I haven’t been posting quite as much here in recent months since I launched the music blog hissing lawns, but this blog continues to be an interesting adventure.

And it has sure told me a lot about what my largely Savannah-based audience wants to read, what types of posts attract search traffic, and other details I could only discover through running a site.

So here, with a little commentary, are the 13 most-read posts on Savannah Unplugged in 2013.

This blog doesn’t get all that much traffic really — I’m averaging about 300 page views/day in recent months. Only rarely do posts here get over 1,000 views, and many are only read by a couple of dozen people.

But a post had to get over 775 views to make my top 13 in 2013.

13: A few thoughts on the passing of Ben Tucker

What a tragedy in early June. This was a pretty quick post on the day that Ben died, but included some quotes, a video, and pics from the 2012 Savannah Jazz Festival. I suspect I would have gotten even more hits on my photos of the second line procession after Ben’s funeral, but some folks who should have linked to that post chose to download photos and post them to private Facebook pages — a frustrating puzzle.

12: Kanye West video projections in Savannah on Saturday night

So this didn’t even happen, but it was an interesting testament to the power and immediacy of the internet to disperse information. For the most part, young people — i.e., not the core Savannah Unplugged readers — were looking for information on the the Kanye West projections, and they found my blog in huge numbers on that particular afternoon.

11: Private Savannah screening of “CBGB” gets a good reaction

There was obviously a huge amount of local interest in CBGB when it filmed in Savannah in 2012 (Rupert Grint! Alan Rickman!), and that interest carried over to the anticipation of the release. I wasn’t invited to this private screening at the SCAD Museum of Art, but I did give the film a disappointing review when I saw it months later.

10: Mayans in Georgia?. . . Here we go again

I can’t believe how much traffic this post got — almost all from search engines. A few spurious claims on cable TV and — boom — viewers are ready to ignore the findings of serious researchers. This post also got hundreds of hits in the final days of 2012.

9: A Savannah intersection voted third worst in the nation

I’m proud to live in a city where posts like this can generate 1,000+ page views on a blog. A large portion of our citizens are interested in traffic, transit, urban design, architecture, and other subjects that deal with the public realm.

8: About the size of new apartments at 61st and Abercorn . . . .

Ditto from #9 above. I agree that the new apartments on 61st near Habersham Village are a little tall, in part because the ground had to be raised a few feet. But the height was otherwise within the longstanding zoning limits, and other objections — especially parking and noise — later proved largely unfounded (as I suspected they would be).

7: Mary Lee — a 16.5 foot, 3500 lb. great white shark — in surf off Jacksonville

The work of OCEARCH has been fun to follow — especially when a huge great white is in the surf break just down the shoreline. Again, this was one of those posts that generated a ton of search traffic since so few publications covered the story relative to the amount of public interest.

6: The Greyboy Allstars booked for SCADâ€s new alumni graduation concert in Forsyth Park

1,200 hits? Really? I think in part this post did so well because of the thoroughness of the title, which has all the key search terms: SCAD, new alumni, graduation, concert, and Forsyth Park.

5: So whatâ€s up with Savannahâ€s future Whole Foods?

Whole Foods eventually opened in late summer, of course, but this post from late April included an embedded tweet with the scheduled opening date as well as pics of the site. Not everyone in Savannah fully appreciated what a big development this was for the city, but regular readers and random searchers simply ate up any information about Whole Foods before it opened.

4: Chipotle opening in mid-September in Savannah

I made a couple of other posts about Chipotle after this one, both of which got many hundreds of hits. Again, the vast majority of the traffic for this post came from search traffic. People like reading about what’s new, and people like reading about popular chains like Whole Foods and Chipotle.

3: No, Mumford & Sons is not playing SCADâ€s new alumni concert in Forsyth Park

A clever hoax went viral. Debunking it attracted well over 2,000 views.

2: When The Rolling Stones stayed in Savannah. . .

Yes, people love anything having to do with celebrities, but this post wasn’t just pandering to that impulse. The Stones stayed in Savannah in 1965, just after appearing for the second time on the Ed Sullivan show. With the help of friends online, we pinpointed where they stayed and took photos of the motel as it appears today on US 17/Ogeechee Road. I’m glad that so many people seem to have gotten pleasure out of this post.

1: An interview with actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers from 2000, unpublished until now

Published almost exactly a year ago, this post continues to get 5-10 hits per day from search traffic or links from forums or sites devoted to Jonathan Rhys Meyers. What a fascinating character he is, but he was in some ways even more interesting back in 2000 when I interviewed him at The Groucho Club in London. I was freelancing for Contents Magazine at the time, but the edited interview never appeared. This lengthy post is pretty much just a raw transcript — and I think the quality of the unedited interview speaks very highly of the young actor.

“We want to start where we began,” Tina Weymouth said.

“He kept us alive,” Weymouth said of the inscrutable club owner. “He fed us and he supported us in every way possible.”

“He told us we needed to expand our sound and get a little more interesting,” she said. “And he taught us a lot about ethics, about how to treat people.”

One of the best moments in CBGB involves Talking Heads. The band takes the stage in the nearly empty dive and launches into “Psycho Killer.” And then Kristal and the handful of listeners catch each others’ eyes, as if it’s just now occurring to them that they’re watching something historic.

The testimonies from Weymouth and David Byrne are shown during the closing credits of CBGB, but — bizarrely — we never see Kristal, (played by Alan Rickman) interact in any way with the band. He doesn’t even talk to them — much less feed them or teach them about ethics.

And that’s sort of the pattern of the entire new film CBGB: fabulously interesting figures from the history of punk and rock pass before us, but we pretty much never see any real human interaction between those musicians and Kristal, the man responsible for so much of their future success.

Sure, there were a lot of major stars who came out of CBGB, and not all of them can be fully realized characters in a feature film.

But only rarely does the script allow any of those musicians to live and breathe, even for a moment — rarely do they become more than just mimics or caricatures.

Later in the movie, as Kristal, now manager of The Dead Boys, tries to respond to the stabbing of Johnny Blitz, he yells at Stiv Bators (Justin Bartha) and Cheetah Chrome (Rupert Grint):  “Iâ€m not your father! Iâ€m just your manager! I canâ€t do this anymore!”

Huh?

We haven’t seen anything remotely paternal in Kristal’s relationship with the young punk band. The sudden outburst comes from somewhere out beyond left field.

The lack of human contact between Kristal and the musicians is perhaps the most puzzling of all the choices in the script by husband and wife team Jody Savin and Randall Miller (Miller also directs).

The poor character development is especially notable in the brief appearances of Iggy Pop (Taylor Hawkins) and Lou Reed (Kyle Gallner), both of whom come across as self-obsessed buffoons.

Terry Ork (Johnny Galecki) gets even worse treatment. A band manager, label owner, and something of a visionary, Ork was largely responsible for Television and deserves considerable credit for putting both the band and the club at the vanguard of American music. But in CBGB, all we see of Ork is his slightly smarmy attempt to get the band on stage and his offer to give  Iggy Pop a blow job.

So, if we aren’t seeing Kristal interact with the musicians, what takes up all the screen time?

Ashley Greene as Hillyâ€s daughter Lisa is especially unlikable. We donâ€t see a single moment of true warmth between father and daughter, and there’s even an embarrassing moment when Greene seems to be channeling Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny.

Twice in the film, characters fall asleep with the water running, flooding the floor below. Really?

We’re treated to several uninteresting scenes with Kristal interacting with a stereotypical cop.

The club might have been legendary for Hillyâ€s dog Johnathan taking dumps everywhere, but dog shit jokes wear thin pretty fast on screen. Ditto for jokes about rats and roaches.

And do we really need to see a montage sequence of a character buying a pair of boots?

The filmmakers have tried to deal with the episodic nature of the script by using comic book imagery reminiscent of Punk magazine to leap from one scene to another. At first this seems like a clever framing device, but it quickly wears thin, further diminishing the already shallow story.

But the music is at least great, right?

The film uses studio versions of classic songs even when there are existing live recordings from the club — raw renditions that might have given CBGB a much-needed jolt.  (Click here for a post with a number of live videos from CBGB’s early days.)

And, inexplicably, hardly any of the performance scenes in the film continue for more than 30 seconds without being interrupted by distracting dialogue, running jokes about the club’s seediness, or other extraneous elements. Viewers are given only the briefest of chances to immerse themselves in the music; we never have a chance to feel either the innocent wonder or the sordid seediness at the heart of the story.

I could go on and on.

As negative as this sounds, I’ll say that I didn’t find the movie boring — it moves too fast for that.

And there are a few touching moments here and there, and a few stirring musical sequences, and I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching Alan Rickman, who famously made drinking tea a work of art.

But you’ll likely walk out of CBGB feeling like you felt after one particularly mediocre night at some second-rate club.

You’ll feel like you just missed all the good stuff that surely must be going down at some other club down the street — one with better music, better sex, better drugs, and better conversation.

Recalling Blitzkrieg Bop on the Bowery; ‘CBGB†Dramatizes the Heyday of New Yorkâ€s Premier Punk Club

It’s definitely worth checking out. (Click here for a less interesting but similar piece in Rolling Stone.)

From the piece:

[…] bit by bit, pieces of the actual former club — the bar, the pay phone, the walls and the notoriously foul toilets — were removed from a Brooklyn storehouse, loaded onto trucks and reassembled on a clean, affluent intersection in Savannah, Ga.

Well that’s wrong.

The pieces of the club were assembled at Meddin Studios, out in the industrial area of Louisville Road.

Only the club exterior was recreated on West Congress Street, a short block that includes The Lady & Sons and Sapphire Grill, but also includes The Jinx, Club 51 Degrees, and one of the city’s most prominent empty and dilapidated buildings. The crew set up on an underutilized parking lot. “Affluent”?

Anyway.

A number of impressions, in no particular order:

The piece is a really fun roundup of movies about punk.

The infighting among punk’s key historical figures is interesting — petty, predictable, even sad in some respects.

The piece suggests the inevitable failure of any movie to reproduce the scene to match the memories of everyone who was part of it, or to bring individual characters to life (many of those portrayed are actually still alive, of course):

And yet for all the hard work, once stills and a teaser trailer hit the Web, the switchblades inevitably came out. People are possessive about punk. The original punks are in their 60s now (those who arenâ€t dead, anyway), a time of life when legacy becomes more crucial than when youâ€re young, loud and snotty. Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters, cast as a blond Iggy Pop, drew particular ire. “I donâ€t follow any of that,” Mr. Rickman said. “There will be a huge sense of ownership, and in that sense I guess you can never get it right.”

I spent part of several days hanging around the public outdoor shoots along Congress Street.

On this particular day, the shoot just moved west over a period of several hours, with exterior filming near a somewhat dilapidated store, on a vacant lot across from Belford’s, and in front of the former location of Universe Trading Company on Ellis Square.

You’ll see the dog playing Johnathan here, plus his handler Renee’ DeRossett. My friend Ian is one of the bums stumbling across the street there at the end.

You’ll note that, as Hilly Kristal, Alan Rickman (yes that’s him with the poofy reddish hair) hardly changes expression in these photos. That’s because the character hardly changes expression in the film. A challenge, to say the least, to have a lead character who emotes so little and so subtly.

So mostly here you can see the crew, the cars, and so forth.

These shots begin with a couple of evening shots on set, including one of Alan Rickman talking to famed Savannah producer and ice cream man Stratton Leopold, and another of Estelle Harris.

The rest of the pics here were from one of the less exciting days (and, as I recall, one of the hottest) on the CBGB set on West Congress St. last July in Savannah.

You’re seeing Alan Rickman as club founder Hilly Kristal on the ladder talking to Terry Ork (a fabulously interesting music promoter and band manager played by Johnny Galecki), who is with the young members of the great band Television, played by Max Reinhardsen, Evan Alex Cole, and Luke Dressler.

Then Ork is walking out of the club to speak with Kristal and Merv Ferguson (Donal Logue).

