Category: Music

I’ve been dividing my purchases of late between new material by artists I enjoy (Nine Inch Nails, Daniel Lanios, others) and old material that I used to be able to borrow from “Chet”:http://mischeathen.com/ and “Patrick”:http://missourilovescompany.blogspot.com/, and thus have had no real contact with for the last 16 years or so.

With that in mind, I picked up Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ _Greatest Hits_ and the Doors _L.A. Woman_. It’s funny, because I picked up the Doors disc in order to be able to, eventually, get rid of the _Greatest Hits_ collection I have for the Doors–I still need _Soft Parade_ and _Strange Days_–while I picked up the Heartbreakers disc because I didn’t want to embark on the task of working through their catalog.

I’m really enjoying the Tom Petty, but I still can’t figure out why I made what is a fairly uncharacteristic move–buying a collection. I usually like a lot of stuff that never makes Greatest HIts collections; I know it’s definitely true of the two Tom Petty albums I’m most familiar with. Oh, well, I suppose I would be bored if I wasn’t somehow a mystery to myself.

Apropos of nothing other than the fact that I’m discussing Petty, I will mention my favorite line on all of Petty’s _Full Moon Fever_:

bq. Well I’ve been to Booker,
and I’ve been to Micanopy,
I’ve been to St. Louis too,
I’ve been all around the world.

I remember well my surprise, the first time we drove from Miami north and passed a sign for “Micanopy”:http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Micanopy,+Alachua,+Florida,+United+States&ie=UTF8&cd=1&geocode=0,29.510130,-82.279460&z=15&iwloc=addr. It is, unsurprisingly, not far from Gainesville

How is it that I end up watching two things (Season 3, Pt 1 of _Entourage_ and _Superbad_) inside a couple of weeks that have Ted Nugent’s _Stranglehold_ in the soundtracks?

You know: finding the images that need to be re-installed in the blog posts, removing ancient copies of the blog from its days running under Blosxom, so forth and so on–I ran across a .wmv of the song “Shake Your Blood” by Probot.

And I thought to myself, “Why am I keeping around a copy of this video–I know it must be up on YouTube.”  And then I looked at the date, and realized that I had had it since before YouTube existed.

Yes, I know that Chet is the only one likely to get the joke. “Still”:http://www.thealternativeguitarandamplifiercompany.com/DooDadSpecs.htm.

No, not Friday, the song by Big Star. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and it just showed up on the big shuffle.

Oh, and while watching some footage of the Sex Pistols, I realized that my Father-in-law has an eerie resemblance to Johnny Rotten. And no, I’m not making this up–Anne agreed.

I wanted it for walking around, where the 80GB Classic I’ve got is just too clunky and insufficiently solid-state.

There was the requisite monkeying with LInux and its somewhat fractious relationship with iPods, and then I started putting stuff on it.

I’ve been so used to dealing with my music collection in its entirety, or at least in very, very large chunks–I started ripping things en mass in mid-’99–that it was sort of interesting to realize that I could get maybe 150 songs on the thing. I had to really think about what I wanted on there.

Some of it is obvious, at least to me: some Stevie Wonder, some Steely Dan, some Queens of the Stone Age, some post-Rattle-and-Hum U2 and all sorts of other eclecticism that has fascinated me for a long time.

Some of it was less obvious–for insance, I’ve been listening to Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” a lot of late. I got there in a way both obvious and circuitous.

I watch _House_ (I want to add, “of course”, but, of course, there is no “of course” about it), and at one point in the season finale I heard a cover of a song that I recognized but simply could not place.

The internets know everything, though, so in short order I was able to find out that it was a cover of the aforementioned Massive Attack song. I was then somewhat embarassed to read that the original version–which I own, and, obviously, find fairly recognizable, is the theme for the show.

Oh, well.

