Sad...

Damaged Ford Mustang wanted in I-37 hit-and-run investigation:

SAN ANTONIO -- Police are on the lookout for white Ford Mustang with front in damage possibly caused in a fatal hit-and-run accident.

It happened just before 3:30 Sunday morning. Police say a woman in her mid 20s was walking along Highway 37 North and East Commerce when she was hit from behind. Witnesses told police the driver of the Mustang slowed down, but did not stop to help the victim.

The woman, who did not have any identification on her, died at the scene.

Police are looking for the white Mustang with tell-tale body damage.

If you think you might know something that could help with the investigation, you are urged to contact the San Antonio Police Department.

The woman has since been identified. I didn't personally know her, but I know other members of her family.

That was an odd sensation...

Sheesh. So I loaded up a pipe, then got distracted and put it down for a minute. Came back, picked it up, struck a match, and sucked nothing but heat. I had picked up an empty pipe that was also sitting nearby. I must be more tired than I thought.

Lousy day ahead tomorrow, but at least I'm not doing any alleys. The OT looks nice on the check stub, though. I looked at this current stub and thought, "I make how much when I'm on time-and-a-half?" Keep sucking up that water, San Antonio!

Stan Ridgway - The Big Heat (1986, LP)

Stan Ridgway was the original lead singer for Wall of Voodoo. This was his first solo album. He has an unusual voice for a pop singer. I like what someone said at Wikipedia:

...Ridgway's unusual vocal style, a flat, uninflected, nasal Western drawl that combined the stoic ballad-style Sprechgesang* of Johnny Cash and the declamatory theatrical delivery of Ethel Merman .

The music is dark and somewhat spooky, much like Wall of Voodoo music from his era. The songs lean toward narrative tales which happen to be sung, like "Drive She Said," a song about a taxi driver who realizes the woman in his back seat has just robbed a bank and "Camouflage," a tale about a Marine in Viet Nam whose life is saved by the ghost of another Marine called Camouflage. Favorites of mine are those two already mentioned plus the very catchy "Pile Driver" and the weirdly introspective "Walkin' Home Alone."

Perfect rip, and I'll be burning this one to CD for mobile listening.



* "spoken-song"

This & that

Just got home from a Cub Scout meeting and thought I'd have a pipe to wind down before bed time. Nothing much going on on Bloglines or FB. And I don't have a whole heck of a lot to say, either.

The heat is pretty bad out there. If you're not getting paid to be out in it, stay inside and run the a/c. If you absolutely have to be out in it, avoid hard work if you can and be extremely careful. Drink lots of water and some kind of Gatorade-type drink too, because when you're sweating constantly water alone just isn't going to cut it. Foods high in potassium are also very good. I eat bananas a lot at work even though I don't like them very much. Watermelons and strawberries are also great high-potassium foods which both taste a lot better than bananas. Bananas are also good for complex carbohydrates which give you the energy to get your job done.

I don't have any use for people who have to stop doing their job every 45 seconds to text someone about something stupid. Also, if you've grown up never doing any hard work, don't expect to excel at it right away (or maybe ever) when you're an (alleged) "adult." Everyone should spend at least a couple of summers hauling hay or watermelons or something so you know what you're getting into. And pay attention to your damn surroundings so you don't constantly have to keep asking, "Where are we?" Yes, I had a totally inept trainee at work this week and I don't think he's going to make the cut.

We got a little rain tonight. Just enough to dampen the top 1/4-inch or so of sand.

Hüsker Dü's double LP album Zen Arcade fits onto a single CD. Totally awesome. 69 minutes of nonstop Hüsker Dü without changing the CD. That'll blow out the cobwebs.

Here's another minimalistic album cover that's on my soon-to-be-ripped stack.

I had no idea...

San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition

"outdoor cat colony permit"?

You city folks are so weird sometimes.

