Albany Archives - Page 2 of 18 - Ramblin' with Roger

Concert: No Doubt, 10 July 1997

MxPx, The Selecter

Reading the book 60 Songs That Explain The ’90s by Rob Harvilla reminded me of a concert by the group No Doubt on 10 July 1997 at the arena in downtown Albany. It used to be the Knickerbocker Arena, and now it’s the MVP Arena, but I believe that it was the Pepsi Arena at the time.

I had a friend who was widowed shortly after her first child was born, her husband dying of Agent Orange in the early ’80s. So I occasionally babysat the girl. When the teen wanted to see No Doubt, her mother suggested that I accompany her and four of her friends. I was familiar with the group. My friend dropped us off.

The first group was called MxPx. The sheer constant audio assault was unnerving to me, but the audience seemed to enjoy it.

Then came an English 2-tone ska revival band, The Selecter – I misremembered that it was The Specials, but they had similar roots. I thought they were excellent. Still, a goodly number of the audience literally turned their back on them; they did not like this music. (Here’s Too Much Pressure.)

Not only did I think it was disrespectful, but they were also oblivious to the fact that the roots of the music that No Doubt was playing came from ska. It would be like if, in the 1960s, a white Blues musician such as Eric Clapton in Cream or Keith Richards in The Rolling Stones were the headliners, with the opening act being B.B. King or Albert King, and the audience turned their backs on them. This ticked me off greatly.

Stefani and company

The main act came out, and they were entertaining enough. I remember very distinctly that Gwen Stefani, the lead singer, wanted the boys to sing the line, “I’m just a girl.” Some were uncomfortable, but most did so.

Harvilla says in his book regarding the group, “…which brings us to the sell-out adjacent song that’s only.005 ska… No Doubt is a great many things: zippy new wave monolith worthy of Cyndi Lauper, the Go-Go’s, or the B-52s. [It’s] a delivery system for lead singer Gwen Stefani, the blindingly sunny pop star and wildly out-of-pocket cultural appropriator who combines the appeal of Jessica Rabbit, Olive Oyl, Cher from Clueless…

“It’s not entirely that the band abandoned its roots on this record, but the roots are no longer a focal point. Maybe with Just A Girl, it’s best to imagine No Doubt as a space shuttle with the rocket boosters’ burnout detachment. She’s a true superstar orbit, and in this case, those abandoned rocket boosters just happen to be labeled ska, and everyone in the band, other than Gwen. “

All that said, I’ve never been all that fussy about selling out or “authenticity,” having seen the movie A Complete Unknown about Bob Dylan. The notion of selling out can be pretty darn fuzzy.

BTW, here’s the likely No Doubt playlist of the concert:

Tragic Kingdom
Excuse Me, Mr.
Different People
Happy Now?
Just a Girl
The Climb
End It on This
Total Hate ’95
Hey You
The Imperial March
Move On / Ghost Town
Don’t Speak
Sunday Morning
Spiderwebs
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Oi to the World

Trinity UMC is closing

At Lark and Lancaster in Albany

Trinity UMC is closing. From the Times Union: “Church members voted May 4 at a Special Charge Conference to discontinue Trinity United Methodist Church, the last Methodist church in Albany.” I knew it was coming, but it still hurts, even though I left there a quarter of a century ago.

As I’ve almost certainly told before, I didn’t attend church much from when I left for college in 1971 until 1982. My grandmother Gertrude Williams had died on Super Bowl Sunday in Charlotte, NC, but her funeral wasn’t until May, held at the Trinity AME Zion Church in Binghamton, NY. I sang in the choir and realised I missed singing in a church choir.

So, I started church shopping with my girlfriend at the time. In December 1982, a tenor from the choir named Gray Taylor stood in front of the congregation and announced that the choir was seeking more people. I said, “That’s what I was waiting to hear. ” In January 1983, I joined the choir.

Music

It was a good group, with 25-30 people singing. We’d participate in Christmas caroling sponsored by the local Business Improvement District. Many of us have kept in touch with each other even after I left the church in 2000. Indeed, a couple of them followed me to First Presbyterian.

I distinctly remember Eric Strand, a choir director in the early ’90s. We watched the Today Show when Bobby McFerrin performed a few songs from the Medicine Man album. A couple of years later, he had three of us sing the 23rd Psalm from that album. It was high in my range, so I sang it in falsetto; my now-wife said that somebody thought I must be gay, which I thought was absurd.

The administrative board decided to have an “interest” fair at the church, trying to get people to join small groups: knitting, card playing, or whatnot. Most of them didn’t stick, but one that did was a book club which lasted about a decade, once a month, ten months a year. I read many books I might not have; specifically, I chose A Handmaid’s Tale when we had to read a novel. Most of the group were women, mostly a generation older than I, whom I was very fond of.

