Had lunch Thursday with some friends from the West Coast. Talking about San Francisco made me nostalgic. Good conversation, good lunch at Mile End deli. It was DELIcious. (Sorry).
I’ve been stop-starting on some stories that I need to focus on. There are so many paths for me to go down, that I need a compass.
I really enjoyed the use of the phrase city-savvy in a sentence — as an alternative for streetwise. What sentence you are asking? The one I just wrote. (Sorry again).
Stay tuned for details about an after party for MikeMadness 3X3 basketball tournament. The tournament is Saturday July 20 to raise money for Lewy body research and awareness. We have raised about $25,000 overall in the previous tournaments. This will be the third and I hope we can raise $25,000 altogether this year to bring our total for three years to $50,000.
Oh this is going to be fun. I have three records here all coming up on the basically alphabetic format I have pioneered (which means they are in alphabetical order except when I decide they are not.)
They are essentially one-hit wonders, this trio of bands I’m lumping together. And their names start with’M.’ And they are sometimes good, sometimes bad and sometimes silly as heck. Bargain bin material for sure.
Men Without Hats –343
ALBUM: Rhythm of Youth (1982)
MVC Rating: 2.0/$
Canadian group hit it big with the Safety Dance featuring a bubbly 1980’s synth dance beat:
‘We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind, because your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, they ain’t no friends of mine.”
Probably everybody in the world has danced to this song. And probably everybody in the world has this record which sits and never gets played unless you put it on a 1980’s synth-dance music playlist. The only other song that captured my attention was ‘I Got the Message.‘
This is a strange group and album. Not to be confused with the LA-based Mr. Big which was even bigger. This UK-based Big’s only significant hit was ‘Romeo although ‘Feel Like Calling Home sounds like a single for the radio. The singer sounds and looks like the bad gang member leader who set the Warriors up in the Walter Hill movie The Warriors. ‘Warriors come out and Plaa-ay, clink clink go the bottles on his fingertips. i checked the liner to see if this cat “Dicken” was listed as playing bottles. Nope. Dicken (just DIcken) is the vocalists name and he seems to be a known entity in some corners of the UK music scene or at least was at one time.
The album ‘Photographic Smile’ is all over the place from hard heavy rock with Brian May-like guitar solos to lilting folk ballads to songs with a sprinkling of Chinese pentatonic musical touches. The title song sounds like 10cc.
There’s talent with songwriting musical hooks and musicianship, but it’s somewhat negated by the wild swing in the music and mediocre to poor lyrics. Still, some of these songs have hooks that catch and stick.
Mouth and MacNeal — 345
ALBUM: How Do You Do
MVC Rating: 2.5/$
Well ‘How Do You Do’. Talking about hooks that catch and stick. The one hit from this group is one of those earworms. Now we had a little fun with Mouth and MacNeal earlier in this blog, naming the song ‘How Do you Do’ the Best Worst song of All Time.” I have to say we were heavily influenced by an old black and white video that was so amateurish, it was hilarious.
On record M&M sound OK. The Mouth, a big bear of a man, has a voice that could make beams fall at a construction site. They put their spin on “Heard it Through the Grapevine,” which is inferior to CCR’s or Marvin Gaye’s version — but not altogether bad.
Try this Mouth and MacNeal for something different::
Tuesday/Wednesday post-holiday edition. We had good fun over the Memorial Day weekend at my parents’ in Athens, Ga. I bought a short stack of bargain bin records at a cool little thrift store . We ate hot dogs walked quite a bit and some of us swam.
Roger Manning is a New York-based artist who went around the world busking — singing for donations. He comes off sounding a bit like a higher pitched kid brother of Bob Dylan.
And he’s angry and sad, good traits for street level busking. Every one of the 12 songs on this self-named album have the ‘Blues’ in the title. In other words there’s the #14 Blues, the #16 Blues, Strange Little Blues, the Pearly Blues and the Lefty Rhetoric Blues and so on.
Funny lines in many backed by a hard strummed acoustic guitar that sounds pretty much the same on every song.
From ‘Lefty Rhetoric Blues:’ Lefty folksinger rhetoric has such a boring ring, they make me sick, they oversimplify everything ….but, then on the other hand they were right about Vietnam
WIkipedia says Manning was part of the ‘anti-folk movement’ and his legal challenge in 1985 overturned New York’s longstanding ban on music in the subway, and launched the Music Under New York program. He is currently a web designer in NYC, according to Wikipedia.
I have a reggae group on my blog called Black Uhuru who sing an anthem called ‘What is Life.’
What is life? I try to see What is life? It’s unity What is life? I try to feel What is life? It’s really real
The term ‘life and death’ issues has almost become trite as a description because it’s tagged to issues that are not about life and death. But I think most will agree that abortion, end-of-life medical care and capital punishment are pretty solid life-death issues.
I’m not exploring all that here but I am leading up to a story by a guest writer to AL.com that is another example of why there are not black-and-white answers to all the questions about these topics.
The story excerpted and linked below is about a man, burned badly over 65 percent of his body. He wanted to die.
His case is now a case study in bioethics classes at UAB. Many thanks to Gregory Pence for sharing this remarkable and well-written piece, which opens like this:
Famous patient in bioethics, Donald (Dax”) Cowart, recently died. A high school football player from Henderson, Texas, he served as a pilot in Vietnam, after which he joined his father in real estate in Henderson.
On June 23, 1973, the two of them, while inspecting a ranch for sale, suffered severe burns from an undetected gas leak, burning over 65% of Dax’s body and killing his father.
