B12 Solipsism

Simple game, hit shuffle on your music library, record the first ten songs that emerge. You can play too, but here’s what showed up on my Friday shuffle.

1. Bowie, David- Letter To Hermione

   
   Space Oddity – Strange to hear David Bowie play softly psychedelic rock before he became famous, and a better musician. Not skippable, but not a desert island disc either.

2. Band, The- Key To The Highway

   
   A Musical History – If you are looking for a good introduction to one of the seminal bands of the 1970s, you wouldn’t go wrong picking up this boxed set. Full of gems. This particular track has enough reverb to start a pogo-stick revolution. Err something like that. Hard to imagine The Band recording songs like this in isolation. I have no evidence either way, just strongly suspect this was recorded with minimal over-dubs.

3. Fools Gold- Poseidon

   
   Fool’s Gold Fool’s Gold is a Los Angeles collective that weaves together western pop aesthetics with African rhythms and melodies, and indeed this is true. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this song was from the Nigeria 70 series, or a Luaka Bop compilation.

4. Fahey, John- Give Me Corn Bread When I’m Hungry

   
   The Dance Of Death & Other Plantation Favorites – can never have enough John Fahey. This is a straightfoward acoustic blues, with percussive bass strings in homage to Mississippi John Hurt and others.

5. Tosh, Peter- Coming In Hot

   
   Honorary Citizen – Bob Marley was never as good as when he was part of The Wailers, and Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer were co-members. Peter Tosh as a solo act was hardly ever as deep as Bob Marley, but still better than most. This is a pop reggae tune with dub-style drums. I guess every song doesn’t have to have political and religious over (and under) tones.

6. Johann Sebastian Bach -

   
   Bach: Cello Suites [Disc 1]

   Bach: Cello Suite #1 In G, BWV 1007 – Menuet #1 & 2- Jaap Ter Linden

   ahh, Bach – in my best Radar O’Reilly voice…

7. Professor Longhair- Cherry Pie

   
   House Party New Orleans Style – A duet with Snooks Eaglin’s guitar. Not much of a lyric, I suspect cherry pie is a sexual innuendo perhaps.

8. The Ruts- Babylon’s Burning

   
   No Thanks! The ’70s Punk Rebellion – Meh. Serviceable track on a great boxed set. Tellingly, this is the only Ruts song I have in my library.

9. Thomas Mapfumo, The Acid Band- Matiregerera Mambo

   
   

   Hokoyo! – Thomas Mapfumo deserves a Nobel Peace Prize more than Barack Obama! One of my favorite musicians I’ve seen perform live: such a leonine stage presence. Don’t know if his band is playing electric guitar arpeggios or an electrified mbira, just know that the Zimbabwe government didn’t like the criticisms, and Mr. Mapfumo lives in exile these days.

10. Bert Jansch & John Renbourn- East Wind

    
    Bert And John – absolutely spectacular acoustic guitar duel/duet. If you play acoustic guitar, you should give this album a listen.

Come on, you can play along too! Shuffle your music library by song, then post the first ten songs on the playlist. Here’s what my list looks like today:

1. Nouvelle Vague- Too Drunk To Fuck

   
   Nouvelle Vague

2. MC5- Skunk (Sonically Speaking)

   
   The Big Bang! Best Of The MC5

3. Queen- Leaving Home Ain’t Easy

   
   Jazz

4. Davis, Miles- Mademoiselle Mabry

   
   Filles De Kilimanjaro

5. R.E.M.- Fall on me

   
   Life’s Rich Pageant

6. Clancy Eccles- Be Faithful Darling

   
   Trojan Tighten Up Box

7. Townes Van Zandt- No Lonesome Tune (with Willie Nelson)
   Texas Rain
8. Mingus, Charles- Fables Of Faubus

   
   Mingus Ah Um

9. Galaxie 500- Decomposing Trees

   
   On Fire

10. Jones, Rickie Lee- Nobody Knows My Name

    
    The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard

Again, for me, I want to post a brief discussion of each song, but entirely too busy with “paying” work to do so. Imagine my sonorous voice droning on…

Some additional reading January 20th from 12:07 to 17:38:

• 
  Stuart Carlson – 2010-01-18 – Satan’s tools, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh

• DIY Refrigerator Care Saves Money, Keeps Refrigerator Alive Longer – Saving Money – Lifehacker – Pippen becomes famous for his refrigerator love
• Devotion to CTA is tattooed on her foot – CTA Tattler – This woman loves maps so much — and the CTA — that she has the rail system map tattooed on the top of foot.

