Why does some food taste better the next day?

Pizza, Chinese, the sandwich I just ate… Days later, after marinating in their own juices, what might have been “eh” the first time around is positively delicious later.

My mother was not a good cook. I’m not saying she had no admirable features. She was a culture vulture, still is, where do you think I got it? She was a fan of Jolly Green Giant and Birdseye, you remember, those boil-in bags from the sixties, with the butter and the “freshness” that was one of the breakthroughs, like Pop-Tarts and Tang? Maybe not. We live in a health era right now, wherein if it’s been pulled from the ground far away and flash frozen, we don’t want it.

So, because she was so busy reading and watching, we frequently went out. Furthermore, my father was a gourmand. He was vastly overweight until he became ill and got what he referenced as a “gastric resection” which I didn’t realize was a gastric bypass, i.e. weight loss surgery, until last year when my sister told me. Ah, the secrets that still emanate from the dead. Did you read that story in today’s “New York Times”?

Secret Histories
In an Age of Lessening Privacy, Some Family Secrets Persist

So every Sunday night we’d go out for dinner. Sometimes fancy, sometimes holes in the wall, and that’s where I got my sense of adventure. Where we ate was just as important as what we saw. Lifestyle was everything to my dad.

Which is how Felice and I found ourselves downtown yesterday, eating at the Nickel Diner.

That was not our first destination. But we pulled up to the Eastside Market Italian Deli and found out it was already closed.

But employing the genius map app we found destination number two, because if you can understand downtown L.A. you live there, and nobody does other than the unbelievably poor and the unbelievably rich.

We found these places via Triple-D, otherwise known as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. And Guy Fieri’s restaurant may have been panned by the “New York Times” but he’s a personal hero, because I too know the satisfaction of biting into something that’s a ten on its own level. Yes, the food might not work at Per Se, but in the greasy spoon, the ultimate fry, the ultimate chocolate chip cookie, that’s what I live for.

The Italian delicacies at the Eastside Market had pictures to die for. They looked like the grinders I grew up with in Bridgeport, a cornucopia of Italian delicacies.

As for the Nickel Diner… It was all about the bacon doughnut, the dessert.

But what to eat first?

I had a steak sandwich, with roasted peppers, pickled onions, mozzarella and dijon sauce… The problem with mainstream food is it’s underseasoned. But go to the one of a kind place and they know how to spice it up. The steak sandwich was gooey and tasty, but the steak was not first rate, not tough, but not tender, unlike the dry aged wagyu ribeye I had at Flame in Vail where the bread was substandard but the steak was savory.

But really, it’s all about the desserts at the Nickel. But by time we were ready the bacon doughnuts were gone!

So we settled for the chocolate potato chip cake. With peanut butter. And frosting. Salty and crunchy. That’s the new thing, have you had salted caramel ice cream yet?

But overall, I would not give the Nickel Diner a thumbs-up.

No, that’s wrong, I’d definitely give it a thumbs-up, I just wouldn’t say it requires a special trip.

Until today. When I just removed the remnants of my steak sandwich from the fridge.

I have a hard time stopping. I eat what you serve. There are starving children in Europe, you know that right? My parents actually said that. And if you put something on your plate and didn’t eat it you’d hear about it for weeks thereafter, that’s the kind of guy my dad was, you obeyed the rules. I still do. Too often to my detriment.

But Felice’s family was different. She can stop. And she did. So she was left with half a burger and I was left with…half a steak sandwich that I did not eat, realizing I could no longer taste it, why continue?

But as I’m watching the game right now, feeling guilty, because after all the NFL is just modern gladiators, much more dangerous than that TV show with that appellation, Felice entered the bedroom with a smile on her face and started to testify how good her half of hamburger was today.

Which reminded me… My steak sandwich!

Some people would heat it up. But somehow that ruins the effect. If you’re not willing to endure the pasty, crunchy, past its peak crust of day old pizza, you’re not a connoisseur. All stuck together it’s something different. Yes, I don’t want to separate out the flavors, I want them all together. That’s what a day or two in the fridge will do. Sure, the bread is soggy, but now it’s infused with flavors absent previously.

And I take one bite… DELICIOUS! BETTER THAN IT WAS ORIGINALLY!

And I’m wondering what’s happening scientifically, but I’ll leave that to Nathan Myhrvold. All I know is I’m sitting at the kitchen table reminiscing about pizza in college, Chinese food in Vail, and how when I dig into the carton and extract the remnants of what once was I’m exquisitely happy.

