Category: Music

Apparently, this is not “The Devil Went Down To Vienna”:

Who could have guessed?

First, Donald Byrd with “Low Life”:

Now Crobot with the rock version:

ROCK MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER. Even when it’s not something the same. Even if it’s only the name of the song.

Wirecutter posted a set of Tanya Tucker songs, including “Texas”:

My mother had this song on a cassette. Not a Tanya Tucker cassette; instead it was a Reader’s Digest collection of country hits, where two cassettes were packaged into an oversized binder that perhaps some people displayed on their shelves. This collection had a bunch of hits from the 1950s to the 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s–I remember it from 1984, but the Tanya Tucker song is from 1978.

My brother and I, when we shared the guest bedroom of my aunt’s house in St. Charles (before we moved into the basement), we would listen to those cassettes on a simple tape recorder. Not a radio/cassette combination–this was one of the type associated with recording things in an office, and it had an earphone. Not headphones: A single earbud before earbuds were the thing, which was just as well as it was not a stereo tape player–it only had a single speaker. We would lie on the floor in that bedroom, marveling in the cool of the air conditioning (whole house air conditioning, not the window kind we’d been used to).

As you know, this was not long after we might have moved to Texas, and the song mentions Milwaukee (“The beer stays cold in old Milwaukee”), further evidence we cited when we urchins tried to convince our uncle of the superiority of Milwaukee over St. Louis. Which I continue to assert to this day although I moved in the opposite direction when I had the chance.

When I hear the song (not so much watch the video above), I can almost catch the remembered experiential flavor of those afternoons that summer, listening to “Tall Oak Tree” by Dorsey Burnette, “Haunted House” by Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, “Bottle of Wine” by the Fireballs, and “Texas” by Tanya Tucker.

By the time my mother passed away, the binders were long gone, and the cassettes were in little plastic boxes instead. I think I might have let my brother have the cassettes along with most of my sainted mother’s bric-a-brac after she passed away. But I’ll go looking for them now as my weekend project.

New Yorker singing out window told to ‘Shut the f–k up!’

When did I see that before?

Oh, yeah, in 1986:

Jeez, the changes we’ve seen in thirty-four years, ainna, Billy?

So this morning’s research on YouTube, as well as correcting the old timey video embeds in this related old post added some country to my suggested playlist.

Country hits of the 1990s and current Brazilian death metal.

Which is kind of like my gym playlist, although in reverse proportion.

You know, WSIE, the former jazz station and now smooth jazz “The Sound” from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, is not afraid to mix in some interesting musical choices. In addition to Sacha Boutros, Janet Evra, and Ashley Pezzotti (along with other favorites like Hiroshima, Keiko Matsui, Cindy Bradley, Al Jarreau, and so on).

Sometimes, they mix in a little Stevie Ray Vaughn and Steely Dan (and Donald Fagen solo). So they go a little towards blues rock. Today, they were all:

BTO, “Looking Out For Number One”.

You know, it’s bluesy enough to fit in with the sound. But some of us are old enough to consider BTO to be Album-Oriented Rock (later known as Classic Rock).

Fun story: I saw BTO in concert once. I have already mentioned it once, but I haven’t told you the whole story. BTO was the early afternoon act on one of the side stages at Summerfest in the early 1990s, and Weird Al was scheduled after them. So I stood on a bench amidst a bunch of aging bikers and didn’t think anything of it. I danced poorly, probably thrashed a bit, and had a great time. Then, after BTO finished, the bikers meandered off, and the Weird Al crowd of thirteen year olds mustered in, and many of them demonstrated Attitude brokered from being away from Mom for the first time, and they were getting a little restive. So I bailed out on Weird Al, the only chance I’ve had to see him live for nothing but the price of a Summerfest ticket, because I was either going to have to deal with abuse from thirteen-year-old tough guys or might end up in a scuffle with said tough guys, and even if I won (not a sure thing as I was a hundred and twenty gangly pounds at eighteen), I would have lost. You know, it probably wouldn’t have been like that, but I tend to extrapolate every conflict into physical violence as I lack the tact to defuse a situation.

Wait, where was I? Oh, yes, listening to WSIE. Which has returned to its more normal playlist of Diana Krall and Al Jarreau whilst I’ve been typing this and wondering exactly how bad I come off relating the BTO anecdote en toto. Not Toto. That’s another band entirely, and I’m sure WSIE could play some selections from them no problem.

Gentle reader, as you know, I like to spend my evenings in a recliner with a good book whilst a “fire” burns in the fireplace and smooth jazz plays (although not currently WSIE as the AirPort Express gave up the support ghost).

The other evening, a song came on as my beautiful wife entered the room, and she said, “Rise?”

“Chuck Mangione, ‘Feels So Good’,” I replied. And we repeated the exchange pretty much verbatim until I explained that it was not, in fact, Herb Alpert, and then she heard it.

I mean, I was able to authoritatively say Chuck Mangione even though this song, like “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen and “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, was one that I’d heard in my youth and hazily remembered. Unlike “Hearts” by Marty Balin, this instrumental (radio edit) did not have lyrics that I could have used to look it up on the Internet were I so inclined.

But I still stream WSIE on my computer, and I heard the song a couple of times, and I remembered it and thought, It’s that song. After a couple such instances, I thought, perhaps I should learn its name since I might not get the chance again. So I paid attention when it came on again and looked at the name/artist text on the live stream.

Which is why I could with certainty that I don’t often demonstrate say, “Chuck Mangione, ‘Feels So Good’.”

How good it feels to you, gentle reader, is up to you.

High-tempo music may make exercise easier and more beneficial:

A new study in Frontiers in Psychology is the first to show that listening to music at a higher tempo reduces the perceived effort involved in exercise and increases its benefits. These effects were greater for endurance exercises, such as walking, than for high-intensity exercises, such as weightlifting. The researchers hope that the findings could help people to increase and improve their exercise habits.

Many people listen to music while exercising and previous studies have documented some of the benefits. For instance, music can distract from fatigue and discomfort and increase participation in exercise. However, “how” we experience music is highly subjective, with cultural factors and personal preferences influencing its effects on individuals. Music is multifaceted with various aspects such as rhythm, lyrics and melody contributing to the experience.

You know, I’ve been known to tell people that I don’t like exercise, but I do like loud music and that I don’t come to the gym to work out, I come to the gym to listen to the music.

I dispute that the music does not affect lifting weights; I do believe it distracts me from the voice in my head that says I cannot lift that.

Speaking of metal, here’s some piping hot new Semblant.

I just saw that on YouTube, and it’s already on my gym playlist. So I will have to go to the gym tomorrow so I can listen to it.

(Link via Neatorama.)

Huey Lewis May Never Perform Again. But He Refuses to Give Up:

Huey Lewis can pinpoint the exact moment his entire world fell apart. It was January 2018 and he was in Dallas to play a corporate gig with his longtime band the News. Opening act Pat Green was entertaining the audience and Lewis was “taking the Elvis route” to the stage through the kitchen.

“I heard this huge noise,” he says. “It sounded like warfare was going on in the other room. I yelled, ‘What is that?’ They said, ‘It’s just Pat, the opening act.’ I put in my in-ear [monitors] in and couldn’t hear anything.”

He hoped things would improve once he got onto the stage, but when the band kicked into the opening song, the sound only got worse. “I thought the bass amp had blown a speaker,” he says. “I just heard this horrible noise and I couldn’t find pitch or even hear myself. It was an absolute nightmare. The worst thing. Just horrible.”

He has a condition that makes it so his hearing is mostly or totally lost depending upon the day, which means he won’t tour again anytime soon.

Which makes me sad; I am a Huey Lewis and the News fan from way back. Sport was the first album I got for a buck at a garage sale when I lived in the trailer park. (I still have it.) His is a music of grown ups.

I say maybe about not ever seeing him because I remain optimistic about the advance of medical science. Perhaps sometime soon it will come up with a treatment or cure for what ails Huey Lewis. I hope so.

Regardless:

And if he never gets his hearing back and therefore never plays live again, Lewis says he’ll be OK.

“I have a great life,” he says. “I’m a lucky guy. No matter what happens, I’m a lucky guy. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that. But I am.”

Still a hero of mine.

In yesterday’s Bleat, Lileks humblebrags about his music library:

I’m agonizing over the music. In the old days: you had a hundred albums or so, arranged on a particle-board shelf with concrete blocks on the end. If you were in college. Or you had them arranged in purloined milk crates. HEY if they didn’t want them stolen they shouldn’t have made them perfect for albums, man. Besides, Big Milk, like, gets money from the government.

Of the 100 albums, there were ten in rotation, and the rest were there to impress someone else, which they never did, or to bring back a mood, or to check if you still liked it. Quite possibly the ones in rotation weren’t even in the albums, just in the paper sleeves, like new friends hanging around the house in their underwear.

Now I have thousands of albums. I do not need them, but there is no cost to having them.

How many albums do I own? I don’t know for sure. I can only say that it looks as though I have ordered 10 100 packs of record covers and I’m almost through the 10th pack. And I have many, many nice record sets. As well as stacks of 78 and 45 rpm singles.

Holy cats, I was going to say that I’d ordered the 100 packs for or five times, but apparently, over the last seven years, I have bought a lot of records. But I guess my Good Album Hunting series is up to 20 or so entries, and I don’t just buy one or two records per.

At any rate, I was going to bow to Lileks, but I guess I have more records than he does. Although he was likely referring to electronic albums, of which I have “975” (I put it in quotes because some of the “albums” are single songs from the album).

As to the actual record rotation, I can say for sure that I have more than 10 in regular circulation, but I might not have 10% of my collection in rotation. I tend to play a lot of the Eydie and Herb and trumpet and sax, and I know that I don’t play some records often (many that I inherited with sixties and seventies pop, the vast Elvis collection), but I do play more than one hundred of them regularly.

Although I am not listening to the record player as often as I did in the past.

As to the electronic copies of the albums (as you know, gentle reader, I buy most of my newer music on CD and rip it to the computer rather than buying MP3 albums. I often listen to the last in most frequently, but I go through phases where I listen to different genres or different albums as a one off. Like listening to Die Trying’s self-titled album because I read a book with the same name.

So I can’t imagine removing anything from my library. Just in case.

So I was going to bow to Lileks, again, but.