To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Not to be confused with local singer/songwriter Lily Belle:
Who I guess is going by Lilybelle now. Or maybe not–the relatively new Web site linked in her most recent YouTube video is already defunct.
Hopefully she’s busy working on a new album since it’s been years since The Sunshine Projects.
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So I was streaming my gym playlist from my phone to the upgraded stereo system in our older conveyance on the way to martial arts class, and Amaranthe’s “82nd All The Way” played.
I really like the song, which is the best Swedish band covering another Swedish band’s song about Alvin York’s experience in so I played it a second time. As I said, the song prompted me to watch the Gary Cooper film Sergeant York.
And the next time I got onto Facebook, which I visit once or twice a day to see if I can recycle any quips I’ve made in the past as blog posts and maybe see if I can find an advertisement to make mock of since my Facebook feed these days is a woman I worked with for a year about fifteen years ago, two or three bloggers, and a slew of advertisements and recommended for you posts dealing with old music or old movie stars–along with the occasional post from someone else on my friends list when they have a Very Important Political Message that Facebook thinks I should see.
So I played this song twice on my phone, and I see:
I don’t have any Facebook app on my phone, gentle reader.
So are the two events actually connected, or am I seeing a pattern that only exists in my mind?
Welcome to the 21st century, where the Occam’s Razor now says Go with the crazy.
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Richard Marx wrote the song “Dance With My Father” for Luther Vandross.
I thought I had mentioned but apparently have not that this song touched me very deeply when I heard it earlier in the century. I think I heard it first right after my first son was born, so I almost wept not only because I lost my father fairly early in my adulthood, but because I knew that someday I would leave my sons behind, and they would hopefully feel the same about me.
I listen to it at my own risk.
It’s from the 2003 album of the same name.
The article about Richard Marx touts his new memoir coming out, and it sounds kind of appealing. I’ll have to watch for it. Although I don’t tend to go through the show biz books at the church sales, so I’ll likely have to find it at a garage sale. Although I don’t tend to go to garage sales very often. Well, I have enough to read anyway.
See also: Songs of Fatherhood.
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Taylor Swift shatters vinyl sales record with ‘Evermore’:
The pop superstar charted a new peak in modern-era vinyl sales — as more music fans turned to vintage records during the pandemic.
The vinyl edition of Swift’s album “Evermore” shattered the US record for largest vinyl album sales in a single week, according to Billboard.
It sold more than 40,000 copies just three days after its May 28 release — already surpassing the biggest single-week sales record since MRC Data began tracking in 1991.
The title had previously been held by Jack White’s “Lazaretto,” which sold 40,000 copies in the week after it launched in June 2014.
Everything is a new record.
Because history got rebooted around the end of the 20th century, and everything is now unprecedented and record-breaking.
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Back in about 1990, when I learned that Milli Vanilli was not really Rob and Fab (after having seen them at Summerfest where they had problems playing the vocal tracks and were delayed several times–yes, with Dave), I thought, huh, someone made that music–they should release a CD with the real vocalists.
Now, in an article about the death of one of the real vocalists, I see they did:
Farian attempted to repackage the group as The Real Milli Vanilli, to feature the actual singers on Milli Vanilli recordings, namely Davis and Brad Howell, 77. Their album “The Moment of Truth” made rounds in Europe, Asia and South America, but the band never again reached the fame launched by Pilatus, who died in 1998 at 33, and Morvan, 55.
Maybe I should….
… Maybe not.
Given that the record was bigger in Europe than stateside, I guess I’ll have to wait until I go to a European garage sale to pick it up.
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I mentioned that I got a copy of Özel Türkbaş’s album How To Make Your Husband A Sultan: Belly Dance with Özel Türkbaş this weekend.
I know, you’re saying, Did he buy this album because he likes to sample music in foreign languages, and this one was only fifty cents, or did he buy this album because it has a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC)? The answer is yes.
The record comes from 1972 which is (counts his rings) forty-nine years ago. It includes some Turkish/Arabic music and a small booklet that includes basic belly dancing directions (swing your hips in time to the music, turn your hands parallel to the ground, bend backwards, wear finger cymbals, basically). I certainly couldn’t do it based on the books; heaven knows I need to take martial arts classes for almost a decade to gain basic competency in body control. Besides, if I wanted to learn belly dancing, I would talk to my cousin, one of the pretty ones, who is a belly dancer and a yoga instructor (one of the benefits of the large family: A cousin for every conversation). But, of course, I’m the husband in my personal situation, so I am the sultanee in the scientific formula and/or recipe.
At any rate, although Özel passed away in 2012, her family keeps alive an official Website offering her bio and theoretically a shop with merchandise, although that link doesn’t currently work. So maybe the site is not being kept alive but instead has a prepaid hosting plan lasting some years. I expect that’s what will happen with me some day, gentle reader.
But I digress. The site and YouTube have a video of her appearance on the Dinah Shore show where she belly dances and then cooks a meal:
She wrote a cookbook and owned a restaurant with her husband at some point.
I’ll drop some stills of Mrs. Türkbaş below the fold.
Continue reading “Strangely, It Is Not An Album About Middle Eastern Court Politics”
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Well, all right, I don’t know that guy, but I see his face on a lot of record covers here at Nogglestead.
One of my current projects is hunting down an article in Newsweek from the mid-1970s. I don’t know the year. I don’t know the month. So I’m accruing some old magazines to try to find it.
In one issue from 1975, as I was flipping through the magazine looking for the article, I came across a picture and story about Herb Alpert:
He seems to be a good guy, and he goes way back being a good guy.
He recently posted on Facebook the question, “Who would you like to see in concert when things are normal?” or something like that. To be honest, I would very much like to see him in concert again, although I should probably have to travel to do it.
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We went to the fairgrounds on Saturday, which is half price day at the semi-annual book sale, and I managed to find a few records. By Saturday, or perhaps all week, they were down to something like twelve or sixteen boxes/crates of records, which is less than half of what they often have on the dollar records side, but I still managed to pick up a few.
The gleanings include:
Whew. That’s 53 new records/2-record sets that I somehow have to jam into my record shelves. The console stereo has a little bunker that can hold maybe ten or twenty; it looks like I’ll have to make use of it.
Best of all, the total cost here was like $30, or less than a silly lark of a handicraft.
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Where one links to a humor piece entitled AN FAQ ABOUT YOUR NEW BIRTH CONTROL: THE MUSIC OF RUSH and one feels compelled to add:
In case you’ve never heard of Rush, you really should. Seriously, love ’em or hate ’em, you’re incomplete if you haven’t heard at least a few of their songs.
What a world we now live in!
(Side note: The three Rush songs on my gym playlist: “Fly By Night”, “Roll the Bones”, and “Dreamline”–coincidentally, what 97 QFM was playing in 1991, when Roll the Bones was something of a comeback album even though the band had not really been away.)
I have given my oldest son a number of Pink Floyd albums (The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here) for Christmas to hopefully helpfully forestall the day when one has to explain which one’s Pink. (The lad asked me the other day, “Waters or Gilmour?” probably to like the opposite one better–teenagers!)
I know, that’s two music posts in a row. But, c’mon, man, you’re not here for the hot takes on news and politics, ainna?
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How black artists are breaking country music’s color barrier
Me, I can’t see color on the radio, but that’s not important. Equity is. And:
Still, country music isn’t exactly woke yet.
Geez Ashlyn Louise. Modern country music is broken enough already without being woke.
Like my books, I tend to prefer my country music from the 20th century.
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I got two $25 gift certificates to Relics Antique Mall for Christmas. Relics’ gift certificates are unique in two ways to Relics’ favor: They expire in a mere six months, and you have to spend the total amount on the gift certificate as they give no change and they’re not gift cards that can carry a balance.