This moment — the one when Ork gets Television onto the CBGB stage — could have been one of the most interesting and dramatic in the movie.

I’ll have a review of the film here soon, and the impending release has prompted me to go back and take a look at some of the photos I took here in Savannah during summer of 2012 while CBGB was being filmed.

I obviously didn’t have access to the set at Meddin Studios, nor to any of the interiors where the film was shot.

But there were quite a number of shooting days on West Congress Street and nearby areas when the goings-on were largely visible to the public.

I don’t have the kind of zoom really needed to be shooting actors a block away, but I had fun hanging out.

Versions of some of these photos were already published, but I’ve re-edited in ways that might make some of the images a little sharper (or not). And now I have a better sense of the mania of all you Rupert Grint fans, so I’ve included more of these images.

So here’s mostly just one scene, with Rupert Grint, Justin Bartha, and Bronson Adams as The Dead Boys Cheetah Chrome, Stiv Bators, and Johnny Blitz.

The scene involves the three band members storming out of CBGB and into traffic, with Hilly Kristal — played by the great Alan Rickman — and Merv Ferguson — played by Donal Logue — coming out behind them.

I’m also including one stray photo of a scene that was shot immediately afterward with Cheetah Chrome (Rupert Grint) giving some money (or something) to a bum on the street. Presumably the bum is Idaho, played by Freddy Rodriguez, but I’m not 100 percent certain of that.

I’ll post some more photos take at other times over the next few days.

I’ve been swamped with things to do at Armstrong — that’s a key reason I’ve been relatively quiet here.

And I’m also working in some fashion almost daily on developing the Savannah-based music blog hissing lawns, the name of which is obviously inspired by one of Joni Mitchell’s great albums.

So far, a total of six of us have contributed to the blog in its first 3+ weeks. Among other things, Larry Jack Sammons is doing weekly updates of his pretty incredibly music calendar, Kayne Lanahan of Savannah Stopover and Revival Fest profiled the international up-and-comer Woodkid, and I have posted photos of from the Savannah Jazz Festival and from a few other recent shows, including Saturday’s great gig at The Jinx featuring Little Tybee, Paleface, and Triathalon.

I hope to add some other contributors and beef up other areas of the content in the coming weeks.

The blog is definitely finding an audience that I don’t typically reach. It looks like about 40 percent of hissing lawns’ readers aren’t even among my 3,000+ friends on Facebook (ridiculous, huh?).

So if you frequently stop here to catch up on music offerings around town, it looks like a lot of that content — including my photos — will be migrating over to hissing lawns, which also has a Facebook page and a Twitter.

Traffic on hissing lawns in the first three weeks has been all over the place — from a low of 31 page views on a day that no new posts were made to a high of 195 (we actually might pass that today). Those are pretty modest numbers, but I’m sure other Savannah bloggers know how hard it is to generate traffic in niches in a relatively small city like ours.

So that’s what’s going on. Thanks to all the readers who have supported and continue to support this blog.

Cheers, Bill

From MTV’s Rupert Grint’s Butt Takes Center Stage In Exclusive ‘CBGB’ Clip:

Essentially, “CBGB” was a place with great music where just about anything could happen. Take this exclusive clip for example. In it, Cheetah Chrome is speaking with Genya Ravan (Stana Katic) at the bar. She comments on his red locks and asks if they are the genuine article or just a dye job.

Cheetah Chrome insists that his hair is, in fact, the real deal, but there’s only one way to really convince her. That’s when he drops trou, and we see a whole lot of Rupert Grint. Not exactly what you expected to see from the former Ron Weasley, huh?

CBGB shot most of its scenes last summer in Savannah — the club’s actual interior was reconstructed at Meddin Studios and many of the exterior shots were done along Congress Street.

I published a lot of images from those outdoor shoots (see here and here), but I’ll be going through some of those pics again soon. I have a fair number that have never been posted and some that could likely use re-editing.

Here’s one that I reposted just recently, with Rupert Grint as Cheetah Chrome, Justin Bartha as Stiv Bators, and Bronson Adams as Johnny Blitz — The Dead Boys.

Anyway, here’s the clip that MTV has posted: