Coffee at the 7-Eleven

7-Eleven, Mills and Main, Ventura

 

In 1985, I read an article in Spin by Henry Rollins singing the praises of the 7-Eleven. I wasn’t really a 7-Eleven guy, though, and on the rare times I bought food from convenience stores it was from AM-PM because they used to have the cheapest gas. Generally, I don’t buy anything from convenience stores beyond the occasional Slurpee/Icee/Froster.

That changed when my daughters showed me this machine at our new 7-Eleven:


This is the latte machine.

Yes, the latte machine. I'm not really a latte drinker, finding that the extra two or more dollars didn’t make my coffee two dollars better. I like lattes, and if you’re buying I’ll have one, but I’m not willing to pay for it. 

Choose the Bold!

But here at the 7-Eleven, the vanilla latte does not cost extra. The machine grinds the beans fresh (‘bean to cup’ in coffee talk), and then brews it up, adding in the steamed milk and vanilla. Since you are making it, you can add an extra pump of vanilla from the counter, as well as a dash of cinnamon, which is how I do it. True, the machine doesn’t do the swirl at the top, but I’ve never found the swirl to add any flavor.

Add Some Vanilla

The extra large latte comes in at $2.89 (less if you bring your own cup), while the Tall Vanilla Latte at Starbucks next door costs around $6.75, meaning it’s half the size for a little over twice the cost. The obvious question is whether the 7-Eleven latte is as good as the Starbucks latte, and Starbucks will be happy to know that it isn’t. However, is the Starbucks latte twice as good, justifying the cost? 

No, the Starbucks coffee is not twice as good. The biggest difference is that the Starbucks Latte is usually hotter, something that I can fix by going down a size in the cup (pushing the button for the large and putting it in the extra large cup), and then topping it off with their fresh roasted drip coffees. In fact, I know that I’ve paid for lattes far more expensive then 7-Eleven that weren’t as good. If I'm just drinking the latte while driving, the 7-Eleven is perfect.

Brewed Coffees

The downside of this is that not all 7-Elevens have the fancy machine, though according to C-Store Dive, some sort of online convenience store trade website, they will all be moving that way by the end of 2025. Of the four 7-Elevens here in Ventura, only the one on the corner of Main and Mills has it. I’ve actually only found one other 7-Eleven with the fancy coffee machine (and I’ve looked, too), and that was in Walnut across from Mt. San Antonio College.

If you come across this, and know of where the fancy coffee machine is, add it in the comments.

7-Eleven, Japan

Fresh Food Shelf-All Good!

7-Eleven, Iwakuni, Japan

On another 7-Eleven note, if you’ve heard about the 7-Elevens in Japan, it’s all true. When the Summer Olympics were in Tokyo in 2020, I read and saw several rave reviews about the food options at the 7-Eleven stores. People talked about the fresh food, low prices, and 24 hour convenience, and when my son was stationed in Japan, I asked him about it. He said the 7-Elevens have everything, and when we visited him and stayed in Hiroshima, the 7-Eleven was the first store I went into. It was amazing. 7-Eleven was the most convenient and cheapest place to change money (I used my ATM card and withdrew cash from my account in Yen), we bought tickets to see the Hiroshima Carp play, I was in every morning for breakfast (melon pan, banana, coffee), bought coffee several times, and since neither my wife nor my son care for sushi, it was the only place I had sushi (except for the fugu restaurant). 7-Eleven was everywhere, and it was the go-to place for snacks and cash. 7-Eleven made the trip to Japan better.

The Rolling Stones-Some Girls

 The Rolling Stones Some Girls

 

I remember bringing Made in the Shade to an 8th grade dance because strangely my Catholic School classmates would only dance to ballads (probably because holding each other drew less attention than ‘shaking your groove thing’), and put on Angie, which was loudly greeted by groans and I took it off right away. I personally didn’t play Made in the Shade that much-I think I bought it because I wanted to
seem more grown up, but found the songs hard to sing along to.

When I started high school, the Rolling Stones were still a big deal with the stoner crowd that I didn’t really hang out with. Black and Blue had just been released, and I wanted to like it, but it didn’t work for me, and I wasn’t going to spend my savings on it.

When Miss You was released I wasn’t as dead set against disco as I would be a few years later-chicks in tight fitting disco clothes will change the mind of a teen-age boy, and somewhere I have the 12” extended version on pink vinyl. At this point, I’m wondering if it’s the same character on both sides-Jagger wandering Central Park on a Friday night, turning down the buddy who wants to take him to meet some ‘Puerto Rican girls’ because he ‘Miss(es) You,’ thumping disco beat coming from nearby clubs, and then flying out to LA, driving through Bakersfield Sunday morning and looking for ‘the girl with far-away eyes’ from NY. Whether that’s true or not, I did play the b-side more.

