Surfing Otters, Lionel Messi, and the Voice of God on the Promenade

Welcome to the Good Times, your stop for great writing, amusements, and fascinating stuff from the last week or so (in 5 mins or less).

Yes, we're doing this to amuse America (and ourselves), but we’ll also donate 10% of revenue to education and affordable housing charities when we start monetizing - not to worry though, this will remain a free newsletter. So kick back and enjoy.

The Good Times Roundup

MUSIC: US vinyl sales up 22% in the US this year. And not only that, they've risen for 17 years straight. Music in all formats saw gains too but vinyl's pop is especially noteworthy since the same period last year saw only a 1% rise. Looks like the record renaissance marches on.

MORE MUSIC: Tracy Chapman loves Luke Combs’s Fast Car cover. Tracy Chapman's atop the charts again (the country charts!). Luke Combs's cover of her iconic 'Fast Car' hit number one earlier this month on Billboard's Country Airplay list, and the singer/songwriter legend loves it:

SURFING OTTERS: Fearless otter in Santa Cruz tussles with surfers and steals their boards. This story first surfaced a couple weeks ago and since then, the outlaw otter's evaded capture and gone viral. Officials have intoned that otter 841's 'unusually aggressive' behavior makes her 'a public safety risk.' The internet disagrees and momentum's building to leave her in the wild. We’re Team Otter here at The Good Times - solid memes on the topic here: @thesurfingotter

FUTBOL: In his Miami debut, Lionel Messi scores game-winner in stoppage time. The Great met the moment - incredible scene in Miami last week:

MEDIA: ESPN in talks with sports leagues about an ownership stake. This will get interesting. Can ESPN cobble an alliance of sports leagues to 1) infuse it with cash 2) get (hopefully) cheaper access to sports rights, and 3) stave off financial calamity from cord-cutting? We'll see. With other deep-pocketed sports buyers circling (Amazon, Google, Apple) ESPN needs these leagues long-term more than the leagues need them - TBD if Bob Iger has one more stroke of dealmaking genius in him.

NEWSPAPERS: A new honest-to-God paper’s coming. Founded by heterodox intellectuals David Samuels and Walter Kirn, 'County Highway' is a new newspaper released bi-monthly in print only (no articles online). If the cliche of a Brooklyn-elite-buying-a-farm assumed newspaper form, this would be it. But to be fair, they cite Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Gram Parsons as inspirations so count me intrigued. Subscribe for home delivery or look for one on your local record store bookshelf.

Take the Day Off 🏖

It's National All or Nothing Day. Buck convention and go steal that surfboard you've always wanted to. Today's your day.

With every newsletter we'll run a featured article on topics ranging from kids, dogs, news, sports, or anything in between. We aim to amuse - put another way, if Mark Twain were alive today we'd desperately try to hire him. Thanks for reading and without further delay...  

Today's Article: The Voice of God on the Promenade

It was 2005 in Santa Monica, CA and yours truly was a resident exhibiting signs of homesickness. Los Angeles isn’t much like Virginia I was gathering, and to compensate, I picked up habits I'd avoided back East like listening to country radio and devouring SEC football.

I also walked the 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica's pedestrian mall, to people-watch and window-shop. The street performers were fun too but rarely delivered anything decent - a lot of crowd-hyping-with-little-payoff (break dancers, looking at you) and crowd participation? A frequent tactic that made me leave the scene immediately.

With that cynic's edge, I was strolling the streets one afternoon when I happened on Roger Ridley, the ‘voice of God,’ for the first time.

Roger played soul music. Just an acoustic guitar with an amplifier, a microphone, and some CDs for sale on the ground. That was it, but Jesus could he sing. A gravelly voice with plenty of miles on it, he sang like he'd lived it all. He smiled wide too, saying he was 'in the joy business,' there to brighten your day.

He certainly did mine and after a couple songs, I sprang the $15 for his CD, the only time I ever bought something from a performer.

I Googled him when I got home - nothing. These were the good times before social media and smartphones so no online presence wasn't surprising, and he lived in my itunes library only.

And that was it. A great talent singing into a veritable void I thought, and I largely forgot about him.

Fast forward 10 years. I'd left and returned to LA and was mindlessly scrolling through my Facebook feed late on a Sunday - nothing remarkable about this evening at all, until the video popped up. There was Roger, in 2005 on the Promenade singing 'Stand by Me.'

'No f'ing way,' I said (to no one, I lived alone).

I clicked.

Roger's video had racked up 10s of millions of views.

I almost fell out of my seat. I asked my friend who posted it how he'd found him and he pointed me to Playing for Change, a group who records street musicians and posts their videos. They started in 2002 but it wasn't until 2005 when they found Roger that their first video exploded.

Looking deeper, I found that multiple Roger videos had gone viral (as of this writing, Stand by Me has 196M views and Dock of the Bay 112M).

And the story didn't end there. Propelled by the success of Roger's videos, Playing for Change expanded globally and attracted music's titans, including Bono, Keith Richards, Sara Bareilles, Keb Mo, Warren Haynes, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks (full list here), all cut together in videos with street musicians around the world.

The momentum culminated in 2009 when Playing for Change released an album that debuted at number 10 on Billboard's Pop chart, and the United Nations approached them in 2020 to stream a concert celebrating their 75th birthday.

An international movement, all from one guy in the joy business.

This rabbit hole wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns however. I learned that Roger passed away in 2005 and never enjoyed his moment in the sun. But that sad fact makes the story all the more remarkable - creators make hundreds of videos hoping one goes viral. Roger, with only a dozen bootleg videos in existence, now has multiple.

Superior talent alone gets a batting average like that, and I’m glad this legend finally got his due. Perfect for day-brightening, Roger's videos are available here.

Postscript

I revisited Roger recently when another video of a musician / construction worker crossed my path: Larry Bellorin built retaining walls in Raleigh, NC, but in his home country of Venezuela, he was a genius on the harp.

That led me to catch-up on Roger, and I uncovered some mind-blowing layers to the Ridley family onion:

• Alice Tan Ridley, Roger's sister, sang for decades in the NYC subway system before landing on America's Got Talent in 2010.

  • That led to a splashy profile in the New York Times in 2016, and Playing for Change cut them both together, Roger and Alice, in a Bring it on Home video.

• Alice's daughter / Roger's niece? Gabourey Sibide, Academy Award nominated actress from 'Precious.'

• And lastly, Roger and Alice’s brother is Jimmy McMillan, the founder of the Rent is Too Damn High Party and star of the show at an NY Governor's debate in 2010.

More Good Stuff

• Electric Owl, world's 1st LEED Gold-certified movie studio, opens in Atlanta 

• Dolly Parton has no plans to retire: 'I'll just hopefully drop dead in the middle of a song onstage'

• The country’s new business hot spots, mapped

• Full In-n-Out secret menu

• Braves turn 1st 8-5-3 triple play since 1884

Lastly, a Good Tune

For your 🐪 day: