As I mentioned earlier today, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary with a lunch at one of her favorite restaurants (Ryan's in New Braunfels). On the way there, we stopped at an old haunt--Hastings in Seguin--with the idea of killing some time and maybe getting a CD or two while we were there. We found that they had a lot of CDs on sale for $3.99 each so we ended up buying about $50 worth of CDs. It was a great haul. Feel free to speculate on which on which ones were chosen by her and which were chosen by me.
Trucker's Jukebox Anthems -- A 2 CD set of "trucking" songs, although some of these must be loosely interpreted as such. The inclusion of Elton John in this set is somewhat puzzling to me, but I have yet to listen to it.
His Hand in Mine -- A collection of various country artists singing gospel songs. Note: This and the previous set were not to be found at freedb. Must be kind of obscure.
Stan Getz - Jazz Moods: Cool. One of two CDs I found in an apparent series of "Jazz Moods: Cool." A compilation of his pieces from the 60s and 70s. Includes "Misty." None of the others ring any bells just from looking at the titles.
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue and Jazz Moods: Cool. The first has been on my hit list for a while, and in fact I think it's in my queue at yourmusic.com so I'll have to check and delete it from there if so. The second is a compilation from the 50s and 60s with a couple of pieces I'm familiar with and several I'm not. Some minor overlap between the two.
Son House - The Original Delta Blues. From 1965. Another that I consider an essential addition to the collection.
Sonny Rollins - The Best of the Complete RCA Victor Recordings. This is a "best of" from a 6-CD set of his complete RCA Victor recordings. All recorded between 1962 and 1964.
Thelonius Monk - Monk. This is another one that's been on my list for a while.
Duke Ellington - The Best of the RCA Victor Recordings. Same kind of thing as the Rollins CD. Recording dates range from 1927 to 1967. A few pieces that I'm familiar with (for example "Take the 'A' Train") and a lot more that I'm not.
Jeff Beck - There and Back and Jeff. The first from 1980, the second from 2003. This doubles the size of my Jeff Beck collection and it's all great instrumental rock with some jazzy and bluesy stuff thrown in. I could buy anything by him.
LeAnn Rimes - Blue. Her first.
I'm still stuffed from that lunch. Topped it off with lemon meringue pie, apple pie and cheesecake, then topped off that desert with watermelon and strawberries.
It's mine & my wife's 17th anniversary today. We went out to eat at one of her favorite places--Ryan's in New Braunfels--then had a clearance-sale-CD-buying binge at the Hastings in Seguin. More details on all the new acquisitions later.
A long time ago I had bought a cassette repair kit, for splicing broken cassette tapes. I don't have it anymore, unfortunately. Today I was going to rip a single song, "Seven Bridges Road" from my old Eagles Live tape, and it broke as I was rewinding it back to the beginning of side 2 where the song is. I tried repairing it, but it was too much for me. So this one gets crossed off the list. I really only wanted two songs from it, the one mentioned and "Life's Been Good." The rest of it I can do without; I have all those songs on studio albums and the live versions don't do anything extra for me. So I guess I'll have to add "Seven Bridges Road" to my list of singles to download.
Anyway, this came up because back in the late 80s-early 90s there used to be a program on KZEP on Sunday mornings called The Tumbleweed Connection. I don't remember the name of the guy who hosted and programmed it, but it was two hours of Americana music (more or less) and I really enjoyed it. I would tape it every Sunday and then listen to the tape two or three times during the week at work, driving back and forth, etc. Occasionally he would play a song that I especially liked so I would record it again to a keeper tape and I eventually had 3 or 4 tapes full of these songs. Unfortunately all these tapes are gone now, and the notes I had made for them (artist, song title, etc.) are also not to be found. But I remembered a version of "Seven Bridges Road" that was not by the Eagles and which I thought was a much better version. I remembered this song, for some reason, earlier this week and spent a little time researching cover versions until I figured out that the one I was looking for was by Ian Matthews, which I downloaded yesterday.
Like I said, I think it's a better version. It's slightly slower and much "spacier" and has a certain haunting quality. And although on their live album they credit Steve Young, the writer of the song, with teaching it to them, the Eagles' version is obviously a copy of Matthews' version. It's from his 1973 album Valley Hi. I think I'll have to get this full album pretty soon.
Saw this thing I Write Like at Trailer Park Paradise and thought it might be amusing. I don't put much stock in such things internet, and this site looks mostly like a way to generate Amazon associate links. Anyhow...
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
Not sure why they had to italicize those words, but anyway, I realize that I am not a real writer and that my "style," if any, tends to fluctuate rather alarmingly. So I thought it would interesting to run a bunch of different stuff through it and see what turns up.
"Welcome to My World" -- Margaret Mitchell. Again. Odd.
"Tearless" -- Raymond Chandler. THE OTHER MASTER!!!
"Changeless Since the Day She Died" -- J.D. Salinger. I'm on a roll.
"The Pretender" -- Chuck Palahniuk. Again.
"Secondhand Blood" -- William Gibson. Now that's really cool.
But like I said, I don't put much stock in these things, because it seems that Herman Melville writes like Robert Louis Stevenson. Surprisingly, Stevenson writes like Stevenson.
If she looks familiar, it's because she's that woman who played "Micki" on Friday the 13th: The Series. And here she is, looking pretty much just like Micki but with more makeup, like that time she was possessed by that one artifact and it turned her into...no, wait a minute, that didn't really happen. That was just one of my, uh...fanfic stories. Yeah, that's the ticket.
So anyway I came across this at Yesterday's Warehouse* and bought it cheap, probably 50¢ or so. Because, well, because it was the woman who played Micki. It apparently had one minor hit called "One Night in Bangkok" but I've never heard the song anywhere except on this record.
She is a musician and songwriter as well as actor. She co-wrote two of the songs on this album. I listened to it a couple of times way back when and I remember being unimpressed. The record looks like it's in good condition, though. I might have to play it again just to see how it's held up. It's unusual to get a used record that looks this good, but then again I don't think it got much use to begin with. This is one of a handful of records I have with a disclaimer like this on the back jacket:
Amazon.com does have this CD, however it is titled One Night in Bangkok. My record has no title other than her last name, which she also used to identify herself in the TV series (her first name is Louise). Most of the comments there are favorable, so I guess I'll have to give it a new listen sometime soon and see if my opinion has changed from back then. Also the track list is different on the CD. The CD's tracks 1-4 make up side 2 of the record, while track 5-8 make up side 1.
So this started out to just be another "odd cover art" post, but I guess I'll have to post something about the music itself once I get around to listening to it again.
UPDATE: Okay, well, it's just plain old solid 80s electronic dance pop. Nothing to make it bad or good--it's just sort of there. I think my favorite from it is "Bored and Beautiful," which pokes fun at vapid teenage airheads, and which is probably going to be a timeless theme. Then again my favorite title is "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show," which is...a lovesong? I think?
As for the record itself, I got a near perfect rip without any editing, which is really amazing for a used record.
*Which means nothing to most people who read this, but quite a lot to two of you.
This must be from the inherited collection. I'm not saying I didn't buy this, because it's exactly the kind of thing I would buy just for the oddness of it--but I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it myself. This is an album of music for contest twirling--the contestants were to use it to practice for the actual contest.
I'm not sure why anyone who was not a twirling contestant would have bought this. Every time I look at this I think that someone, somewhere missed an opportunity at creating yet another weird anime movie.
In the early 80s there was a radio station in San Antonio with the call letters KLLS, which played what I think they call "adult contemporary" music. I listened to it a lot between the time that I got tired of listening to what was passing for "country" back then and before I started really listening to rock. Anyhow, one day as it was approaching Halloween they had an announcement that beginning at 10:00 PM on Halloween night they were going to play this album in full (Halloween being the time of the broadcast of the old Orson Wells radio adaptation). At the time, I had never heard of it, but they did a good job of talking it up and everything they said about it made me want to hear it.
So at ten o'clock on Halloween night I was ready, with my boombox set up with a couple of fresh cassettes, and I taped the whole thing. They did indeed play the album in full, with no commercial interruptions, which seems quite amazing now since this album runs more than 90 minutes. And since no one at any record stores had ever heard of this thing, those radio tapes were the only copy I had of it for several years. Any time I ran into someone with whom I'd have a conversation about music, I made it a point to ask if they had ever heard of it, always seeking information on it. No one ever had.
Jeff Wayne has an entry on Wikipedia that can fill in lots of blanks. As a quick summary here I can say that he is a musician (keyboardist and composer) who has written many theme songs and jingles but has produced only two albums, of which this is one. The other is a musical version of Spartacus which apparently is no longer in print and available only as a collector's item.
The mid-80s came along and one night at work I was talking music with a co-worker who had also become my friend (Babel and Brer might remember shift leader Greg) and I was surprised and delighted to discover that he had actually heard the album! A friend of his from high school had bought it and he had made tapes of it for himself but eventually wore them out.
More time went by, several months at least. One night at work he told me that he had seen the album at Hastings that day! He said he almost bought it, but he knew how badly I wanted it so he had left it there for me, and if I didn't buy it the next day he was going to go in and get it himself (if no one else had bought it, either). I thanked him profusely and hurried in the next day to buy it for myself. The one I bought was the only one on their racks, and it was never replaced after I bought it.
This is a rock musical adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, of course, and you can read all about it at the link. It was ground-breaking in its use of electronic orchestration. It is also unique, I think, in using rock music to adapt a classic of literature. I don't think there is any other album like it (except perhaps for the out-of-print Spartacus, which I have never heard).
There are several recurring motifs used throughout the album, and I have included clips of two of the most famous here. The first is an ominous-sounding monophonic synthesizer portamento that signals the approach or nearby presence of Martians: ominous. In this version from the beginning of the story there are background sounds like a heartbeat and crickets chirping (or something). Later versions have a repetitive staccato synthesizer pulse that follows the "ominous" sound.
I think the most famous motif, and the sound by which secret fans of the album recognize each other (joke--sort of), is the "ulla" sound. This is how it's spelled in the liner notes, but it isn't a very expressive spelling. I think a better way to spell it would be "OOOOHHHLLLLLLAAAAAAHHHHH!!!" The album credits state that this is performed by Jo Partridge and is "The Heat Ray," however whoever wrote the credits made a small mistake here. This is not the sound of the actual heat ray, but the sound the Martians howl as they are attacking. Click to listen: ulla. The last time we hear this sound, it is no longer a blood-curdling attack howl, but a ghastly death moan as the Martians lie dying from Terran diseases against which they have no immunity: ulla death.
Some of the performers on this album are still unfamiliar to me, though I know they are much more well-known in England: the aforementioned Jo Partridge as the voice of the Martians; Julie Covington as Beth, the parson's wife; David Essex as the Artilleryman; and Chris Thompson who sings one of the album's two singles, "Thunder Child." However other names are known to me and probably to you as well: actor Richard Burton plays the Journalist, who narrates the story in first person; Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues sings two pieces, "The Eve of the War" and "Forever Autumn," the latter of which was another single released from the album; and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy who plays Parson Nathaniel and sings a duet with Julie Covington in "The Spirit of Man." Here's another quick sound clip of Lynott as Parson Nathaniel: devil. I've been considered loading this one onto my phone and turning it into an interesting ring tone.
The album is long even for a double LP, running about 94 minutes total. I worked with special care on this one because I wanted to get a really good rip. This time I did something I hadn't done before: after I had finished working it over, I burned the wavs to CD so that I could re-rip them and go back and fix any new noise that I might have missed. Of course I then converted the wavs to mp3 so I could play them on my computer or mp3 player.
The album was later released on CD and still later re-released on enhanced CD with lots of extras. If any of this sounds even remotely interesting to you, I recommend that you buy it, and I don't think you will be sorry for it.
When I was a kid, this became my very first favorite album. It was a cassette that my mother had bought. In a previous post some time ago, I said that I thought I had bought a CD of it but hadn't. In combing through the shelves a few weeks ago, I noticed that I had bought the record. The one that I had tried to rip & convert before had been either my wife's or her mother's, and was in bad shape so I didn't get a very good rip. However my own record was still in quite good condition and I got a very good rip from it.
I also noticed that in the inherited collection there's the album that has "Some Days a Diamond, Some Days a Stone," which is another favorite of mine. I'll try ripping that one soon but I don't have very high hopes.
I still don't like "Sunshine on my Shoulders" though. And G-d help me if I ever hear "Annie's Song" again.
Cycle 11 today (Harry Wurzbach & Rittiman). I saw it coming earlier this week and knew that I wouldn't get to skip it this time. However, I made sure to warn two "superiors" that I probably wouldn't be able to finish a full assignment; that is, I would probably finish the full route, but not the partial that's always tacked onto it. I was right.
When I last did this route, in April, it took me 4 3/4 hours. That was 1/2 hour longer than the previous month and 45 minutes longer than the month before that.* I remember telling one of the supervisors that if it kept raining now and then, by the end of the summer it was going to be a 7-hour route. Today it took me 6 hours. So it looks like my prediction is on schedule. I had only about 20 minutes left to work on the partial route before I had to go back to the office.
In case anyone wonders, I am allowed two 15-minute breaks and one 45-minute lunch. I usually don't take any breaks or lunch, so I can finish sooner. On a day like today I took my lunch. It's almost impossible for someone in my line of work to take their 15-minute breaks, unless you just want to sit down and not move for 15 minutes, and there wouldn't be much point in that.