Nickel Diner

Eastside Market Italian Deli

Nickel Diner pics

Eastside Market Italian Deli pics

P.S. What I hate about modern media is content providers’ adherence to old business models, as in I was choosing a destination but all Triple-D episodes had been scrubbed from YouTube, so I’d be forced to sit in front of the Food Channel night after night to be edified. Why not make everything available and monetize it?

Mama never told me it would be like this.

As a matter of fact, my mother still doesn’t know how the world works. Like most people, she wants to believe you work hard, marry right, put your nose to the grindstone and it all works out.

But it doesn’t really happen that way at all.

My father knew. And always got in trouble for it. No one wanted to hear what he had to say, except the people who made a lot of money on his words, lawyers and property owners whose land was taken by the government whom my father convinced the amount offered was unjust. He had some big victories. My father got a flat fee, under the law appraisers must, but attorneys got a third of the increase, and when the gap is between seventy nine thousand and a couple of million…you love my dad.

But regular people did not.

Because my father always wanted to lift the end of the carpet, to uncover the truth.

As he told me more than once, “there are no miracles.”

The person driving a hundred thousand dollar car with no visible means of support… He’s inherited millions, or is on the way to bankruptcy. Because if it looks inexplicable, it is.

So they tell us to work hard, get into a good college and it will all work out.

Only it doesn’t.

Let’s forget the losers. Those who drop out, who watch reality television and dream of winning a hundred grand. Because a hundred grand doesn’t go far, and it certainly doesn’t last. Winners don’t only score once, but again and again. Which is why the smart people become record executives, not recording stars.

So you graduate from college and take a job at the factory. Call it the law firm, the bank, the brokerage house. You think you’re winning, but you’re afraid of risk, like Jennifer Lawrence’s character in this movie you don’t like change.

But change is constant. Winners know this. And adjust on the fly.

Naked ambition is plentiful.

The smarts to pull it off?

I don’t know how accurate this movie is. Probably not very. But the moral of the story…there’s truth.

Small time players want fame. They think if they get their name in the paper, they’ve won. I’ve never understood the people who allow their houses to be featured in the real estate section, even the multi-million dollar trophy homes in the “Wall Street Journal” “Mansion” section. Oh, you’re unaware of this Friday feature? This is where the nouveau riche keep score. But the truly rich don’t want their name anywhere, they don’t want any light upon their affairs, because if you comb through their history…it’s ugly.

Kind of like independent promotion. How did your record go to number one?

And who can you trust? Your spouse? Your lover? Nobody?

You’ve got no real friends, it’s only business. And those who you’re not in business with, if they’ve got time for you at all, it’s only until it conflicts with their shot, because everybody’s hustling.

That’s how the record business was built. By lying, cheating, independent scumbags. The most revered man in modern record business history? Ahmet Ertegun? They did a feature on him in the “New Yorker” but they didn’t mention that he specialized in underpaying his artists, if he paid them at all. Because those writing for magazines…they don’t understand. Just like those working for the government.

How did Eliot Spitzer get in trouble?

It was his personality. He thought he was bigger than the game, lived outside the law.

As do most of the winners in society. They don’t do what’s right, but what’s expedient. And the great unwashed buy the image, because they never get to meet the men and women they adore.

Kind of like the musical stars. If you think they’re nice, friendly people you haven’t met any. They’re oftentimes mercurial pricks who step over others to succeed. Kind of like Madonna. A brilliant person who used Jellybean and so many more to achieve her goal, to the point where she’s revered and you overpay to see her.

But she’s smart. She understands you use what you’ve got. That most of what you need to win is not taught in school. You employ cunning and manipulation to make others feel good as you achieve your goal and leave them behind. Yup, no one talks shit about Madonna, because they were glad to get picked for the role. She chose THEM!

Which is kind of how Bridget Anne Kelly got used and abused by Chris Christie. Hell, she may be out on the sidewalk today, but she was close to power for years.

She and her cronies may have messed up traffic, but they didn’t think it was wrong because that’s what winners do, bend rules. And sometimes the cops get them, the press outs them, but then the game continues, because new players are born every minute and the public has a short attention span, because their lives are so lame they’ve got to put the winners on a pedestal. Or as Helen Kushnick told Jay Leno…”I’ve been serving you steak dinners for the last eighteen years, I just haven’t bothered showing you how I slaughtered the cow.” Yes, Jay Leno was a nice guy, a good comic, but he never would have succeeded without Kushnick, who fought for him and held off all comers.