A very special album cover for you

I haven't listened to this in a long time so I will not comment on the music now except to say that it's 80s thrash/punk. Click to enlarge. Seriously, check it out. You can actually see the sweat running down his belly.

You should have seen it in 1800-pixel resolution like I did. Or maybe not.

Presumptive alert

If I ever disappear for a while and stop blogging, it's most likely because my computer has finally given up its final ghost and I can't afford to buy a new one right away.

I had to restart the thing again after a crash last night; fortunately I have become quite adept at this and do backups so often that I rarely lose anything important. It's just a major pain, of course.

This time something new happened upon the restart. After I installed Avira Anti-Virus, it wouldn't run. I puzzled over it for a while before finally noticing that it said it had expired. This is the free personal version, and it expires every once in a while, necessitating a new download of the install program. The thing was, it said my copy had expired on 9/1/2011. So I checked the computer's date setting and somehow it had started in the year 5969.

Voluntary OT tomorrow. Mandatory next Saturday.

That's Zedong to you, fella

Here is a scan of the back cover of an album which I am, for the nonce, not going to identify. This kind of hyperbole about a mere rock band always both bemuses and amuses me. Click to enlarge and if you don't already know who this was written about, take a stab at guessing. That trope that "it...cannot be ignored" was commonly written about some bands from this era (such as The Doors, for example--but they aren't the band in question here). Certain items at the end have been redacted to prevent giving away the answer, but I will say that it was a trio.

UPDATE: Here is the front cover of this album. In case you're like me and you're still saying What? Who?, as Albatross correctly answered in comments, the band in question is Grand Funk Railroad. I plan on ripping this one eventually so I'll not say more about it now except that it looks like it's in exceptionally good condition for a used album.


P.S. Mao?

The Doors - Classics (1985, LP)

The last of the compilation albums that has anything that isn't redundant with everything else, it has a live version of "Roadhouse Blues" that isn't the same as the one included in the Box Set. Perfect rip.

I think that does it for the compilations. There's one other that I have, but I'm pretty sure it's 100% redundant now (that one made for quad systems).

One more Doors album to rip, but it's an odd one.

The Doors - Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine (1972, double LP)

I think the reason that I have some of the old out-of-print albums is because I was dancing around the fire trying to satisfy my curiosity with various compilation albums; eventually I gave up and just started buying everything.

This was an easy rip because there are only two songs on here that aren't redundant with all the CDs I bought later on: "Who Scared You" and "(You Need Meat) Don't Go No Further," that latter of which is sung by Ray Manzarek instead of Jim Morrison. Other than that, this album will just sit on the shelf as an out-of-print curiosity alongside that "Best of" album that was made for the quadraphonic system and that first "Greatest Hits" album. I never got 13.

A dream with a moose

Sometimes I wake up early in the morning and have a hard time getting back to sleep. When I do eventually fall asleep, it's not normal sleep. This is when I have my most vivid and weirdest dreams. Weirdest, because there is a certain level of reality within them that make them seem like they could actually happen.

So I was at this new school, looking for a new meter that no one had yet found. A road wound around the perimeter of the campus, and I was driving slowly around it looking for the meter. I saw several boxes but when I stopped to check, there were no meters in them. Eventually I came to the far back corner where there was a large fenced-in area with a small office at the gate. I got out and went into the office. Inside was a weird-looking older hippyish woman. I told her I was looking for a new meter and asked if I could walk around in the fenced area to look for it. "Oh sure," she said, "I'll go with you."

Inside the big pen I saw some weird deer with really long, curly red hair. "Whoa," I said, "I've never seen deer like that before."

"Those are red deer," she said. "That's where we get paraffin from."

"I thought paraffin was a petroleum by-product," I said.

"No," she answered shortly.

There was a few cows in the pen. And then I stopped abruptly when I saw...

"You have a moose in here?!"

"Oh sure," she said. "A moose...there's a bear lying in the shade under those trees over there...and there's a mountain lion in here somewhere."