I had a couple of minutes between picking up the oldest from his after school activity and picking up the youngest from his after school activity, so I stopped by to see if I could find anything. When I was in during the Christmas season, I had spotted a set of fencing equipment which I believe had two vests, two helmets, four gloves, and two foils, and I would have been all over that if I saw it again. I mistakenly thought I had two $30 gift certificates, so I thought I would almost afford the fencing set which was $75 if memory serves. But I didn’t see it. I started browsing records though, thinking if I could find $30 in records in fifteen minutes, I would spend one of the certificates, and if I only found a couple bucks’ worth of records, I’d pay.
Well, as I have lamented before, record prices have been rising. Not so fast for the old and the obscure stuff I like as much as for more popular fare, but where records would have been a couple bucks a couple years ago, now they’re five dollars and way, way up.
Still, I was playing with house money. And in about twenty minutes, I found enough to spend both certificates.
I got:
I carefully estimated and thought I’d picked out about $65 in records (profligately). It was only when I got to the register that I re-discovered my gift certificates were for $50 total. But with the discounts applied, the total came to $53 something.
Which means that the records I got only cost me $4. Many of them came with their own mylar sleeves, which is further savings.
However, as my recent tidying of my record shelving has indicated, I really need to build more shelving. Especially with the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale coming up later this month with its fifty cent records on the Saturday. Ay, if only I had a pickup truck to easily haul lumber.
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On Facebook, Jane Monheit touts that her new album, released last week, is doing well:
Which led me to wonder, Who is Veronica Swift?
A “prodigy” of jazz, the child of jazz musicians, who recorded her first album at the age of nine. Now she’s 26 and has a new album out.
I ordered it. Of course, the new Monheit album is also on order. Which means my musical balance is way out of whack lately. And, given that I’m ordering a lot from artists’ Web sites, it will be harder for me to track them down since they’re not all on my Amazon orders list.
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Apparently, the musical fiscal year has changed or something–the local Jack radio station (best of the 80s, 90s, and today, where “today” presumably covers the last twenty years) has started playing some different songs–which I will hear over and over as I work the dial for the next year.
Including “Unskinny Bop” by Poison:
Eesh, that song is from Flesh and Blood. In 1990. That song is 31 years old.
I saw Poison twice on that tour: Once at the Milwaukee Arena with Warrant and once at Summerfest.
I need to refactor my listening to contemporary music and to old music from the 1940s through the 1960s and leave a big doughnut hole in the playlist for the music from when I was young because the calculations are making me feel my age.
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When talking about Milwaukee radio stations last week, Friar and I got to commenting on the Triplets, and I mentioned that, in researching my comment, I saw that they had released new music in the interim between my rounding out their then-complete catalog in 2015 and last week.
So I ordered a couple of their new CDs.
I ordered from their Web site, and they included a thank you note:
You know, if I traveled back in time to 1991 and said that, in the year 2021, Brian J., you will live in the country with a beautiful wife with a couple of kids, will hold a black belt in martial arts, will weigh almost 200 pounds, will do a couple of triathlons a year, but the country will have a pandemic where the government orders you to stay home and wear masks if you go out in public, and the Triplets will write you a card with hugs expressed in it, and I am pretty sure I would be nodding along right up until the last bit, which I would not believe at all.
Also, perhaps not the almost 200 pounds bit, either. Or the martial arts. You know, I would probably think me from the future was a liar. Or a cyborg or clone whose agenda was trying to manipulate me somehow into changing the course of history to its own advantage.
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Longtime Milwaukee radio personality Karen Dalessandro is leaving town for a new gig in Phoenix.
Dalessandro, the former country music host who has been on the afternoon drive shift at WKLH-FM (96.5) for more than two years, will be taking over the same gig at another classic rock station, Phoenix’s KSLX-FM starting April 5, AllAccess.com reported Tuesday.
According to OnMilwaukee.com, her last day at WKLH will be March 26.
Dalessandro spent 20 years as a country radio host in Milwaukee at WMIL-FM (106.1). After briefly retiring in 2017 — she was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame in 2015 — Dalessandro joined WKTI-FM (94.5), which had switched to a country-music format. After WKTI flipped to an all-sports format in 2018, she landed at WKLH as a part-time host, going full-time as the station’s host from 3 to 7 p.m. in 2019.
I guess I am coming up on 27 years since I last left Milwaukee.
