Steve Young - Rock Salt & Nails (1969)

I have been looking for this album for a while now, since I first tracked down the origin of the song "Seven Bridges Road." Steve Young is the guy who wrote it, and originally released it on this album.

Of course it's out of print. It was later released on CD but even that is out of print and available only as a collectible import. It is not even available as an mp3 download from either Amazon or Rhapsody.

I was able to find the "Seven Bridges Road" from this album* on YouTube, but it was in mono, so my search continued. Also I wanted to hear the rest of the album if possible. Note: I might go ahead and upload a stereo version to YouTube before too long, just for kicks.

So finally I found it. If you click here, it will take you to a country music forum wherein one of the moderators made the entire album available via streaming. Naturally, due to my own peculiar obsession/hobby-horse, I used my equipment to record the whole thing and create mp3 versions of my own for repeated listening and future reference.

So, for anyone trying to find this album, just follow the link.


*I say "the 'Seven Bridges Road' from this album" because he re-recorded it a second time for a later album, but more about that some other time.

Man of Constant Sorrow and Other Timeless Mountain Ballads

A while back I was reading an article about the current state of "country" music, I don't remember where now, and this album cover was used at the top of the article. Unfortunately, the guy who wrote it spent his whole time ranting (justifiably, in my opinion) and never even mentioned anything about the album pictured.

So I looked it up at Amazon and it looked very interesting. I recently got it--having waited until I could order enough stuff at once to get free shipping. This is one I wanted to get on CD instead of just downloading because I wanted to get the booklet with any possible further information it might have.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have much, mostly just a blurb about how great the album is. However, it does have some photos of some of the people who recorded these songs.

The album is comprised of 20 tracks recorded by people who were probably not professional musicians in the usual sense, but that is not a comment on their talent and skill, I mean only that they didn't make a living by playing music.

These songs were originally recorded on 78 rpm records during the 1920s and '30s. One notable thing is that it also includes the first ever recording of the now popular "Man of Constant Sorrow." They cleaned up the old 78s quite a bit, but there is still some slight noise now and then, and of course they are monophonic.

I had never heard of any of these people before, and I'm familiar with only a few of the songs, and even those are quite different from any other versions I've heard.

Here's one of the photos that I like quite a lot. Earl Johnson (far right) and Family, 1915. Listed as Earl Johnson and His Dixie Entertainers in the track list. They do a version of "John Henry" which is titled "John Henry Blues."

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to digest the whole thing this evening as I had planned, because I've had to do some online preliminary shopping for a new cell phone. The females in my family seem to have a bad problem with destroying phones (both cordless and mobile) by getting them wet. So it looks like I'm going to pass the two cheapest phones down to wife and daughter, and get myself something nice and new. Maybe that will teach them to stop flushing phones down toilets and jumping into swimming pools with them, but I doubt it.

You can download the mp3 version for about $9, or buy a used CD pretty cheap. I got mine new because I love fighting through all that plastic wrap so much.

I think I'll have to do some research on these people and see if I can find out more about who they were. It should be interesting.

Christopher Cross (1979)

1979. A very strange and dark year. Only one real rock group in the top ten, but there was a lot of good music that year: Supertramp, Styx, Bad Company, Dire Straits, Cheap Trick, ELO. They gamely held their ground against the gradually diminishing but still overwhelming force of disco: Village People, Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, Gino Vanelli, G.Q. and the Gibbs brothers in their various permutations. Billy Joel was rapidly abandoning his roots, nobody knew what the h*** the Doobie Brothers were thinking, and Bob Seger had gone decidedly sentimental. Streisand and Diamond were everywhere with their bubblegum lounge music. And then late in the year, some guy from San Antonio who no one had ever heard of released an eponymous album. The following year, he cleaned up at the Grammies.

In 1979, auto tune was still being used to analyze earthquakes. Synthesizers were still analog, mostly, unless you wanted to shell out $20,000 for a Fairlight. You could still make great pop music with a soaring voice, some decent guitar licks, carefully crafted songs and a bunch of famous musicians backing you up. And there were a lot of them on Christopher Cross' first album: Larry Carlton, Don Henley, Nicolette Larson, Michael McDonald, and plenty more you can read about at Wikipedia.

Superbly polished pop, perhaps. Why did the album get as popular as it did? This was something my friends and I discussed in the olden days, and something I still wonder about. The music on this album is slickly commercialized, no doubt about it, but there's still an honesty about the songs that speak of just some guy going for it and dedicating himself to making it big. The album was full of earworms; even the songs that weren't hits would have you humming along with them.

Mr. Geppert is still putting out albums; he released his newest just this year. But he still looks like some guy you'd likely run into buying plumbing fixtures at Home Depot--not like a pop star. I wandered into other musical paths in the early 80s, and didn't follow him much after that, except to hear him on the radio, mostly with "Arthur's Theme" which didn't thrill me, so I never bought another of his albums.

I wondered how the album would hold up after 30+ years. I'm not sure modern ears are able to hear it in the same way we heard it back then--modern ears used to saccharin auto tune and the uniform blandness of modern pop, able to listen to such older music only "ironically." I must confess that I cannot speak of this album objectively; it played a huge part in the development of my own musical tastes during a time when I had stopped listening to "my parents' music" and began developing distinctive tastes of my own which have led me down a widely varying and fascinating road. I bought this album on cassette as a new release and wore it out. I've been missing it for a long time now.

Earlier today I turned on "Ride Like the Wind" and turned the stereo up much louder than usual. My daughter asked me why I had it so loud. "Because that's the only way to listen to this song," I told her. It was true in 1980, and it's still true.

The guy from the Dyer Electronics commercials made it big, and I still love his music. I think maybe I should see what he's up to nowadays.

Kasey Chambers - Little Bird (2011, mp3 download)

I have only a few tracks from Kasey Chambers that I've downloaded via a few free (legal) offerings, mostly from Amazon. When I saw this come up today for only $3.99 for the download I couldn't pass it up. The price below is for the CD, and the sale price for the download won't last long. Americana, I guess. I'm pretty sure you'll never hear her on any of the "country" stations around here, although you could hear her on KNBT out of New Braunfels. That's where I first heard her.

Remembrance - Fall, Obsidian Night (mp3 download, 2010)

Well, I said I was going to go in a completely different direction for my next album purchase, but I got sidetracked. I was doing some pseudo-random listening the other day and up came this track "The Omen" by a group called Remembrance. It was from the Metalhit Doom Metal Sampler that I downloaded a while back, and I remembered that it had been one of my favorite tracks from that collection. So I looked up a few other tracks on YouTube and decided to go for it.

Fall, Obsidian Night is a 2010 release from funeral doom metal band Remembrance. They're from France, but lyrics are (apparently) in English. As is usual with these kinds of vocals, I can't understand anything they're saying, but I don't really think of these vocals as lyrical vocals. I think of them more as a specialized form of vocalese. All the lyrics can be found online and, as expected, "place an emphasis on evoking a sense of emptiness and despair."

Instrumentation includes both electric and acoustic guitars as well as synthesizers. Both male and female vocals are used.

I love this music.

Here's the only purely instrumental track from the album, "Our Memories are Made of Stones."




The CD is available via Amazon but from third-party sellers and the prices are high. The mp3 download is quite cheap.

The Chameleons - Script of the Bridge (1983)

For some reason, this band's initial release in the States had them called "Chameleons UK," but their real name was The Chameleons. Wikipedia calls them post-punk. This is one of those albums that, if you hear something from it, you probably won't recognize it but you'll immediately think: 1980s. Or at least, early 1980s.

Back when I used to work at the pizza place and had several co-workers with whom I discussed music almost constantly, this was a group that everyone else referred to as "one of those groups Alan likes." Also included in this list was Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Shriekback and The Screaming Blue Messiahs (for example). I never actually got any of the Lemon Drops' albums, just for the record. And I'm still trying to replace my worn-out-beyond-listening tape of the Messiahs' Bikini Red, which included the immortal classic "I Wanna Be a Flintstone."

Seminal 80s. They didn't have great commercial success themselves, but were influential on later bands, most of whom I've never heard of (according to Wikipedia). This was their first album and the only one I ever bought, but then, I don't remember ever seeing any of their other albums of the 80s turning up in the local record store, either.

I just finished cleaning this one up today. One track had a dull pop that I had to delete to get it to sound okay. All other tracks turned out perfect.

Available as a 25th anniversary release on CD or mp3 download. This release has more music than the original, or at least my U.S. original, with about 57 minutes of music instead of the 37 on my record.

Marty Robbins - Marty After Midnight (1962, LP)

A few months ago my wife found this at some flea market or yard sale, and promptly brought it home and requested that I rip and burn it to CD for her so she could listen to it in her car.

Well, it took me a while. Mostly it was not in really good condition and had a lot of pops & clicks that I couldn't remove by cleaning. There were a couple of tracks that needed only minimal editing, and one track that was perfect, but mostly it took a lot of work and it took me quite some time to finish. But finally, I did.

This was kind of an odd one, to me. It's a collection of pop standards, some of which are also jazz standards (such as "Misty") sung by Robbins, who most people (including myself) know as more of a country/western artist.

So it turns out I kind of like it and I'll be keeping it in my archives for future listening, and I'll even add a couple of tracks to my general favorites list: "Misty" and "Summertime." The latter of which was the one perfect track with no pops. "Misty" did need some editing but it was good enough that by the time I finished with it, it also sounded perfect.

"Misty," as I have mentioned before, is one of my favorite songs, regardless of artist or style. "Summertime" is also good. That is, I like it but there's something about that melody that always makes me think it came from a horror movie.

I was thinking about uploading some of these to YouTube but I discovered that it is still in print, sort of. Amazon has CD copies of it, but only as collectors items from other sellers, which usually means I consider it "out of print." However, they also have it available as an mp3 download. So here's only a portion of "Misty."

Different, but nice.

Album update

Eagles: Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (1982)

James Young: City Slicker (1985)

I actually finished converting two records yesterday. I hadn't done any of this work in a long time, so I picked out two that were in good shape and wouldn't require much work, and two that were relatively close to being finished anyway.

Nothing really special here. I did the Eagles record so I'd have an option in case my Hotel California record has some problems. Also it has four tracks from The Long Run on it, and I don't have an probably will never get that one. And finally because it has "Seven Bridges Road" on it and I did want their version of that song. Someday I intend to get hold of all the covers of that song I can find and comparing them all, just for fun. I think I got this record as part of of the introductory offer for some record club back in the 80s because they didn't really have anything else I wanted.

The James Young record I bought at Hastings in Seguin as a new release because back then I was still a fairly big fan of Styx and I wanted to hear his "solo" work. I never heard anything from it on the radio and I guess there weren't any real hits from it. Nothing on it that sounds like it could have been a radio hit, to me. It has a couple of songs that will go on my big general favorites list, but nothing really great.

I've done a lot of free sampler downloading from Amazon lately and I took a break from building the big playlist to give them a trial listen. So far the only one that had anything I really liked was an EP from Dan Mangan called Robots vs. Indie Queens, especially the song "Robots." Also somewhat interesting is a collection from the industrial group Iszoloscope called beyond within and so on. But then I sometimes am in the mood for industrial and I realize that's probably not the thing of most readers of this blog.

There have been a few other downloads I'll probably get around to mentioning, but I want to listen to them more first.

Traditional Gospel Hymns (free sampler)

Just wanted to mention this collection which has proven somewhat interesting. Fifteen tracks, 8 of which are a capella and the other 7 instrumental. Well, I'm not a big fan of instrumental-only gospel music because it seems like kind of a waste of time and something of an oxymoron.

However, check it out, especially the a capella tracks which are all by a group listed only as "Savae." This is actually the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble. Their tracks on this sampler comprise about half of their 2007 album Revival Tonight!

Rhonda Vincent and The Rage: Taken (2010, CD)

Uh...now where was I? Oh yeah...

As I said before, this was one my dad & stepmom asked me to get for them, since I have a reputation in my family as "the guy who knows how to find and get things." Since the switch to digital TV, my dad has been watching a show on one of the alternate KLRN channels called WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. I don't have my TV hooked up to a regular antenna to pick up this channel, but I may have to do that just so I can watch this program. They discovered Vincent when she performed on this program.

When I looked her up and saw that she is a contemporary female bluegrass artist, I knew I would like her stuff too, so I ripped the CD for my own collection before passing it along to my dad. Rhonda Vincent is a singer and songwriter who also plays fiddle, guitar and mandolin. Her backing band, The Rage, all play traditional bluegrass instruments and some of them also provide backing vocals.

I don't know if any of these songs are old bluegrass numbers; I'm familiar with only one track. But heck, it's bluegrass with a female lead and sweet vocal harmonies so how can you lose?

The only track I was already familiar with is "Back On My Mind," which was a hit for Ronnie Milsap back in 1979 and continued to be played on some country stations well into the 80s. P.S. Back in those days I was a big Ronnie Milsap fan.

The only track I didn't particularly care for is the last one, which sounds like it was being sung by a couple of children. It's very sweet and all that, just not really my thing, and it's not really bluegrass.

Anyway, great album. Available on CD or mp3 download at Amazon, which has samples of all the tracks.

UPDATE: You can listen to Rhonda Vincent's appearance on WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour by clicking on the WoodSongs Archive Showlist. Just go down the list and look for her--she's been on there several times. Both video and audio-only podcasts available.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Beethoven's Last Night (mp3 download)

What do you get when some progressive metalists (is that a word?) create a tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven? You get this:


This turned up in my subscription for digital downloads from Amazon.com this morning and I figured, what the hey, can't lose for $2.99. I've been listening to it today, although I haven't had time to finish it (73 minutes long), and I like it. No Christmas music on this one; it's all based on Beethoven except for a little that's based on Mozart.

If you don't like bombast in your music, then you probably want to avoid it, but if you listen to any kind of metal at all you've probably developed either a liking or a tolerance for bombast anyway.

So yeah, I think $2.99 is a steal for this download. It comes with a "digital booklet" (pdf file) that I haven't read yet, one commenter recommended listening to the full album while reading along in the booklet at least once. I'll have to try that sometime.

A couple more from Juice Newton

Juice Newton: Dirty Looks and Can't Wait All Night.

I know I mentioned some time before that her first solo album to be noticed*, Juice, is one of my all-time favorite albums and has been since it was released when I was in high school. I also like her second album, Quiet Lies, although not as much.

These were her next two albums, and unlike the first two which I bought on cassette, I got these two on LP. I like both of these less than the first two but there are still certain songs on each that I will put on my general favorites playlist.

Both are still in print, and you can even buy Can't Wait as an mp3 download from Amazon, although Dirty Looks is available only as a double packaged with her following album, Old Flame. I was dissatisfied enough with Dirty Looks that I lost interest and quit following her after that.

Both rips were not completely perfect, but pretty close.

*Juice was actually her sixth album, but she had never had any radio hits from any of her previous albums, and Juice is when most people--including myself--suddenly noticed her.

Poor old Bach...

He's never going to make any money at this rate.


Couldn't turn down this one, even though I'm not a really big fan of classical. And I'm always ready for more "dark" music. Finally a full version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and Saint-Saëns "Danse Macabre"! I remember hearing a very abbreviated version of that used as the theme music for Jonathan Creek and I went around humming it to myself for days afterward.

One commenter said it totals 11 hours of music and slightly over a gig of disk space. Ye gads. The only drawback is, I betcha they don't have the files tagged with composer information. I'm going to be doing a lot of Wiki-ing for composers in the next few days.

Currently in progress

My wife came home with this record from a yard sale last Saturday, and "requested" that I convert it to CD for her so she can play it in her car. It's in better shape than most yard sale records I have come across; it's taking some work, but so far when I finish with a track it sounds pretty good.

Marty Robbins sings the old standard "Misty." By the way, this is one of my favorite songs, regardless of artist.



NOTE: After uploading this, I found that this album is still in print. So I've deleted the full version of this track and uploaded a partial edit in its place. I tried uploading it straight to Blogger rather than use YouTube for this edit, but it just would not upload.

Allegro 2011 Winter Sampler (free mp3 download)

Just wanted to recommend this sampler that I downloaded recently. Many of the free samplers I've downloaded from Amazon have given me the opportunity to wade through a whole lot of cr*p to find a few tarnished gems. However, this sampler is full of jewels. In fact, the Allegro label seems to put out some really good stuff and this is not the only sampler of theirs that I would recommend.

Anyhow, ten tracks by ten different artists, the first 7 of which fall firmly into the jazz category. Most are instrumental but track 2 is a very clever (both musically and lyrically) vocal piece by Lorraine Feather. I had never heard her name before, but I think I should have. There are other jazz artists on here who I have heard of, for example Freddie Hubbard and James Moody. All great tracks.

Now, come track 8 we find a piece that leans far more toward the ambient, by Deuter, who I have also heard of but not in jazz circles. A cool new age-y piece that still has a beat and isn't boring like a lot of that kind of music. I've come across a few other random pieces by him and I've liked them all.

Track 9 is by Jasbir Jassi. This piece would just be called "world music" by most folks in the U.S., but is more specifically--as I have just learned--Bhangra, a form of Indian dance music. Also cool.

Track 10 hits the jackpot with "The Rebel Piper" by The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. Bagpipes with modern instrumental accompaniment. A great, bright piece to close the album.

It's free, but good enough to pay for. I don't usually say that about Amazon free samplers.

Tommy Shaw - The Great Divide (mp3 download)

As I stated my intention to in a previous post, I downloaded this today. I'm still a little shy about buying albums by download, mostly because I don't get the booklet with all the info about the backup musicians and other niggling details. But, I did download it and am now just about finished listening to it. I love this album. As I probably said before, I bought his first two solo albums way back when, but then bailed out on any others because I thought they were kind of boring and nothing on them really grabbed me. But if he keeps putting out albums like this, I will keep buying them.

If you buy the download you get one bonus track that isn't on the CD. This is not hardcore, traditional bluegrass, but rather more of a "newgrass" kind of thing with some rock influences. If you don't like bluegrass to begin with, you probably won't like this album much. Likewise, if you want your bluegrass to sound exactly like it did 60 years ago, you probably won't care for it much either.

Great album. 5 stars.

Michelle Shocked - Short Sharp Shocked (1988, LP)

This is another one that I previously ripped from a duplicate tape. It was still in very good shape because I had played the record only twice, both times to record it to cassette, so this is only the third time the record has been played. Between those two cassettes, however, I've listened to this album many, many times.

That's an actual photo of her being strangled by a NYC (or was it an SF? I don't remember) cop who outweighed her by about 150 pounds during some protest or other back in her "skateboard punk rocker" days. You can read more about her bio online if you wish.

I first heard this album when I walked into Sundance Records in San Marcos one day (the old store on the square) and they were playing it in the store. It immediately struck as something I had to have, so I bought it that day and it has been one of my favorite albums ever since. This is the only one of hers that I bought on LP; the others I have are on CD. This was her first real studio album. There was one other before it, The Texas Campfire Tapes, which was recorded by a talent scout at the Kerrville Folk Life Festival and released totally as is (or as was), complete with crickets chirping and cars driving by in the background.

She isn't all that famous to the general public because her music is too country--and sometimes too folk--to played on rock stations but too rock to be played on country stations. This album is full of references to her childhood in east Texas. All the songs on it were written by her except for a cover of the country/folk standard "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore," which was written by Jean Ritchie and also covered by Johnny Cash.

Almost this whole album will go on my general favorites list. The modern CD release contains 2 discs, the first being the original album and the second bonus material.

The Rose Garden (self-titled LP, 1968)

Above is the cleaned-up version of the record cover. If you care to see what mine actually looks like, click the small one to the right.

This is another old album that I picked up at Yesterday's Warehouse back in the 80s for a dollar; also another album that had previously belonged to the Schertz Public Library.

I was surprised to find out as much about this band as I did on the internet. I guess I'm used to not being able to find out anything about old bands like this. However, The Rose Garden did have one hit that reached #17 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1968: "Next Plane to London."

They had that jangly folk/rock sound similar to The Byrds, with three-part vocal harmonies. The female singer, Diana Di Rose, sang lead on three tracks while one of the men sang lead on the other seven. There was one other male backup vocalist; when the lead singers weren't singing lead they also sang backup. One thing that's really worth pointing out here is Di Rose's throaty voice, which sat comfortably in the tenor range. That is, she had a very low voice compared to most women singers, and I like her voice a lot. In my opinion, the best songs on here are the ones she sang lead on. Only one song was written by members of the band; the rest were written by professional song writers who also wrote songs for many other bands & solo artists of the time. Also they covered one Bob Dylan song on this album (and back then, who didn't?). One other track which Di Rose sang lead on, "I'm Only Second," has a decidedly country theme to the lyrics, though not necessarily the music.

Below is a larger-res version of the back cover that should be big enough to read all the fine print. Click to enlarge.


Wikipedia page is here. This album is available at Amazon.com as both a CD or an mp3 download. My record cleaned up much better than I expected it to and I got a pretty much perfect copy of it.

Here's "Next Plane to London" on YouTube.



And here's "I'm Only Second."



The three "reviews" of it at Amazon are glowing, 5-star ratings. I wouldn't rate it that high, but then I was only 4 years old when this came out and I wasn't listening to that stuff much at the time* so it doesn't hold a lot of nostalgia for me. But it is a good example of southern California folk/rock from a band that most people have probably not heard of.



*Except for Peter, Paul & Mary.

Jimmy Smith - Live at the Club Baby Grand, vols 1 & 2

I knew that before Jimmy Smith became famous as a jazz organist, he was a pianist. So when I saw these listed at Yourmusic.com as "Live at the Baby Grand," I thought, cool, some recordings of him playing the piano! Not so. I didn't inspect their small thumbnail album art closely; if I had, I might have noticed that the actual title of this set is "Live at the Club Baby Grand." So I was slightly disappointed that it still isn't Smith playing the piano. However, it's still Jimmy Smith, so I wasn't very disappointed.

I'm still wondering if he was ever recorded playing the piano. As far as I have been able to determine: no.

Uriah Heep - Very 'eavy... Very 'umble (1970, LP)

I took a break from this for a while, but I'm getting back into it now, slowly. Here's one that I had previously ripped from a dupe tape, and this time ripped it straight from the vinyl.

I became sort of a big fan of Uriah Heep back in the 80s, but mostly of the albums Demons & Wizards and The Magician's Birthday. I already had both of those, and I think Return to Fantasy before I bought this one. This was their first album, released in 1970. The above graphic is one that I snatched from Wikipedia, which is what the original cover looked like. My cover looks like the one below:

It has that little faux page-turn in the upper left corner. The original was a gatefold cover. Mine is a 1971 Italian reprint that is just a standard jacket, no gatefold. This album was released in the U.S. as Uriah Heep with a completely different cover. See the Wikipedia entry if you want to see what it looked like. Also the U.S. release had one different track from the rest-of-the-world release, which you can also read about at the link. I don't think I've ever actually seen that cover anywhere except online. Mine has the original U.K. track list.

So anyway I listened to this a lot, too, and it has a few tracks that I would add to my general favorites list. I have a couple of latter-day (post-David Byron) albums of theirs, but they don't grab me like the old ones did.

This is one of those groups that Rolling Stone always hated. One critic famously said, upon the release of this (their first) album, that she'd have to commit suicide if "this band makes it," or some such stupid thing (I hope you passed away peacefully and painlessly, Melissa). I had already learned by this time that if they hated a group, it was worth checking out.* Although they had only what I guess we would have to call "minor success" in the U.S., they were and still are quite popular elsewhere. According to Wikipedia, they were the first western band to play in Soviet Russia after the introduction of glasnost. The current Heep lineup has only one original member, guitarist Mick Box.

This is one of those records that I recorded to cassette the first time I played it, and thereafter listened only to the cassette. So this is only the second time I've played the vinyl, and got a perfect rip after cleaning out 2 or 3 very minor pops.


Sound samples available at Amazon, and I'm sure you can find it on YouTube as well. I would suggest giving "Gypsy" and "Dreammare" a try.

*However, they were totally right about Black Oak Arkansas.