"Somewhere?! Are you &^%$#@! crazy? You have a bear and a mountain lion at a school with a bunch of little kids running around?"

"Oh, they won't hurt anyone," she said. "They're just like big pets."

"Screw this," I said, "somebody else can find that $#@! meter."

One of the cows stalked me all the way back to the gate.

At one point we even had to pull-start it with a Datsun pickup

Interesting post at Two--Four. My dad's first tractor was an 8N, and we never had to take it apart that far, but we did a lot of work on it to keep it running. My dad's also had a front-end loader built onto it that someone had put on after-factory. We had to repair it once, and took it all apart. On putting it back together, it would still go up but wouldn't stay up. We discovered that we had missed a single bearing--a 3/8" steel ball whose entire purpose was to stop up the hydraulic line so that fluid wouldn't run back down until you told it to with the lever. So we had to disassemble the whole thing again to put that bearing back in.

Long day today. I woke up this morning to find I had a dead battery in my truck, so I had to take my wife's van to work (fortunately she was off work today), then got back home to work on the truck. Broke out the Dremel once again to cut off a badly corroded positive battery clamp and polish up the cable, took the battery to NAPA where they tested it and pronounced that it had only 7 cranking amps out of a max of 540: it was graveyard dead, but I got about as much life out of it as I had expected. Installed a new clamp and bought a new battery and everything is copacetic* again. Tomorrow I'm going to install a new ground clamp just for bunkum.

But I still had the energy to edit the last couple of songs on that Doors album and now I think I'll kick back and watch Warehouse 13.

*Copacetic passed the spell-checker? How about that.

The Doors - Alive She Cried (1983, LP)

Of course as any self-respecting Doors fan I have some albums of theirs that overlap. This isn't one of them. When I bought this, I already had their "official" live album Absolutely Live on LP (and recently bought the CD re-release which has a couple more songs on it). This is another live album that was made from some lost tapes. The story of the tapes is in the liner notes on the inner sleeve. What it boils down to is that some live recordings were made and then lost sometime in the 70s. A song that the surviving Doors knew was on those lost tapes was heard on a European TV show a few years later and they set about to try and find those missing tapes. They finally tracked them down in a warehouse that was being used to store a bunch of stuff; these tapes had been put in that warehouse but never cataloged--just a box sitting there and no one knew what was in it.

So this album was made from those tapes and they made sure not to include anything that was already on Absolutely Live. It's hard to believe they didn't have a live version of "Light My Fire"* on that album, but they didn't, so there's one on this album.

So here's the whole track list:

Gloria -- This is the one by Van Morrison. They played it a lot in concert but never put it on an album. The interesting thing about this track is that it was recorded during a sound check before a concert, so it's essentially a live track without any audience noise.

Light My Fire -- Already mentioned. This version is a couple minutes longer than the studio version from their first album.

You Make Me Real

Texas Radio & the Big Beat -- A shorter version that was recorded still in the working-up stage before it was committed to an official album.

Love Me Two Times

Little Red Rooster -- A blues number that was not on any other album. This one also has John Sebastian (of The Lovin' Spoonful) on harmonica. He can really make that harmonica burn.

Moonlight Drive -- Robby Krieger's guitar on this one is really amazing. Longer than the studio version because it incorporates the poem "Horse Latitudes" within it. But really, Morrison could have just stood aside and let Krieger riff on this one the whole time.

This album is no longer available on any medium (except used or collectible), but all the songs on it were later included on The Doors In Concert.

Not a perfect rip, but very close.



*I heard one of those call-in shows back in the 80s with the three surviving Doors. Someone asked Robby Krieger if it bothered him that most people thought Jim Morrison had written this song instead of him. He said, "No...as long as they don't think José Feliciano wrote it."

Sunday notes

Today I finally finished the re-ripping project of "certain select CDs" to a higher bit rate, which turned out to be quite a few more "select CDs" than I had anticipated. Then I decided it was time to edit a couple more songs before checking a few blogs & FB.