  

• Open Letter From OK Go – OK Go – Fifteen years ago, when the terms of contracts like ours were dreamt up, a major label could record two cats fighting in a bag and three months later they’d have a hit. No more. People of the world, there has been a revolution. You no longer give a shit what major labels want you to listen to (good job, world!), and you no longer spend money actually buying the music you listen to (perhaps not so good job, world). So the money that used to flow through the music business has slowed to a trickle, and every label, large or small, is scrambling to catch every last drop. You can’t blame them; they need new shoes, just like everybody else. And musicians need them to survive so we can use them as banks. Even bands like us who do most of our own promotion still need them to write checks every once in a while.But where are they gonna find money if no one buys music?

youtubery in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Verve Jazz Masters 58: Nina Sings Nina” (Nina Simone)

The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can’t you see it
Can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying ‘Go slow! ‘

But that’s just the trouble
‘Do it slow’
Washing the windows
‘Do it slow’
Picking the cotton
‘Do it slow’
You’re just plain rotten
‘Do it slow’
You’re too damn lazy
‘Do it slow’
The thinking’s crazy
‘Do it slow’
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don’t know
I don’t know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin’

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you any more
You keep on saying ‘Go slow! ‘
‘Go slow! ‘

But that’s just the trouble
‘Do it slow’
Desegregation
‘Do it slow’
Mass participation
‘Do it slow’
Reunification
‘Do it slow’
Do things gradually
‘Do it slow’
But bring more tragedy
‘Do it slow’
Why don’t you see it
Why don’t you feel it
I don’t know
I don’t know

You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Another glowing review of Ella Fitzgerald’s residency at the Crescendo Club in the early 1960s, this time by Will Friedwald:

June 1962. The Crescendo Club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Ella Fitzgerald and her quartet have settled in for a two-week run in her adopted hometown. In the middle of a set, she starts singing “Too Darn Hot,” which had been a highlight of her 1956 album, “The Cole Porter Songbook.” But a few notes into the song, Fitzgerald is interrupted by the sound of kids dancing the twist in another joint upstairs. She decides to go with the flow: Drummer Gus Johnson and pianist Lou Levy start pounding out a boogie-shuffle beat, and the singer improvises lyrics about how hard it is to sing Porter while everybody’s twistin’. She then launches into the “Kiss Me Kate” show tune with the kind of energy and swing that the young twisters couldn’t even dream about. It’s a brilliant, spontaneous moment, and a wonderful insight into the thinking of one of the iconic interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

This performance is one of the many joys of the recently released four-CD boxed set “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” and it’s also a microcosm of what was occurring in American culture at the time. At start of the ’60s, Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra were the powerhouses of the record-album business. Rock ‘n’ roll was in the doldrums, and even at its earlier height it was mainly a singles market. No less than Sinatra with his concept albums, Fitzgerald and her producer-manager Norman Granz had transformed the long-playing medium with their songbook and live albums. In 1959 and 1960, Fitzgerald brought both these ideas to unprecedented heights with one project that was incredibly ambitious, her five-LP “George and Ira Gershwin Songbook,” and another that was masterful in its simplicity, “Ella in Berlin—Mack the Knife.”

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood | By Will Friedwald - WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read the full review]

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Finally got my copy of the new Ella Fitzgerald boxed set, Twelve Nights in Hollywood. Awesome. Recorded over a two week stay at the Crescendo Club in Hollywood, 1961, with some additional material recorded in 1962 with a trio¹

With all the multi-disc jazz boxes that have come out in recent years — the complete Miles Davis on Columbia, the complete Charlie Parker on Savoy, the complete Duke Ellington on RCA and so on — it’s hard to believe that any significant tapes by any major musician might still be languishing undiscovered in a record company’s archives.

Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years, and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit the bins in her lifetime.

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered - ‘Twelve Nights in Hollywood’ - NYTimes.com]

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet (77 songs, over four hours of music), but what I’ve heard is just spectacular. Highly recommended for fans of the human voice. The band is good, swinging intimate small-combo jazz², but the highlight is Ms. Fitzgerald’s emotive expressive voice and utter, relaxed joy.

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” is not a complete document. (If it were, it would consist of more than a dozen CDs, not four.) But it does include what Mr. Seidel regards as the best version of nearly every song — 76 out of 83 — that Fitzgerald sang on those nights. Six of those 76 songs were also included on the “Ella in Hollywood” album. Because Verve was about to reissue it as well, Mr. Seidel, to avoid redundancy, picked different versions of those songs, which she’d sung on different nights from the ones that Granz selected. On five of those six songs, Mr. Seidel’s choices are clearly better — more spirited, more playful, more passionate, even bluesier.

The blues were never Fitzgerald’s strong point; her few stabs at singing them in the studio came off as lame because it was hard to believe she had the capacity to be sad. But on these recordings she sings several blues songs, most notably “St. Louis Blues,” and, while no one would mistake her for Billie Holiday, she takes them for a bumpy, saucy ride.

When she scats on these recordings, she goes higher, lower, faster, more syncopated, more harmonically complex than usual; it sounds like a really good bebop horn solo, not an affectation, as her scatting on studio albums sometimes does.

And when she sings a ballad, she takes the melody in more — and more inventive — directions while still making it at least as heartbreaking as she ever did in a studio or large concert hall.

Herman Leonard, the great photographer, once took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of what Ellington was smiling at.

photograph © Herman Leonard – Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington at the Downbeat Club

1. Paul Smith – piano; Wilfred Middlebrooks – bass; Stan Levey – drums [↩]
2. Lou Levy- piano; Herb Ellis – guitar; Wilfred Middlebrooks -bass; Gus Johnson – drums [↩]

A few interesting links collected January 5th through January 8th:

• Letters of Note: Art is useless because… – Included in the preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is the now famous and often misconstrued line, ‘All art is quite useless’. In fact, following the novel’s original publication in 1890, Oxford undergraduate Bernulf Clegg was so intrigued by the claim that he wrote to Wilde and asked him to elaborate. The following handwritten letter was Wilde’s response.
• The Airport Scanner Scam | Mother Jones – Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work—and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
• 
• Buddyhead’s Best and Worst Records Of 2009 | BUDDYHEAD – Animal Collective – “Merriweather Post Pavilion”Lazy music journalists tried to act like these nerds armed with bongos and delay pedals were the second coming of The Beatles or some shit. Everyone from Mojo to Rolling Stone to Pitchdork seemed to have these fruitcakes somewhere in their top five records for 2009. These dudes couldn’t write a song if their lives depended on it, they are to songwriting what “Alvin and The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is to cinema.

NPR covered the sins of modern musical over-compression, a topic we’ve discussed a few times before.

Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he’s been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.

…

“The ‘Loudness Wars’ have gone back to the days of 45s,” Ludwig says. “When I first got into the business and was doing a lot of vinyl disc cutting, one producer after another just wanted to have his 45 sound louder than the next guy’s so that when the program director at the Top 40 radio station was going through his stack of 45s to decide which two or three he was going to add that week, that the record would kind of jump out to the program director, aurally at least.”

That’s still a motivation for some producers. If their record jumps out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it, then they’ve accomplished their goal.

Bob Ludwig thinks that’s an unfortunate development.

“People talk about downloads hurting record sales,” Ludwig says. “I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”

[Click to continue reading The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR]

Don’t get me wrong, I love the convenience of digital music, but something has been sacrificed, namely nuance. For CDs I rip myself, I use higher settings¹ than the default 128 kbps – which to my ears sounds like a shitty little AM transistor radio.

Matt Mayfield created a little YouTube explanation, check it out…

Big-name CD manufacturers are distorting sounds to make them seem louder. Sound quality suffers.

This video was made with image editing software and a screen capture program for the visuals, and a DAW (Digital Performer 4.5) to process the audio

1. 256 kbps Variable Bit Recording setting if you really want to know [↩]

“Barry Goldberg” (Barry Goldberg)

Michael Simmons reports on a bit of Bob Dylan related obscurity, namely that Barry Goldberg (songwriter of such hits as Devil With A Blue Dress and I’ve Got To Use My Imagination as well as being half of

Two Jew’s Blues

along with Michael Bloomfield) has reissued his mid-70s album with the original vocals restored.

Anyway, this rock ‘n’ roll Zelig also pounded the ivories behind Bob at Newport ’65 when Zimmy stuck his middle finger in an electric socket and his hair frizzed out, after which every one else began letting their hair frizz out (or something like that). When you’ve shared a stage with someone in front of a hostile audience, it’s like sharing a trench. They stayed in touch and jammed together with the Band and Sir Doug Sahm and, of course, Bloomfield. In ’73, Goldberg had a heap of good songs and was gonna record a single at RCA Records. His pal Bob sez “No no Barry, let me take ‘em to Jerry Wexler,” the legendary R&B producer at Atlantic Records. Wex agrees to sign him and take Goldberg into the studio but says Bob’s gotta co-produce the sessions with him.

When Bob Dylan is handed to you on a silver platter as producer (co or udderwise), you say yes. With relish. Especially when you’re the only artist he’s ever offered his services to in this role (and ever will).

So everybody descends on Muscle Shoals, Alabama — Barry and wife/co-writer Gail and Dylan and Wex. Waiting for them are the hotshot Southern studio cats with whom one Duane Allman had paid his dues before the Brothers and who’d grooved on Two Jew’s Blues. Eddie Hinton, Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carr, David Hood, Roger Hawkins and friends. If you’ve ever dug an Aretha Franklin tune from the late ’60s, you’ve heard these aces of soulfulness. They tracked Barry’s Gladys Knight tune and one Rod Stewart covered called “It’s Not the Spotlight” and a bunch of others. “…Spotlight” and “Minstrel Show” were damn good songs about being a working musician. “Orange County Bus” is about the kind of legal trouble hippie musicians experienced all too frequently in them days. It’s a song of its time, as is “Dusty Country,” a paean to the earthy rural ideal sporting a lovely dobro. Even the strings on “She Was Such A Lady” and “…Spotlight” sound natural — no cold synthesizers that were beginning to be popular in that period. A solid album. Comfortable. Real. What they now call Americana.

[Click to continue reading Michael Simmons: The Only Album "Bob Dylan" Ever Produced ]

Sounds like perfect Rock snob fodder…

I support the mission of Chirp, though to be honest, I never even consider listening to the radio these days. The pool has been brackish and dead for too many years thanks to the corporate radio model utilized by such behemoths as Clear Channel and their ilk. Now I just keep an iPod or an iPhone with me anywhere that I might have listened to the radio in years past- car, walking, biking, riding the CTA.

What will set Chirp apart, Ms. Campbell said, is not only the sheer breadth of its offerings, which she described as “a diverse array of independent and under-appreciated music from a wide range of eras and genres,” but also its D.J.’s passionate love for the songs they play.

“Maybe I’ll play a great new local band sandwiched between a David Bowie song and a Yo La Tengo song,” said Mr. Drase, who will co-host a show. “You never know what you’re going to turn people on to.”

Unlike most commercial stations, where the average play list might include about 500 songs, Chirp has a catalog of nearly 50,000 albums, which were donated. And the idea, said Billy Kalb, the station’s music director, is to play as many as possible.

“We want to be like the friend with the really amazing record collection,” said Mr. Kalb, 24, as he sorted through donated CD’s. “We want to play enough new music to keep things interesting, and the local bands that other stations probably won’t touch.”

[Click to continue reading Independent Station’s Power Lies With Its People - NYTimes.com]

If Chirp had only been launched fifteen years ago, before we all started carrying around our music libraries¹ nearly everywhere we go…

Here’s what they say about themselves:

The Chicago Independent Radio Project, or CHIRP, was formed to bring a truly independent music- and arts-focused community radio station to Chicago.

At a time when corporate-owned radio grows ever more bland, repetitious, and commercialized, community radio is more important than ever. The volunteers at CHIRP are true believers in radio that is diverse, exciting, live, and locally-based. Community radio is non-commercial, and is created by regular people from all walks of life, not just broadcast professionals. It is committed to playing music the big stations won’t touch, and to focusing on the vibrant culture of a community that often flies under the radar. This is the kind of station CHIRP is creating.

CHIRP is launching its new service on the web at CHIRPradio.org in the fall of 2009. In addition, we are working to change the law so we can eventually apply for a broadcast license. In order to do this, CHIRP and its allies must convince Congress and the FCC to change rules that say there is no room for new low power FM radio stations in big cities like Chicago.

CHIRP must raise money to cover the costs of its day-to-day operation, which includes costs like rent, streaming, utilities, and equipment. The organization also needs funds on hand so that it is in good position to apply for a new broadcast license at some point in the future.

