Steely Dan: Time out of mind
There’s music and then there’s Music, folks, and that’s what J2 people and Radio Hauraki (co-presenters of the NZ leg of Steely Dan’s Heavy Rollers tour) don’t understand. The first kind of ‘music’ is what the airwaves are full of. As J2 discovered, Steely Dan videos are thin on the ground, although they may once or twice have given Donald Fagen’s New Frontier clip an airing. It’s been more than 10 years since I last chose to listen to Hauraki, but my guess is that the only Steely Dan they play is Rikki, Do It Again, Reeling In The Years and, very rarely, Haitian Divorce.
The other kind of music — the sort that doesn’t get played on J2 or Hauraki and never will — doesn’t require anything other than musicians and their instruments. No image accoutrements, no smug FM djs to introduce it, no recreational drugs to make it sound good. Donald Fagen may look like a greying old raven escaped from the Tower disguised in crooked Ray-Bans; and Walter Becker might have all the rock chic of an overweight chartered accountant who’s been hauled in to cover for a sick guitar player (“Gee, look at me, I’m in a rock ‘n’ roll band!”), but they do not need pyrotechnics, million-dollar light rigs and dancing girls to work their magic. Their songs do any required dirty work for them.
I’ve been listening to SD since the 1970s, have seen them live twice and countless times in concert on DVD and video. I know exactly what Fagen looks like. The sound of his voice is hardwired into my circuitry. Nevertheless, when I close my eyes, his super-ironic, nasal BeBop Daddy drawl emanates from an idealised Rock God face. And that’s the way it should be.
If you never bothered to buy Two Against Nature or Everything Must Go or Kamakiriad or Morph The Cat or 11 Tracks of Whack, where you do get off demanding this band plays Rikki or Do It Again? In Melbourne, apparently, some guy in the third row wasted his breath shouting for Nightfly the entire way through the show. Eventually, at that show, The Donald lost his patience, and stopped the show during his Do It Again intro to shout back, “You’re annoying me now man. We play what we want, so just cool it.”
Touché. That’s exactly what the Auckland audience needed to hear. Just because you’re used to hearing music for a $10 cover charge down at your local pub doesn’t mean when you fork out $130 for it that it’s your own private show. Silences between songs at the Vector show were filled with the shouts of those who think that, having paid for a ticket, they have a divine right to hear whichever song they want. If you really want to hear Rikki, stay at home and put the record on. Or hire a Steely Dan covers band to come and play at your birthday party. I’m afraid I can’t make it.
The truism is that Americans can’t do irony, so this band must be the exception that proves it. The Dan oozes it; it drips from the stage; from the spoken introductions to every nuance of every song. I know this because it went right over the heads of certain elements of this crowd, who clearly didn’t need entreating to get wasted; many were far gone before they even arrived at the show.
Let’s take Hey Nineteen’s “the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian” chant as an example. People: it’s a song about an old man trying to seduce a nineteen-year-old (“No, we got nothing in common...”). It’s not meant to be an exhortation, or a blueprint for living. Nevertheless, Walter Becker was kind enough to suggest (and I paraphrase) that while it may be none of his business, if you do decide to try this kind of behaviour on a spring evening in Auckland, you might want to take along a cassette radio (to listen to the cricket, perhaps), as well as an umbrella. It rains a lot here, right?
The Dan’s music is what you might call aspirational — not in a career sense; it’s a kind of sci-fi fantasy of rock ‘n’ roll, played immaculately by jazz musicians. It’s a vision of alternative realities. Just check out the lyrics to Pixeleen if you have no idea what I’m talking about; it’s the William Gibson of rock. Which is part of the problem for the kind of people who wouldn’t be seen dead at an SD gig: the mother of all perception gaps; the black hole of bigotry. Because if the larger part of this 8000+ house has only ever heard the ‘hit singles’ on Hauraki, imagine what the ‘hipper than thou’ element who grew up listening to Kiwi indie bands on Flying Nun (not that there’s anything wrong with that) think of them. I’ve heard friends trying to blur the line between SD and west coast rock (the very words make them spit), as though there were no difference between Aja and what the Eagles and REO Speedwagon play. I’ve even heard The Dan dismissed as, shock horror, “session musicians”.
Let me explain that term to you: session musicians are the ones good enough to play anything at any time for anybody. They are not people who have no soul. If you told these guys that a certain mid-song hand signal meant they had to start giving every seventeenth bar the inflection of a wryly raised eyebrow in a difficult time signature, not only could they play it they would make it sound like fun.
Some people wouldn’t know music if it fell on them like a Steinway grand from a 14th storey window. These are the people who were too busy hoarsely yelling for Rikki to listen to Keith Carlock on drums making the breaks in Aja skitter, stutter and tumble tantalisingly into the stabbing chords around them. Freddie Washington has played bass with everyone from the Isley Brothers to Gladys Knight, and what he does on stage has very little to do with virtuoso chops; his simplest lines groove. But that’s like telling someone the bottle of wine they’re drinking from is among the finest in the world; if all you’re interested in is getting pissed and making a spectacle of yourself, you’re unlikely to be impressed by world-class tastes.
Even though to my mind there are few things more dispiriting than seeing untrained, middle-aged, fat white people trying to dance, I would be the last one to ban them from doing so after they’ve forked out their hard-earned readies to attend a Steely Dan show. I just wish someone would brief the over-taxed security staff about the venue’s policy on dancing before this spontanous outbreak of terpsichorean abandon is inflicted on me. If I want to see ugly white people wobbling out of time, I can do that any time, for free. We have mirrors at our place.
The real trouble with uncool people who think their own feet award them instant cool-points is that, try as you might, their behaviour eventually adheres to your shoes like dogshit, leaving a bad smell to follow you around for the rest of the night. Thus I will now never be able to banish the image of the sad old slapper who tried to attract Walter Becker’s attention during the band introductions. Christ knows what she wanted, but fortunately Walter has been through enough in his life to remain unfazed by such indignities. He gestured to her to wait, and then, when she persisted, paused to introduce her, as: “the lady in front who has had too much to drink”.
I feel absolutely no guilt about wishing her the mother of all hangovers and the dawning realisation that she did something terribly embarrassing last night.
At the front of the hall you get the spill of the backline from the stage but can still hear the vocals from the PA. You’re close enough to hear the unmiked sound of the drumkit and the same sound from the bass rig that the bassist is hearing. It’s the only way to listen to a show; as if you’re sitting onstage with the band. The word from further back in the auditorium was that there was a big hole in the upper bass/lower midrange frequencies. I was sitting about two metres away in front of Donald’s Fender Rhodes and I have no shame.
Back to the set, which was almost perfection and grace. I can see what they’re doing with the Cubano Chant overture. It’s a nice way of warming up the crowd and means Donald and Walter don’t have to come onstage in the dark. It just goes on too long. Other than that, the newest song they played was from 1980, so the audience really had nothing to complain about as far as them flogging newer, unknown material was concerned. Personally, I would have loved to hear Jack of Speed (again) and Pixeleen live; but then, I’m not the musical director, and unlike some of the sad cases in the Vector Arena last night, I’m not selfish enough to think that this show was for my benefit. Walter put a different spin on Haitian Divorce by singing the lead. I love his voice on 11 Tracks of Whack — Down At The Bottom must be the ultimate in self-deprecation — but I doubt I would be convinced by his vocal contribution last night unless I was able to hear him do it again (bad pun acknowledged).
Home At Last is the story of Ulysses played as New Orleans jazz-blues — the kind of thing Dr John might do well — sadly, it doesn’t quite work with Fender Rhodes substituting for the grand piano of the studio version. It’s one of The Dan’s most epic songs, but Donald and the backing vocalists made the chorus sound a little too polite, like a cocktail lounge band doing a passable Steely Dan cover.
They changed the set very slightly from the Melbourne show. It’s hard to imagine how they could do the vocal harmonies on Dirty Work live, but apparently the female backing vocalists can pull it off. They played Deacon Blues instead, and Donald’s “I cried when I wrote this song/Sue me if I play too long” was an unnecessary caveat because, in contrast with the Art Crimes tour (11 years ago now), soloing was brief and the show reined in at about an hour and forty minutes plus encores.
The highlight may have been the Owsley Stanley homage, Kid Charlemagne. The fourth-verse scramble to clear the acid lab of its test tubes and scales, and the way Donald delivers the lines, “Is there gas in the car?/Yes, there’s gas in the car!” gets me whether live or on record. But, eventually, no matter how much I tried to focus on the stage, the lunatics had taken over the arena and some of the lunacy had been detected by the band.
Between songs, Donald — perhaps surprised by the dancing in the aisles and the crowd’s hoarse whoops of delight — described the audience as “mad”. Later on we were labelled as “wild dudes”. Before the band came back onstage for the encores, one such wild dude — a Mussolini lookalike in the front row — seemed in his tired and emotional state to have become convinced that the crowd was applauding him. He condescended to wave back, climbed up on a temporarily vacant chair next to us, revealing his torn underwear, exchanged some kind of il Duce salute with the house, before dismounting and announcing to my friends and me conspiratorially, with beery breath and eyes like pissholes in the snow, “My Old School!”
Eventually, he went away but, spookily, the encores were changed from Do It Again followed by Bodhisattva to Bodhisattva followed by My Old School. Even a BeBop Daddy, it seems, is not immune to the needs and desires of the great unwashed.
About World Party, SD’s support band, I will only say they did an admirable job, and it was both smart and brave of them to start the set with their most familiar hit; especially as far as the dullards in the house were concerned. Karl Wallinger endearingly and modestly confessed to having written a hit for Robbie Williams, and then sang it with panache. The audience was suitably kind to them.
That Auckland set in full:
Cubano Chant
Time Out of Mind
Black Cow
Hey Nineteen
Home At Last
Peg
Babylon Sisters
Green Earrings
Haitian Divorce
Black Friday
Deacon Blues
Josie
Aja
Kid Charlemagne
Encores:
Bodhisattva
My Old School
The other kind of music — the sort that doesn’t get played on J2 or Hauraki and never will — doesn’t require anything other than musicians and their instruments. No image accoutrements, no smug FM djs to introduce it, no recreational drugs to make it sound good. Donald Fagen may look like a greying old raven escaped from the Tower disguised in crooked Ray-Bans; and Walter Becker might have all the rock chic of an overweight chartered accountant who’s been hauled in to cover for a sick guitar player (“Gee, look at me, I’m in a rock ‘n’ roll band!”), but they do not need pyrotechnics, million-dollar light rigs and dancing girls to work their magic. Their songs do any required dirty work for them.
I’ve been listening to SD since the 1970s, have seen them live twice and countless times in concert on DVD and video. I know exactly what Fagen looks like. The sound of his voice is hardwired into my circuitry. Nevertheless, when I close my eyes, his super-ironic, nasal BeBop Daddy drawl emanates from an idealised Rock God face. And that’s the way it should be.
If you never bothered to buy Two Against Nature or Everything Must Go or Kamakiriad or Morph The Cat or 11 Tracks of Whack, where you do get off demanding this band plays Rikki or Do It Again? In Melbourne, apparently, some guy in the third row wasted his breath shouting for Nightfly the entire way through the show. Eventually, at that show, The Donald lost his patience, and stopped the show during his Do It Again intro to shout back, “You’re annoying me now man. We play what we want, so just cool it.”
Touché. That’s exactly what the Auckland audience needed to hear. Just because you’re used to hearing music for a $10 cover charge down at your local pub doesn’t mean when you fork out $130 for it that it’s your own private show. Silences between songs at the Vector show were filled with the shouts of those who think that, having paid for a ticket, they have a divine right to hear whichever song they want. If you really want to hear Rikki, stay at home and put the record on. Or hire a Steely Dan covers band to come and play at your birthday party. I’m afraid I can’t make it.
The truism is that Americans can’t do irony, so this band must be the exception that proves it. The Dan oozes it; it drips from the stage; from the spoken introductions to every nuance of every song. I know this because it went right over the heads of certain elements of this crowd, who clearly didn’t need entreating to get wasted; many were far gone before they even arrived at the show.
Let’s take Hey Nineteen’s “the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian” chant as an example. People: it’s a song about an old man trying to seduce a nineteen-year-old (“No, we got nothing in common...”). It’s not meant to be an exhortation, or a blueprint for living. Nevertheless, Walter Becker was kind enough to suggest (and I paraphrase) that while it may be none of his business, if you do decide to try this kind of behaviour on a spring evening in Auckland, you might want to take along a cassette radio (to listen to the cricket, perhaps), as well as an umbrella. It rains a lot here, right?
The Dan’s music is what you might call aspirational — not in a career sense; it’s a kind of sci-fi fantasy of rock ‘n’ roll, played immaculately by jazz musicians. It’s a vision of alternative realities. Just check out the lyrics to Pixeleen if you have no idea what I’m talking about; it’s the William Gibson of rock. Which is part of the problem for the kind of people who wouldn’t be seen dead at an SD gig: the mother of all perception gaps; the black hole of bigotry. Because if the larger part of this 8000+ house has only ever heard the ‘hit singles’ on Hauraki, imagine what the ‘hipper than thou’ element who grew up listening to Kiwi indie bands on Flying Nun (not that there’s anything wrong with that) think of them. I’ve heard friends trying to blur the line between SD and west coast rock (the very words make them spit), as though there were no difference between Aja and what the Eagles and REO Speedwagon play. I’ve even heard The Dan dismissed as, shock horror, “session musicians”.
Let me explain that term to you: session musicians are the ones good enough to play anything at any time for anybody. They are not people who have no soul. If you told these guys that a certain mid-song hand signal meant they had to start giving every seventeenth bar the inflection of a wryly raised eyebrow in a difficult time signature, not only could they play it they would make it sound like fun.
Some people wouldn’t know music if it fell on them like a Steinway grand from a 14th storey window. These are the people who were too busy hoarsely yelling for Rikki to listen to Keith Carlock on drums making the breaks in Aja skitter, stutter and tumble tantalisingly into the stabbing chords around them. Freddie Washington has played bass with everyone from the Isley Brothers to Gladys Knight, and what he does on stage has very little to do with virtuoso chops; his simplest lines groove. But that’s like telling someone the bottle of wine they’re drinking from is among the finest in the world; if all you’re interested in is getting pissed and making a spectacle of yourself, you’re unlikely to be impressed by world-class tastes.
Even though to my mind there are few things more dispiriting than seeing untrained, middle-aged, fat white people trying to dance, I would be the last one to ban them from doing so after they’ve forked out their hard-earned readies to attend a Steely Dan show. I just wish someone would brief the over-taxed security staff about the venue’s policy on dancing before this spontanous outbreak of terpsichorean abandon is inflicted on me. If I want to see ugly white people wobbling out of time, I can do that any time, for free. We have mirrors at our place.
The real trouble with uncool people who think their own feet award them instant cool-points is that, try as you might, their behaviour eventually adheres to your shoes like dogshit, leaving a bad smell to follow you around for the rest of the night. Thus I will now never be able to banish the image of the sad old slapper who tried to attract Walter Becker’s attention during the band introductions. Christ knows what she wanted, but fortunately Walter has been through enough in his life to remain unfazed by such indignities. He gestured to her to wait, and then, when she persisted, paused to introduce her, as: “the lady in front who has had too much to drink”.
I feel absolutely no guilt about wishing her the mother of all hangovers and the dawning realisation that she did something terribly embarrassing last night.
At the front of the hall you get the spill of the backline from the stage but can still hear the vocals from the PA. You’re close enough to hear the unmiked sound of the drumkit and the same sound from the bass rig that the bassist is hearing. It’s the only way to listen to a show; as if you’re sitting onstage with the band. The word from further back in the auditorium was that there was a big hole in the upper bass/lower midrange frequencies. I was sitting about two metres away in front of Donald’s Fender Rhodes and I have no shame.
Back to the set, which was almost perfection and grace. I can see what they’re doing with the Cubano Chant overture. It’s a nice way of warming up the crowd and means Donald and Walter don’t have to come onstage in the dark. It just goes on too long. Other than that, the newest song they played was from 1980, so the audience really had nothing to complain about as far as them flogging newer, unknown material was concerned. Personally, I would have loved to hear Jack of Speed (again) and Pixeleen live; but then, I’m not the musical director, and unlike some of the sad cases in the Vector Arena last night, I’m not selfish enough to think that this show was for my benefit. Walter put a different spin on Haitian Divorce by singing the lead. I love his voice on 11 Tracks of Whack — Down At The Bottom must be the ultimate in self-deprecation — but I doubt I would be convinced by his vocal contribution last night unless I was able to hear him do it again (bad pun acknowledged).
