This is composer Daniele Luppi’s musical statement regarding Milan when it was party central in the 1980’s.
This album features Karen O and Parquet Floors. It has some interesting songs including a few that have nothing on Prince’s early work when it comes to R-rated sexual content.
The last song on the album is an instrumental free jazz piece that is as good as it is long and as long as it is unexpected in the context of other songs. I’ll have to file this record under ‘re-visit’ when I’m in a better place to take more time to get into it.
I believe this was sent to me — new vinyl late last year by one of my relatives but honestly have forgotten who.
Danielle Luppi worked as an arranger for artists like Gnarls Barkley and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
According to a Pitchfork review in the Milan Luppi is evoking is that of a city where everything was possible.. “Money flowed, parties raged, and the streets were filled with glamorous foreigners.”
It was superficial but vibrant.
Featured here are Karen O, the lead singer with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Parquet Floors. One blogger called it the strangest albums recorded. I’d say yes, it’s strange, but after recently reviewing the Mothers of the Invention, my threshold for strange has been broadened and few albums are stranger than several of Zappa.
I also hear a B-52’s influence here in songs like Flush. I hear bits of Talking Heads and Prince as well.
I SAID I’M HERE TODAY TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT HEARING LOSS.
What? We’re NEARING SLOSS? We’re FEARING FLOSS?
No, no, no. HEARING LOSS..
Hearing loss happens to all of us getting older. It makes
you feel left out because you can’t hear
what they are saying behind your back anymore.
I went to Costco to
get some hearing aids but they took one look at my ears (two looks actually)
and said I need to go see an ENT (Ear Nose and Throat doctor). So I did.
I’m supposed to put drops in my ears for
a few days and go back next week to get rid of what was called an ‘occlusion.’
I understand that to be packed-in ear wax.
So gross. I’m writing about my own ear wax.
Hey Oliver don’t you write about music?
My answer: Hmmmm. Hearing loss and rock music. Wonder how that might be related?
Yes it is documented that loud music – just like loud construction noise, can be harmful to hearing.
My ears rang for days after the Who concert in the 1980s in
Atlanta.
The music at concerts may not be as loud as it was in my day
with the Who, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and KISS making ears bleed from coast to
coast. Punk rock. Loud.
Healthline.com
reports that long exposures to sounds over 85 decibels (dB) can cause hearing
loss. Concerts tend to be about 115 dB or more, Healthline says.
Old man tip: Wear earplugs to concerts.
It’s like using sunscreen at the beach, a must do.
Don’t wait until you’re 50 to do it. Put them in now so you won’t have to put hearing aids in later. (Price check: Hearing aids are expensive like $3,000 to $12,000 for a pair.)
Young ears brutalized by decibels turn into deaf ears as you
age. Besides the ‘occlusion’ I also have
nerve damage. Do I need hearing aids? Stay tuned I’ll find out next week.
Now back to my vinyl records – or known by another name: Wax.
Mike Oliver who has Lewy body dementia often writes about living with that disease and other health and aging issues.. See his blog here.
It might sound weird to describe this straight ahead hard rock band as influential. They rarely colored out of the lines. Guitarist and lead singer Leslie West took his direction early following Eric Clapton’s gritty blues rock as displayed by Clapton’s work with the Yardbirds and Cream..
But they did become influential in that they are one of a several bands mentioned as precursors to heavy metal. The Long Island, NY, group also had a big fan in fellow Long Island native Howard Stern. And they played Woodstock.
Leslie West’s guitar playing was admired and mimicked by later hard rocking heavy metalists. The crunching chords and cowbell (yes more is less) opening to Mississippi Queen was and is a staple of classic rock radio.
Key members of Mountain included West, Corky Lainge and Felix Pappalardi. I’ve had this record a long time and not sure where I picked it up but I think it was from my Athens, Ga., high school and college years. I hadn’t played it in a while prior to this review and it’s solid, rock solid.