Fortunately, these goals are well underway. Studio buildout is nearly complete. Congress and the FCC are in the midst of reconsidering the law that limited LPFM to rural and exurban areas. And CHIRP has already raised thousands of dollars thanks to the generous support of individuals, bands, venues, and foundations.

[Click to continue reading CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project]

1. I have over 171 days worth of music in my library at the moment. Of course some of it is shite, but at least I am in control of what song gets played when [↩]

“Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary” (Stephen Calt)

Ooh, I’m getting a copy of this dictionary. Sounds fun…

Enter Stephen Calt, a blues historian and amateur linguist whose new book, “Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary,” published by the University of Illinois Press, is an impeccably scholarly, irresistibly readable guide to the language heard on the recordings of the great blues singers who were active in the first half of the 20th century. If there was ever a time when you found yourself wondering what it means to get a “stone pony” or “make a panther squall,” Mr. Calt is your man. As far back as the late ’60s, he was interviewing aging blues singers and sifting through arcane printed sources in the hopes of untangling the verbal mysteries of the music he loved.

…

All this and much, much more is made manifest in the pages of “Barrelhouse Words,” perhaps the only dictionary on my bulging bookshelf that can be read for pure pleasure from cover to cover.

Part of the pleasure arises from Mr. Calt’s donnish sense of humor. He must have been smiling quietly to himself when he defined “crying shame” as “an exceedingly lamentable occurrence.” No less enjoyable, though, are the examples of contemporary usage that accompany his definitions, all of them drawn from classic blues records. A few are genuinely poetic, while others are drop-dead funny. Look up “business, pork-grindin’,” for instance, and you’ll be confronted with this stanza from Kokomo Arnold’s 1935 recording of “Sissy Man Blues”: Lord, I woke up this mornin’ with my pork-grindin’ business in my hand / Now if you can’t send me no woman, please send me a sissy man. This is a family newspaper, so if you can’t figure the rest out for yourself, turn to page 42 of “Barrelhouse Words.” I haven’t laughed so hard while reading a reference book since the last time I consulted H.L. Mencken’s “New Dictionary of Quotations.”

[Click to continue reading Barrelhouse Words Defines the Blues | Sightings by Terry Teachout - WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link for full version of article]

postscript: I hope there is an entry on Little Red Bike, as discussed here

I had not heard Kokomo Arnold’s version of this song, only these two, with similar lyric. Connie McLean sings: with my business in my hand, and Josh White sings what sounds like “pork grinding business“, but the words are a bit hard to make out:

1. Connie McLean’s Rhythm Boys- Sissy Man Bues

   
   The Copulatin’ Blues Compact Disc

2. Joshua White- Sissy Man

   
   Roots N’ Blues: The Retrospective

I’ll have to look for the song. Looks like an album of 24 Kokomo Arnold songs is available at Amazon for $8.99.

A few interesting links collected December 18th through December 23rd:

• Climate Change Deniers vs The Consensus | Information Is Beautiful – point by point refutation of climate change deniers
• Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon Recipe « Knopf Doubleday – Cooking – "one of Julia Child’s signature dishes: boeuf bourguignon. In case you’d like to follow in her footsteps, we are a sharing a PDF of the recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking."
• Make: Online : Flashback: The Sweet Sound of Particleboard – The Sweet Sound of Particleboard
  Beef up the tone of open-back amps with a little thrift shop help.
• Featured Article – Bourbon versus vodka: Bourbon hurts more the next day, performance is the same – While the toxic chemicals called congeners could be poisonous in large amounts, they occur in very small amounts in alcoholic beverages," explained Damaris J. Rohsenow, professor of community health at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. "There are far more of them in the darker distilled beverages and wines than in the lighter colored ones. While the alcohol alone is enough to make many people feel sick the next day, these toxic natural substances can add to the ill effects as our body reacts to them."

Plugged headphone into iPod containing 27,773 songs¹, hit shuffle, and here’s what emerged. Added a two mile run on the treadmill to the beginning of this mediation, which did require me to skip an 8 minute cello piece; cannot keep a steady pace unless the music is moving too.

1. Yardbirds, The- You’re A Better Man Than I

   
   Greatest Hits, Volume One

2. Led Zeppelin- Immigrant Song

   
   BBC Sessions

   One of the few Led Zeppelin songs I just don’t care for. This live-at-the-BBC-studios version is better than most.

