble Slab called to us like a mythological siren. We couldn't resist. There I had some double dark chocolate ice cream mixed with peanut butter ice cream and covered it with hot fudge. (Today I'm eating Lean Cuisine and anticipating a trip to the gym!)

Dougie MacLean is a wonderful songwriter and performer. His songs are melodically beautiful and lyrically strong, and he's a fine guitar player as well. In addition to these pleasures, he's terrifically funny and engaging. If you ever get a chance to see him perform live, do it.

My favorite song of his is "Ready for the Storm," a song I first heard covered by Christian recording artist Rich Mullins. Dougie opened his second set with it last night. I'm going to try to work it up with our band at Cherokee.


Check Dougie out at http://www.dougiemaclean.com/. The photo of him is the work of Roger Liptrot and can be found at www.folkimages.com/dougiemaclean.html.