Category: Music

Well, gentle reader, rest assured I am not writing long form material all of a sudden, although I have had spates of it in the past where I decide to go for it.

Someone at work posted about the band Train, and I mentioned the video for “50 Ways To Say Goodbye” had the Hoff:

And I got to thinking about how he’s also in the video for Brad Paisley’s “Last Time For Everything”:

I mentioned how the song affected me when I first heard it in 2017; six years (?!) later, my oldest has entered his senior year and is experiencing many of the last things from the video, but he will only learn it when he thinks back later. Me, I’ll mourn for him and for myself now.

So, anyway, I got to thinking of other music videos that the Hoff is in…. and I drew a blank.

Well, not entirely a blank. Of course he’s in videos for his own songs. My youngest has “Hooked on a Feeling” on his playlist, so I hear it often, and I thought it was the Hoff’s version because it has the oooka choka part that I associated with the David Hasselhoff version:

I mean, the version my son has is clearly not B.J. Thomas. Apparently, it’s the Blue Swede version from 1974, which also has the oooka choka locka on it and is the one on the soundtrack for the Guardians of the Galaxy movie from…. 10 years ago already?

Speaking of Swedes, here’s the Hoff singing “True Survivor”:

Basically, it is the sound track to Kung Fury (produced by Swedes) which I first mentioned on this blog in 2015.

So a proper five paragraph essay would have an intro, three examples of the Hoff guest starring in videos, and then a conclusion. But I could only think of two examples off the top of my head. He does not appear in music videos that I tend to partially watch these days which are symphonic metal. Which is odd because the Hoff was big in those countries. Maybe still is.

Help me out, gentle reader. What other music videos has David Hasselhoff guested in?

I don’t want to make you feel old, old man, but the song “1985” is closer to the actual 1985 than it is to today.

I warned you last year that this post was coming. And still you returned, dreading the day it would come.

Also, I don’t want you to think this blog is old, old man, but here’s my post when I first heard the song in September 2004.

Last night? The night before last? I mentioned several Italian-American singers who had Americanized their names.

Including Anthony Benedetto, who passed away today.

I have a number of his CDs and records, but he hasn’t been one of my favorites. Higher than Andy Williams, lower than Perry Como.

But KCSM is playing a lot of him today, and I’m sad.

Taylor Swift just made Billboard history, again

Drop everything now: Taylor Swift has just made history as the first woman — and third artist ever — to have four of the Top 10 albums in the Billboard 200 chart at the same time.

Herb Alpert had four albums in the top 10 in 1966.

Which was back when people bought albums. So I would suspect the number of albums sold is quite different.

Also, Herb Alpert has won a Grammy for vocal performance and instrumental performance and has continued to tour and draw crowds into his 80s.

So I guess Taylor Swift is not almost as good as Herb Alpert after all.

It has taken a little over a month, gentle reader, for me to finish listening to the records I bought at the Spring book sale. And “finish” is a relative term–the current turntable cannot accommodate 78 rpm records, so I have not listened to the Benny Goodman set, and I have not listened to the three LP “learn Mandarin from records” set (which might go into the drawer with the other learn-a-foreign-language sets that I have gathered over the years before I actually learn a language via LP–see also the audiocassette teach-yourself-Japanese course that’s been in my office closets for 25 years).

I finished with the New Cristy Minstrels because they’re more of my beautiful wife’s thing, although she has said they’re more of her mother’s thing, and that she (my wife) really did only hear the Christmas record as her mother did not listen to records that much in her memory.

I also held off, strangely enough, on the Eydie Gorme record (Here’s Eydie Gorme) as the first time I tried to listen to it, the turntable was acting squirrelly, leading me to fear its imminent failure. However, the next day, it had no problems, but by then the Eydie Gorme record was lower in the stack.

And as I completed (mostly) listening to them, I realized that this stack of records has more animal sounds than perhaps my whole library previously had (an untrue assertion, as we have a record version of Disney World’s Enchanted Tiki Room and some of Kipling’s Just So Stories, but bear with me here–I’m blogging).

The Eydie Gorme record has “I’ve Gotta Crow” which apparently (according to Wikipedia) was her first single with Steve Lawrence circa 1954, but the LP I got is from a decade later. In it, Eydie Gorme, well, makes what presumably are Brooklyn crow noises as crows don’t sound like this in the Ozarks:

Then, relatively shortly thereafter, I heard the song “The Cat” from the The New Christy Minstrels Tell Tall Tales! (Legends and Nonsense) which features band members meowing:

At Nogglestead, that song is more closely associate with Ralph the Dog from The Muppet Show:

I’m hard pressed to think of another record where the band makes animal noises. I’m sure we have one or more in the library, but these leaped out at me because I heard them in such close proximity.

Oh, and of those New Cristy Minstrels records: New Kick! is apparently signed by one of the players:

Pete Henderson inscribed this to John and pointed out which songs he played or was featured. Not bad for a dollar.

This is a bit of a Recycler post, but it’s pretty fresh, gentle reader.

I posted this yesterday on social media:

All I got for Valentine’s Day was the blues.

But that’s what I asked for.

Which is true: When my beautiful wife asked what I wanted for Valentine’s Day, I mentioned that I’d added a number of Keb’ Mo’ CDs to my Amazon Wishlist.

WSIE plays “Soon As I Get Paid” a lot:

However, “Tell Everybody I Know” is more Valentine-themed:

I haven’t been buying many CDs these days–the last would have been a couple of Christmas CDs, although I did recently get a digital album with Amazon credits, and the musical balance is a little off kilter from my normal jazz songbirds and metal. Of the four most recent acquisitions, three are blues and one is funk. Maybe I am mellowing.

Ah, gentle reader, you know how I operate: I go “Christmas shopping” at a local antique mall and end up with a stack of records.

Well, this year was going to be different. It’s not so much that I’ve straightened up as I’ve run out of space to store records as well as new books–so I skipped the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County library book sale. We have one or two boxes of sixties folk records that we herited when my mother-in-law downsized that are under the desk in the parlor. I have a box of records in the store room yet, my sainted mother’s pop hits of the 60s and 70s. And I moved the two boxes of books I received from my mother in law into my closet so it’s out of sight until I can clear space on the to-read shelves. Friends, reading paperbacks is not making that space. I shall have to read bigger books in 2023.

So I was minding my own business, dragging a bored teenager, when I found a box of $1 records at a booth. A booth which was having a 20% of sale. These records were eighty cents each. It seemed a moral imperative that I take them.

I got:

• Songs of Leonard Cohen by Leonard Cohen. (Discogs marketplace price: $5.11)
• Silk Degrees by Boz Skaggs. I confused him with Ricky Skaggs for a long time; however, WSIE plays Boz Scaggs since he’s not a country singer, so I got this, my first of his. (Discogs: .18)
• Command Performances by The Ray Charles Singers ($1.00)
• Golden Rainbow: The Original Broadway Cast Recording. I’m not going soft on you, gentle reader: This is a Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme record. ($ .50)
• The Year of the Cat by Al Stewart. Fun fact: When I heard this on the radio, I thought it was the Pet Shop Boys. So it’s the second in four bullet points so far where I’ve confused the artist with someone else ($ .43)
• Doris Day Sings Her Great Movie Hits by Doris Day. For a guy who listens to death metal, I sure have a lot of Doris Day records. ($1.00)
• Doris Day’s Greatest Hits by Doris Day. And I have even more now. ($1.00)
• Friendship by Ray Charles. A lot of Ray Charles in the two bins I looked through. ($ .95)
• Get Closer by Linda Ronstadt. ($ .50)
• Hometown Girl by Mary Chapin Carpenter. You know, gentle reader, I have seen her in concert (with Shawn Colvin) within the last decade. When I showed this album to my beautiful wife, she said, “Thank you.” So I am not in trouble for this set of records. ($ .99)
• Can’t Buy a Thrill by Steely Dan. My beautiful wife already has several Steely Dan albums, but not this one. ($2.51)
• Great Jazz Pianists of Our Time. Includes Oscar Peterson, Errol Garner, and Art Tatum. ($9.48)
• Hey There! Here’s Fran Warren! by Fran Warren / arranged by Marty Paich. No idea who this is, but Pretty Woman on Cover. ($1.22)
• The Genius Sings the Blues by Ray Charles. ($7.51)

So the dollar pricing tracks pretty closely with the Internet prices for the records–the jazz pianists and one Ray Charles album were the big scores. As we went to other booths, I pointed out to the youngster why I felt compelled to look through these bins. Here are $20 records, here the prices start at $5 for bands you’ve never heard of, and so forth. I have to wonder if the records at antique malls are priced for the casual collector who doesn’t go to discogs and who isn’t serious but is a casual or fashionable collector. That is, someone following the fad of liking vinyl. The kind of person who buys new records for $25 when the CD is $15. Ah, what does it matter–I am not a collector, I am an accumulator, and I favor accumulating records from an era where the records were the only format available and hence have lots of copies, and they’re from an era not really enjoyed by the casual collector, who wants vinyl renditions of things they hear on the 80s, 90s, and now radio stations.

I won’t listen to this batch until after the holidays–we’re on all Christmas records here, and the two Nogglestead radios are tuned to the Christmas music station, but in a little over a week, we will be back to regular programming, and I will listen to these records whilst I read my many adopted hometown newspapers.

Although who knows whether I will buy other records in the interim. After all, the trip to Ozarks treasures did not yield all the gifts I need to yet buy.

As you might be aware, gentle reader, a myriadic plethora of radio stations play the modern equivalent of the “Jack” format, billing themselves as the best of the 80s, 90s, and today, but their playlists are really only an inch deep and reflect whatever catalogs of song rights are cheap at the moment–and they tend to play the same songs from the 1980s year after year, and have for a long time.

Suffice to say that none of those songs that I’ve heard, if not constantly since the 1980s, at least in the last decade or so since the 80s hits have taken over the airwaves again. I mean, Bon Jovi’s catalog from the Slippery When Wet era gets heavy rotation on both the Jack and the Classic Rock stations, so they’re not pinned in my memory to the time. Or Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” from the Breakfast Club soundtrack. That runs regularly on the radio.

But the 1980s programs like the American Top 40 replays or Nina Blackwood’s syndicated program play songs that were on the radio all the time in the 1980s but have not been on the radio all the time since, so those songs pin me like a butterfly on a display board to the moments when I was young and wishing that the DJ would stop talking so I could record the whole song from the radio even though they were talking in and talking out to keep me from recording on the radio.

I recognized one such song on the radio during one of the aforementioned radio programs, but not enough to identify it. Apparently, it was Simple Minds’ “Alive and Kicking”:

It pulled me back to the 1980s when I heard it even though I could not name it. My beautiful wife could, as she had (or maybe has) the record.

Yeah, “Jesse’s Girl” doesn’t do that. “Jesse’s Girl”, who is on Medicare now, has been a staple through the decades. Which makes it common. And not evocative of the time of which it is the product.

Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks to perform at Arrowhead Stadium

Things I would have thought it impossible to say twenty years ago: It’s been over twenty years since I saw Billy Joel in concert. Which is true: It was his 2000 Years tour. Back when I was a technical writer and worked at DRA. He played at the arena in St. Louis, Savvis Center I think it was called then.

But 20 years have passed, and I’m not sure how keen I am to drive three hours to sit in a stadium to watch him. Which is more a testament to my aging and getting to be nearly a senior citizen in that time.

Of course, all bets are off if Herb Alpert comes within a three hour drive of me. But that would be at a more intimate venue. I think I’m just out of the age of stadium concerts. Not that I’ve ever been to a concert in a big stadium anyway. Perhaps I never was of that age.

Chuck Mangione’s “The Land of Make Believe” in the original Klingon tuba:

The livestream for WSIE has gone awry, so I’m listening to KCSM which has a more pure jazz playlist, which means I get to hear things like this for the nonce.