I bought Some Girls with the original cover filled with women, only some of whom I recognized, and played it often. I liked the way the guitars blended together, with no real discernible lead guitar, and that most of the songs were short. The title track, with what the ‘Black Girls’ want to do, was appropriately taboo for a 16 year old, and Richards’ vocal Before they Make Me Run made me feel better about my own limited vocal range. I was moving into my Punk Rock phase, but the Rolling Stones were still a common touchstone in an American high school. Shortly after, I was rifling the extensive cut-out bins Big Ben’s in Lakewood, where Metamorphisis would regularly turn up, and found Rolled Gold, a cash

grab compilation from Decca focused on the early work of the Stones, and two other compilations (one with a red cover and one with a blue cover) and discovered that I really liked early 60's era Stones, things like Paint it Black, Under My Thumb, and Get Off My Cloud, which led me to buy my second favorite Stones album, Aftermath (US Version-I didn't know there was a different UK version), which didn’t really win me many friends when the stoners at school were listening to Black and Blue or It’s Only Rock and Roll.

When the 2011 Deluxe reissue was released, I bought it curious to hear the bonus tracks from the time. I knew that the best of the outtakes were used for the Tattoo You lp, so I didn’t have high hopes, but No Spare Parts jumped out of the speakers. Another first person narrative like Miss You and Far Away Eyes, it stuck with me immediately. Jagger redid the vocals, and the song is better for it-compare with the original here. His voice is older and works better with the character, and the narrative is leaner, seemingly about an older man driving through the southwest to visit (and care for) his much younger woman. Interestingly, the other outtake high point, So Young, also seems to be older man/younger woman, but here Jagger sounds like the creepy old guy hitting on a teenager at a French arcade. A few of the other tracks are worth a listen as well.

Johnny Cash-American Recordings

 

 

Johnny Cash American Recordings

I’ve always known who Johnny Cash was. He’s Johnny Cash, a mythical figure who’s deep voice and large presence just seemed to dwell in my consciousness. I don’t know of a time when Folsom Prison Blues didn’t exist. I know that I was alive on the release of A Boy Named Sue, but it seems like it was always there. I’d watch Johnny when he showed up on the Mike Douglas Show, which came on after school and would have a variety of musical guests.

From late ’75 to early ’76 I listened to country music station KLAC, and recall two hits of that time, Johnny Cash’s One Piece at a Time and Tom T. Hall’s Faster Horses.

In the 80s, I thought of Johnny as a kind of dinosaur that continued to roam the earth, a larger than life figure that called up a time long past. While I was on the Otter in SLO, my radio co-host and I pulled the new U2 Album, Zooropa and played the Wanderer on a lark. Playing it now, I stand by my original opinion-why? It’s a good vocal performance for Cash, but the synthesized backing track seems gimmicky, and I wonder if the song would have been improved with the synth mixed down and an acoustic guitar mixed up.

A few years later, on a ski trip in Mammoth with a girlfriend and her family, her step-dad pulled out American Recordings, and I listened to Delia’s Gone. I was floored.

For the next few days, I asked to hear that cassette every evening, and bought American Recordings when I got home. This old man (just a touch older than I am now) was singing these amazing songs, just him and his old Martin acoustic. The music was so full, I don’t think I realized that there were no backing musicians. (Like a Bird on a Wire is playing right now, filling the space here in my backyard). A credit to producer Rick Rubin, who somehow managed to capture the fullness of the rooms (Johnny’s cabin and Rubin’s living room) in the recordings.

House of Blues, Sunset Strip

There were a couple of live tracks, Tennessee Stud and The Man Who Couldn’t Cry, played for an adoring crowd at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room, and I’d go see Johnny at the House of Blues on his birthday in 1996. Johnny commanded the stage in a way that I’ve only seen a few performers do. He started the way you’d imagine-“Hello, my name is Johnny Cash,” and went right into I Walk the Line. June came out and sang a few songs, and it looked like Grandma and Grandpa climbed onstage. June belted songs from the bottom of her feet-it was quite a sight. We were also treated to Carlene Carter and Rosanne Cash, and Johnny looked happy and proud. The encore saw Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and Howie Epstein come out for Rusty Cage. By the end, I was convinced that Johnny could have come out and sang the phone book and it would have been awesome.