So you watch a movie like “American Hustle” and the unsophisticated see Amy Adams’s tits and Bradley Cooper’s perm and the unannounced cameo by, spoiler alert, Robert DeNiro. But the sophisticated see an accurate reflection of life not only in the seventies, but today. Where hustlers are independent, they never work for anybody else other than themselves. Where you win by constantly adjusting the formula, not by consulting the textbook written by a professor who never earned a legitimate dollar himself. Where the thrills are visceral and you never know who to trust and you try to avoid getting caught and very few win. Big.

So I applaud the makers of this movie. Because they accurately reflected life in these United States. The only question is whether the audience is smart enough to understand this. To realize no matter how much education you’ve got, that does not mean you can win. That music business school will prepare you for a nonexistent job at the label, but it’ll never teach you how to be the next David Geffen or Irving Azoff.

The winners write history. They see laws and morals as something to be bent.

You may not like it, but it’s the truth.

I read Warren Haynes played “Come and Go Blues” at the Gregg Allman tribute.

It’s hard to convey how big “Brothers and Sisters” was.

Duane died in ’71, after Bill Graham had them close the Fillmore and their double album tour-de-force was released.

But still, most people didn’t know who the Allmans were. No, that’s not true, all the hipsters, everybody who was paying attention to album radio, did. But unlike today, the media was not hip, the Allmans were not anointed, despite the quality of their music and the deaths of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley.

But then came “Brothers and Sisters” in the fall of ’73, with its ubiquitous hit, “Ramblin’ Man.”

Never underestimate the power of Top Forty, its ability to jet you into the stratosphere. Suddenly, the Allmans were the biggest band in America. You were subjected to “Ramblin’ Man” everywhere, to the point you abhorred it. And people started to name their dogs and their daughters “Jessica.”

But my favorite cut on “Brothers and Sisters” was “Come and Go Blues.”

People say that you’re no good
But I wouldn’t cut you loose baby if I could

You want your friends to like your significant other. Even worse is when you venture to the dark side and start to date, never mind get involved with, someone they disapprove of, who they believe is no good.

I seem to stay down on the ground
Baby I’m too far gone to turn around

And this was Gregg Allman! You fall and you cannot pick yourself back up.

Oh, if only you would make up your mind
Take me where you go, leave me layin’ behind

Definitive answers… We hate the lack of clarity. Are we in or are we out?

Woman, you got those come and go blues
Yes you do
Lord, you got those come and go blues

The curse of my life. I wish someone had told me… If they’re indecisive, move on. It means they just don’t love you enough, even if they love you for a while.

There was this girl in high school… Like “Godfather III,” just when I thought it was done, she’d call. Not apologetic, but as if nothing had happened, as if we’d spoken just the day before. And you know how it is…when they’re present, they want to get together, they want to be your significant other, until…

Round and round, ’round we go
Don’t ask me why I stay here, I don’t know

You lose perspective, you’re neither here nor there. It tastes so good, and then you go hungry.

Well maybe I’m a fool to care

That’s the worst part…you know your predicament, you know you’re in limbo, you know you’re being toyed with, your friends no longer want to hear about it.

Here I’ll stay locked in your web
Till that day I might find someone else

But you can’t. Especially when they’re gone. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. No one else looks as good.

Sail on, my darlin’, sail on
You just go your way and I’ll go mine
But it seems to me that I once heard
That everything is finally cured by time

But it’s not! You never lose the attraction. It’s just that you learn not to participate, not to play. And it is a game. It’s even worse when they don’t even know they’re playing it, because if you call them on it they don’t know what you’re talking about.

But it wasn’t only that girl in high school… My life has been riddled by this curse. My ex moved out, but didn’t want to get a divorce. So, do you have hope or file papers?

The latter. I’m telling you now.

So fifteen years after the original an alternate take was released on the Allmans’ boxed set “Dreams,” it became my go-to version.

But looking on YouTube for the Hot Lanta performance earlier this month I came across this, Gregg Allman with Warren Haynes doing “Come and Go Blues” acoustically:

Gregg Allman with Warren Haynes – Come and Go Blues (acoustic)

It’s even better this way. Because it’s more world-weary. Without extraneous instruments, you hear the heart. Then again, all these years later, Gregg Allman is wiser, he’s not as pained, you don’t hear the wistfulness, his vocal borders on anger, he’s resigned, he’s learned.

