John Scott's SSR Pick: June 23, 2022

What’s up Sorry State Readers? This is my first write up in about three weeks as I was visiting a friend out in Madrid, so I wanted to write about what I was listening to while I was over there, which happened to be a lot of the Rolling Stones, naturally, as we had tickets to go see their show in Amsterdam. I love the Stones but if I had to pick a favorite album of theirs, I’d have to go with Tattoo You. This is another one of the many albums I can thank my brother for really putting me onto. I remember one time he said, “You know what the best part of Tops is? Heaven comes on after it.” He’s right though, the B side of this record is one of my favorite sides of any record. It starts off with Worried About You, which is a good song, but nothing too amazing for me. It’s really the last four songs on this album that make the whole thing worth it to me, which would be Tops>Heaven>No Use In Crying>Waiting On a Friend. Basically, any time I listen to one of them, I end up listening to all four. They’re all so great. My favorite of the bunch is constantly changing. Tops has one of my favorite choruses to belt out and do my best Mick impression. Heaven is one of the weirder songs in their catalog and sounds different from any of their other stuff, and I love it. No Use in Crying feels like a song only they could pull off and make it sound so good and Waiting on a Friend is the perfect end to the album. Anyways, Madrid is a city that thrives at night, so there were a lot of late-night listening sessions. We hung out there for about a week (I think I drank more Aperol Spritzes than water during that time) and flew to Amsterdam a couple days before the show, so we had some time to hang out there. It’s probably the coolest and weirdest place I’ve ever been to in the best way possible. Everything felt topsy turvy, but that also could have been the result of the many different things they’ve got to offer there. We walked about fifteen miles each day we were there just exploring the city and finding all these little spots. I loved just sitting out by the canals and watching the ducks and boats go by and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect coming from Madrid where it was getting up to 100 every day. The day of the show arrived, and we were just taking it easy and went to the Rijksmuseum and laid out on the lawn outside of it afterwards. We stocked up on goods before the show and headed back to the Airbnb to get ready. About an hour later we went to order the Uber to head to the venue, and I was double checking it on google to make sure we were heading to the right place when I saw the fateful headline “Mick Jagger Tests Positive for Covid: Amsterdam Show Postponed.” What a bummer. Oh well, there are lot worse places to have a free night in after a cancelled show so I wasn’t complaining. We headed back out and made the most of our night. We had one more day in Amsterdam and then went back to Madrid for a few days before I flew back home. All in all, it was an amazing trip, and although it would’ve been great to see the Stones live, it was a testament to how much fun we were having that we didn’t even let the cancellation bring our spirits down. We sat in silence for a moment after we had read the headline when my friend said, “Did we steal the sun yesterday and now we’re being punished?” before we both started cracking up. We very well may have, cause I had never had such a fun time. Some things are just out of your control and like Mick said, “You can’t always get whatchu want.”


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