Home At Last is the story of Ulysses played as New Orleans jazz-blues — the kind of thing Dr John might do well — sadly, it doesn’t quite work with Fender Rhodes substituting for the grand piano of the studio version. It’s one of The Dan’s most epic songs, but Donald and the backing vocalists made the chorus sound a little too polite, like a cocktail lounge band doing a passable Steely Dan cover.
They changed the set very slightly from the Melbourne show. It’s hard to imagine how they could do the vocal harmonies on Dirty Work live, but apparently the female backing vocalists can pull it off. They played Deacon Blues instead, and Donald’s “I cried when I wrote this song/Sue me if I play too long” was an unnecessary caveat because, in contrast with the Art Crimes tour (11 years ago now), soloing was brief and the show reined in at about an hour and forty minutes plus encores.
The highlight may have been the Owsley Stanley homage, Kid Charlemagne. The fourth-verse scramble to clear the acid lab of its test tubes and scales, and the way Donald delivers the lines, “Is there gas in the car?/Yes, there’s gas in the car!” gets me whether live or on record. But, eventually, no matter how much I tried to focus on the stage, the lunatics had taken over the arena and some of the lunacy had been detected by the band.
Between songs, Donald — perhaps surprised by the dancing in the aisles and the crowd’s hoarse whoops of delight — described the audience as “mad”. Later on we were labelled as “wild dudes”. Before the band came back onstage for the encores, one such wild dude — a Mussolini lookalike in the front row — seemed in his tired and emotional state to have become convinced that the crowd was applauding him. He condescended to wave back, climbed up on a temporarily vacant chair next to us, revealing his torn underwear, exchanged some kind of il Duce salute with the house, before dismounting and announcing to my friends and me conspiratorially, with beery breath and eyes like pissholes in the snow, “My Old School!”
Eventually, he went away but, spookily, the encores were changed from Do It Again followed by Bodhisattva to Bodhisattva followed by My Old School. Even a BeBop Daddy, it seems, is not immune to the needs and desires of the great unwashed.
About World Party, SD’s support band, I will only say they did an admirable job, and it was both smart and brave of them to start the set with their most familiar hit; especially as far as the dullards in the house were concerned. Karl Wallinger endearingly and modestly confessed to having written a hit for Robbie Williams, and then sang it with panache. The audience was suitably kind to them.
That Auckland set in full:
Cubano Chant
Time Out of Mind
Black Cow
Hey Nineteen
Home At Last
Peg
Babylon Sisters
Green Earrings
Haitian Divorce
Black Friday
Deacon Blues
Josie
Aja
Kid Charlemagne
Encores:
Bodhisattva
My Old School
12 Comments:
Excellent writing! I enjoyed every bit of it, but especially this:
...I’ve even heard The Dan dismissed as, shock horror, “session musicians”.
Let me explain that term to you: session musicians are the ones good enough to play anything at any time for anybody. They are not people who have no soul. If you told these guys that a certain mid-song hand signal meant they had to start giving every seventeenth bar the inflection of a wryly raised eyebrow in a difficult time signature, not only could they play it they would make it sound like fun.
That was the best. Yes, it's embarrassing to see dorks jumping on seats, and old farts hanging their boobs out for all to see (yuck), but all that aside, it was an awesome concert and a great venue.
Thanks, Scott, Tracy and Ryley.
The Vector Arena looks like a world-class venue and could so easily have been just that.
For the time being it's stuck with only having the cosmetics right, but it's not too late to change it. The revenue it's pulling in this year should cover the investment in some decent acoustic refurbishment.
But the upper level seats go up too close to the ceiling for my liking, and you'll never get the right blend of good sound/visibility up there because it will always be a compromise: any hanging drapes (of the kind they use overseas) will restrict the view and reduce potential revenue.
But this stuff is nothing new and really should have been addressed before they started taking money off punters.
This post has been removed by the author.
That's an interesting misreading, chris. I apologise for feeling superior to an old slapper whose idea of fun is trying to request songs from Walter Becker while he's introducing his band.
And what's your point about the seats, that I'm not a true fan and therefore didn't deserve to have them? Perhaps that has more to do with an inferiority complex on someone else's behalf than a superiority complex on mine.
You should write a review, you clearly feel very strongly about the show. If you wanted to point out to me that I forgot to mention that Walter smiled a lot during the encores and failed to indicate how much fun I had, I'm happy to redress that here, since "perfection and grace" clearly mean something altogether different to me than they do to you.