All volumes of American Recordings are excellent, and Johnny’s version of Hurt, especially with the video, is frightening, showing the frailty of a man near death, and alarming in that wife June is shown gazing at him, and would precede him to the Promised Land. I almost put his VH1 Storytellers album with Willie Nelson on this list as well. I enjoy the 60s era Columbia records, too, but Rick Rubin really seemed to know how to get the best out of Johnny Cash, and as I get older, I’m glad that Johnny Cash did excellent work in his 60s.

Cheap Trick-In Color

 In 1977, I was able to talk my Dad into taking me to see Led Zeppelin at the Fabulous Forum, and then my sister and I were able to talk both my parents to taking us to see Kiss. Somewhere in my Mom’s garage, the “I Was There” button remains, as they were recording the concerts for the Alive II album.

I really liked the opening act, too. There were two total rocker dudes,
the singer/rhythm guitarist and the bassist, and also some nerdy guy with a weird hat and a bunch of guitars playing lead and a balding guy who looked like he should be working at a bank playing drums. In a building full of crazed Kiss fans, the opener, a band called Cheap Trick, held their own.

They were touring behind their second album, In Color, which I bought a few weeks after the show. Something about albums that you don’t get from downloads-the covers were often extremely interesting. In Color had Robin Zander and Tom Peterson (the rockers) sitting astride choppers in color on the front, and Rick Neilson and Bun E. Carlos on mopeds in black and white on the back. Several of the songs from the concert (Rick Neilson standing on a tiny riser playing the opening lick of Clock Strikes Ten at the front of the stage still burns in my memory), were on the album, including one that I thought should be a huge hit and I played if for everyone who’d listen-the studio version of I Want You to Want Me.

I still like the studio version better than what became the hit, the live version from Budokan. I thought the crowd was unnecessary and took away from the sonic textures of the album version. Tom Werman’s production was clean and bright, with guitars and vocals loud in the mix. I Want You to Want Me is a great song, three minutes of pop perfection on an album filled with great pop rock songs.

The opening track, Hello There, I remembered from the concert and still opens their live sets-I now see Cheap Trick regularly on 45 year intervals, having last saw them at the Ventura County Fair two years ago. (Next time, 2067). It’s starts with a tightly strummed power chord, and then a drum cuts through followed by Zander’s “Hello there ladies and gentlemen/are you ready to rock?”

Rick Nielson, the band’s songwriter and lead guitarist, crafts solid three minute guitar heavy pop, and though there are some dark moments (I want to live on a mountain/way down yonder in Australia/it’s either that or suicide/it’s such a strain on you), the gloss on the music might keep you from noticing.

Heaven Tonight, Live at Budakon (I had the original Japanese import) and Dream Police were all good, too. When the original bass player left, the quality dropped a bit, but The Summer Looks Good on You from a couple of year ago is a great track.

I also have and recommend the Steve Albini sessions of In Color, where the band went into the studio with the Nirvana producer in 1997 and re-recorded In Color in a more stripped down version.

Matthew Sweet-Girlfriend

 

In 1992 I quit my LAUSD teaching job in a huff, broke up with my girlfriend and moved in with a buddy in San Luis Obispo. I was 29, and going through an ‘angry young man’ stage of moderate self-sabotage, the chrysalis before my emergence to what I am now, 30-odd years later.

In the year I lived in SLO, I worked several odd jobs, juggled girls, and was the fill in guy at KOTR, a free form FM station where Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend was in heavy rotation. I think I was able to talk the station managers, Drew and Clam Chowder into scoring me a copy, which I played non-stop at home. It seemed to catch my mood perfectly. Guitars both jangly and jagged provided by Robert Quine, Richard Lloyd and Sweet himself, Sweet’s self-harmonizing, Lloyd Cole’s solid bass lines and Fred Maher’s inventive drumming and bright production all served what Sweet called his ‘break-up’ album, and though Sweet would have solid songs on all of his following albums, nothing matched the quality and variety of Girlfriend

The title track has everything, an acoustic guitar hard strumming, a crunching electric rhythm guitar with a lead guitar howling over both, drums and maracas playing, and then the instruments drop out and Sweet’s voice comes in with the opening line of:

I wanna love somebody/ I hear you need somebody to love.

It’s exactly what I was thinking, and exactly the way I wanted to say it.