I began backing up the records I've ripped to data CDs so I won't lose them if the worst happens--fwiw I have them all on an external hard drive anyway. Also backed up a bunch of other stuff that I don't want to lose but don't really want cluttering up my computer. I'm glad blank CDs are so cheap.

We had an amusing moment after buying the scanner yesterday--both my kids said that the store wasn't like what they were expecting. I asked them what it was they had expected, and they both described something cave-like and dark with computers lining the walls and shelves, no light coming from anything but the computer screens. I don't know how they got that impression, but I thought it was funny. I got it at the Altex on IH35.

Cool album art: Armored Saint - March of the Saint (1984)

I haven't ripped this one yet, and I might not at all, because the music isn't really my thing--plain old unsophisticated headbanger metal, but here is one I bought back in 1984 just because of the cover art. Click to enlarge. Front on the left, back on the right.

Winterkat - The Struggle (1985, EP)

This is one that doesn't have a Wikipedia entry and very little is to be found about them anywhere on the web that I can discern. They were from the San Antonio area, their correspondence address was a place on Blanco Road, and the album was recorded in Dallas. For a long time I thought this was the only thing they recorded but in poking around recently I did manage to discover that this was their second album, the first being eponymously titled and having similar though not identical cover art. Both records are short EPs; this one has a total playing time of around 17 minutes.

The music is good 80s pomp rock. There are three original songs, plus a cover of Hendrix's "Little Wing" and an obligatory 50-second Bach minuet. They sound like they were heavily influenced by Triumph. The problem with this record is the mixing. I'm not a professional sound engineer, or even an amateur one, but $#@! this sounds bad. The drums & bass completely drown out the singer; he sounds like he's singing from the back of the room. In many places they even muddy up the lead guitar, and I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen. On occasion there are harmony vocals, and the harmony just leaps out but as soon as it's back to the lead singer alone, he's banished to the back of the room once again.

Also, this is an album that I didn't buy in a record store. They probably weren't big enough to go through normal distribution channels, so they took records to various music stores. I bought this one at Stage Door Music in Seguin, which was a store that sold instruments, not albums.

So is it worth anything? I don't know. Some guy on Amazon is trying to sell what I think is their first album but his listing is so vague that I don't know for sure, asking $60 for a used one and I think he's living in a fantasy world. Rockadrome has their first one still sealed in the jacket for $35. AOR FM has some further information on it, but their listing is for a reissue with extra tracks--the one I have is the original issue with only 5 tracks. The SA ROCKS Blog has a video. If you snoop around enough you'll be able to find places where you can download this and their other album.

The rip was pretty close to perfect. And by the way I got a new scanner today and it's working great. This was the first album cover I scanned with it. It's a Canon LiDE 100.

The lundehund

I got an interesting comment on an old post from the Eponym blog. Readers who have been around long enough may remember the Maine mystery dog. Here's the comment:

In 2001 I moved to Maine from North Carolina and I sold a lundehund there, This dog had extra toes, just like a lunde, I believe I may have been the cause of all of this. Sorry to say it but I thought the man I had sold the puppy to would have it neutered not allow it to breed in with the regular dogs around the area, do a search on lundehunds and you will see what I am talking about

Wikipedia: Lundehund. The dog in the photo there has the same kind of odd snout that the dead dog did. I think this may be the solution to this mystery. I don't recall ever hearing any results of the DNA tests that were supposed to have happened.

On hold

No more album stuff until I get a new scanner. I've run into a couple of records that I can't find decent graphics for, not even good enough to use as display thumbnails for my own collection. I'm going to check Altex this weekend maybe, it looks like that's the only place around here to get a plain old scanner, since I'm never going to buy an all-in-one again.

Stryper - The Yellow and Black Attack (1984, EP)

This is one of my two Stryper albums. This was their first album, although only a shorter EP-length record with six tracks (total playing time about 24 minutes). It was later re-released after the success of their second album, Soldiers Under Command. The re-release had two extra tracks that were not on the original.