3. Freddie King- Play It Cool

   
   Atlantic Blues: Chicago

   slinky guitar blues from 1969, about the sexual revolution, or something. Mini-skirts, my baby thinks she was put here forever, so she’s going to love as many (men) as she can, etc.

4. The Velvet Underground- Rock & Roll (Demo)

   
   Fully Loaded Edition

   The vocals aren’t quite as tightly wound, and there is a flub in the last minute or two², otherwise this could have been the final version. Thinner sound, perhaps, were there over-dubs on the final release?

5. Cooder, Ry- Look At Granny Run Run

   
   Bop Till You Drop

   is this about a prototype of Viagra? 1979 seems a little early to be singing about a brand new pill that Grandpa takes that causes him to regain his, umm, energy for lovin’. Filled with tasty Ry Cooder guitar licks, of course.

6. Thomas Mapfumo, The Acid Band- Chengeta Va Bereki

   
   Hokoyo!

   A favorite concert of recent vintage was in Manhattan a few years ago, at some benefit hosted by Bonnie Raitt. For me, the highlight was Thomas Mapfumo. Such a voice, full of expressive power with a hint of melancholy. A musical hero of mine.

7. Cale, John- Child’s Christmas In Wales

   
   Paris 1919

   Buoyant pop tune, you’d never know that John Cale was the glowering rocker clad in black on the Velvet Underground’s first two albums just a few years prior to this album’s release in 1973. Some of the lyrics are obscure to me, but the melody compensates. Also, I’ll have to check, but that sure as hell sounds like Ry Cooder playing some slide guitar. You should probably own this album if you don’t, highly rewarding.³

8. Led Zeppelin- The Song Remains The Same
   Conspiracy Theory
   Bootleg recording from 1975, to my ears, not recorded from the soundboard, despite. Still pretty good quality, so maybe it is from a soundboard. Not Jimmy Page’s finest guitar solo – it is kind of formless, and John Paul Jones is mostly buried in the mix, but John Bonham sounds fucking loud, possessed, and Robert Plant assures you everything small will grow. If you like Zepp, you should have this.
9. Fred McDowell- Red Cross Store Blues

   
   Good Morning, Little School Girl

   Fred McDowell’s voice and his guitar perfectly in tune, limited range, but extremely powerful. In the days before Yelp!, one had record one’s complaints in song form, and hope for compensation. Whatever that Red Cross Store did to Mr. McDowell, they should be sorry. Damn. Probably racial, at least in part, but who knows. All we know is that he’s not going to that store any more.

10. John Fogerty- Heaven’s Just A Sin Away

    
    The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again

    Speaking of copyright theft, John Fogerty got screwed re: Credence Clearwater residuals for years. This country-pop song is pretty light-weight though.

11. Akli D.- Azul – Salut à vous

    
    Anefas trankil
    not quite Raï, but similar in spirit. Tamazight, actually, a Berber language from North Africa⁴. Hypnotic, insistent, quite spectacular. Worth owning if you are at all fond of desert blues.

12. Sun Kil Moon- Lily And Parrots

    
    Ghosts Of The Great Highway

    Really love this song, timbre of the lead vocalist reminds me of Neil Young, and now that I think of it, this could be a Crazy Horse record. Rocking, in other words.

13. Big Star- September Gurls

    
    Keep an Eye on the Sky

    Probably my favorite box set of 2009 was the Big Star collection. Remastered, and filled with transcendent moments, including songs like this one. Love the backing vocals going “whoo-oooh”, among other subtle touches.

14. Damned, The- Noise, Noise, Noise

    
    Machine Gun Etiquette
    I know The Damned are punk-rock legends, but this song doesn’t do much for me. Not that it sucks, but I’m not picking the needle up to play the tune again

15. Thompson, Richard- Rockin’ In Rhythm

    
    Strict Tempo!

    Sprightly instrumental, did Richard Thompson overdub the second guitar? or does he have 25 fingers? Seeing as the only other musician credited on this seemingly out-of-print album is drummer Dave Mattacks, I guess Thompson does have 28 fingers.

16. Boozoo Chavis- Who Stole My Monkey?

    
    Who Stole My Monkey

    ?
    Nearly instrumental, as a matter of fact, the lyrics are just variants of You Stole My Monkey, repeated over a danceable zydeco beat.

17. Little Richard- Good Golly Miss Molly

    
    Greatest Gold Hits

    even after a thousand plays, still love Little Richard’s whoops.

