Category: Music

On Saturday, Brian J. was a good, good boy and completed all of his weekend chores, which included dusting and vacuuming the common areas of the house and doing a quick, expensive wipe of the hall and foyer. After a martial arts class, too.

So I thought I would head up to Relics and buy a couple records using the gift certificates I received for my birthday (like I did the previous weekend). However: Relics had an event of some sort, and parking was at a premium, so I did not go in.

But: I had an errand (coincidentally!) that took me to the area yesterday, so I stopped in for twenty or thirty minutes, just pawing through the same booth, and picked up 9 records.

I got:

• Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. The song from The Exorcist. Looking at it now, I think I might already have it. Which so often happens. But generally not at these prices.
• The Baddest Hubbard by Freddie Hubbard.
• Surprises by Herbie Mann featuring Cissy Houston.
• Μαζί Με Τον Σταμάτη by Σταμάτης Κόκοτας. Because I cannot tell the difference, at a glance, between Hebrew and Greek. I thought I’d troll my oldest who is steeped in podcast politics and would be scandalized by a Jewish album. But this is Greek folk music by Stamatis Kakotas.
• Low Ride by Earl Klugh.
• The Changing of the Gard by Stargard. I told the young lady ringing me out that buying this made me the biggest Stargard fan in Springfield.
• The Beginning and the End by Clifford Brown. Hard not to type Jr. behind it, but this is the DJ’s father. Apparently, the booth was not rife with them–this is the only record they had.
• Reunion by the Ramsey Lewis Trio.
• Land of the Midnight Sun by Al Di Meola.

A couple of trumpeters, a couple of jazz guitarist, a flutist. Left behind: A couple of Moody Blues records. A couple of David Sanborn records, as I mentioned. No further Billy Joel records in evidence.

The total was $73 and change, which is the perfect amount in one sense: As it was just under the total of the certificates I had, I paid two gift certificates plus some cash. But I don’t expect to go next weekend. Let’s let the stock turn over for a month or two. Or I can find another booth and give myself permission to spend more than three dollars a record.

So I received four $25 gift certificates to Relics Antique Mall for my birthday. If you recall, gentle reader, these are certificates, not gift cards, and Relics does not give change from them. So you have to spend the whole amount (or more), which is why I had four certificates and not one for $100. Also, remember, gentle reader, these have fairly quick expiration dates–six months from issue.

So I made my way to the antique mall, hoping to find a katana in the bladed weapons cabinet since I bought a tachi/wakizashi pair last year and had purchased a rapier that I mentioned caressing in 2023 with some other gift cardery or certificatage. But, as periodically happens, the bladed weapon cabinet was gone. No axes, no sword canes, and certainly no katana.

I’d also thought that I would look through some of the higher-priced record album booths since I have the notion of rebuilding my Billy Joel record set. I’d gotten a pretty good set of the late 1970s and early 1980s works around 1990 from Recordhead in Milwaukee, where records were cheap because everyone was getting rid of them to go to CDs. But I sold them at garage sales in the middle of that decade when I needed dollars more than LPs, and after I’d sold the stereo that had a turntable.

But: No Billy Joel records. Seriously, where have they gone? I have not seen many in the wild–I picked up Songs in the Attic and 52nd Street at some point (Songs in the Attic in 2008, The Bridge in in 2023). But I haven’t seen a lot of them in the wild. Which is odd: He sold a pile of records. So where have they all gone? Do Billy Joel fans have them? Did Columbia Records cheap out on the materials?

Ah, well. At any rate, I was going to just quit and save the certificates for the end of July (right before they expire, where I would be a little less choosy and more driven to spend them) when something caught my eye.

Can you guess what it was?

Yes, Fandango, by Herb Alpert. Which I have on CD, but now I have it on vinyl. I might have mentioned that Herb Alpert is the only 4-media artist at Nogglestead. We have records, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s–albums bought electronically (the CDs have been ripped to the electronic library as well).

So once I committed to, what, $6? I had to spend the remaining $20, so I got two Bob James records (“H”, which also features Grover Washington, Jr., and Rameau) and a David Sanborn record (Close-Up). The booth had a lot of David Sanborn, but records I already have.

So I still have $75 to spend, most likely this summer. And once I have to spend it, maybe I’ll pick up some of the inexpensive Clifford Brown records I saw. I do listen to his son’s radio program on KCSM sometimes.

I mentioned that I was starting to watch the Bruce Lee boxed set that I bought in 2024. And WSIE, the jazz station out of Edwardsville, is putting me in the mood.

They currently have Kamasi Washington’s “Fists of Fury” in heavy rotation.

Additionally, I heard The Olympians’ “California” and thought it sounded a log like the music in The Big Boss (aforelinked):

I actually ordered the latter’s In Search of a Revival (from Bandcamp, since I’m almost sorta still on an Amazon Tweehad).

The Washington, not so much.

So my beautiful wife is on her way to a conference, and she has a layover in Charlotte. So, on the way to drop her at SGF this morning, I told her that they hated it if you called it C-Harlot–actually, no, nobody knows what that means.

Today, I came across a post from last week on Stuff Nobody Cares About indicating that “Charlotte the Harlot” was the most underrated song on Iron Maiden’s first record.

Ah, gentle reader. My wife, an Iron Maiden fan from way back, might have thought I was making an Iron Maiden allusion with the quip. And I am not going to dissuade her if it makes her fall more in love with me.

