So I was doing the evening chores, and I found myself singing a bit of “Ew wah ew wah ew wah ew wah.”
Unlike when I found myself ruminating on the melody of Marty Balin’s “Hearts” in February, I knew where this came from.
Dwight Yoakum’s “Pocket of a Clown”.
Although I did have to search for it to make sure I wasn’t crazy (“Pocket of a Clown”? No way that’s a real song.).
I had Dwight Yoakum’s This Time album when it was fresh. It’s weird; I think of my college years as mostly steeped in pop music, but I listened to my share of country at the beginning of the 1990s as well.
Why it came up in my mind’s rotation, I have no idea. I am pleased, though, that the radio station that I can listen to while mowing the lawn has, after a couple of years, backed off of the all-bro-country format and returned to a mix of today and oldies. And by “oldies,” I mean things current when I was an adult.
Friends, somehow this spring’s book sale sneaked up on me, so I only found an opportunity to visit it on half price day today. Which worked out all right for me, as I only spent thirty some dollars on records.
Which is 61 LPs, double-albums, and boxed sets.
I got:
Asilos de Abandonados Miguel Aceves Mejia
Entre Copa y Copa Miguel Aceves Mejia
Canta…Los Huapangos de Oro Miguel Aceves Mejia
Con Mariachi Los Panchos
Midnight Time The Three Suns
Help Is On The Way Melissa Manchester
Romantic Jazz Jackie Gleason
Trumpet A Go Go James Last Band
El Nuevo Trio Los Panchos Trio Los Panchos
Greatest Hits Boots Randolph
Court and Ceremonial Music of the 16th Century Roger Blanchard Ensemble with the Poulteau Consort
Songs of Italy 101 Strings
Sings Spanish and Latin American Favorites Connie Francis
1100 Bel Aire Place Julio Iglesias
The Sound of Boots Boots Randolph
The Best of Vicki Carr Vicki Carr
The Yakin’ Sax Man Boots Randolph
Heart Like A Wheel Linda Ronstadt
Songs of the Seasons in Japan 101 Strings
The Manhattan Transfer The Manhattan Transfer
Maynard Ferguson Maynard Ferguson
Forever Gold The Isley Brothers
Fall Into Spring Rita Coolidge
Love Me Again Rita Coolidge
Everything Under the Sun The Three Suns
Men of Brass Massed Brass Bands of Foden’s, Fairey Aviation and Morris Motors
1980 Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson
Como Swings Perry Como
Miriam Makeba Miriam Makeba
Lead, Kindly Light The Three Suns
Cocktail Piano Frankie Carle
So Early in the Spring Jackie Collins
30 Hits of the Tuneful ’20s Frankie Carle
Look to the Rainbow Al Jarreau
El Gallo Colorado Miguel Aceves Mejia
A Treasury of the Award-Winning Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass The Longines Symphonette Society
Lo Mejor De Miguel Aceves Mejia (box set) Miguel Aceves Mejia
Lo Mejor De Amalia Mendoza (box set) Amalia Mendoza
Lo Mejor De Jose Alfredo Jimenez Jose Alfredo Jimenez
It Must Be Him Vicki Carr
Le Monde Musical de Baden Powell Volume 2 Baden Powell
Ecos de Cuba Trio Matamoros
Even in the Quietest Moments Supertramp
Sweet Talk Boots Randolph
Spanish Fly Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam
Love Is A Season Eydie Gorme
Louis and Keely Louis Prima and Keely Smith
Cocktail Time Frankie Carle
The Fantastic Boots Randolph Boots Randolph
Portrait of My Love Steve Lawrence
Golden Saxophones Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra
Come Waltz with Me Steve Lawrence
Cantos de Amor Campriano Miguel Aceves Mejia
Para Cantar Yo Naci Miguel Aceves Mejia
Classical Cats
A Man and a Woman (Un Homme et Une Femme) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Die Große Stereo-Starparade – Folge 3
Soulful Dionne Warwick
The Road to Romance Dorothy Lamour
Bourbon Street Pete Fountain and Al Hirt
Also Sprach Zarathustra Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Honey, I didn’t buy 100 LPs, I told my beautiful wife via text message to soften her up.
I am not sure it worked.
I jumped on someone’s former collection of Miguel Aceves Mejia; on first listen, it’s more traditional Mexican music than the pop that I have tended to favor. I got a couple of other box sets akin to his that will likely prove similar.
I got some more Frankie Carle, The Three Suns, Boots Randolph, and Vicki Carr to add to my catalog of their LPs.
I’ve also started the slide into 80s pop (Supertramp and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam) since that music is coming on 35 years old now. As close to today as Sinatra was to us. You might hear a song or two on the radio from these bands, maybe, but I really need to pick up the source material because the stuff on radio playlists is so shallow in breadth. Can you be shallow in breadth? On this blog, you can!
I also got some books, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see what I got.
Harold Faltermeyer was quite the instrumentalist for movie soundtracks in the 1980s, including two from that movie that had a Saturday Night Live alum portraying the title character, an investigator who assumes various comic roles as part of his investigation.
I’m talking about Fletch, of course.
I’m talking about Axel Foley, of course.
I prefer the former due to racism, of course. Also, because it is a little more than the synth progressions of the “Axel F Theme”.
It also made me start enumerating the films where a Saturday Night Live alum starred as a wise-cracking cop or investigator. Between the Fletch and Beverly Hills Cop movies, we’re already up to five. Throw in Taxi, and we’re up to six. Surely there are more, which I’ll give far too much thought and investigation to.
You know, my beautiful wife owns a number of Styx albums, including at least one on vinyl, but I really don’t like many of their songs.
But one, “Show Me The Way”, struck a chord with me.
It came out in 1990, when I was transitioning from an awkward high school student into an awkward college student. I moved from small town Missouri back to the city of Milwaukee, and I certainly could have used some guidance.
I still can.
I often think of Styx as a seventies band, but this hit was from 1990.
Kind of how I think of the Rolling Stones as a sixties band, but they charted records well into the 1980s. But the radio playlists really focus on the greatest hits of both bands, which are the early hits.
An ad on my Facebook feed makes an assertion that country music science does not support.
The ad:
The study that refutes it:
Why this ad appeared on my Facebook feed, though, I have no idea. One would expect with all the data that Facebook harvests from me that they would know we don’t host many gatherings here at Nogglestead.
We still have blue and orange disposable cups from my oldest child’s fifth birthday party, almost eight years ago. The bags are gone, though, so I could not tell you if they were Solo or Hefty in nature.
You know, my knowledge and appreciation of popular music from the middle 1990s is strangely lacking. I think I was listening mostly to country at that time or something.
Speaking of Monday morning, this line of Keats in “The Eve of St. Agnes” which I finished reading this morning stuck with me:
But let me laugh awhile, I’ve mickle time to grieve.
Mickle means “a large amount.” You can bet I’ll use this word on a call today, if not the whole line.
Well, Gimlet didn’t say this recently. He mentioned in 2012 that I was not familiar with Iron Maiden’s “Phantom of the Opera”.
You know, when I worked in an office, I played Iron Maiden at my desk all the time. My beautiful wife’s Iron Maiden, if I must confess all.
But working remotely, I haven’t listened to much Iron Maiden in the home office. Sometimes I do, but it’s not the go-to metal. Perhaps I rely a lot on my latest metal albums too heavily. I don’t even have any Iron Maiden on my gym playlist.
I should probably listen to some now. Care to join me?
Don’t look for Okilly Dokilly on my music balance lists any time soon, though. It’s a bit of a shame that some metal bands have to do a gag or something to get attention.
But if they’re having fun with it, go with it. They got to make an appearance under the closing credits on a Simpsons episode, so they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
This week’s Bleat by James Lileks has a banner image of a comely woman reclining on a scattered collection of LP covers (and, presumably, LPs, but it’s a drawing, so we’re actually assuming everything).
Last year, I did a couple of posts about the album covers hanging at Classic Rock Coffee and how many of the albums I have (I and II).
I’ve been in the mood for old country music lately, whereas old means twenty-five or thirty years old, from when I was young. Not old as in Patsy Cline or Buck Owens.
A new jazz crush: Morgan James, here with Postmodern Jukebox, covering Aerosmith’s “Dream On”:
I may not have used Amazon’s official social media buttons, but I’ll share with you, gentle reader, that I just ordered her albums Hunter and Reckless Abandon.
Last night’s triathlon class was brutal: We started with some hill running and then cooled off in the pool with some timed intervals. Let’s be honest: I have not improved in swimming in two years, and last night the swim about killed me. During drills, I focused on too many things and lost my breathing rhythm, which meant I breathed and swallowed a lot of air and a lot of water, both going to the wrong chambers in my torso.
But then, The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” came on the music piped into the pool.
Another fellow in the remedial swim lane has a strategy of walking most of the laps, and he was finishing a length of the pool not far behind me as I did whatever it is I do that is almost as fast as walking in water.
“I’m not going to drown and have the Spice Girls be the last words I hear,” I announced to him.
And I did not drown.
So consider me inspired by the Spice Girls.
Looking back on this blog, I see the other mention of the Spice Girls comes from 2005, where I boasted I could name them all even though I’d only listened to a complete Spice Girls song once. I think fourteen years later, I could go four out of five, maybe. Also, back in, what, 1997, I wrote about them in The Cynic Express’d.
I had to take a trip to Kansas City on the Ides of February, so I stopped by the library to check out a couple of audio courses to listen to on the way up and back (in a day–it was seven hours of driving for about an hour of work appointment).
Since I liked Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion, I picked up this course to supplement what I learned from the earlier course. All the way up and back, I swapped discs between this course and one on the Old Testament (that I’m still listening to, so don’t expect to see it any time soon).
But I didn’t like this course as much.
For starters, it begins (hem) with a couple courses on listening to jazz where the lecturer talks about the sounds of jazz, the elements (hem) and how they evolved, and the instructor illustrates a bit on the trumpet (his instrument). But then the bulk of the course is a name-checking of jazz musicians and who they played with de-coupled from the sounds of the jazz they’re making. For some reason, probably rights issues, the courses themselves do not have music samples inline to illustrate what the lecturer is saying. Instead, the course includes a two-CD collection of jazz that originally accompanied another book or textbook, and the lecturer refers to sample songs by track number, and the bulk of this course has no music in it whatsoever.
The lecturer’s presentation was a little flat and a little uninspired, too, especially compared to the enthusiasm and humor expressed by the lecturer in Elements of Jazz.
So the whole course pales in comparison. Perhaps it would seem better if it was the only course you listened to or if you listened to them in the opposite order. Or if this was your only dabbling in jazz lectures. Or if you wanted more of a history of jazz.
As this was a library edition, I had to hasten it back to the library before I read the guide book that came with it, so I don’t really get to count it as a book read this year. Much like, perhaps, The Count of Monte Cristo.
When I was at the university, I was a commuter, so most of my friendships developed with people outside the university. I drew a number of them from the grocery store where I worked in a transitional (on the way down) corner of town. Another guy named Brian started there a year or so after I did, and we got to be pretty good friends. We spent a lot of evenings together cruising the local mall or gaming together. We bought musical instruments together, a guitar for him and a bass guitar for me, and along with the third part of our triumvirate, we were going to be a band called Ghostriders.
Until he announced that he thought of the band as a back-up band for his Elvis impersonator show.
He was the young Elvis then, and although he got away from it for a while, he’s back at it, but he’s no longer the young Elvis.
It’s been like eight months since I posted about my musical balance, wherein I prove yet again that my musical taste runs in jazz songbirds and heavy metal.
Well, Brian J., you ask. How have you done over the Christmas season, where the One For You/One For Me protocol takes effect?
Well. Last Christmas, the One For You/One For Me protocol took place mostly at antique malls which don’t count in the arbitrary classifications that I made up for these posts (especially since they don’t fit into the schtick of these posts, but note that my album buying tends to be jazz or easy listening from the mid-twentieth century, R&B, and lately a little disco and 80s pop). So I’ve only bought fourteen CDs new in the last eight months (is that a lot?), and most of them have been the jazz songbirds. Reeling backwards through my Amazon order history, I see that I bought a bunch of metal in the late summer and early autumn and mostly jazz songbirds since.
Here’s what I’ve bought since last July:
Cindy Bradley Unscripted
Cindy Bradley Natural
Sara Gazarek Return to You
Erin Bode Little Garden
Erin Bode Be Still My Soul
Erin Bode A Cold December Night
Erin Bode Here and Now
Erin Bode The Little Garden
Natsumi Kiyoura Jyukuiro
U.D.O. Rev-Raptor
Diamonte Coming In Hot
Unleash The Archers Time Stands Still
Ghost Prequelle
Unleash the Archers Apex
That’s eight jazz, one Japanese pop singer, and five metal CDs (three of which are bands fronted by women who might be metal songbirds if the concept were not so alien as to be almost incomprehensible).
I haven’t been listening to Spotify to find metal artists that sound similar to bands that I already like. I haven’t been hearing much new metal on the local hard rock station. That’s partly because I’ve been listening to audio courses or books like this one, and partly because Q102 hasn’t yet convinced me that I like Bring Me The Horizon.
Instead, I’ve been listening to the stream of WSIE a lot, and it has reminded me that I like Sara Gazarek and recently introduced me to Cindy Bradley who sounds a little like later Herb Alpert:
She might be the second prettiest trumpeter in the world. The first, unfortunately, is not on YouTube.
For my birthday, my beautiful wife got me a two CD collection of Angela Bofill’s greatest hits. As you know, I’ve been accumulating her records for a couple of years now, and she’s becoming one of my favorite R & B musicians if not one of my current musical crushes:
A couple years ago I picked up the Walter Murphy Band’s A Fifth of Beethoven based on the weight of the title song which also appears on the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever and because one of the guys I know made a gag about it. My favorite song from that album is actually “California Strut”:
The booklet that came with the Angela Bofill CDs points out that she provided the vocal tracks for that particular song.
Coincidence? Or a discerning ear?
Please, choose the option which reflects best upon your host.
So last evening as I folded some laundry, I was humming a bit of a song that I remembered from my youth. I didn’t know much of it, but I repeated a motif of it over and over again.
But I typed “is everything alright i just called” into Bing, and it started auto-suggesting the next words, and the song is obviously (to the computers of the Internet) “Hearts” by Marty Balin:
Sometimes, this worldwide computer amazes me.
The song is from 1981, the year my parents’ marriage broke up. In my unreliable memory, we heard this song in heavy rotation on the way to and while at my grandfather’s cabin in the upper peninsula of Michigan not far from the Wisconsin state line. I relate a couple of different songs to that venue because the cabin had an old cathedral radio in it, and on rainy days we didn’t have much to do but listen to it and the hiss of rain outside. If I remember correctly, this must have been in the summer before the bottom dropped out.
The song sort of fits my mood. As some of you know, I just celebrated a birthday, and, if I make it to next January, I will have lived longer than my father did. So I’m ruminating and marinating in a blend of nostalgia and melancholia. The song and melody fit right in.
Because President’s Day was a holiday for only some of us, I took the boys out for the day so my beautiful wife could work in peace. We went bowling and to the (relatively) new Wonders of Wildlife museum and aquarium where I basically paid $50 to see a museum of things I try not to hit with my car.
To cap the day, we stopped at Relics Antique Mall to extend her worktime by another forty minutes or so.
I found the end cap where I’d spotted an unpriced Phoebe Snow album last year no longer had any albums, so I just picked through a couple bins on the middle row.
I spent less than $20 and got:
City Kids by Spyro Gyra. Now that I know they’re Buckwheat Zydeco, I’m picking their stuff up here and there.
Hero by Clarence Clemons, the E Street Band saxophonist. Apparently, the first song, “You’re a Friend of Mine” with Jackson Browne, was a hit, but I don’t remember it.
Quincy Jones Plays Hip Hits
Swing Along With Jonah Jones; he’s a jazz trumpeter who sounds like he might be trying to imitate Louis Armstrong a bit too strongly to stand out on his own. Still, it’s cool jazz. I saw another of his albums that I did not pick up this time, but I’ll look for it next time.
She Works Hard for the Money by Donna Summer. So now that we’re almost to forty years past disco and thirty some years past the Eighties Sound, apparently I think they’re old enough to buy on vinyl.
Hall of Fame featuring The McGuire Sisters and the De John Sisters.
It’s enough to keep my burgeoning record collection accumulation from seeming stale. For a couple of weeks.
Sometimes, I have to type a word, backspace over some possible misspelling, and then type it two different ways a couple of times until I’m sure it’s right, which is often after I look it up.
Like devestated devastated.
Well, I’m not going to play that particular game any more.
From now on, it’s devostated in my writing.
I’m pretty sure those of us of a certain age will get the point even without embedding a music video every time it appears.
I had to take a trip to Kansas City on the Ides of February, so I stopped by the library to check out a couple of audio courses to listen to on the way up and back (in a day–it was seven hours of driving for about an hour of work appointment).