So anyway I decided that today's hard work justified cutting open my last stash of Bayou Night. I tore off a couple of hunks and re-sealed it. This is still my favorite pipe tobacco.
*I don't remember all these details. I have a small notebook that I keep this information in. It's helpful, sometimes.
After all this time and all the publicity, all the movie & TV treatments made to these books, all the public commentary on and about them: if you still can't make up your own mind if you should read them or not, then why in the hell are you asking me?
I'm sure this album of duets by Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell is chock full o' perfectly fine vintage rock and roll. But for some reason I find this cover art frightening.
Okay, this is not weird cover art. I just wanted to share it with you. Above is the front cover. Below is the pertinent selection of the back cover. Click to enlarge.
There were times this week, especially Friday morning, that I felt it was one of those weeks when I should be thankful that I survived without injury. The alleys on my cycles 5 and 7 are getting dangerously bad. Seven is the least worst, because it only has about 100 alley meters out of 475 total or something like that. Five is worse, with around 250 alley meters out of about 450 total. Last month on the cycle 5 I painted the snot out of everything to mark the meters. The brush is so thick that the fences are too hidden to paint, so many times I just painted the brush or even the grass on the ground. I'll probably have to paint it again next month, because the paint doesn't stick too well on vegetation.
In going through my digital collection I suddenly realized that I had never purchased The Doors' Strange Days on CD. Don't know how I overlooked that one.
I finished cleaning up The War of the Worlds this morning. It will probably be a few days at least before I say any more about it, because I want to make a few more sound clips and get them uploaded before I write it up.
In looking for a few more odd album covers today, I came to regret the passing of my old sources of very cheap, obscure used records. It would be nice to be able to browse them again just to look for weird cover art.
I wonder whatever happened to all that stuff left over when Yesterday's Warehouse closed down?
So I've posted something album-related every day this week, I think, but don't get used to it. Anyhow here at last is my Official Post on Attila. This Wikipedia stub has one paragraph that tells you pretty much all you need to know.
They released only one album, Attila, in 1970, later reissued by CBS Inc in 1985. Attila is often selected by critics and other music journalists as one of the worst rock albums of all time, but also receives a significant amount of praise from people who normally would not listen to Billy Joel. Joel himself has gone on record as describing the album as "psychedelic bullshit".
I fall into that latter camp of "people who normally would not listen to Billy Joel."* The album is interesting as an experiment into a 2-person power trio, if you know what I mean. It's quite obvious that Joel's voice is not suited to this kind of music, however in my opinion his organ playing is really good and for me bears up to repeated listening. Click the following link (previously posted) to hear a 40-odd second sound clip of his organ playing: Selection from "California Flash".
The lyrics are generally fairly stupid. As an example here is another piece (full song, lo-fi, previously posted) called "Revenge is Sweet."
I don't know what the original release label was for this record, and to me the most astounding thing is that it was ever released at all. I think someone must have had something on somebody to get this thing pressed on vinyl. The version I have is the 1985 re-release by Back-Trac Records, which is a subsidiary of CBS. I'm sure this re-release was one attempt to capitalize on the Billy Joel fever that inexplicably gripped the world in the mid-80s.
Oh, I should mention that this album has two instrumentals, so not every piece has vocals.
What genre is this stuff? I call it metal, or at least proto-metal (which would make it ore?). If you can accept that music can be metal without guitars, then it's metal. If you can't accept that, then I leave it to you to decide what it is on your own. There are parts of this album that remind me of both Emerson, Lake and Palmer and early Uriah Heep (like from the Very 'eavy, Very 'umble era).
So here's something I haven't posted yet. The liner notes. This is where it gets really good, and I've uploaded a large enough version that you should be able to read it, I think. The notes are so pretentiously over-the-top that they are just hilarious. "He...only sweats two things: perfecting his sound and South East Asia" still cracks me up.
Time has passed and it is now obvious to all that Billy Joel had much bigger and more commercially viable things ahead of him. Three years after this album was released, he was the Piano Man.
*I used to have a cassette of Glass Houses. I thought the album as a whole was pretty lame, except for one song which is still a favorite of mine and is certainly my favorite Billy Joel song: "You May Be Right."
I got rained only a little today; we had a very easy route and I finished early, picked the kids up from Grandpa's house where they were making sour milk sugar cookies from an old family recipe (had a few--don't let the "sour milk" part throw you--they're awesome), had a long nap, watched some 'Allo 'Allo from the latest Netflix DVD, and am now listening to a new addition to my CD collection.
So today has been an above-average day.
Back in the 80s when I was a pizza delivery guy, a co-worker and fellow driver had their Declaration CD which I thought was awesome. He loaned it to me and as was my wont, I taped it and eventually wore the tape out. Went looking for it somewhere and couldn't find it, but I did find their Electric Folklore Live which I bought since it had a couple of the Declaration songs on it. I still wanted a really good collection of their stuff and when I saw this at yourmusic.com I put it in the queue.
My only gripe with it is that it has the single versions of pretty much all the songs on it. The album versions were often longer. But I guess if they had used the album versions they couldn't have put as many songs on it. 21 songs in all for a total playing time of 76 minutes, so they packed this one as full as it would go. I never understood why these guys weren't more famous than they were. They were often compared to U2, but personally I'd rather listen to The Alarm than U2 any day.
I might still have to download certain album-length tracks from Amazon just to have the full versions. But this one is still a great example of 80s music that did not suck.
click to enlarge (in case the small version isn't sanity-blasting enough)
Witness Jimmy Milligan and Betty Sue Olsen. Just two kids looking for a night of fun, a night of dancing, in a place new and exciting. They took a road they had never been on before, to a little place that serves burgers and malteds all night long and the jukebox is always free. It's a friendly little place not far away and just inside...the Twilight Zone.
See his mouth drawn back in a rictus of unspeakable horror. See her blank gaze, struck numb with a terror from which there is no relief nor recovery.
This is another inherited record. Back in the ye olden days certain record companies would record a bunch of moderate hits using unnamed studio musicians and release records like this. So no, you're not going to get "Another Saturday Night" by Sam Cooke or "My Heart is an Open Book" by Carl Dobkins, Jr. You're going to get a bunch of lame covers by a group of perfectly adequate studio musicians who did the dirty work and never got credit for it.
Just in case you missed it in the big version above, here is a cut-out to highlight what someone once wrote on the cover.
Other than the minor scratches that come with a record of this age that hasn't been well cared for, there is nothing physically wrong with it. So I can only speculate on what the person who wrote that meant.
If that cover art isn't a picture of two lost souls suffering eternal damnation in their own special kind of hell, then I don't know what it is.
I don't know about that for sure, but it's quite old. I saw this clip as part of a documentary about Count Basie that aired on Ovation last night. The singer is Jimmy Rushing, who was part of Count Basie's orchestra during the 30s and 40s. Okay, it's in black & white, the music is swing blues (jazz) and it's around 70 years old, but otherwise it bears all the marks of a modern music video. Watch it see if you don't agree.
When I bought this album around '84 or '85 there really weren't any good ways to get further information on groups and albums. I think I must have read a little about them in the old Rolling Stone Record Guide which I had read from cover to cover in the early 80s.
So most of what I know about Petra I have learned only recently from reading online sources. The most significant thing about them is they pretty much created the genre of Christian rock.
Beat the System came out before "contemporary Christian" music had really established itself and ruined popular Christian music forever. This was easily their most popular album which is probably why I came across it at Hastings. They changed their sound quite a lot over the years, always trying to stay current with popular sounds (which you can interpret different ways) and this album has a very 80s electronic sound but with a much harder edge than stereotypical 80s pop. The lead singer at this time* has a voice that I would compare to Rik Emmett (of Triumph) in range and timbre.
Each song is referenced by a scripture from the Bible and the album is overtly Christian in theme. So if that turns you off, you won't like it. A couple of tracks (I'd say the first two for sure) have themes that could be interpreted in a more secular way of the individual standing against the "system." This album has one song that proved to be very controversial called "God Gave Rock and Roll To You." Heh. Another song called "Witch Hunt" criticizes so-called "Christians" who spend all their time "witch hunting" instead of applying themselves to their "Gospel labors" as they should.
I probably played this record only once when I bought it, at which time I recorded it to cassette and listened only to the cassette after that. This time my old habit paid off and I easily got a pretty much perfect rip. I have only one other album of theirs, but I bought it used and I don't think it will be in as good shape. So really, this is the only album of theirs I've heard so far, and I can't comment on any of the others.
Amazon has sound samples of all tracks.
*They had several through the years, including the guy who used to sing for the popular rock group Head East after he converted to Christianity.
This is not one that I would consider strange or weird really, except that it has some images specific to San Antonio and is a reminder of the olden days when KTSA was a Top 40 station. I did find some information about this and related records at this Take 6 Album Discography.
Take-6 Enterprises, Incorporated, was located at 6565 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Take-6 issued albums exclusively for radio stations to use as promotional items, giveaways, or sales. Occasionally they were sold in stores, but only locally. Since the albums issued were all local items not meant for national distribution, Take-6 used the opportunity for a huge overlap in songs from album to album, with Take-6 licensing a relatively small number of songs and reissuing them over and over. The albums themselves were not reissued per se, but the songs were mixed and reordered so that two albums may differ only by one or two songs, although the song sequence was quite different. Album cover art was reissued, however, as several of the albums have the same basic cover art, modified to meet the needs of the particular station, even to the extent of working drawings of the deejays into the cover scenes.
[...]
Since Take-6 albums were issued in limited quantity only to certain locales, they are difficult to find today. Since they were manufactured for radio stations, they did not show up in standard references such as Schwann Catalog.
If you follow the link and scroll down to view the various variations on cover art, you can see that the KTSA version is basically identical to the KROY, KDWB and KIRL versions except that images of the Alamo and the Tower of Americas have been added. The majority of these albums all used the same elements in their cover art but the elements are arranged differently. Also, further toward the bottom of that page you can see that this record was issued for KTSA another time with entirely different cover art, which looks to me like someone was trying to imitate an R. Crumb comic.
No specific year on this, but the songs are all rock & roll hits of the 60s with a couple of tracks venturing into the more commercially accessible boundary of psychedelic rock and maybe a couple more that could be called folk-rock. A full track list is available at the link.
I haven't listened to it yet, but looking at the record I'd say this one isn't in good condition and so even though it's a relative rarity I doubt if it's worth anything.
Today I went through the shelves and grabbed a few of what to my perceptions are "odd," "strange," or perhaps even...but no, I don't think I quite have anything "bizarre" that I know of. These records were selected not for the music on them, but for the strangeness of the cover art. I thought I'd go ahead and just get this one out of the way. Note: This is something from my late mother-in-law's collection.
Steam was a pop-rock music group best known for the 1969 number one hit song and perennial favorite "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye." The song was written and recorded by studio musicians Garrett DeCarlo, Dale Frashuer, and producer/writer Paul Leka at Mercury Records studios in New York City. The single was attributed to the band "Steam" although at the time there was actually no band with that name. Paul Leka and the studio group recorded the first album.
So, if you've ever been afflicted with that song and I'm pretty sure at one time or another you have, this is where it came from. I found this passage from the above link particularly amusing:
To make the song less palatable to DJ's, they lengthened the song with a repetitive chorus of "na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye". Nobody believed that Na Na was worth anything and since neither Leka or DeCarlo wanted to have their names on it, the song was attributed to a non-existent band that they named Steam.
And they used this song for a throw-away B-side. But even though they intentionally tried to make the song even worse, some DJ decided to flip it over and play the B-side, requests for it came pouring in, Mercury noticed it was getting airplay and spent $50,000 to buy 100,000 copies of their own single to make sure it went onto the Billboard charts, and...
By the beginning of the 21st century, sales of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" had exceeded 6.5 million records.
I've listened to side 1 and the rest of the songs on that side are the same kind of bland early-70s bubblegum pop. The last song on side 1, "Love and Affection," even throws in an occasional "na na na na" to echo the hit song that begins the side.
I hope you'll allow me the luxury of not listening to side 2.
Did you know that some CDs are encoded with additional "breaks" within tracks? Long ago I had CD player that, like all other players, displayed the "track" number. However, it also displayed a small Roman numeral to show which section of the track was being played, but only on certain CDs. At that time, in my collection I had Beethoven's complete symphonies and a couple of other classical CDs, and these extra breaks were displayed to show which section of a symphonic movement was being played. The only non-classical CD I had at that time that displayed these extra breaks was 2112 by Rush.
I don't have that player anymore and no other player I've had since then had the ability to display these internal track breaks, so I don't know if any CDs I've acquired since then have this. Anyway upon recently re-ripping 2112 for encoding at a higher bit rate, I ripped "side 1" to wavs and manually broke it into its separate internal breaks before encoding to mp3 so when I'm listening to my Rush collection on shuffle play it doesn't play the whole thing at once. Which I think is cool.
I threw something together for supper tonight that turned out pretty good. Having spent the entire day soaking wet since I got caught in a downpour at 7:15 AM, I wanted a hot meal with a lot of body, but I wanted something slightly more interesting than hamburger helper. (Also: I hate cooking.)