To be honest, I mostly listen to Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and No Prayer for the Dying when I’m in an Iron Maiden mood, so I’m less familiar with the earlier work.

KCSM played “Triangle” by Herbie Hancock this morning, and I sat up and took notice. Especially at about the 7:23 mark.

That jangle sounds just like my weather alert radio which I have set to go off only in the event of a tornado warning.

Won’t I be surprised if there’s a nuclear assault and I don’t get the alert.

But I had to turn down the speakers to make sure it was the song on the Internet radio and not an actual tornado in the clear blue sky. Or a failure of the weather radio.

KCSM has Kat Edmondson’s “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” in heavy rotation this year.

To me, she sounds a lot like Stacey Kent.

Which does not mean she sounds like Stacey Kent.

But heaven knows I equate vocalists who are very different for some reason.

Will you find these Christmas albums on a musical balance post soon? Probably not; I’m topped up on Christmas music for the nonce.

No Rap Songs in the Top 40 for First Time in 35 Years: Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s ‘Luther’ Exits Billboard Hot 100

An AI artist has hit the Billboard charts. Who is Xania Monet?

To be honest, the amount of rap that I have bought in my accumulation over the decades is minimal. Singles (The Beastie Boys’ “So Whatcha Want”, Young MC’s “Bust a Move” come to mind), accidental (Foxy Brown’s “I’ll Be”, also a single, but I thought it might be R&B), or songs with bits of rap in them. And the amount of AI music that I’ll buy is none if I can help it.

Which is a terrible thing to say given that my beautiful wife has used AI to generate tech-themed symphonic metal songs as… novelty, I guess?

And I’ve bought The Defect’s album after hearing them earlier this year, but they’re almost into that uncanny valley of sounding too much like AI for me to really get into them.

Facebook showed me this post for some reason:

I am not sure where this purported CD case comes from, but the actual soundtrack on CD only contains the first 11 tracks listed.

The “Bonus Tracks” are in the movie, but are not included on the soundtrack nor in the closing credits, which explains why VodkaPundit and I had a hard time learning about Leonard Cohen in 1993.

Maybe if I’d have clicked More…. I would have seen text to this effect.

Note that this soundtrack is on my top-five list of soundtracks of all time.

Some promoted post from some David Gilmour something something appeared on my timeline:

The text doesn’t identify her, but I know Liona Boyd. As a matter of fact, I have the Persona album it mentions as well as Virtuoso which I bought later (in 2021).

Both are shelved right if you know what I mean (and if you don’t, I can explain).

St. Louis’ must-see concerts in August include Diana Ross, Rod Stewart and Wilco

He’s playing the Touhill Center for Performing Arts in August. I’ll be there if he is.

I saw him when he was in Springfield…. eight years ago? Already?

We’d hoped to catch him somewhere else in the intervening years, but the closest he came as Kansas City. Man is 90 years old. He’s not likely to pass this way again.

Ted Gioia mentions the release of some new Gal Costa tracks:

The late Gal Costa (1945-2022) is one of my favorite Brazilian vocalists. And I’m not alone in my admiration. How many popular singers get invited to share a piano bench with Herbie Hancock?

During her storied career, Costa performed and recorded with all the leading stars of Brazilian commercial music, and gained international renown as an exponent of the Tropicália style.

Now—out of the blue—Universal Music releases three tracks that have been sitting on the shelf since 1972. These capture Costa at absolutely peak expressive power.

I was thinking about Gal Costa yesterday.

As you might remember, gentle reader, the LP library at Nogglestead (now even fuller than shown in that post with the unboxing of my mother-in-law’s folk collection, given to us when she downsized a couple years ago, and another year’s worth of gleanings from antique malls and book sales) is not organized.

So, as it happens, records I don’t like that much end up on the left end of shelves. I pick things out of the library, play them, and then stack them on the desk. When it comes time to reshelve them, I shove all the records on the shelf to the left and then put the ones I’ve listened to on the right. So things I listen to frequently or like most end up sorted to the right, whereas the left extremes of each shelf ends up holding my wife’s folk records (and eventually the ones that had belonged to my mother-in-law), my own sainted mother’s sixties pop collections and Elvis records, the country or seventies folk records (including Olivia Newton-John, Lynda Carter, and Linda Ronstadt) that I bought because the covers had pretty women on them), and probably a copy of Firefall’s Elan somehow.

But this weekend, for a change of pace, I took from the most left of the top shelves, and discovered my only Tommy Reynolds 33⅓ LP (the rest of my collection are 78s or 45s). So I started working my way to the right from that left-most edge. I found and played Beth Carvalho’s Sentimento Braśileiro record, and I thought about Gal Costa since I bought a couple of her LPs at the same time as I bought a bunch of Brazilian LPs in 2016. Specifically, I thought of Fantasia which depicts a possibly nude Gal Costa on the cover which scandalized my boys some years later when they saw the cover.

So, to make a short story long, I knew the artist Gioia was talking about and had thought about her very recently indeed.

Unlike Gioia, Costa is not my Brazilian singer (Mizuho Lin, ultimately, has not surpassed Astrud Gilberto as my favorite).

(So how did some favorites end up on the left? I presume it’s because I had box sets there before I built the most recent set of record shelves, and when I moved all boxed sets to under the console stereo, I backfilled with some LPs that were actually favorites.)