Once we had an intergenerational dance event. It must have been in the late ’80s, because I remember from some of the latter music included Bobby Brown’s My Perogative, with all the young kids, who are now about 50, dancing to it. I bought that Bobby Brown CD primarily in honor of that event.

Cathedral

I served as a docent for that building at least a few times. It’s a great building, and there are some very historic stained glass windows there. I learned a lot about the history of Methodism, from the racially tinged Central Jurisdiction to the 1968 merger of the Methodist Church and the United Brethren Church to form the UMC.

I was very involved in the lay leadership, serving on the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee. For a time, I was vice-chair of the Administrative Board; then the chair resigned, and I became chair. At a different point, I chaired the Council on Ministries, which served as the engine of outreach activities. Our church would table on Lark Street at various events.

We occasionally engaged in different types of services. There was a Taize series, which is a very meditative format. The church had two different Spanish language congregations there in the ’90s, which the church wanted, but the cultural divide became problematic.

There were several opportunities for Bible study, often led by Jim Kalas. I also participated in something called Disciple, which was held at my then former girlfriend/now wife’s apartment, during which I read the entirety of the Bible in 34 weeks; reading the whole thing wasn’t required, but if you if you’re gonna read 48 chapters of Genesis you might as well read the other two, right?

Food, of course

A social group called the Ogden Fellowship met monthly, which featured a speaker; local newspeople Chris Kapostasy Jansing and the late Ed Dague spoke at a couple of them. Fran Allee was that event’s chief cook, although she encouraged others to prepare food. Twice, my future wife and I prepared Shepherd’s pie for 40.

I experienced love and marriage at Trinity more than once. For certain, there’s a lot more I could share.

I stopped attending Trinity in 2000 over the Troubles, though I returned to Trinity one last weekend, singing at the funeral of campus minister Frank Snow on a Saturday. The next day, the weather was such that First Pres was closed, but Trinity, two blocks away, was open, so I sang there.

Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye

When there was a FOCUS service – First Pres and Trinity were both members – and it was held at Trinity, it was a tad awkward early on. Apparently, my choir music slot (#6, I was told) still had my name on it. Three and four years after my departure, people kept asking me when I would return to Trinity; that would never happen.

But I still feel enormously sad at the church’s demise. “On June 22, the church will host its last Sunday service, accompanied by a farewell video that members are encouraged to add to and share their favorite memories from the church.”

What Albany winters used to be

no singing?

December 17, 2020 – Albany, NY – Albany digs out after an early winter storm. (Mike Groll/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo)

Having lived in the New York State capital since 1979, I recall what Albany winters used to be: colder and snowier. Here’s a February 2024 news article about another mild winter.

Most of this winter wasn’t terrible, but February 2025 sucked. On February 9th at church, the education classes were canceled, and the choir didn’t sing in anticipation of a forecasted snowstorm. It wasn’t that bad in Albany. I ended up reading the prayers of people.

The following weekend, choir and education hours were canceled again, less because of the snow but the threat of ice. I ended up being an usher. Somebody said after the service, “Isn’t it nice having time off from choir?” NO! I miss the singing.

The ice continued throughout the week all over the city, with high winds and subzero wind chills. When I had to go to a drugstore, trying to climb over the intersections of solid ice was treacherous. If not for using my cane, I would surely have fallen more than once.

I take pride in keeping my sidewalk clear, but it took two days and multiple applications of deicer to get down to the pavement. It didn’t matter much since most of the rest of the walks weren’t clear for several days when it finally reached freezing.

The Catholic tradition

Jesuit

When the movie Conclave came to the area, I had to go see it because it was all about the popes. For a Protestant kid, I’ve been oddly obsessed with the Catholic tradition.

As a kid, I was probably trying to understand the difference between my traditions and Roman Catholic ones at some level. At my African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, we recited the Apostles Creed. There’s a line about the “holy catholic church,” and I was confused by that because we were Protestants. They were talking about the universal church, small c catholic, not big C Catholic.

“The term comes from two Greek words that together mean ‘throughout the whole.’ This single word, ‘catholic,’ means throughout all time and places and also points to the essential unity or wholeness of the church in Christ. No one English term captures that dual sense of this ancient Greek term quite as well as ‘catholic.’ So when the creed states, ‘I believe in the holy catholic church,’ it refers to the wholeness of the whole church in all times and places rather than to any specific branch of Christianity.”

When I went to public school, Daniel Dickinson in Binghamton, NY, at the bottom of a wide driveway was Saint Cyril’s parochial school, with the church nearby. The kids from Dickinson and Cyril’s would occasionally get into mild skirmishes. Dickinson kids would call them St. Cheerios, and I’m sure they also offered some nicknames.