Other tracks, like the opener Divine Intervention could have been singing right to me-“I don’t know where I’m gonna live/Don’t know if I’ll find a place,” summed up my SLO experience perfectly. The music behind the lyric, though, that was the clincher, an overdriven electric chugging through power chords in a medium tempo, an acoustic guitar matching it, with lots of sonic goodies underneath and Richard Lloyd’s guitar squealing over the top. The false fade of melodic noise also adds to this track. Some God issues, which I was also having, floated through this song and others (Evangeline, Holy War) on the album as well.

The Legacy edition includes the Goodfriends bonus disc, with two more versions (one with piano that's really good) of the title track, as well as demos and live versions of other tracks, which is almost as good, showing that even stripped down the songs hold up.

Sweet’s about my age, and, as is apparent on his “Under the Covers” series with Susana Hoffs, must have the same record collection I did. You can hear his influences-Neil Young’s lead guitar and Beatles-like harmony especially, and though it is definitely a band album, there’s a lot of things sonically happening in the mix. Songs starting as if the guys had been playing something else first and false fades are common, as well as the sound of guitars plugging in and odd percussion elements. The album rewards repeated listening with aural surprises and 30 years later Girlfriend is still my favorite.

And Tuesday Weld is beautiful.

Have I written about Matthew Sweet before? Yes I have, thanks for asking-check right here

Have I written about K-Otter before? Yep, done that too! Check here and here

Locals Only by the Surf Punks

 

   The Surf Punks’ Locals Only might well be the guiltiest of guilty pleasures on this list. It’s not deep or profound, the musicianship is basic, and the songs are simplistic and filled with junior high locker room humor.

    But in my JuCo days I thought it was hysterically funny and I played it all the time. Formed by producer/drummer/singer Dennis Dragon (The Captain of Captain and Tennille’s younger brother) and Drew Steele in Malibu, the surfers/musicians seemed to be hosting the beach party that I wanted to get into. Their first album, My Beach, had a couple of good songs and lots of pieces of other songs, but it was their second one, Locals Only, where it all seemed to come together. Unlike the first album, there was an actual band for the second album, and though most of the songs were written by Dragon/Steele, stand out contributions also came from Mark “the Shark” Miller’s sliding bar chord classic Shark Attack, and Scott “the Valley” Goddard’s I’m a Valley (he wrote Manny Moe and Jack with the Dickies as well as Cowpunk). The musicianship was all pretty basic, but there were a lot of audio surprises mixed into the songs, making the sound of the album far more interesting.

    The live shows were where the Surf Punks stood out. They weren’t true punks like the rest of the LA scene. These were not pasty white guys screaming about how their parents didn’t love them enough and how tough their life was, wearing torn black clothes and safety pins. The Surf Punks were a little bit older, in surf trunks, day-glo tank tops and water polo caps, and instead of angst, they were singing songs showing the hedonistic pleasure of their beach lives. In the title track, their verses of trips to “Diego” ("those boys threw rocks at me!") and Ventura ("they not think we funny!"), end with the party that I wanted to be at: Now we have beach parties, naked girls will do the swim. I knew their naked girls would be big bosomed blonde beach babes and not the frightening looking goth chicks that were on the LA punk rock scene (Susana Hoffs and Jane Weidlin notwithstanding).

    I saw the Surf Punks twice, once in Hollywood and once in “the Valley” and both times they delivered. Drew rode in on his skate board guitar, Jerry Weber walked all over the stage with his keyboard around his neck, Andy the lifeguard came out of his tower-yes, there was a lifeguard tower on stage-to peel off some lead licks, bikini clad chicks coming out to dance to “Big Top” (when are those things gonna pop?) Mark the Shark wearing his fin, Scott the Valley singing his songs, and Dennis keeping a no-nonsense 4/4 beat. It appealed to me and my water polo playing buddys.

    Locals Only catches the wave of the Surf Punks party, and now, 40 years later when I can go to Malibu anytime, I still want to find where the Spoiled Brats from Malibu hang out.

12 Favorite Albums/iMac Jukebox

What seems like a hundred years ago, I was visiting my in-laws, and I noticed that they had a fancy digital music storage system. They had stacks of cd's, all piled around a massive hard drive. I remember looking it up, and seeing it was pretty expensive.

Years after that, I was updating my home computer, and had an idea-why not store all of my cd's on a computer dedicated to only music. I was about to transfer my data from my old iMac to my new iMac, but the old one was still in reasonably good shape. I figured that if I took everything but iTunes off of it, and kept only iTunes and an external hard drive, it would be pretty much the same thing as my in-laws had, and with a good set of computer speakers, it would work for the living room. It wasn't set up to rattle the walls, but I don't listen to music that way much in the house-the car is a different story-so I didn't need that kind of volume.