The first time, of course, was at age 11; then I returned for the University, but when my prospects were uncertain (I had an English/Philosophy degree and a ton of grocery store experience), so I returned to the St. Louis area to live in my mother’s basement until I found myself (three years later, I landed a technical writing position because I was taking programming classes at night, not just because I had a writing degree).
So I have missed this veteran broadcaster’s entire career. She was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame, for crying out loud. And even if I would have been there at the very outset of her career, I was not listening to WMIL. I was listening to the AOR stations at the time. QFM and whatnot.
I listened to WKTI when I was in high school on summer trips to my father’s house and early in my college days, but they played pop music then (and ‘hits’ like Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich” pretty much hourly. Like, hourly.
Although WKTI did introduce me to the Triplets, so it’s got that going for me.
But apparently WKTI has gone through two complete format changes in the interim.
I still have my Best of Dave and Carole from WKLH cassette which I have not listened to for a long time. I see that show ended five years ago. I should pull that old comedy tape out whilst I still have a motor vehicle that supports it.
Ah, well, everything passes, and in the twenty-first century, radio stations and radio personalities tend to swap around a lot and disappear.
You can bet my boys, who are exposed to a lot of radio for their age, won’t have the same nostalgia for stations and personalities that a couple generations of their forefathers did.
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The Low Spark of High-Speed Rail
Ha! An allusion to Traffic!
Alright, alright, alright, I am not old enough to remember that song contemporaneously–the album of the same title came out the year before I was born–but I do remember that album because of Dennis Cast, the assistant manager of the grocery store where I worked through college (one of many assistant managers–and even though it had a couple different names because it had a couple of different owners, but it was the same store to me). I listened to what they called Album Oriented Rock in those days–slightly older hard rock music–and he tried to broaden my horizons by loaning me a couple of cassettes, including The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys and Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. To be honest, the long-riffing lightly psychadelic sound of the middle 1970s didn’t do it for me. But I remember the song and have called it up once or twice since.
At any rate, I feel clever.
Also, I should note that I previously mentioned I remembered an episode of My Two Dads from The New Shows of 1987:
My Two Dads; I remember a single episode, where they give a party and try to engage the teens in conversation, and the daughter imagines them as really old.
In that episode, the B.J. and the Bear dad asks if the tween boys thought Steve Winwood did his best work with Traffic. That’s almost an exact quote, but not enough to put in actual quotation marks. Steve Winwood, at the time, had returned to the charts with his comeback songs like “Back in the High Life Again” and “Valerie”. However, it was not something the kids were listening to on their own–back in those days, I think adult attention figured into the charts.
At any rate, what is the article about? The usual highlighting the inefficiencies of light rail mass transit, I suppose. I already know the outlines of the argument, so plugging in this particular set of costs and overruns, which will prove less than the numbers plugged into the articles on this topic next year, doesn’t add much.
But the title took me back a bit. Not all the way back to 1971. Back to 1992, anyway.
And the time I spent on this post is about 12 minutes. The length of the song itself.
Thank you, that is all.
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So, yesterday, Kim du Toit extolled the virtues of symphonic metal, recommending the works of Nightwish (both Floor and Tarja), Epica, Ayreon, Within Temptation, and Battle Beast (I happened to be listening to their eponymous album whilst reading his post).
No mention of Semblant (whose album Obscura I listened to before the Battle Beast, and who properly is classified as Brazilian death metal, but Mizuho Lin was also trained classically) or Amaranthe.
Also, no pictures, which is unlike him.
So I will remedy that.
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Amaranthe |
Semblant |
Within Temptation |
Battle Beast |
Also, let us not forget that Amaranthe’s “82nd All The Way” is the best Swedish band cover of another Swedish band’s (Sabaton’s) song about American Congressional Medal of Honor winner Alvin York you’ll hear all day:
Or, as I like to call it, The Plank Song, because when it comes on at the gym, I have to stop what I’m doing to try to do a plank through the whole song. I’m not there yet.
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As you know, gentle reader, I received a gift certificate from a real record shop for Christmas and went to spend it over the holidays. Was that only two weeks ago? Man, it seems like a long, long time ago.
