32 I’m thinking specifically of the opening verse: “Sleeping on the Avenue de Montaigne in my borrowed mourner’s suit / you pranced in with your motley crew and returned me what I’d lost.”
33 Cross relies on Milton Fletcher, a mild-mannered Buddhist who, in his wilder days, reputedly rode a stolen pony into a Kroger grocery.
34 Pittsburgh might be his best show in a decade. And I was in the bathroom listening to Muzak.
35 He owes them precisely nothing.
36 With the exception, of course, of books on Cross — which is no small task. Last year there were five monographs, a new anthology of scholarly essays, a revised edition of his complete lyrics, and a two-volume graphic novel inspired by his seminal Double Ditz.
37 I don’t think she was making a pun with my name.
38 I almost never listen to music, since a car stereo isn’t so appealing when you’re accustomed to a concert hall crammed with living sound.
39 The ones with the most remarkable voices, almost universally, have terrible personal histories that lend their voices a battered weight. I’m thinking of Etta James, Roy Orbison, Sarah Vaughan, maybe, to a lesser extent, Dolly Parton. Pretty people with pretty voices end up on Broadway.
40 It seemed a mystery at the time: later it came out in GuitarStar that he’d had surgery for a bone spur.
41 When Cross took the stage at the Springfield Armory on September 16, 1994, Mark Washington sat behind Jeff Hickok’s drum set. Deke Purcell replaced Owen Soppe at rhythm guitar and Fat Ronnie Hood — the Gospel Don — didn’t return after the first set.
42 That majestic building now houses the utterly soulless Hard Rock Hotel.
43 Sutliff has a real voice and Albert can sing. Dom, on the other hand, sounds like he’s testifying in a deposition — it’s joyless.
44 The nicest thing any reviewer said: No one will ever allege the younger Cross had help writing these songs.
45 That no one thought to bring out a chair earlier suggests to me that the whole appearance is unscripted.