So I set it up, and added a few features. The screen saver is set to show pictures of the family, so if the iMac isn't playing music, it's acting like a giant picture frame. Originally, I used an iMac G4 (which is still in the garage doing the same thing) and then switched to an iMac G5 from 2006 that I bought it used in 2012 for around $100. I started with just uploading selected songs from the thousand or so cd's that I had, but when I was working on my Master's degree, I realized that it easier to just load the entire cd and then sort out what I wanted later. I would take a stack of cds and upload them whenever I needed to look up from whatever project I was working on.

What I didn't realize initially was that the Mac download was set to 192kbps instead of 320kbps, a sound quality loss that is noticeable with careful listening. I adjusted that about six years ago, and now generally only download things that are at that bit rate. At the end of the pandemic I decided to start taking selected cd's that I had loaded previously and reloading them at a higher bit rate, and it was going pretty well until my external hard drive crashed. The hard drive was old and had been making funny noises-it was the kind with the spinning disk-and then one day it just went belly-up. 

I took the hard drive all over town to see if someone could salvage the files. Many songs I'd picked up off the internet from websites that were only up for a while (Willard's Wormholes was a particular favorite, and I was never quite sure what surprises the WFMU blog would have), and weren't available anymore. But the hard drive truly was trashed.

I had backed up about 3/4s of what I had onto a newer hard drive, and I've been slowly hunting down other things. I think I'm still 4,000 songs short, but it's mostly obscure stuff that I hadn't really listened to, so I don't really know what's missing.

I'm also back to the project that I had originally started, upping the sound quality on the files, and taking a close listen to what I have. I can also see how often I've played something. I've decided to take another look at my favorites-which cd's I'd take with me if I was stuck on an island with an old Walkman, (Side note-I've been experimenting with upgrading a couple of old click wheel iPods-more on that later).

On the right I have a list that I made when I started this blog, and a few I'd still take with me. Girlfriend, Ragged Glory, Rain Dogs, Revolver and American Recordings all still stand the test of time. But I'm not so sure about The Supreme Genius of King Khan & the Shrines, Potatoes, and (gasp) Sinatra's Swingin' Sessions and More.

In my playing history, I'm more likely to pull out Cheap Trick's In Color, Donovan's The Classics Live, The Rolling Stones' Aftermath or Some Girls, or the Who's Sell Out. For reasons somewhat unclear to me, the Surf Punks' Locals Only had crept back into my rotation. I also have a soft spot for What's the Story, Morning Glory? and Social Distortion.

You probably noticed that nothing I've listed has been recorded in this century. I still listen to music, and things catch my ear that I enjoy. Wet Leg's Chaise Lounge and Wet Dream (I had to look up "Buffalo 66"), I find to be very sexy, but the album didn't really move me. I'll watch every video Youtube spits at me of Garfunkel and Oates, but I can't imagine just listening to them. Both Lil Nas X's Old Town Road and Cardi B's WAP are in rotation in my car, but I haven't picked up an album by either of them. The other day I was watching something and Battez Vous by the French artist Brigitte was playing and I downloaded it. I still buy new music when it's released by acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, X, The Rev. Horton Heat, Brian Setzer, Andy Prieboy and Southern Culture on the Skids, (again, all acts from the 80s and 90s) and I'm a big fan of new music compilations from Raiders of the Lost Hook and Ice Cream Man Power Pop and More! I also enjoy Little Steven's Underground Garage when I have access to Sirius XM.

I think I kept pretty up-to-date on music until my mid-thirties. Then I got married, had kids and didn't really have the time anymore. KROQ was my connection for new music, but it's hard to get here in Ventura. I'm not young anymore, but I still like a catchy, three minute song. I just don't relate to songs about girls and school and parties and such unless they remind me of a time when I did relate to girls and school and parties and such. Now it's women, work and retirement-not very rock and roll.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to thoughtfully write about my favorite albums. So again, here they are, in alphabetical order by artist:

1. The Beatles-Revolver
   
2. Johnny Cash-American Recordings
3. Cheap Trick-In Color
   
4. Donovan-Classics Live 
5. Oasis-What's the Story, Morning Glory?
   
6. The Rolling Stones-Some Girls
7. Social Distortion-Social Distortion 
   
8. Surf Punks-Locals Only
   
9. Matthew Sweet-Girlfriend
10. Tom Waits-Rain Dogs
11. The Who-Sell Out
    
12. Neil Young-Ragged Glory  

This is going to be writing practice for me, and I don't want to get bogged down on any one entry, so I'm going to keep my thoughts at no more than 500 words.