So I made some "Spanish rice" flavored Rice-a-Roni, browned a pound of hamburger in another skillet, then mixed it together along with a can of Rotel and let it simmer for a while (you know, "until the rice is tender").
Son and wife (daughter is away at camp this week) came home with the DVD of that Percy Jackson movie.
Pretty much butchered traditional Greek mythology, but I didn't expect much else.
P.S. It's a little-known fact that the gaze of Uma Thurman can turn one to stone. Fortunately, both her eyes have to focus on their target at the same time, which rarely happens since they're on opposite sides of her head.
I was off work yesterday (vacation day) so I didn't do much of anything except catch a few movies on the free HBO weekend DishNetwork was having.
Aliens in the Attic -- Watched this one because I knew my son would like it, and he did. Not much of a movie but okay for kids. Also that chick from that Disney TV show is all grown up now. The scenes with Doris Roberts doing Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon-style karate were pretty cool.
The Imposter -- Sigh. Let me make it clear in case I haven't already that Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite authors (often referring to him as The Other Master). But a great many of his stories have the same basic theme, and it seems that all the stories Hollywood picks to make movies from are the stories that use that theme*. So I watched it, but I knew how it was going to end pretty much from the minute it started. For some reason I've always like Gary Sinise though. First thing I ever saw him in was a stage version of The Grapes of Wrath that was shown on PBS many years ago--an odd version which didn't use any props whatsoever. He played Tom Joad, of course. I was so impressed with his performance in that play that I've always kind of kept an eye out for him. Also Rose of Sharon's expression as the play ended was indefatigably haunting.
Land of the Lost -- If you're a purist for the original show, don't watch it. If you have no time for extremely low-brow "comedy," don't watch it. But as a farce, I enjoyed it and it had its moments, especially with Will Ferrell playing his totally clueless genius dimwit character. The "it's a walnut" scene had me cracking up and the ending was great. Also Will's reaction to Marshall riding the T-Rex was hilarious. I've added the DVDs of the original series to my Netflix queue and am looking forward to seeing those again (also my son is REALLY looking forward to it). I was unaware that the series had been rebooted in the early 90s until just recently when I was reading about it at Wikipedia, but it appears that DVDs of the reboot aren't available.
*If you've seen Total Recall you know what theme I'm talking about.
Had a setback with War of the Worlds. Side 1 had two skips on it, one physical and the other digital (must've been a momentary computer problem) which required extra cleaning and re-recording. So I'm going to have to do it all over again. I'm being very picky to get this one as perfect as possible.
Anyhow, here's a quick clip from Side 2. Should make a pretty cool ringtone.
I hadn't gotten around to commenting on this recent LP rip. Not that it's important or anything, but I know there may be a couple of you who knew me in a past life and who are still slightly interested in my history.
Anyway, I looked this one up to see exactly when it was released: April 1982. So it was released the month before I finished high school. I was completely unaware of it until I began college that fall, so I always think of Toto as "college music." I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it until at least 1983, and this would have been among the first actual records I ever bought (as opposed to albums on cassette, which I began buying several years before then).
And I'm not sure exactly why I bought it, but it must have been because of the song "Africa." I'm fairly certain this was purchased at the ACU Bookstore when I was going to school in Abilene. I'll tell you one thing for sure: I did not buy it because of the song "Rosanna."
The college radio station played that song so much... I had mental pictures of the student announcers sitting there frantically checking their watches and screaming at each other ohmygodit'sbeenlikefiveminutessincewelastplayedrosannafortheloveofgodplayrosannaagainQUICK!!!
So...I will definitely add "Africa" to my general favorites list, and probably even to my special favorites list. "I Won't Hold You Back" and "Make Believe" will also go on my general favorites list, and maybe even a couple of the others after I've listened to it again. But "Rosanna" will never go on there. I got so sick of hearing that song almost 30 years ago that I still haven't recovered from it. They must have run that song 30 or 40 times for every one time they played any of the other three singles.
Ripping results were okay. Most of the tracks turned out fine after some editing. "Hold You Back" had some kind of foreign material stuck to the grooves that required extra cleaning before it could be ripped. Unfortunately (and ironically), "Africa" had damage to the grooves that I couldn't work around and in order to have my favorite song from this album, I had to buy the download from Amazon.
Somehow I managed to get lucky enough to not do my regular Cycle 11 route again, which makes two months in a row. That one thing made the whole week a lot easier.
As shown in the previous post, my 9-year-old son (who recently became a Bear) went to a Cub Scout day camp this week, had loads of fun and got a lot of things accomplished. They did not only a lot of BB gun shooting, but also archery (and now of course he wants a bow...will be checking into kid's bows for a Christmas present). He kept his targets, which will go into a box of other mementos I'm keeping for him.
The nagging cold I had last week settled itself in my throat and has given me slight laryngitis, but when I can speak it has changed my voice from a tenor to a mellow bass. It's always fun for me to exploit an illness like this just so I can hit the low notes for a change.
I changed my tactics in LP ripping lately. Instead of focusing solely on one album at a time until it's completely finished, I have about a dozen in progress so I don't get listening fatigue just listening to one artist. I even finally started editing the War of the Worlds today, but I don't think I'm going to break the sides into separate tracks. They all segue into each other with no breaks in the music and a lot of it doesn't really work as stand-alone tracks anyway. I will probably try to separate out "Forever Autumn" and possibly "Farewell Thunderchild" for my favorites list but otherwise leave it intact. It looks like I'm going to have to manually fix all the pops in the narrated parts; I have discovered that Richard Burton's voice distorts easily when run through Goldwave's pop filter.
In my ongoing quest to find the best ice chest for work, I have purchased one of those 12-quart "Ice Cube" chests from Igloo which Dollar General has for $15. Significantly larger than my old chest, but still small enough to fit where I need to put it. I'll be able to carry quite a lot of cold water and Gatorade, and on certain days when it's not so hot I can substitute a couple of cans of soft drink for Gatorade, or maybe a V-8 which I like to have with my lunch sandwich. I tried it out already and I plan on packing it with two 32-ounce bottles of cold water, two 20-ounce bottles of ice to keep it cold and drink the melt if I run low on other water, four 12-ounce bottles of Gatorade and two sandwiches plus even a banana or something like that. Plus, during the hot weather like this I carry a 2-liter hydration backpack (not an actual CamelPak but one of those that Wal-Mart sells). The new chest also has a small lid compartment where I can stash a couple of energy bars or something like that that doesn't require refrigeration.
I wrote about ripping Tony Carey's album Some Tough City a while back. Here's his video for "A Fine, Fine Day" which is from what I think of as the golden age of music videos. I never had any time for any of those "concert footage" videos; I think they're just boring. A video should tell a story, although not necessarily the same story as the song. This is one that follows the song.
I saw her again. This time she must have seen me coming, because she met me with a bottle of cold water. Completely bare from about the hip joint down. Painted on "Egyptian" eyebrows. About 4 inches taller than me in her bare feet. She must buy Nair by the gallon. Egad.
Can you spot the pop in this screen shot? It's quite obvious even without hearing it.
It's that sharp vertical mark at slightly less than the 4 second mark in the left channel (the green one). Now here's a zoom-in on that pop.
Click to enlarge. If you look at the bottom part of the shot you can see some time information. This pop occupies less than 1/1000th of a second. Seems like something so transient wouldn't be so annoyingly obvious. This kind of pop is easily eliminated by Goldwave's pop filter.
If I had snapped this photo one second later, you would have seen nothing but tongue. So, yeah, I had to wipe deer spit off my phone. Not many people can claim they've done that, I guess.
This guy had to be bottle-fed as a fawn, so he's very tame.
Anyone want to know all the stuff I do to rip LPs? Didn't think so.
In the olden days I used my wife's inherited Zenith stereo (which, btw, can play 78s!*) plugged into the computer via a device called an iMic. Although the iMic eliminated a lot of noise, since it inputs into the computer via a USB port, the stereo itself was really noisy. It's also quite old, and the left channel had a tendency to drop out quite frequently. So a while back, as you may recall if you've been reading this blog for a long time, I bought a USB turntable. It's not audiophile quality, but it's good enough for me.
The software I use is Goldwave. I tried a few other audio programs, but Goldwave is the one I really liked and eventually bought. So after cleaning the record with some stuff called GruvGlide, I play it and record a whole side at a time into a big wav file. I break this file into individual tracks and more or less give them all a fairly uniform beginning and ending silence, and save each of the individual tracks as separate wav files. This is not always the case, but it is for all "normal" albums.
Following that, I run a batch with Goldwave that runs each wav through a hum filter which eliminates pretty much all the hiss & rumble you get playing records, then it normalizes (or maximizes, in Goldwave's terminology) each file and saves them all as new wav files in a different directory.
After that, I turn the volume up some and listen to each track all the way through, carefully listening for pops. In most cases, when I hear a pop, I stop the playing and select just a brief section before and after the pop (including the pop) and run Goldwave's pop filter on that selection. Most of the time, this eliminates it, although sometimes it isn't quite as simple as I've made it sound--sometimes the filter itself creates an artifact, or a new pop. Sometimes it doesn't work well enough--or at all, so I "zoom in" on the pop until I'm viewing just the split second that it occurs and manually redraw the sound wave to eliminate the pop. This also (usually) works well. Sometimes there's a noise buried so deep in the music that I can't pinpoint it; in this case I will try to delete the fraction of a second in which the noise occurs, and if this doesn't work I just give up and go on. I've found that I can delete up to about 0.05 second without making it sound weird (sometimes more, but if you get close to a tenth of a second you will probably hear it). Most pops occupy much less time even than that--the main problem is pin-pointing them. Most of the time, I'm listening to these wavs at a higher volume level than I do for "enjoyment listening," so when I turn the volume back down to my normal level, I can't hear the noise anyway.
You may wonder why I don't just pop-filter the whole track at once. Well, I tried this when I was first starting out, and learned that it doesn't work as well that way. For one thing, it reduces the effectiveness of the filter when it's run on too big of a selection. For another thing, it tends to create distortion. The distortion is especially bad when filtering music that's made mostly with acoustic instruments such as jazz or classical (and by "acoustic" I am including the human voice). It works much better on pop/rock and so forth that use mostly electric or electronic instruments. I don't know why--it's just something I've learned.
When I think I've done all I can I save the wav file again and go on to the next one. When I'm done, I batch convert this directory of cleaned up wavs into mp3s using Goldwave. Then I use a little freeware program called MP3 Tag Tools to tag all the files properly. This includes tagging each file with an embedded graphic of the cover art. By "embedded" I mean it becomes a part of the mp3 file itself. I started out just snagging thumbnails from Amazon or Wikipedia, but I wasn't always happy with them and many times I couldn't find the exact art I was looking for, so lately I've been scanning the covers and resizing them down to a 400x400 pixel graphic. Of course my scanner isn't big enough to scan a whole record cover at once, so it takes me 4 passes to stitch all together to create the full cover.
I started out saving all the mp3s at 128 kbps, which is considered "FM radio quality" and which I had decided was good enough. Later on I became a little pickier (or snootier**) and now I save them all at 320 kbps VBR (variable bit rate), which is considered "CD quality." The files are larger, but I have room for them (so far).
A strange hobby, I suppose, but otherwise I'd just be out back building scale model fortifications and blogging about the difference between hornworks and bastions.
*It would be quite simple to play a 78 on my turntable at either 45 or 33 and then use Goldwave to speed it up to the proper speed. However, I'm not entirely certain playing 78s would be good for the stylus. I think if the situation ever arises, I'll just go back to the old Zenith.
**"snootier" is in Firefox's spell checker!? But "hornworks" isn't?!
A current screen shot of StatCounter hits for the Free Wayne Webring homepage. All of the hits appear to be from search engine hits using the string "free wayne." Anybody have any idea why?
Since I have nothing better to post, here's a quick contest for my legions of loyal readers (all 6 of you). The first to name the artist and album title that this selection is from wins bragging rights!
No hints!
Inconsequential details: when I scan a record cover I end up with a graphic that's roughly 2400x2400 pixels, which I resize down to 400x400 pixels to keep in my digital collection. This is a selection that is 400x400 from the original large graphic.
Apparently my being quite tired and really dragging @ss at work this week wasn't only because of the heat. Thursday night I discovered that I was actually sick. It was just another of those summertime colds but didn't have any severe symptoms (mostly just a scratchy throat) except for extreme fatigue.
Thursday afternoon as my wife was leaving for work, her car suddenly stopped going. Everything seemed to work okay except it wouldn't move. Well, we have this roadside assistance thing as part of our DriveTime deal, so they sent a tow truck all the way out here (we had to cover part of the towing fee, but not all of it) and hauled it in to their place in S.A. (some place on Old Perrin Beitel--which means I'll probably read their meter this coming week while our car is still there). I feared the worst, but it turns out that it's a common problem with the Ford Freestar and DriveTime is going to pay for all of it except a $50 diagnostic fee. So to that I said WHEW! and I've said it several times over the weekend every time I think about it.
Saturday my son and I attended a Cub Scout bird-watching outing at Mitchell Lake. I've been wanting to do this for some time, and I'd like to do it again in cooler weather. The kids got to ID several different birds that they hadn't seen before, and got some hands-on experience with a couple of soft-shelled turtles and one slider turtle. I kept my eyes open for alligators quietly surfacing but never saw any. There were some really big turtles sticking their heads up out there, though. As I said on Dave's blog, on the way there, we hit a bird. My son humorously pointed out the irony of the situation, even though he didn't know to use the actual word "irony." In spite of being extremely fatigued, the walk was much easier than my usual daily trek and a few of the kids learned that what they thought was enough water was not enough water. We had spare water so no one got too thirsty, and I was carrying a jug that I had filled with ice water so I passed out ice cubes for the kids to suck on toward the end of the walk. We spent about 3 hours walking around plus about another hour at the guard shack, where the kids (and myself) also got to see a rat snake that they keep in a box upstairs.
Other than that I have spent most of the weekend taking Alka Seltzer Cold Medicine and sleeping. I felt so bad I went three days without smoking a pipe, but I broke that fast today.
Here is a 40-odd-second selection from the track "California Flash" from the Attila album. No vocals on this selection (although the track does have lyrics). I just picked it out as an example of some of the totally hot organ work Billy Joel was once capable of.
Okay, let's see if this works. This is what I would say is the stupidest song on the album because of the lyrics. Your mileage may vary. I do actually like what he's done with the organ on this album. I think it's some good stuff.
NOTE: This is lo fi because I can't upload very large files on dial-up. Also, I haven't yet checked this track for pops, but I don't think it has any.
My daughter has been down at the coast (Corpus Christi) with a friend's family for about a week. My son spent last night and will spend tonight at Grandpa's house. My wife has been working. So I've had two nights in a row with no interruptions except the $#@! telephone. Both kids come home tomorrow. So the house has been weirdly quiet.
I watched District 9 last night and enjoyed it very much. It gripped me and sucked me in right from the beginning and never let go. My minor gripe is that the aliens were only physically alien; psychologically they were just like humans. Also their language, though not reproduceable by humans, could be understood by them and was easily translated into English (or whatever that is they speak in Johannesburg). But I guess they couldn't have told the story they did if the aliens had been too different.
What I enjoyed the most was the psychological transformation of the main human character. He started out as an odious, mostly self-serving bureaucrat and ended up...well, if you haven't seen it I guess I shouldn't give away too many spoilers. But as I said on that other place (FB), being victimized by the government you thought you were a valued part of can probably do that to you.
Also when they got the aliens' weapons to work the carnage was totally cool. And I now have the urge to say "fookin'" a lot.
I hope they never make a sequel. That would ruin the story. But I'm sure they will.
I've found two possums in meter boxes this week. One Monday, one today. The humidity this week has been terrible, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that the alleys have become nearly impassable. Also I learned that the little spines on those big wild sunflowers will make you look like someone took a cat-o-nine-tails to you if you're not careful. In some of those alleys, the sunflowers are growing eight feet high with stems that are 2-3 inches wide at the base. Avoid brushing against them with bare skin.
And on Monday something bit me. I don't know what it was, and it's starting to heal now, but it left a big wound that looks like a very large mosquito bite, surrounded by a bruise. Could've been some kind of spider, I guess. Whatever it was crawled way up inside my pants leg before it bit, and when it happened I didn't even feel it. Which by the way is an odd phenomenon I've noticed before. Many times I have discovered minor injuries I never noticed before when I'm taking a shower at home after a bad day.
I had to schedule a day off Friday so I can be home with the kids. So...short week this week and a three-day weekend coming up. I am definitely going to take the kids fishing at my dad's tank this weekend. He says he has mudcats and "perch" (not really perch, as I said before) that are big enough to catch with a hook. So we'll see.
Sigh...next week is going to be the week when I get all my worst routes, and I have to check on my dad's deer every day because he's going on a vacation. It's fawning time, but it doesn't look like there will be any new births while he's gone. His stock is up to about 25 deer now, not counting fawns. He has several bucks with antlers all velvety right now.
...was not fun. The heat was terrible, and I was in alleys all day. There's no air movement in those alleys, not even the slightest breeze. I saw a couple of things I could've taken pictures of but I was so beat that I didn't want to do anything that wasn't directly related to meter reading. I found a young possum inside one box. I don't know how it got in there because I couldn't see any access holes in the bottom. I left the lid cracked so it could climb out if it wanted to. That's the second time I've found a possum in a box.
Downloaded this free sampler from Amazon last night, and it's very good. Thanks to a commenter there for filling in missing information. Ten tracks, 2 each from five different artists: John Coltrane (actually is probably Coltrane AND Monk!), Dave Brubeck Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Joe Pass and Art Pepper.
Recommended download. Like I said check the comments for additional information.
I just realized I had never commented on this album. If I recall correctly, I heard of this group one day while listening to one of the Sirius jazz channels on DishNetwork. Not the "classic jazz" channel, but one of the other ones, I don't recall exactly (not the "smooth jazz" channel, either). It could have been one of DishNetwork's non-Sirius music channels, possibly the one called NuJazz.
Nik Bärtsch is a Swiss pianist and composer (click for his Wikipedia entry), and Ronin is a group he formed and which is one of his three main projects. The version of Ronin on this album consists of Bärtsch on piano with other musicians playing bass clarinet, alto sax, bass guitar, drums and percussion. So it's not your typical jazz band lineup, nor is it your typical jazz band music. Self-described as "zen-funk," it incorporates elements of many different musical styles to create something that is certainly jazz but not strictly jazz. I would describe it as hypnotic, funky, mysterious, somewhat in the "chill" range as well as somewhat avant-garde but very listenable.
This is not the kind of thing you would be able to find very easily in any music stores around here, nor do I think you would ever hear of it on the local jazz station (KRTU). Even Amazon.com has only three of his albums available. I got this one from Yourmusic.com, and was surprised to find it there. I do intend to expand my collection of his work with whatever I can find, finances permitting.
This is the only album I have from 38 Special. I used to be a pretty big Skynyrd fan, but this group was, to me, another "radio group"* and not much else. That is, until I heard "If I'd Been the One."
If I had to pick One Song that pretty much defined the 80s for me, it would be this song. It's still a song that totally hits me in the gut and it gets a big 5 on my personal ratings scale, which is as high as it can get.
I'm pretty sure I got this record with one of those introductory "12-records-for-a-penny" offers from Columbia Record Club. Five out of the nine songs get a rating that will put them on my general favorites list: "If I'd Been the One," "Back Where You Belong," "One Time for Old Times," "See Me In Your Eyes" and "One of the Lonely Ones." Overall I give the album a 2.6. There's a couple of songs that I could throw away.
The sound quality that I finally ended up with is not perfect, although there are no obvious pops. There are a couple of dull noises that are buried so far down I can't dig them out and when I listen to it at my usual listening volume level I can't hear them, so it's good enough to commit to a CD sometime.
Pretty good buy for 1/12 of a penny.