I had a great night. In spite of Benito Mussolini and the fat dancing women. And I loved Walter's feigned double-take when he walked out onstage at the start of the set.
You speak with great authority about what it's like to be a performing musician, so I assume you know what you're talking about.
But please don't tell me what I understand and what I don't. It makes you sound as though you have a superiority complex or something.
In retrospect I could have left out my first paragraph. Alas it's unfortunately easy to be insulting over the internet.
Perhaps it was different at the front, where I was sitting (row 27) I would have loved to see more movement and people looking like they knew all the material, were into the show and wanted to be there :)
No worries, Chris. You would have to put in some serious overtime to insult me. Everyone at an SD gig is going to be more of a "friend" rather than an "enemy", so embarrassment is really my problem not anyone else's.
In my writing I try to convey a sense of the atmosphere, rather than just telling people how much or how little fun I've had (I leave the banalities to the MSM critics). If I write more than 1000 words about anything, it's something about which I feel strongly. I hope that emotion is communicated; if it isn't, that's my failing as a writer.
People enjoy themselves in different ways. Although nowhere near as well as Keith Carlock, personally, I prefer to groove in a seated position. I was too phased about sitting two metres away from one of my idols, almost as though across a dinner table, for anything more physical than that.
But I think we can take it as read that most people were into the show and wanted to be there.
Whether they knew all the material is another matter.
How was the sound in Row 27? I'm hearing some very conflicting reports from different areas of the arena. I hear Dylan did have acoustic drapes hanging, so perhaps it's the choice of the individual sound engineers, or a cost thing. But they must restrict the view in the top-level seats.
Hi Chris,
After having to put up with appalling sound (garbled wash of vocals, piercing high end and echoing disjointed bass) at both the Bob Dylan and Cure concerts, I approached the SD concert with some trepidation.
We were there for the music. BTW the sound was fantastic where we were.
But the event was spoiled by a constant stream of people walking to and from the bar.
Seated in the Lower Bowl area, our view of the stage was frequently blocked by people at floor level wandering back and then standing in front of our seats.
The low point came when my friend asked a group of these people to move and was assaulted by an extremely drunk male – possibly the Mussolini guy. Security staff were thin on the ground and were largely ineffective.
Sure, let the punters buy a drink before the show and even take it with them into the auditorium, but why have the bar operate throughout the concert? Is the Vector Arena a concert venue or a booze barn?
Hmmm... don't what happened to my earlier reply, pipi, but it has disappeared.
Your comments are all valid. Vector Arena management has some serious work to do to bring this venue up to standard. I hope it's taking note.
There is some further comment on the Australasian gigs here:
http://www.dandom.com/guestbook
but also some very insightful writing on inappropriate audience behaviour in the Vector arena in the comments section of this lovely site:
http://tinyurl.com/2qb5yh
And I thoroughly recommend you to check out the 'Pics from the road' section of the official Steely Dan website. They haven't posted anything from NZ yet, but there are some nice shots from Aus:
http://tinyurl.com/2rcqfc
I got the news...
As one of about ten or so under 21-year-olds, I loved the concert. Not because the sound was perfect where I was, not because they played all the best ones (and I'm glad they didn't, it would have lasted days), but because I got to hear for probably the only time in my life two artists whose musical talent I've idolised for years now. Only one I would have loved to hear that they didn't play was the title track from Everything Must Go - but I was thrilled they didn't play Rikki. Great review, I agree with most everything you said.
Thanks for your comments, mono.
You have no idea how gratifying it is for an old Dan Fan like me to hear that under-21-year-olds are discovering the band. I guess there's no difference from me rediscovering the Beatles, Soft Machine and Miles Davis in my late teens.
In the end, the MSM reviews of the gig were overwhelmingly positive. I particularly liked Liam Dann's comparison between t-shirt designs and the crowd:
http://tinyurl.com/yrqrnp
And Mark Wilson on Stuff did quite a nice job, too (apart from seriously underestimating the number of guitarists Jon Herrington is vying with on various songs):
http://tinyurl.com/yq9mpe
And you're right about Everything Must Go: another classic!
Thanks for the links - I think Herrington can just be thankful that they didn't play Third World Man...
Post a Comment
<< Home