The ashes

But I was fascinated that some of my Catholic friends at Dickinson would go out at lunchtime on Ash Wednesday and return with dirt on their foreheads. Or so I thought.

During the decade before 1982, when I wasn’t attending church very much, I’d occasionally attend a Christmas Eve service. As often as not, it would be at a Roman Catholic church. I liked the ritual, and I tended to love the music.

Around 2005, I attended a FOCUS churches’ Ash Wednesday service at Israel AME church in Albany. They applied ashes to the foreheads of the congregants. Huh. I thought it was a great idea because I’m pro-ecumenicalism. My current church follows this tradition.

It’s like when I went to the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany for an anniversary concert, and they allowed, even invited, the Protestants to take communion, something that was otherwise not done. As I noted, some of my Protestant friends refused, but I felt that if they offered, I’d accept.

Pontiffs

This morphed into knowing all of the popes in my lifetime. When I was on JEOPARDY in 1998, there was a question in the category PUT ‘EM IN ORDER. The clue was Paul VI, John Paul I, Pius XII. Easy-peasy.

I wrote about them back in 2013. The first pope in my lifetime was Pius XII (1939-1958). There’s been a reevaluation of his papacy regarding his attitude toward the Holocaust.

He was followed by John XXIII (1958-1963), who named the first cardinals to Africa, Japan, and the Phillippines. Paul VI (1963-1978) was followed by John Paul I (1978), who was in office for five weeks before he died.

John Paul II (1978-2005) was the very popular Polish Pope in many circles, particularly for his anti-communist cadence. He tended to oppose the death penalty. He did apologize for many of the sins of the church, from complacency in the African slave trade to, late in his tenure, the first recognition of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and others.

I didn’t like Benedict XVI (2005-2013) from Germany as pope or afterward. But I didn’t know one could resign. “In 2019 [as Pope emeritus], Benedict released a 6,000-word letter that attributed the Church’s sexual abuse crisis to an erosion of morality driven by secularization and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The letter was in sharp contrast to the viewpoint of his successor, Francis, who saw the issue as a byproduct of abuses of power within the Church’s hierarchical structure.” He died in 2022.

The current guy

Francis (2013-) from Argentina “is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century papacy of the Syrian pope Gregory III.”

“In December 2019, Francis abolished the pontifical secrecy privilege in sexual abuse cases, clarifying that bishops do not need authorization from the Vatican to turn over to materials from canonical trials upon request of civil law enforcement authorities. The lifting of the confidentiality rule was praised by victim advocates, but did not require the Church to affirmatively turn over canonical documents to civil authorities.”

While progressive in many ways, “Francis has categorically rejected the ordination of women as priests. Early in his papacy, he initiated dialogue on the possibility of deaconesses, creating in 2016 a Study Commission on the Women’s Diaconate to research the role of female deacons in early Christianity.” But his position seems to have hardened.

Anyway, that was part of the reason I had to see a movie about selecting a Catholic pope.

Shopping carts

newspapers

In mid-October, I went to the Price Chopper/Market 32 grocery store nearest my home on Madison Avenue, but I couldn’t find any shopping carts. I used a basket they had in the store that I hadn’t seen for a while.

I did my shopping. When I checked out, I asked the cashier. They told me the store had done some work on its entrances and exits. Someone had turned off the mechanism that locked the shopping cart wheels when the carts reached the parking lot’s perimeter.

As a result, many shopping carts disappeared. When I went shopping the next week, I found a single cart outdoors. As I finished my shopping, I passed along my cart to a customer seeking one. It took about a month, but they have been replenished,

Evening Press

I thought about this a lot because shopping carts always hung out on the street when I was a kid. When I had a newspaper route when I was 12 and 13, I often used the shopping cart. I never took it from the store, but they would always be available, like a community resource. That was probably the delusion of a tween.

One day, as usual, I was taking a cart to the pick-up point for the Evening and Sunday Press in my section of Binghamton, NY. Some guy stopped his car and said, “Oh, that cart belongs to our store. Do you wanna get arrested?” I said no, and I let him take the cart. In retrospect, I don’t know that he worked for the supermarket since there was nothing on the car indicating that. But by the time I reached the pick-up point, I had found another cart.

Cities now have abandoned cart regulations, which I reckon is a good thing. Albany has such legislation, but it’s been not as successful as hoped.

Speaking of crime, my Price Chopper store has had an armed security guard at the entranceway for about the last year. It startled me initially, but now I see the person and shrug. It does not make me feel any more secure—in fact, it is probably the opposite—but I know many other stores in the area have hired armed personnel.

Tag: Albany