And now you have too.

But you really haven’t. Because that’s the nature of love, there is no school, you’re destined, sentenced, to figure it all out by yourself. Only you live in your body, only you have your hormones, and you find it impossible to deny them.

And that’s what it takes to extricate yourself from the syndrome…willpower.

Maybe they don’t love you enough, maybe this is their style, but it never works out, even when you have them it’s only for a short while, don’t fall prey, you can lose your money, your house, your life. Yes, come and go blues people can drive you to suicide, just do a bit of research on Sarah Miles. Just because they’re great when they’re there…

So listen to the original.

Listen to the “Dreams” take.

Listen to Gregg’s live version.

Even listen to Hank Williams, Jr.’s rendition.

They’re all good, the more you listen the more you can’t stop. Because there’s a human truth encapsulated in the lyrics and sound.

But unlike people, the songs are there, readily available to soothe us when we’ve got more questions than answers.

Rhinofy-Come and Go Blues

I never thought I’d see Bernie play with them again.

But it was that kind of night, a homecoming.

No, we didn’t find out about the show on KMET, but we did all get in our cars and drive south to where a building always described as a wedding cake awaited our arrival.

But this time it was different.

This time it was only for us.

No Lakers, no Kings, just music.

And boy was the sound incredible.

Dolan told me they hired this company that put microphones all around the arena to ensure…

But I could tell from the very first note, it was all anybody talked about, how good the show sounded. Usually you go to the arena and if you don’t know the song by heart, it’s indecipherable noise. But here lyrics that are questionable on the record emerge perfectly intelligible.

As for the building itself…

Much has been made of the high-backed chairs. But little has been told of the resculpting, wherein the bottom level of the loge has been removed and the floor is bigger and downstairs there are bars and restrooms and upstairs there are name brand restaurants, local fare like Pink’s and Carney’s, and a dedicated merch booth. Hell, you can even drink outside on the patio. Now they take your ticket before you ascend.

But a building is nothing without people.

And those in attendance were not the downtown crowd. The Forum always had a South Bay feel. There were plenty of Hawaiian shirts and no suits.

And everybody was there to see the Eagles.

Yes, right now the Fabulous Forum is the number one music venue in the world, a ton of money was injected to make it so.

But almost no one will ever go there.

Except for us.

The natives and the transplants. Who understand finance is focused in New York and tech emerges from San Francisco, but there’s nowhere we’d rather be than Los Angeles.

Randy Newman wrote a pretty good song.

But the heart of the Southern California experience is the Eagles. Because they too picked up and left to come here, to live free and make it.

So funny aging, because you realize most people don’t make it. Many never try. But most miss the target. They’re afraid to work that hard, but mostly they’re afraid to look at themselves, if you’re not constantly evaluating and redressing your flaws you’re never going to get the brass ring. And that’s what the Eagles achieved, and have been on an endless victory lap ever since.

They didn’t expect it to be this way. It wasn’t until the country cover album “Common Thread” demonstrated how much love was still extant for the band, when their greatest hits album exceeded the sales of “Thriller,” that they reunited. And sure, their solo careers never flew as high, but really we needed them. To remind us. Of how it once was and still could be.

Boy could they play. And sing too.

It’s so different from the great unwashed of today who focus on fame and refuse to practice. But that’s all the Eagles did. See the Beatles and rehearse in the garage. Every baby boomer alive picked up an instrument after the Fab Four appeared on “Ed Sullivan.” But most of us gave up. A few soldiered on.

Glenn left Detroit. Don left Texas. And they came to the City of Angels to discover…

No one cared. That’s how it is when you’re not famous. You’re irrelevant. You find others with the same problem, whether it be Jack Tempchin in San Diego or J.D. Souther in from the flatlands. And you play in bands, and you make friends and you get enough experience until you believe…you’re ready.

That’s what the Eagles did. After backing up Ronstadt they got hooked up with Bernie Leadon and…

They rented a rehearsal hall in the Valley for six bucks an hour and hunkered down.

They had an immediate hit, “Take It Easy,” and then were exiled into the wilderness. Until suddenly, by a fluke, a random radio request, “Best Of My Love” from their third album, was played on a midwest station and caught on and became their first number one. The band went from struggling to selling out stadiums. It happens just about that fast. And then they proceeded to record “Hotel California” and become legends.

That’s the truth, you can never leave.

Oh, there’s an occasional east coaster who doesn’t get it, who moves here for a while and returns, but the rest of us…we’re lifers.

And we don’t need to convince you. We just need to go to the Forum and revel in our blessedness.

There’s no coat check, why would there be?

There’s plenty of parking, Los Angeles doesn’t believe in public transportation, it’s the suburbs on steroids.

And we sit on our aged asses and listen to…the way it used to be.

You remember that, don’t you?

Maybe you don’t.

Well, let me tell you.

First and foremost you had to know how to play.

And if you were good and lucky you got a manager and a record deal and some radio action.

And if you were really good, it continued.

And you lived an undocumented life so wild and crazy, so fulfilling and fetter free, that to this day everybody wants to be a “rock star,” whatever that means.

Want to know what it used to mean?

You destroy a hotel room out of boredom and your manager peels off hundreds to make it go away and no one really cares, because the very next night you’re going to make tons more dough.

You can get laid every day. By different women. And you do. There is no AIDS. And they’re lining up to blow you. The world runs on sex, just ask the President of France, and rock stars and their music were the epicenter of it. Still are.

You stay in the finest places and everyone knows your name. You can barely open your wallet because everybody wants to give you stuff for free.

And everybody hangs on every word.

That’s the essence of the game, your music. Made only by you only for us. There are no middlemen. Corporations are abhorred. The label has no input. You lay it down raw and we want to hear everything you have to say. That’s when album rock began. Not when they created the LP, but when classic acts could fill it.

So when you sit in the Forum and hear Bernie sing “Train Leaves Here This Morning” as Don and Glenn strum along on their guitars…

You’re taken right back to the summer of ’72, when you couldn’t drive down the boulevard without hearing that acoustic intro with the refrain telling us to take it easy. You knew every note. And when the band plays “Witchy Woman,” you revel in what is a greatest hit, even though you’ll find it on no chart.

And when Don Henley sings the “Doolin’ Dalton/Desperado (Reprise)” you’re almost ready to pick up the tonearm and start the record again after this album ending cut.

And when Frey tells us he was inspired by the Beach Boys, mere miles from Hawthorne, where the Wilsons grew up and made their initial music, and that they’ve rearranged “Heartache Tonight” in tribute to “Barbara Ann” from “Beach Boys’ Party”…

WE OWNED THAT ALBUM! WE KNOW WHAT HE’S TALKING ABOUT! WE DON’T WANT TO GO OUT FOR A PEE AND TEXT OUR FRIENDS, WE WANT TO STAND IN JOY AND CLAP ALONG!

Joy. That’s what last night was about. A retrospective of what once was, when we were growing up and the whole world was in front of us.

But it’s already gone at this point. At least most of it. But to be able to return to the scene of the crime with the greatest exponent of that era…

That’s heaven.

P.S. You had to be there to hear the roar after Glenn Frey introduced Don Henley, the singer-songwriter-drummer-guitarist from Linden, Texas. It was loud and vociferous and never would have stopped if it hadn’t been cut short to introduce Joe Walsh. There’s nowhere else you can get this hit. No matter how rich you are. We revere our rock stars. Not for their fame, but their talent!

P.P.S. Yes, Joe Walsh keeps the second half of the show together. And reminds us there once was a paradigm known as the “guitar hero.” Those were the days.

P.P.P.S. “Life in the fast lane, surely make you lose your mind.” And your life. Some didn’t make it, they’re six feet under or have been cast to the wind. But these guys survived and can still do it every bit as well and we were there to see it and if that doesn’t make you feel completely alive, you’re dead.

There are stars in the southern sky
And if ever you decide you should go
There is a taste of thyme sweetened honey
Down the seven bridges road

Take the 405 to Manchester. Or La Cienega from downtown. Southward as you go. Because five more times this month the biggest band in Southern California history, in American history, is demonstrating what it was once like. When we were addicted to the radio, when going to the record store was a pilgrimage as important as a trip to Mecca or Jerusalem. When we couldn’t wait to get home and break the shrinkwrap and hear what our favorites had to say. And there will be moments when there are so many guitars on stage you’d think you were at Guitar Center, or Fred Fred Walecki’s Westwood Music. But late in the show, the assembled multitude will stride up to the mics and sing a cappella the Steve Young song we know by heart from their live album. And you’ll close your eyes or look to the sky and remember…not only the music, but the sex, the alcohol and the dope. Doing nothing without the music playing, going to the gig because that’s what you did, never finding it too expensive to attend. It’s an experience that can’t be captured on wax or film, you just have to go. And you should.