18. Helmet- Unsung

    
    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Radio X

    In Grand Theft Auto, music plays on the radio in any car you steal. As the GTA franchise has gotten older, the soundtrack has gotten more expansive. This box set is actually pretty good, even though this heavy rock song is on it, not my typical listening.

19. Wire- Strange

    
    Pink Flag

    such an unusual loping vamp in A and E⁵. R.E.M. covered the song , but the original is better. Love this song, love this album.

Part of the fun for me of this project is stretching my memory: can I remember what my impressions about a song are later when I am in front of a computer? Listening to music is, and has been, my most favored hobby for nearly my entire life, but I would not assert that I am an astute critic of what I hear. I’ll never get better explaining what I like and don’t like unless I try. Odds are, I’ll tire of it soon enough, and go back to mostly blogging about politics and corporate corruption.

1. out of a possible 61,676 [↩]
2. Lou Reed can be heard laughing [↩]
3. nope, turns out it was Lowell George, of Little Feat fame. Interesting. Though Ry Cooder did do studio work on Little Feat’s first album [↩]
4. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and elsewhere [↩]
5. if my guess is correct [↩]

Haven’t gotten bored with this game yet- lower the lights, go into the sauna-pod, put on the headphones, and hit shuffle on my iPod. Here’s the latest results:

1. El Rego et ses Commandos- Vimado Wingnan

   
   Legends Of Benin

   Delightful West African release of Afro-funk etc. If The Talking Heads were not listening to artists covered on this album, I would be very surprised. Chiming arpeggio guitars, funk drums, driving bass lines, infectious poly-rhythms, great fun.

2. Young, Neil- Through My Sails

   
   Zuma

   A near-Desert Island disc. Still debating whether to splurge on the BluRay Neil Young archive Vol 1 or not. If it doesn’t include regular audio files that can be converted to MP3 and played on an iPod, will hardly ever listen to it. This lovely song is acoustic guitar, with backing vocals by what sounds like Stephen Stills and maybe even David Crosby.

3. Observer All Stars, The- Rebel Dance

   
   Trojan Dub Box Set

   instrumental reggae, not much dub weirdness, thus not a great tune. Good for meditation though.

4. Weezer- O Girlfriend

   
   Weezer (Green Album)

   gah what tiresome 1990s alternative rock crap. If I wasn’t an inveterate pack rat, I’d have deleted this annoyance long ago.

5. Ramones, The- I Don’t Wanna Be Learned / I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed (Demo)

   
   Ramones

   whew, a welcome palate cleanser after the Weezer dreck. The Ramones only play two or three chords, but more energy in their demos than Weezer’s entire recorded output combined.

6. Joe Higgs- My Baby Still Loves me

   
   Life of Contradiction

   I lean towards political reggae more than “sweet” reggae, but this is a decent enough “sweet” reggae tune. Can’t always listen to songs of institutional oppression, right? This is a good album to own if you want to branch out beyond Bob Marley, especially since Joe Higgs was extremely influential on creating the classic Wailers sound, mentoring Marley and Tosh in the early 1970s.

7. Funkadelic- Hit It And Quit It

   
   Maggot Brain

   Before George Clinton decided if Parliament-Funkadelic was a rock band or a funk band, they recorded this album. Other than a somewhat annoying organ solo, a great tune. A template for all the Red Hot Chile Peppers and like-minded bands to follow; reverbed-like-crazy rock guitar, coupled with driving New Orleans style funk drums. Still remember purchasing this album from the now defunct Sound Exchange next to Mad Dogs and Beans and Les Amis. Ahh, youth.

8. Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier [Disc 1]
   Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 – Prelude #12 In F Minor, BWV 857- Leon Berben
   ahh, Bach.
9. Reign- Padre Nuestro
   Silencio= Muerte: Red Hot + Latin Redux
   am a sucker for the Red Hot + comps. This a latin dance-club tune, or what I would call so anyway. Good in small doses
10. Garcia, Jerry- Gone Home

    
    Almost Acoustic

    I don’t know this for a fact, but strongly suspect Jerry Garcia was in the depths of his heroin addiction when this dirge was recorded. Waltz-time, but slower. Though, to be fair, it is a funeral song, and has some fine mandolin bits, and bit of the High, Lonesome wild mercury sound that Bob Dylan is always muttering about. Not a shite song, just wouldn’t be good to listen while biking the lakefront, your bike might keel over.

11. Dylan, Bob- You Ain’t Going Nowhere
    Genuine Basement Tapes
    I wish these delightfully fun tracks would get a proper release. They float around on the internet, but the bit rate is often low. Bob Dylan and The Band hanging out in Woodstock, having a probably illegal amount of fun. Lots of silliness, like in this track, probably one of the ones where the lyrics were written randomly¹ by committee²; Richard Manuel backing vocals, and some classic Robbie Robertson guitar work. Wonder if Robbie Robertson’s copyright theft from the rest of The Band is part of the reason these songs have never been given a proper release?
12. The Mamas & The Papas- California Dreamin’
    All Time Greatest Hits
    I first heard this band only a couple of years ago, before the whole incestual/attention grabbing news about John Phillips and his daughter, but the song is a classic slice of Americana, evocative of the time in which it was created. Undercurrents of foreboding, minor keys, but so damn catchy.

1. just pick up that oilcloth/cram it in the corner/I don’t care if your name is Michael/you’re gonna need some boards/get your lunch/you foreign bib/you ain’t goin’ nowhere [↩]
2. this particular Basement track was polished up, all that remains on the Genuine Basement Tape version is the chorus [↩]

Immersed myself in my meditative tube, put on my headphones, and hit shuffle on the iPod. Here’s what played:

1. Alejandro Escovedo- Slow Down

   
   Real Animal

   I won’t bore you with a tale of Alejandro Escovedo, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew album, LSD and the (now defunct) Waterloo Records Vinyl Annex, as I think I told it before. Glad Mr. Escovedo doesn’t have to clerk at Waterloo Records anymore though: he played at the Democratic National Convention in Denver if I’m not mistaken.

2. Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: Cello Suites [Disc 2]
   Bach: Cello Suite #2 In D Minor, BWV 1008 – Gigue- Jaap Ter Linden
   Cello is becoming one of my favorite instruments to listen to
3. Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestroes- Akuyan Ekassa

   
   Nigeria 70 Vol. 1

   an awesome album, and a great funky tune; guitars, bass, drums, percussion.

4. Freakwater- Put My Little Shoes

   
   Feels Like the Third Time

   other than the nice Carter Family-esque guitar playing¹, not a favorite. They have much better songs in their oeuvre, some of which are even on this album, like My Old Drunk Friend which is a classic.

5. Swanksalot Orchestra, The- Dancing Bull
   Swanky Headroom III
   a tune composed, mostly in GarageBand, and not one of my most successful, I’m afraid. Thought it would be fun to record a bunch of guitar riffs and merge them, but it didn’t turn out that well. Oh well, still fun to hear fruit of my labor from 4 years ago. Hadn’t listened to it in a while.
6. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark- Enola Gay

   
   Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The ’80s Underground

   little bit of nostalgia for the 80s, though this track is not a huge favorite of mine. Love this Rhino 4 disc box set however, tons of good singles on it.

7. Pearl Jam- Gone

   
   Pearl Jam

   I like the idea of Pearl Jam: earnest, Pacific-Northwesterners, with political views close to mine, but truth be told, have never really have enjoyed listening to their music. Boring to me, this song included.

8. Cale, John- Antarctica Starts Here

   
   Paris 1919

   quiet, melodic pop tune. No idea what the song is about

9. Lang, Peter- St. Charles Shuffle

   
   John Fahey, Peter Lang, Leo Kottke

   flashy acoustic guitar instrumental from an album full of them. Is it a dobro? Steel strings at least.

10. The Melodians- Sweet Sensation

    
    The Harder They Come

    classic reggae tune from The Harder They Come soundtrack, a Jamaican blaxsploitation film that is worth Netflixing if you haven’t ever seen it. The Melodians biggest hit was Rivers of Babylon, Sweet Sensation is solid, just not as good.

11. Devendra Banhart- Lover

    
    Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

    fun, bouncy track, a homage to early 70s funky-soul, or whatever the hell it called, complete with slightly risqué lyrics.

12. ChickenFat Klezmer Orchestra- Ot Azoy
    ChickenFat Demos
    Surprisingly good stuff from a local band; need to go see them perform live one of these days. They have several MP3s available at their website, check it out.

Today’s play list had a few duds on it, guess that’s part of the randomizer fun. Better luck next time…

1. bass strings of the guitar playing a melody, in other words [↩]