The original was released by Enigma Records, which as I have said before was a label that I always kept an eye out for. They didn't think Stryper was going to be very successful so less than 20,000 copies of the original were printed. My record is one of that limited run, which surprised me.

I never have been impressed by bands who have to incorporate the length of their hair and their ridiculous costumes into a description of their music's genre, but Stryper was different, being a Christian metal (of sorts) band and it was nice to hear that kind of music with positive, upbeat lyrics for a change.

Stryper is one of the very few bands who I have actually seen in concert. I have never been a fan of going to concerts; all those strangers crammed into such a relative small space gives me the creeps. But a friend and co-worker of mine back then wanted to see them when they came to San Antonio, and he wanted someone to go with him, so I bought a ticket and went. It was a decent concert, except the opening band (Heaven) completely sucked, and were just about the exact opposite kind of band that Stryper fans were going to enjoy or even tolerate. Their was an audible collective sigh of relief when they finally left the stage. Somebody somewhere really screwed up when they put those two bands together, most likely just thinking that since their name was "Heaven" they must be a Christian band too. Guess again.

Anyway this is perfectly good glam metal but I wasn't a big enough fan to stick with them for long because overall that kind of music generally isn't my thing. I got a pretty good rip on this except for one song that has a soft scratchy sort of sound at one point, but it's hardly noticeable unless I'm really paying attention.


Enclosed in the jacket there was also this promotional thing. The "record" part is transparent plastic, mounted against a cardboard backing which also supplies the graphic. It has a brief blurb by a member of the band (Shy) with brief excerpts from three tracks from their debut album Brave the Storm.

Marillion - Brief Encounter (1986, EP)

Sometime in 1986 I began to despair that Marillion were not going to release another new album that year, and I was right, but then this one turned up at Hastings and I snatched it up just like lots of other Marillion fans did because it was the only thing released by them that year. It had two new studio songs on it that I'd never heard, plus three live songs that I had heard (the studio versions of).

The two studio songs are "Lady Nina" and "Freaks," which were both released as non-album singles in the U.K. but had not before been released at all in the U.S. According to what I've read, this album was not originally released in the U.K. but still came to be somewhat in demand there because they released nothing else that year, and the live tracks had never been released anywhere before. "Lady Nina" is one of only two songs by them that I ever heard on the radio, the other being "Kayleigh" from Misplaced Childhood.*

This EP has a total playing time of right at 30 minutes. The three live songs are the title tracks from Script for a Jester's Tear and Fugazi, and a live version of "Kayleigh" since Misplaced Childhood doesn't have a title track. The album as a stand-alone is now out of print and vinyl versions such as this have become slightly collectible (there's one selling on Amazon now for around $16). It's available on CD bundled with their previously mentioned live album Real to Reel.

Perfect rip.


*My sister quite liked the Misplaced Childhood album as well. She named her daughter Kaleigh, leaving out the "y." Which meant that it was out of consideration for any future daughter I might have. But we came up with a pretty good name anyway.

Misc notes

I thought I would have another album ready for today, but ran into problems with my scanner and didn't get around to editing but one song. I keep getting some kind of hardware interrupt error. So I may have to go back to just using covers that I can find on the internet, which will be kind of a bummer. Until I can figure out the scanner problem.

Anyway, as I was looking for this particular cover art I came across a minor oddity. Seems there was this Christian metal band called Guardian (still extant, I believe) who did a complete re-recording of Stryper's The Yellow and Black Attack. You can see a picture of the Guardian cover here. They even reproduced the original cover art almost exactly.

So I've been working on a few EPs because I figured they would be relatively quick & easy to finish and I've been wanting to do them anyway. One of them is the Styper album mentioned previously, and in hunting down the cover art I found that I have not the re-release of it, but the original, of which there were only 20,000 copies made. Interesting.

A couple of nights ago I downloaded the Eagles' "Journey of the Sorcerer." It sounds so much better than my old tape version. I'm gonna have to download the whole album, or at least the songs that I don't already have on their "Best of" CD. Also I found that I do have their Desperado album, which is the one I wasn't sure if I had or not. Will have to rip it soon.

Here's another awesome metal band cover thanks again to Collecting Vinyl Records.

Kamelot.

Best of David Arkenstone (2005, CD)

Just got this in today from yourmusic.com. I know he looks like a cross between Yanni and Weird Al Yankovic and he has a ridiculous last name, but if you're into new age music, this is some of the best of the best. Great chill music.

Marillion - Real to Reel (1984, LP)

I hadn't planned on doing three in a row from 1984, and to be honest, I didn't buy this one as a new release because it just wasn't available around here when it first came out.

This was one of several Marillion albums to show up in local record stores in the wake of the relatively well-met Misplaced Childhood album of 1985. It's a live album, but different from most live albums in that it's a single record--just about every other live album I've seen is a double. I'm not usually one to buy a live album because I'm not usually interested in a live rehashing of something I already have the studio version of, but after all, this was Marillion, so it's different. Also this album has two songs, "Market Square Heroes" and "Cinderella Search," which I did not have the studio versions of at the time and that was even more reason to buy it. "Market Square Heroes" was their first single release but not part of an album. "Cinderella Search" was the B-side of their single "Assassing" which was from their second album Fugazi, but it was also not on that album.

Fish-era Marillion are still one of my most favorite bands and I have never tired of listening to the albums repeatedly. This album has some fantastic live keyboard work by Mark Kelly which just boggles my mind.

I had some trouble with this one, which was all the more frustrating because it's one of those records that I played only once in order to tape it. A second cleaning took care of all but very minor pops which I edited out easily, so I ended up with a perfect rip.

Metal bands have all the best album covers

This is the kind of thing I would buy (and have bought) just for the cover art, but only on vinyl so I could get a big album-sized version, suitable for framing.

via Collecting Vinyl Records

And now, a brief rant

About this show "The Office" that seems to be, or have been, such a big hit. Being the fan of Britcoms that I am, I attempted to watch the original when it was first being run on BBC America. I found it enraging and infuriating. I hated it so much that I would start channel surfing just to avoid the commercials for it. Last night I allowed myself to witness a few minutes of one of the American version shows and it stills enrages me.

You know all those things they exaggerate for purposes of satire? Well, I worked at a company where all those things happened, pretty much literally and without exception. It was not funny. It was very frustrating and extremely stressful. I had one co-worker who was driven to anxiety attacks so bad that she eventually couldn't even leave her house. The company ended up paying her disability. Another co-worker actually committed suicide. Yes, she killed herself.

It is wrong to sanction the behavior portrayed on that show by allowing it to be made into an alleged "comedy." One of the many things wrong with this country today is that such outrageous behavior is tolerated and even encouraged by the corporate culture.

During the few minutes that I saw last night, the boss played a joke on an employee by telling her she was fired for stealing a post-it note, then told her it was just a joke. Her reaction was to yell at him that he was a jerk. This was an inappropriate response. An appropriate response would have been for her to slit his throat right where he sat and leave his blood-soaked corpse there as a warning for the next sh*thead who would inevitably be sent down from corporate to replace him.

If you think this kind of crap is funny, there's something wrong with you. And that is that.

Dio - The Last in Line (1984, LP)

Like I said yesterday, another great album from 1984, and great albums were hard to come by back then. This is my only album by the late Ronnie James Dio but it's always been one of my favorites. Favorite songs from it are the title track, "Mystery" and "Egypt (The Chains are On)."

I used to go to sleep listening to this record. There are certain hard(er) rock artists who can do that to me, and that's not an insult. In fact music that I would find boring would never put me to sleep because it would be so annoying. There just seemed to be something about the music on this album that would fill my head and block out everything else.

Not quite a perfect rip, but so close that I doubt I'll be able to hear any flaws under normal circumstances.

"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one"

I beg to differ. Sometimes the flaw is so heinous that you might as well just grind that diamond into dust.

I was listening to this song today. "Young Enough to Cry" by Triumph. I like this song. It's a perfectly fine blues-rock ballad in the self-pitying mode. Nothing wrong with that. The lyrics are just fine, too, until...

I've known a lot of women baby
I've even loved a few
Some were good and some were bad
No one was just like you
Now they say I'm too old to get hurt in love
That ain't true
'Cause girl when you left me
You broke my heart right in two

CHORUS:
I'm too old to get hurt baby
I'm too old to get hurt baby
I'm too old to get hurt baby
I'm too old to get hurt baby
Oh but I'm young enough, young enough to cry

Now my head is spinning baby,
Just like a ferris wheel
Don't know what the matter babe,
I think I see
A girl so sad and alone
Can she be crying, just like me?

CHORUS

No matter how hard I try I can't shake it baby
My mind keeps drifting away
You couldn't see a good thing
When you had it in your hand, girl
Maybe it was meant to be another day

Are you sure I'm the heartless one, woman,
After all we've been through?
I gave you the best of my love, sweet hoochie-koo

Wait. What? Sweet hoochie-koo? Is that the best you could come up with? This would be a pretty good song if not for that one phrase. Now it just makes me giggle.

Metallica - Ride the Lightning (1984, LP)

First of all, PERFECT RIP!!!

I've been cleaning up all the stuff I had recorded, doing the easy ones first just to get them done so I won't have so much stuff in progress. I have discovered that having too many in progress at once means I don't ever finish anything. I should have realized this before, since the same thing applies to books, for me, at least.

So this is my only Metallica album, and I guess if you're going to have only one, this is the one to have. Not a single weak spot on it, and it's better now than it was when I bought it new in 1984.

One of my special favorites from this one is "The Call of Ktulu," and not because of the title. I almost always like the metal instrumentals better than the ones with vocals.

Another excellent album from 1984 tomorrow, I think. I don't think there would be much point to say any more about this one. You either like metal or you don't, I suppose, and if you like it you probably already have this one. If you like metal and you don't have it, then what the **** is wrong with you?

Eagles (1972, LP)

My first Eagles album was their first Greatest Hits on cassette, which immediately became one of my favorite albums. I don't remember if I ever got all of their old albums, but I still want to. My college room-mate had a record of The Long Run, which I listened to and even made a dub tape for myself, but I never cared for it a lot and I don't think I'll bother with it. However I do still have some holes to fill.

Anyhow, this is their first and it includes their three hits "Take it Easy," "Witchy Woman" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling." I like pretty much the whole album but I do think it has a couple of weak points (for example, "Chug All Night" is just one of those silly songs that doesn't do anything for me).

I also have a cassette of One of These Nights which I like a lot and am going to do a partial digital replacement for it. The hits from it are on that first Greatest Hits album, so I already have digital versions of those. The rest I plan on downloading one at a time from Amazon to fill in the full album.* My favorite piece from it is an extended instrumental called "Journey of the Sorcerer." They never did anything else like it as far as I know.

Recently the CD player in my truck started acting up. If I leave it without a CD in it, it keeps trying to eject a CD but since there's not one in it, it just keeps doing it over and over and I can't see the clock display when it does this. So I figured I'd burn a CD and just leave it in there all the time so I can still see the clock. I'm slightly worried now that it might eventually crash completely and leave me with a CD permanently stuck in it, so I'll probably only be using duplicate CDs. So to start with, I burned this album to CD and listened to it once last week. It sounded just fine. I got a perfect rip on this one.


*I just did this with The Doors' Strange Days. Four tracks from it are included on the "Band Favorites" disc from their 4-CD Box Set. I downloaded the remaining tracks from Amazon to fill it out.