music

Good things on the Internet: swingin’ sixties and seventies edition

Here, presented without comment, a selection of images from what in my humble opinion is one of the Best Blogs Ever.

Just. Go. Here.

Liz Eggleston’s impeccably and indefatigably curated collection of sixties and seventies images–the glorious, the tacky and the gloriously tacky–mainly from her own scans of British and French magazines, is an unspeakably great treasure. Her focus is on the British Boutique movement, but she confesses to being inspired by “the weirder, even seedier, aspects of popular culture.” This is the kind of amateur (in the French sense) labor of love that the pre-listicle era Internet promised, but really didn’t deliver….

 

boucanier-november-1972

omar-sharif

nice-girls-do-2

wedge4

sockssmockscombinations7

smirnoff

fair-weather-friends-3

rose-tinted-quant

annacat

guiness-september-1973

Getting “countrier than thou” about “artificial redneck morons”

Can’t explain exactly why I’ve been silent here for so long, or why I’m finally prodded into action by this (uncharacteristically) dumb Charles Pierce reaction to the “Obamacare by Morning” schtick at the CMAs the other night.

To these lyin’ eyes, Brad and Carrie’s routine looks like a fairly safe, innocuous jab at a much-discussed current event. And clever. Both in the wordplay and by the fact that it butters up featured CMA guest George Strait, who doesn’t always turn up for awards shows.

Its attitude is pretty closely aligned to this (also very funny) bit from the Daily Show:


But Brad and Carrie really set something off in Pierce:

Let’s forget, shall we, that the act is working gloriously in places like Kentucky, but that places like Tennessee, which hosted the yearly gathering of artificial redneck morons, have decided to sabotage the act because Tennessee insists on electing idiots, which is why there are a lot of the problems for Jethro and Zelda Mae to make sport of on the electric teevee. Let’s also forget how much an actual Medicaid expansion would help in all those Southern states where these posers sell records and that have governors who suddenly find themselves allergic to Free Money (!) Let’s also forget that none of the make-believe goobers on stage last night ever are going to have to make the decision between medicine for the kids and food on the table.

Not a lot to disagree with here on the substance (though I might be cautious about proclaiming  “the act is working gloriously in places like Kentucky” until those enrolled actually try to get their claims processed), but what is notable (beyond the embarrassing attempt at country diction) is the contemptuous “How Dare They” vibe. “Jethro and Zelda Mae.” Wow. “Make-believe goobers”! Pierce knows as well as anyone the glaring issues with ACA, and Jon Stewart’s much more critical satire goes unremarked, but country singers making fun of what is looking (sadly) to be a prototypical product of 21st century (neo)liberalism is just too much for Mr. Pierce to bear.

First the ad hominem, and then the revealing obiter dictum.

Let’s forget all of that and concentrate on the main issue — which is that I think modern country music sucks gigantic bowls of monkey dick. It is, weight for age, the phoniest genre of music since Pat Boone was ripping off Little Richard. Most of what is celebrated as “country” these days is simply bad rock and roll played by people who look like they flunked the audition for a Night Ranger tribute band. I mean, Taylor Fking Swift is already a “legend,” and Patsy Cline would have eaten her on toast.

Stop the presses.  Boston-based writer derides current country music as fake, knows what REAL country music is.

Pierce then moves on to the musical question “You know what coutry music is?” and name checks Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle and Harvard Divinity School dropout Gram Parsons. I’m a fan of all of these guys, but every one of them is a middle-class white dude, applying a bookish veneer to the country genre. To Pierce’s credit he does mention Loretta Lynn, but doesn’t link to any of her iconic songs (you know, the ones a Jethro or Zelda Mae might know), but to “Van Lear Rose,” from the all-over-the-place album she did with another slummer, hipster Jack White.

Which is a little weird. And where am I going with this exactly?

A first bash: patronizing east coast writer’s take can be summarized as: these rubes don’t know what they want (the ACA), or even what they like (debased country music, not the “real” stuff), and they sure as shit don’t know what’s good for them. There’s a lot of the crazy in Southern-identified folks mistrust of Yankee superciliousness, but sometimes there’s some justification….

Country music left its rural roots behind at least as far back as the (then-maligned, now celebrated) countrypolitan era. It’s been a suburban thing for half a century, so the Jethro and Zelda Mae jibe is kind of out of the blue. Are Brad and Carrie trying to act like hicks? Does Carrie Underwood have her teeth blacked out? Not exactly. Say what you will about her outfit here but … not exactly. (OK. Paisley does wear a cowboy hat. It’s a Nashville thing, a shorthand connection to country’s real country (distant) past. Also, a godsend for artists with receding hairlines.)

Ian Crouch’s dispatch in the New Yorker, while still a tad glib, at least indicates that he actually saw the CMAs and didn’t just fly off the handle because OMG these rubes were making fun of Obamacare.

And the music itself, as always, has one foot in respectability and the other in foolishness. The best-selling country album in the United States right now is a Christmas collection recorded by the family from “Duck Dynasty.” One of the tracks, “Away in a Manger,” features the vocals of Alison Krauss. It’s still a weird swamp down there in Nashville.

Weird swamp indeed. And it has always been so. As someone who listens to a lot of country music, both old (“authentic”) and new (“bogus”), I have a lot of problems with contemporary music trends, but beg to differ with the notion that today’s country stars are talentless hacks. All of them are in possession of major chops, as players, singers or writers (or all three) or they wouldn’t be on the CMA stage rubbing elbows with Vince Gill.

Random anecdote: I recently had a quick overnight visit to Nashville. Three friends and I went out to see some music. Being cheap–we only went to free bars, –and old–our night started at 5 and ended before midnight–, we were exposed to the absolute bottom tier of Nashville talent (it was a Sunday night too) but I found it pretty remarkable that everybody at that level could really play and sing. There are tens of thousands of full-time musical strivers between these cover musicians and the Carries, Brads, and yes, Taylors. Country is another classic American winner-take-all, long-shot business–like the movies, pro sports, and fashion–but the problem is never the talent. The business of Nashville is just like those other show biz machines. It mercilessly molds artists into a template that is predictable and sells. But the talent shows through, it always has. Personally, this is why I pay attention to any pop culture: genius, of some sort, rising above an overly rigid framework. The auteur theory of country music, to get all grad schoolier than thou.

A common tactic of those who argue for a false Golden Age of anything is to set up a dubiously intense competition between artists of yore and the poseurs of today. So “Taylor Fking Swift is already a ‘legend,’ and Patsy Cline would have eaten her on toast”. I disagree. If Patsy and Taylor had been contemporaries, they would have collaborated dozens of times.

To be even more contrary, I would go so far as to say that we are in the midst of a Golden Age of Nashville, for female singers and songwriters, at least. In thirty years, a crusty writer will spit when mentioning the current crop of fake country talent, fix you with a steely gaze, jab a bony finger in your chest and say, “Now Miranda Lambert. There was a true badass country singer.” (And so she is)….
 

Once again stuck for a way to end this, am bailed out by the great Robbie Fulks, who has noticed the tendency of Yankees to preach to country folks what real country is. I love the weird and wonderful adjectival mouthful below, and think Pierce might find himself somewhere in there. He certainly will see his reflection in the opinionated, overalled Bostonian (cue to 2:22).

Not a hillbilly dilletante, fair weather hick, demi-clod, faux po’folks, well-readneck…
Robert-E.-come-lately hayseed wanna-be undercover Yankee…
Mississippi Ph. D., Alabamateur, 50% less Tarheel armchair Arkansan

2012: The Year in YOLO

I gave in this year to pop music and am not at all ashamed to admit my “best songs of 2012 (The Big List)” features a number of songs that are unapologetically pop and (to my ears at least) awfully good.

Maybe it’s having young kids who listen to the radio All The Time, maybe it’s because there’s an unusual quantity of good pop songs out there, maybe this is just another manifestation of my own contrariness. But I find myself wondering again and again: What’s Not to Like?

So, yes! yes! to Taylor and Carly Rae and P!nk and Xtina and Psy and Pitbull and Adam Levine and Kelly and Ke$ha and on the country side, that Little Big Town is pretty freaking catchy. I never thought I would like a song so good that name-checks Coors, but there you go. Perhaps I have been living in the South for too long.

For those whose tastes are so refined, they simply can’t abide listening to things enjoyed by the rabble (you know who you are) I have made a slightly condensed playlist that cuts out the pop mega-hits. It’s still a good list.

But I felt I had to go ahead and choose my favorite songs of the year. Hell is other people’s playlists, a wise person once said, so here, for better or worse, a dozen or so good tunes from YOLO Year of Our Lord 2012.

Ke$sha haters can suck it. This is an instant classic. It makes me wish that she would have made Warrior more along the lines of her original (stated) intent: more sleazy 70s rock, more guitars, less pop, fewer synths. As the man in A Hard Day’s Night said, perhaps this is “an early clue to the new direction.” I can only hope. “Sweet-ass mullet,” ftw.

The Youtube vid for “Everything is Embarrassing” has just surpassed a million hits, so this treads perilously close to Too Mainstream, but  the timelessness* of this song  can’t be denied.
_________________________________
*or perhaps perfect evocation of 90s production values

Apparently I am a sucker for songs with “Everything” in the title. Hard to separate the song from the beautiful video.  Old School in the best sense.

A duet teaming a young rappper born and raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and Kurtis Blow, the Bronx.  I love this. Why isn’t this getting ten million hits on Youtube??

Pure pop confection that sounds even more ethereal in Japanese for some reason.

Feisty, sexy, funny–three things you really don’t expect from mainstream country these days.

Seems like this song has been around for more than a year. Never get tired of it, though.

The reissue of “Pearl” came out in 2012, in case you wonder why this song makes the list. Janis’ crazy cackle shows she knew she blew the take right at the beginning. But on and on it goes, and the world is better for it. The ad libs are absolutely priceless. Amy Adams to star as Janis in a movie coming soon? Don’t quite know how I feel about that.

My son’s gang posts videos of their trampoline tricks online. His friend used a Brother Ali song in one. Instead of getting a cease-and-desist from a company lawyer, he got a “cool, bro” from Brother Ali himself. That prejudices me in the man’s favor but this entire album is great. Angry, political, intensely human.

In awe of this entire thing. Sixteen definitely ain’t enough. “How’s he God if he lets Lucifer let loose on us?”

As though someone discovered a cassette featuring Gram Parsons gigging with the Dead, circa American Beauty.

The most YOLO song of a YOLO year.

“I’ve lived at the very end of what must have been a wonderful country”

I followed a link on tumblr first thing this morning and came to such a trove of Merle Haggard lore my first thought was, “Holy shit! The great man has died.” But no, it’s just a very good, passionate fan site.

It linked to an Esquire Q&A from 2007 I had never seen. It’s great. Here is an extremely large chunk of it.

I’ve lived at the very end of what must have been a wonderful country.

They’ve left the redwoods up alongside the highway so we’ll think they’re all there. But go up in an airplane and you’ll see that they’ve clear-cut everything behind.

The kids just don’t know how big the tear on the rip-off was. If they had any idea, I believe they could do something about it. But it may be too late. We’ll see. They’re smarter. They can talk to one another. I don’t look for a politician to bullshit his way in this time.

When I was nine years old, right after my dad died, my mother got me some violin lessons with this big heavyset lady. It took nine lessons before this lady said to my mother, “You’re wasting your money. He’s got too good an ear. He’s not going to fool with learning to read when he can play something that he hears on the radio.” When I heard her say that, I knew I had something.

We weren’t thieves by nature. Pranksters. Practical jokers. We were without a car one time, Dean Holloway and I. We just went out and started borrowing cars. Sometimes we’d bring ’em back. Put gas in ’em. Clean ’em up. Leave a little note: THANKS FOR THE CAR. Like the Phantom.

I’m in a very small percentage of people ever in the joint who beat it. It’s like 2 percent of 2 percent. If you’ve ever been to the joint, you’re going back.

[snip] …

Freedom is what prohibition ain’t.

I probably had as bad a sex urge as anybody when I was younger. I remember an old guitar player, Eldon Shamblin, told me, “When you get pussy off your mind, you can go ahead and learn something.” Isn’t that great?

Willie Nelson’s the one who told me the reason it costs so much to get divorced is because it’s worth it.

I remember going to a dance when I was a kid — my older brother took me in. Roy Nichols was playing. My brother said, “Hey, there’s a little guy in there playing guitar. He don’t have to pick cotton or go to school.” Roy Nichols became my idol on the guitar. Many years later, he went on to play for me for half price. But he and I could never look directly at each other. I never knew why. At first, I thought it was because I admired him too much. But it was Roy, too. Anyway, late in his life, Roy had a stroke. Paralyzed him on one side. Right down the middle. Half of his nose he could blow, the other half was dead. After his stroke, I went over to Roy’s house. He looked me right in the eye and said, “Look here: I love you.” I got chills. He said, “That old shit went down the hole with this stroke.”

They got laws for the white man and laws for the black man — we all know that.

There’s more. Here is the link to the original. And again, here is the link to 190 Proof.

Paul and Linda take to the country, or revisiting “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far”

This is a terrific review of the Ram reissue. Often I can’t stand the show-offy braininess of Pitchfork’s writers, but here Jayson Greene just hits too many bulls eyes for me to quibble about it.

Ram, simply put, is the first Paul McCartney release completely devoid of John’s musical influence. Of course, John wiggled his way into some of the album’s lyrics– in those fresh, post-breakup years, the two couldn’t quite keep each other out of their music. But musically, Ram proposes an alternate universe where young Paul skipped church the morning of July 6, 1957, and the two never crossed paths. It’s breezy, abstracted, completely hallucinogen-free, and utterly lacking grandiose ambitions. Its an album whistled to itself. It’s purely Paul.

Greene pokes around the issue of how hated the record was on release, expressed from on high by Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau: “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far.” (Now that there is an insufferably pretentious rock critic).

Greene sees some sort of family dynamic in Landau’s (and generally speaking sixties hipster elite) opinion:

Landau was right, however, that [it] did spell the end of something, which might be a clue to the vitriol: If “60s rock” was defined, in large part, by the existence of the Beatles, then Ram made it clear in a new, and newly painful, way that there would be no Beatles ever again. To use a messy-divorce metaphor: When your parents are still screaming red-faced at each other, it’s a nightmare, but you can still be assured they care. When one of them picks up and continues on living, it smarts in an entirely different way.

I want to run with that messy divorce thing for a moment longer. When talking about the Beatles it seems necessary to state one’s Team John or Team Paul bias. I have always leaned Team Paul.

I was once commissioned to write a book for young teens about the McCartney family. (Still in print! and screaming up the Amazon Best Sellers list: now cresting at #2,727,671!!!).

Specifically it was “Famous Families,” Paul and Stella, but you can’t write about that family without getting sucked into the pastoral idyll to which Paul retreated immediately after the Beatles crashed and burned. It enraged many, apparently, but looking at it today, I just wonder: “Who could possibly have a problem with this?”

Anyway, I’m definitely Team Paul, but yeah, as a product of the broken home that is the Beatles marriage, do want to shout, “I love dad too, and I just wish you two would stop fighting.” And start to cry, retreat to my room, and slam the door. Or I would, if they hadn’t actually divorced four decades ago.

Also, interesting stuff about the City and the Country:

“I want a horse, I want a sheep/ Want to get me a good night’s sleep,” Paul jauntily sings on “Heart of the Country”, a city boy’s vision of the country if ever there was one, and another clue to the record’s mindstate. For Paul, the country isn’t just a place where crops grow; it’s “a place where holy people grow.” Now that American cities everywhere are having their Great Pastoral Moment, full of artisans churning goat’s-milk yogurt and canning their own jams, Ram feels like particularly ripe fruit.

A lot to answer for, from one perspective, but you know, always ahead of his time, that Macca.

I can’t help thinking about the Ram period without also thinking about Ronnie Lane’s parallel retreat from rock stardom. It didn’t come out near as well for Ronnie, who of course was not quite in Paul’s league musically, and didn’t end up one of Britain’s wealthiest men (he was absolutely an idiot with money–kept his rock star dough in a plastic bag in his house), and had the bad fortune to come down with a crippling degenerative fatal disease.

But the rootsy, rustic, slightly clueless back-to-the-country vibe is the same, and a beautiful thing, too. I don’t know what is going on with the famous Beatles Spotify holdout, as I am able to post a Ram  reissue playlist. Maybe that’s temporary. Sadly, there remains a massive hole in Spotify’s catalog where Ronnie Lane’s music should go.

Todd, Rahm and hydrogen bombs made out of dumb

A new record from Todd Snider is always a cause for celebration, and Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables is currently streaming here. (Or was.) [Update 3/19–now on Spotify!]

But. BUT. Todd is friends with Rahm Emanuel? WTF?!! This little snippet pretty much blew my mind:

Yeah. He’s my friend. I love that guy. He first came to see me in Washington, D.C., and he was about to go to some big meeting. The next time I met him was in Chicago. I was telling him about this song I was making up about the military-industrial complex. I was telling him it’s a stoner fable. All the stoners in the world are convinced that the world is run by these people that Eisenhower warned us about. He said, “You’d be surprised how much power the banks have now by comparison.” He pointed out that there’s a song about “the military and the monetary” by Gil Scott Heron called “Work for Peace.” So it’s been tackled. He said, “What would Woody Guthrie do? He’d figure out a way to point out what the bankers are doing right now.”

Now if I were a marginally famous folksinger and the White House Chief of Staff came up to me after a show to tell me how awesome I was, I’d probably have a hard time bad-mouthing the dude, but … Rahm Emanuel. You know, the guy who made 18 million dollars in two and a half years as an “investment banker.” As per the Times, his rainmaking for Wasserstein Perella & Company involved “turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions.”

For this guy to talk about exposing “what the bankers are doing right now” and to imply he’s down with Woody Guthrie and Gil Scott Heron–that takes some pretty spectacular compartmentalization. Or balls. Or both. I want to say it started with Clinton and his sax, the first hipster president, but I think the real precursor is this guy.

It continues to this day of course….. Yeah, Obama’s day job involves making up lists of people to assassinate without charge or warning … but did you hear that Al Green thing he did????

***

And slightly off the topic, here is a quotable quote from the Salon piece. Here’s hoping “Hydrogen bomb made out of dumb” becomes part of everyone’s vocabulary:

I grew up conservative Christian and all that, and now when someone tells me they’re conservative politically and also a Christian, I think, Why didn’t you just tell me that you’re a hydrogen bomb made out of dumb. Because those two ideas don’t gel. There’s one group that’s saying, Take everything you have and give it to the poor. And there’s another group that’s saying, Don’t tell me what to give to the poor. How can you join both groups? That’s like you’re joining Puppy Kickers Animal Rights of America. It just doesn’t gel, and that’s what I ran away from.

Whale: Favorite Band of All Time of the Day

Looking at that post below. Intense! Sorry! Sometimes you just want to recommend a Stephen Colbert video and you start typing and suddenly it’s like the world is going to shit.

Anyway, this week I have been stuck on Village Voice editor Maura Johnston’s terrific “remember the 90s (late)” playlist on Spotify. And I came upon these crazy Swedes. I don’t know a lot about them. Swedes. (Said that.) The 90s. By the look of it they did loads of drugs. There’s maybe a little Sleigh Bells thing there. The thrashy noise with the sweet girly voice floating over top. The singer Cia Berg was a television presenter of some sort. She had braces in one video, and not in another. They collaborated with Tricky on some things.

I think I might have seen the Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe video once, on MTV, and thought WOW! But then I forgot about them.

But … WOW! Or Holy shit! Or as Butthead says “this kinda like uh rocks”

This!

And this!

If you’re as taken with them as I was/am, you’ll want to investigate their slim but kickin’ catalog.

Country music and suicide

Just came across this on my twitter feed this morning:

This article assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates. Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is thought to reinforce the link between country music and suicide. Our model explains 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates.

Hmm. “Country Music.” How can you generalize about a genre that encompasses  both bluesy, soulful, melancholy Merle Haggard AND upbeat country heartthrob Kenny Chesney?

I would like to suggest a further experiment.  Expose one group of lab rats to nonstop booze and heartbreak tunes.  Williams, Jones, Haggard, Cash. The other group gets to listen to nothing but the  life-affirming paeans to domestic fidelity and small-town life that dominate contemporary country.

See which rats try to claw their way out of their cages first….

 

After Spotify

When I moved to New York from Minneapolis in 1988, I wasn’t looking to set the city on fire, at least not right away. As it turned out, I never did, but that is another story.

My goals were modest: to have a lease, a little  money in the bank, take a few trips each year, and to be able to buy any CD I wanted. It didn’t take long to become a huge success by those modest standards.

It was the early 90s. I realize in retrospect I was  working in a marketing department at the tail end of the Golden Age of Working in Marketing Departments. I was in books, at HarperCollins, and it was a common and lovely practice  to call your counterparts at any publisher or record company  to trade books for books or books for CDs. There were days when the mail drop on my floor would be teeming with jiffy bags and boxes of books and musical wonderment. A lot of it was junk, but you often got  more or less what you asked for, and there were a few serendipitous things I would never have thought I’d like. Nancy Wilson and George Shearing The Swingin’s Mutual, for one. Malcolm McLaren’s Fans, for another. Cibo Mato, Viva la Woman!

Between trading and buying whatever music I  wanted, my New York years produced a collection of CDs so large that it became a major project to pack it up when it was time to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest. I settled on large 240-cd folios, about six of them, kept some of the nicer big-format boxed sets, and put an ad on Craigslist for 1500 jewel boxes.

Fast forward eight years, and we are living in Kentucky in the age of  Spotify and instant musical gratification. Those folios sit on our porch and I very rarely have occasion to open them. Lo, the larges folios begat smaller ones, the “travel” kind that hold 48 CDs.  I created about six of these smaller collections for the car, but the adding and subtracting of CDs to the car folios quickly became tiresome, and the plastic dividers that hold the cds in place tore and fell apart. And then I discovered how easy it was to  load an IPod with a thousand songs and use it in conjunction with the car stereo. The CDs and their folios got sadder and more neglected, and crawled further under the passenger seat, with the golf  tees, candy wrappers, and empty bottles of Life Water.

And yet. Something in me recoils at limitless choices. From my teens through my mid-twenties, I remember expending much mental energy trying to listen to music I had read about, in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, or the local alternative weeklies in the Twin Cities. With the much-lamented passing of the indie KQRS, radio wasn’t much of an option and if you didn’t have friends who actually possessed the vinyl, you were out of luck. I was desperate enough to go halves on an album with friends, and let the friend keep the physical product, just so I could make a cassette.

I remember once interviewing to become part of a shared house with four guys from the western suburbs–Edina? Minnetonka? Wayzata?, in my mental map of the Twin Cities a mysterious Forbidden Zone populated by the rich, arrogant and decadent. These bros all  had asymmetrical haircuts, used copious amounts of hair gel, went to First Avenue a lot (for the dancy part, not the bands), and were “really into ABC.”

I  didn’t get the place in that house, needless to say, and never had a personal connection to anyone else who shared the communal enthusiasm for ABC. My curiosity had long expired, but just now I got up to speed via Spotify/Youtube. No regrets…..

***

For some reason, having the luxury of Spotify has taken some of the mystery, and joy, out of being a music aficionado. Being able to hear virtually any song I want on demand, has driven me backwards, made me appreciate serendipity and repetition.  I realize now I really like leaving a single disc in the car CD player for days at at a time. Last week, I played these three until the grooves wore out:

  • The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest (“What is a war if it doesn’t have a general? What’s channel nine if it doesn’t have Arsenio? … What are the youth if they ain’t rebellin’? What’s Ralph Cramden if he ain’t yellin’–at Ed Norton, what is coke snortin’?”);
  • The Stiff Records Box Set, Disc Three (Madness, Desmond Dekker, Tracey Ullman, Graham Parker, Tenpole Tudor, some truly daft things from one-hit wonders….);
  • George Strait’s Strait Out of the Box, Disc Two, his peak years, lots of hard country songs, plus the super-slick pop ones, eg. “The Chair”, one of the best stalker songs ever. A duet with Hank Thompson on “Six-Pack To Go”!

As for serendipity, I had taken for granted that local radio here in central Kentucky would not have much to offer. I didn’t try hard to search for good stations. My prejudice was that there would be lots of mainstream Nashville junk, the occasional classic country station, Christian rock, and cheesy mainstream pop with really obnoxious DJs.

My snobby ignorance persisted for over eight years, and then yesterday, I happened upon a station of bizarre eclecticism that played a succession of songs that were right in my wheelhouse, some of which I had not heard for decades. “I Wanna Be Sedated”! Ten Years After’s “I’d Love to Change the World” and “5:15” from Quadrophenia.

The video below is kind of amazing. I had forgotten I had seen the movie. I had not, however, forgotten a single word of the lyrics, which I hadn’t listened to since college. My teenage infatuation with late-period Who still being something of an embarrassment to me.

The lyrics to “5:15” are complete doggerel nonsense–“The ushers are sniffing/Eau de cologne-ing!”–but like  “madman drummers bummers” etc. from the early early skinny-hippy Springsteen, are somehow impossible to forget.

I realize that to this point I’ve failed miserably to tie this all together. Who can complain about the near-infinity of choices offered by a post-Spotify musical universe? And yet I appear to be doing just that. Something something Surprise Mystery Serendipity Tyranny of Choice. Just saying something has been lost with the absolute freedom of Spotify.

Perhaps a tendentious quote from an obscure Yeats play, Fergus and the Druid, will suffice. For now, it’s all I got:

And all these things were wonderful and great; But now I have grown nothing, knowing all

Phil Ochs’ birthday: You know what they say, or you don’t

I’m strongly of the opinion that Phil Ochs’ “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” as timeless as it is, could use an update.

There is this one, from Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon, good as far as it goes, but a lot has happened since 2007. There’s Schumer, there’s Clooney, there’s Kerry on a surfboard, there’s Bill,there’s Hillary (lots of Hillary!), but it would be nice to have a verse or two about the current occupant of the White House, who probably wasn’t even on Jello Biafra’s radar in 2007.

Here also, for comparison, Phil’s version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54VYw

AND, Todd Snider doing a beautiful version of his great song “Thin Wild Mercury,” about the time Dylan kicked Phil out of his limo for “speakin’ his mind.” (It’s pretty stripped down: the studio take is much more uptempo.)

Happy Birthday, Phil.  We could have used you the past few years…..

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