And then there are the desert island tracks. King Crimson’s “Discipline”, Led Zeppelin’s “Bron Yr Aur”, a few other things that I think I could listen to every day for the rest of my life in tight rotation and never get tired of.

And then there’s Jeff Buckley’s “Vancouver”. Everyone goes gaga over “Hallelujah”, but there is an echo of pain in “Vancouver” that punches me in the gut each and every time.

I’m bad about noting the anniversaries of deaths–I had to look up his on Wikipedia–so I’m a few days late in noting that it’s been 11 years since Jeff Buckley died, and not a week goes by that I don’t wonder what he would have accomplished.

And just to illustrate the self-referential nature of my musical tastes, the vocals for “Teardrop” were recorded shortly after Elizabeth Fraser (the vocalist on the track, and a friend of Buckley’s), got word of his death.

Which is why I’ve pretty much only ever used stuff I’ve ripped myself. I don’t even like the way Nine Inch Nails has tagged their own stuff with the last couple of releases.

Thus I was amused to find out about a form that “last.fm”:http://last.fm/ have “to show you some of the wild-ass stuff that people’s mp3s have tagged in them”:http://playground.last.fm/aliases.

“Via”:http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/124701.html

“Moog Music is making a guitar”:http://moogmusic.com/moogguitar/?section=product&product_id=21129. As you might expect, it’s all sorts of bizarre.

The absolute high-point of the show for me was the rendition of _Blockhead_, which, with 10 Crafties and Robert Fripp to boot, was quite powerful. The most beautiful was easily the piece done entirely acoustically as the final encore. The most whimsical was the theme from “Mission: Impossible”.

There were pieces, certainly, that didn’t move me. But at the same time, watching an ensemble like this perform holds its own energy–to watch a group of players working in such synchronicity is amazing.

Check out his drum solo:

One of the more interesting things about the Great CD-Ripping project (I’m within 30 discs of being done!) is realizing what I have never gotten around to ripping. Frankly, some of it baffles me. For instance, I had never gotten around to ripping my Stevie Wonder material, despite the fact that it’s some of my favorite music on Earth (it’s the stuff from the 70’s, when Stevie could Do No Wrong). I never ripped either of the Who discs I have. Or the Los Lobos collection Chet got me umpteen years ago, even though I think that _Kiko and the Lavender Moon_ may be one of the most perfect songs ever.

There have been any number of other single disc things that I’ve noticed, but those are the biggies that I remember right now.

I do have to admit that I worry sometimes that new stuff isn’t going to get its due, in amongst the 30-days-of-continuous-music that I’ve currently got access to. For instance, _Year Zero_ hasn’t yet made a real impression, and I don’t think I’ve even listened to the new _Modest Mouse_. Hmmmm.

…at least so far: I finally sat down and listened to the Ani DiFranco CD my sister got me, maybe a decade ago.

Before I continue, one funny note: I knew about Ani DiFranco before she did; I remember, albeit hazily, seeing video of a bald chick playing ferocious acoustic guitar in weird tunings on a public access channel in Boston. As is often the case with seeing things in weird venues like that, they never told me who the fuck it was I was watching. So, you know, years and years pass…

Anyway, I’ve had this on the shelf forever, listened to it once or twice, and I let it sit. For whatever reason, I wrote her off as too earnest, too literalist, I dunno, too unsubtle.

As often seems to be the case, I wish there were some effective way to reach back and slap the me of ten years ago.

Which isn’t to say that I think the music will appeal to everyone; it’s demanding in its lack of sentimentality–I think that’s what I had perceived as earnestness before–and at least in her older material, well, it’s mostly the narrative of intrapersonal relationships, so it’s not entirely outre to suggest that it sometimes sounds like a few songs repeated endlessly. And it’s all pretty specifically political. And sometimes It seems lyrically awkward, though sometimes that very awkwardness comes, after repeated listening, to seem inevitable and necessary.

But it’s also music that speaks of joy and hope and possibilities in a very unambiguous way.