At any rate, I had just bought a couple Chuck Mangione albums three days earlier while redeeming gift cards with the children, so I was clearly in the mood. But I didn’t find Feels So Good, the album that contains the nine-minute version of the hit song which WSIE plays from time-to-time and what I consider the epitome of light 1970s chill music.
Well, I had a little time to kill yesterday before picking my youngest up from an afterschool activity. Instead of going to Hooked on Books, I went to the nearby antique mall flea market, Ozarks Treasures, to walk off a half hour. I figured if nothing else, I might find some Christmas gifts for 2021’s survivors.
But I found Feels So Good. For $2.
Someone has written TNT over his mouth; they did not selectively blacken teeth. Which is a subtly less offensive defacing.
I might have flipped past this record several times in 2019 and 2020 and only consciously discovered it now as I am building up my Chuck Mangione collection.
The guy behind the counter recognized Chuck Mangione, but only because the cashier said Chuck Mangione played himself in the cartoon King of the Hill several times over that shows run (which ended 10 years ago, old man). Which probably explains why the fellow at the record store recognized the name Chuck Mangione but not the album Feels So Good or the song by the same name. Ay. I am an old man: recognizing the old musicians for their music and not their appearances in animated television shows.
At any rate, a word about the antique mall/flea market market: I have noticed over the late Christmas shopping season and this trip that the stores have a higher than normal number of empty booths. Perhaps the new normal temporarily until these places go out of business completely, the next new normal. The number of booths with records was smaller, too, weighted a bit more heavily to booths with $10 common records versus $2 common records. I saw piles of video media, some booths with DVDs at $1 or $2 (cheaper than buying them at a defunctuating video store, but not the same experience browsing) and some booths with VHS cassettes at $10. So less to look over overall, but still, one always has the chance of finding a steal like I did yesterday.
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Well, now I have done it.
I mentioned in December that I had heard a song on WSIE sung by Charles Glenn, the former St. Louis Blues hockey national anthem singer–although to be honest, I kind of missed the Charles Glenn era, attending the majority of my games when Edward Curtis, the previous national anthem singer, held the office.
I thought I would buy the album it was on if I could find it, and a couple of Internet searches could not identify the source. I suppose I could have reached out to WSIE, but, c’mon, man, it was a passing fancy.
But sometime between the original post in December and an allusion to the song in a January post, the name of the album appeared on the Soundcloud post. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn’t see it. Regardless, I visited Soundcloud to hear the song, and in another round of searching, I found a copy of it available.
Which arrived today.
Nominally, it’s Larry Barker’s, the pianist’s, album with Charles Glenn providing the vocals on a number of tracks. It’s fourteen songs:
So it’s got a couple of jazz standards, a couple of jazz piano numbers, but it’s mostly hymns, albeit jazzy hymns.
I’ve already listened to it and have passed it onto my beautiful wife because I think she’ll enjoy it.
And I’ve already taken a moment to taunt the Internet that I own this rather collectible bit which I bought from a bookstore in Michigan, apparently, that did not know what it had.
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Pro-Trump heavy metal guitarist reportedly identified as Capitol rioter:
A pro-President Trump heavy metal guitarist has been identified as one of the US Capitol rioters, according to a report.
Multiple sources told the Indianapolis Star Wednesday that one of the suspects in the deadly Jan. 6 siege is Jon Schaffer, a founding member of a Florida-based heavy metal band called Iced Earth who is originally from central Indiana.
The article also notes no charges were filed against the artist. Maybe that means yet.
According to Iced Earth’s Web site, they have released like 30 albums and EPs since the founding in 1988. I have never heard of the band, but that’s true for most metal bands, even metal bands with recording contracts and multi-decade careers.
Don’t expect to find Iced Earth on my musical balance posts, though: I’m buying jazz lately, not heavy metal. And by “lately,” I meant this week. Last week was a long time ago. I cannot remember that far unless I look at my purchase history.
But I want you to know, gentle reader, I am keeping up the latest metal news for you.
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