Dax had learned about burns from his pilot’s training. Found by a farmer, Dax asked for a gun to kill himself.
It’s an issue I want to explore further at another time because those of us with dementia may face instances of chronic pain and lowered quality of living.
Pence’s column really leaves you wondering. I’m still not sure what the takeaway is in this column and that’s what makes it so provocative. It’s not a same-size-fits-all lesson here.
That’s all for now. Check out my column tomorrow on AL.com: It’s about MyVinyCountdown.com reaching the half-way point.
And, importantly, let’s remember our veterans who have died.
1:18 p.m. Update:
Another story has come through that is related to this topic: Conservative Christian anti-abortion mother of two children with special medical needs sees the nuance and strongly opposes the new law banning abortions. Story here.
I just got this in a bargain bin and it will be, i think, my last ‘L.’ Short review but it was inexpensive and I was becoming more curious after reading Rick Bragg’s excellent book on JLL.
This album I”m reviewing here was billed as a comeback from his rock and roll success in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It features Lewis doing ‘hard country.’
He had a great soulful voice for country as well as R&B and rockabilly. But for the sake of clarity, this album is a pure old school country music — as Bragg wrote it was not the goopy high production sound popular on the radio. It was Hank Williams country.
That’s my favorite although I do also like alt-country, a newer genre, and even some of that overproduced stuff when it is purveyed by artists like Glen Campbell.
Ever think about the calendar? Man if somebody hadn’t invented a calendar it would be tough sledding.
And to break it down into 12 months was genius. Otherwise we’d be dealing with one long sequential number.
“What’s the date today honey,” asking my wife.
“It’s January 2,321,300,” she smiles looking at her smart phone. “Maybe this 2.3 million weather will let up. Can’t wait for some cooler weather in the 2.4 millions.”
“And is it Monday?” I ask.
“Honey, it’s always Monday,” she said.
HEALTH: Feeling so much better today than Monday. Fluctuating going on. Muscle soreness and some odd sensations like heat on my neck and wobbly legs every now and then. But all minor invisible ailments that don’t affect me too much — except for the right hand problems.
ALBUMS: One for the Road (live) (1976); Gimme Back My Bullets (1976); Nuthin’ Fancy (1975).
MVT Rating: Live 4/$$$$; Bullets 4/$$$$; Fancy 4/$$$$
I remember some lunchtime conversation in Orlando with a few colleagues although I can’t remember who was there. But we started talking music and Lynyrd Skynyrd came up. This was the 90s so Skynyrd had already crashed their plane and had settled into comfortable Southern rock ‘classic rock’ kind of a band, without their most significant participant, Ronnie Van Zant. Before he died, he was their lead singer and had written most of their songs.
Everybody at the table dissed them leading me to proclaim, they are/were one of the best bands ever. I was the only one in the group to have seen them live.
I brought up the Allman Brothers and, now,they said ‘Oh they aren’t the same, the Allman’s were cool.’
Now I’ve heard this before. Skynyrd had a string of big hits and were on the radio quite a bit in those early days in the 1970s. Just because they didn’t put on albums of one song per side: See In Memory of Elizabeth Reed — doesn’t mean they weren’t great.
The Allmans were certainly pioneers, combining smooth almost country vocals to rhythm and blues, jazz and rock. Skynyrd absorbed that influence, amped it up a bit and wrote shorter, catchier — but still intelligent — songs. The cautionary (anti) drug song, ‘That Smell’ and the anti-gun song, ‘Saturday Night Special,’ and of course their magnum opus —‘Free Bird.And there was’ ‘Call me the Breeze’ and ‘The Ballad of Curtis Loew and ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’
I first picked up ‘Nuthin’ Fancy’ with the classic shot of one of the band members flipping off the camera person, I guess.
I was told by a friend that his big sister said we couldn’t listen to Skynyrd because the band took a shot at Neil Young in ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’
“I hope Neil Young will remember, Southern Man don’t need him around, anyhow.”
Those words are a response to Young, the Canada-born rocker who wrote the song “Southern Man,’ an unflattering portrait of its title subject.
Young reportedly said upon hearing it: “Sounds like they mean it.”
According to Wikipedia Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from Leonard Skinner, a high school P.E. teacher who rigidly enforced the hair length rule.
What’s a little confusing to me is that a picture of real estate For Sale signs printed inside the ‘Nuthin’ Fancy’ album have the name Leonard Skinner, Real Estate Agent.
Maybe he was both PE coach and agent. I don’t know but it has gnawed at me for long time.
Another reader suggested was an American Idol singer, Wade Cotas, who did a spot-on version of Joe Cocker’s version of the Beatles ‘With a Little Help from My Friends.’ Cocker sang it at Woodstock.
(Cotas is good but after side by side watching I have to give Cocker the edge. )
Nobody seems to put more into a song than Cocker.
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Health-wise, I’m noticing my fluctuations. I’ll be a little shaky and a little more cloudy one day and on the next day I feel much better — almost feeling like I don’t have a disease. I am thankful for any time I get pre-disease clarity and try to time it to my work.
Sounds more difficult than it is — even though there have been some posts that I accidentally published with missing words and stuff.
Reminder Hoopsters: Assemble teams for Mike’s Madness only two months away. Here’s the link:
I’m adding a couple of songs to the chorus on a day when hundreds of women speak online at AL.com and in the pages of the Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, and the Mobile Press-Register.