And she can play the fuck out of a guitar.

So maybe everyone else on the planet earth already knew about this, but the idea that one of Judas Priest’s signature songs was originally a Joan Baez tune was somewhat, err, startling.

I am intensely curious to know what Joan Baez thinks of the cover version.

I was involved in the prior discussion while at a performance by “The Water Callers”:http://www.myspace.com/thewatercallers, a local pair. If you go to the myspace page, I would suggest you listen to _In The Moonlight_, which I think is the best of the tracks they’ve got posted, though not the best they’ve written.

It was fun, even if it does end up with me posting this after midnight. We saw a number of people from the kula there, some expected, some not. I don’t think we’ve been as likely to run into people we know out of the blue since living in Tuscaloosa.

It’s rather nice.

As I was tooling around the UNC campus, playing musical subversive (that is, playing whatever mix CD I had in the car at moderate-to-loud volume in the hopes of making the lives of people I passed a little more surreal when things went from, say, _Beck_ to _Earth, Wind & Fire_), I came to a stop sign. At these points I usually turn down the stereo a little, and I kind of idly noted that this was probably a kind move for the older, almost elderly gentleman passing in front of me, though it was just _Dear Prudence_ on at the time, so it’s not like it’s all that abrasive.

And then it hit me–this song is nearly 40 years old. A guy as mobile as this one was couldn’t be more than, say, 70, which means he was 30 *tops* when this came out. Hell, this guy could easily have been a Beatles _fan_. And yet the track doesn’t sound dated at all.

Incidentally, it was apparently written for “Mia Farrow’s”:http://imdb.com/name/nm0001201/ sister “Prudence”:http://imdb.com/name/nm0268527/. I forget where I heard this.

It’s been a long running joke with “Chet”:http://mischeathen.com/ that if I am unaquainted with some particular bit of American culture–movie, TV show, what have you–it is because I was in Germany at the time it happened.

In many cases, of course, this _is_ actually the reason, but it eventually morphed into an all-purpose response.

So, after Chet pointed me to a “Stevie Wonder video”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/music/060630stevie-sesame.html, I ended up doing a little YouTube archaeology (which spawned “another post from Chet”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/music/060630vh-zz.html) to find something I’d always heard about but never seen because, well, *I was in Germany when MTV launched*.

It is somehow nothing like what I expected, and yet exactly what it should be. And it includes everything in the title to this post.
I present to you, Van Halen’s video for _Pretty Woman_. Because in 1982, no one knew that this wasn’t what music videos were supposed to be like:

Well, “Wow” for a start, I suppose. “Huh?” follows along sharply thereafter.

Microsoft is using recordings of Robert Fripp in one of their Windows Vista sound themes, “and they’ve got the video to prove it”:http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=151853.

Now, Linux-head that I am, I’m not really all that anti-Microsoft, I just don’t see why people put up with it. Maybe this is a good reason. 🙂

Oh, I lied, I *do* know what to say. Fripp uses a Mac.

Well, yeah, at least two people who might read this do know, but for the rest of you, “witness the lovely protectionism of mid-to-late-60’s America”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3833078/:

bq. In 1966 the American Federation of Musicians, convinced that British bands were getting a disproportionate share of musicians income, had the Kinks banned from touring in the United States. The organization finally relented in October 1969.

Presumably the AFM pressured the government to deny them work visas. The part that seems so frigging weird to me is, well…_The Kinks_? I mean, were they worried that if they banned the Beatles or the Stones there would be riots (not that weren’t anyway :), so they picked on someone who was arguably less-popular but still better known than most of their contemporaries?

It seems likely that this ban had a significant effect on the band, “since it kept them from playing the most lucrative market during a critical time”:http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11%3Ajtkku3y5anok%7ET1.

Anyway, here’s a nice little dose of the Kinks, from ??Do You Remember Walter??:

bq. Yes people often change,
but memories of people can remain.