*A group that I enjoyed hearing on the radio but never went so far as to buy their albums.
I was ripping Toto IV and discovered that "Africa" is completely unrippable. I can't even see what's causing the problem, although it must be a tiny nick in the vinyl. I tried weighting the needle, playing it wet, applying very slight pressure to the stylus arm--nothing worked. Since this was the only track that I really wanted from this record, because it's going right onto my special favorites list, I had to download it from Amazon.
I finished re-ripping the last handful of records that I had grabbed a few weeks ago, so I thought this time I'd grab some to re-rip and some new ones that I hadn't done yet and hadn't listened to in a long time. One song in particular has been echoing in my mind for the past few days for some reason, so I went to the big shelf looking for that album and ended up coming away with a stack of records.
The song and album I was looking for was "If I'd Been the One" from Tour de Force by 38 Special. I really wanted to see the video again and of course post it here but it seems that it is not on YouTube. How bizarre. They have the song with some still pix and some amateur video live clips, but not the official video. Really weird. They do have the official video for "Back Where You Belong" from the same album.
Anyway as soon as I had the record going I started playing as it was recording. I usually listen to music with my stereo turned up to "20" on the volume knob, and up to 25-26 while editing LP rips so I can listen more closely for pops & clicks. I cranked it up to "30" and had the song reverberating pretty much through the whole house. Man it was great to hear that song again.
So here's the stack that I grabbed today. If I can get motivated enough maybe I'll post more about them as I listen to them again.
38 Special - Tour de Force Stormtroopers of Death - Speak English or Die The Southern Death Cult (eponymous) Skinny Puppy - viviSECTvi (previously ripped only from dub cassette) The Smithereens - Especially for You (previously ripped only from dub cassette) The Marshall Tucker Band - Searchin' for a Rainbow (Marshall Tucker Band? I have a Marshall Tucker Band LP? Who knew?) Triumph - The Sport of Kings (previously ripped only from dub cassette) Toto - IV (oh gosh I haven't heard any of these songs in such a long time) Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (I will definitely have to write something up about this later...I know breaking it into discrete tracks is going to be work--and it's a double LP too). Marillion - Real to Reel (a live album that I'm only ripping because I'm such a Marillion fan...all the tracks on it are redundant with various studio versions...if you can call a "live" track redundant). Uriah Heep - Very 'eavy, Very 'umble (previously ripped only from dub cassette) Stryper - The Yellow and Black Attack (their 1st album, an EP...oddly inside the jacket I found a plastic flexidisk [a plastic single backed with stiff posterboard] from some other group called Shy...I don't remember ever seeing this before, maybe I overlooked it?) Winterkat - The Struggle Wall of Voodoo - Happy Planet (previously ripped only from dub cassette) Wall of Voodoo - Dark Continent (original lineup with Stan Ridgeway) The Steve Miller Band - Greatest Hits 1974-78 (I forgot I had this) Metallica - Ride the Lightning (bought during my brief flirtation with metal in the mid 80s) Dio - The Last in Line (I used to go to sleep listening to this) Your Twist Party with the King of Twist, Chubby Checker (mother-in-law's collection...the cover is so totally retro I had to grab it) Petra - Beat the System (I think I have one other album of theirs...this was Christian rock before there was Christian rock) Kate Bush - The Whole Story (only going to rip two tracks from this one which aren't on any of my CDs) Triumph - Thunder Seven (previously ripped only from dub cassette) Jethro Tull - The Broadsword and the Beast (previously ripped only from dub cassette) Johnny Cash - Classic Cash (to re-encode at higher bit rate for CD burning) Medieval Music (re-rip) Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams are made of this (re-rip) Nina Hagen - Nunsexmonkrock (re-rip) The Dream Academy (eponymous) (re-rip) Triumph - Just a Game (previously ripped only from dub cassette) Heart - Dreamboat Annie (to re-encode at higher bit rate for CD burning) Steve Vai - Flexable (to re-encode at higher bit rate for CD burning) Leo Kottke - Dreams and All That Stuff (to re-encode at higher bit rate for CD burning) Heart (eponymous) (re-rip) Ultravox - Vienna and Lament (to re-encode at higher bit rate for CD burning) David & David - Boomtown (to re-encode at higher bit rate for CD burning) Public Bulletin - Broke from the Sound (re-rip)
"Re-rip" means I want to encode it at a higher bit rate but I probably won't be burning it to CD.
So here's the video I found but wasn't looking for.
So about 4:00 PM today my cell phone "rang." Although it doesn't really ring. It plays a short ambient-chillish ringtone that came loaded on it already, and which to me sounds like it could be the beginning of a nice relaxing piece of electronic music. I chose it because 1) I like it, and 2) no one else uses it, so I know when it goes off that it's mine. Also a lot of people seem to be annoyed by it, which is a bonus.
Anyway it was a number I didn't recognize but it was the second time today I had seen it. Also it was one of those old-fashioned 1-800 numbers back when all toll free numbers were still "800s" and were once known as a WATS line and I think they still technically are but I haven't heard anyone use that term in a long time. So although I don't usually answer strange number calls I decided to see what was up with this one.*
Some woman asked me if she could speak with Lance. I told her she had the wrong number, so she verified the number she had called, which was mine but obviously wrong. "Is this a new number for you, maybe?" she asked. "No," I answered, "I've had this number for...a long time...remember back when T-Mobile used to be Voicestream?" "Oh wow," she said, "that is an old number."
Then she added, "So...you've never heard of Lance Lafontaine?"
I said, "Nope, sorry," but I wanted to say, "No, but now that you mention it I think I will be changing my name. That's just awesome."
So she said she'd remove my number from their call list. That must be the coolest name I've ever heard from a wrong number. Maybe someday I'll use it for a pen-name.
*A couple of different reverse phone number lookups yielded no results.
Last night I downloaded the X5 Free Sampler: Jazz Legends from Amazon. I have downloaded a few of these X5 samplers so far, and they are all quite good. I thought I'd take a moment to recommend this one. It's a good way to add a few nice tracks to your jazz collection if you don't have them already.
I do have a quibble, however. The volume levels of these tracks are not even close to each other. Tracks 1 & 5 especially are so low that I have to reach over and turn up the volume four or five clicks to hear them better. It sounds like tracks 2 & 4 are in mono, although they were encoded in stereo, which only results in a larger file without changing the sound at all. I've never heard of that group on track 1, and it sounds more modern, so I'm not sure how much of a "legend" they are.
This is the last week of school for my kids, and it's a short week, at that, because of Memorial Day. Everything is over by now...all the tests and such. Last night at 9:00 I called out "bed time!" and my son asked if they could stay up until 10:00. "No," I said, "not until school is out."
His plaintive reply was, "But I'm not even going to learn anything this week!"