Frank Zappa records tend to be worth a little more in the resale market. This is a greatest ‘hits’ album of early stuff before Zappa put his name out front of the band, which was made-up of former members of the 60’s rock/pop group the Turtles.
I will be writing more about Zappa when I get to the Z’s. He can be brilliant and disgusting, often at the same time.
Meanwile, enjoy (if you are able) songs such as Wowie Zowie and Who Needs the Peace Corps and Flower Punk. This album had a median price, used, of $12 on Discogs; it’s probably the least valuable of my Zappa stuff.
This is a trailblazer in mixing orchestral music with rock music.
Here it is the Moody Blues and the London Festival Orchestra conducted by Peter Knight, All molded into a dramatic and pretty song cycle. It was deep music for the 1967 contemplative hippie. To my ears now it sounds like music from the Bambi soundtrack featuring spoken word poet Rod McKeun. Next comes lyrics like: ‘cold hearted orb that rules the night.’
The two album-cut hits are Nights in White Satin and Tuesday Afternoon. I had a hippie foster sister for a while as my parents were helping somebody out of a jam.
Kathy loved the Moodies. The album ‘Question’ is their best in my opinion. Besides the title epic it also had a simple sad refrain called ‘Melancholy Man.’
Samba! Brazilian! bossa nova? Organ music? Slightly psychedelic on the Sergio Mendez platter Gentle Rain.
Sergio was the unusual example of a Brazilian artist whose work was nearly exclusively done in the U.S. And is not all that well known in Brazil, according to Wikipedia. On my anecdotal accounts, there’s a lot of his work sadly sitting in bargain bins. He spent a career introducing Brazilian music to the U.S. and beyond: He’d take a Bacharach song like ‘Do you know the way to San Jose?’ and completely samba-ize it [patent pending, not to be confused with Simonize].
So Walter Wanderly, sometimes billed as Brazil’s No. 1 organist, was on the Gentle Rain album with Sergio and multiple musicians. Of these two I have, Wanderley’s Rain Forest is the one I would purchase. At times it sounds like the organ music played when hockey games cleared the ice between periods. Or mall music, sprightly yet warm. But then you start listening, really listening, it’s like a hypnotic.
Don’t need that second beer. Just flip the switch to Wanderley. It’s electric organ like a banjo always playing bright and happy music, only more soothing. The effect is rolling waves of controlled improv tightly harnessed by song structures.
I’m not kidding, I Iike this a lot. Happy Mall Music or old time skating rink music in 2/4 time it’s its own jazzy thing. There are lots of folks who collect Brazilian music and I can see why. But I can’t get lost down that rabbit hole though. Need to stay focused.
You may have wondered why Wanderley is here in the middle of the M’s alphabetically. It’s because he’s being ushered in along with Sergio Mendes.
On July 11, 2018, I was writing I would be done with My Vinyl Countdown in 30 months. That was 13 months ago and if I hold steady, 17 more months feels about right but as I show you later, that’s a brisk brisk pace.
321/17= about 19. So to finish this in 17 months I need to write 19 reviews a month. I may have overestimated myself at the time I wrote the earlier piece with that 17 month prediction.
To further explain: The big numbers you see in the artists’ headlines on my blog indicate the place that record is in the count down of my 678 albums..
At that last accounting I was on 458 records. That means MVC had just reviewed David Gates, a solo album by the lead singer for the group Bread, which gets a lot of hits on this blog. But that was 13 months . Now we are sitting at 321 with John Mellencamp. That’s 320 to go.
Math, ugh. 458 – 320 = 138 records reviewed in 13 months. PACE: 138/13= about 10.5 per month. That may be a little ambitious to think I’ll do 10 or more a month.
678 -321 = 357 is the number of musical posts done overall. 321/10.5 = 30.5 is how many months I have let if i continue at 10.5 per month.
My essays and stories number over a 100 aside of the music reviews. You have my permission not to read it all.
And, there is also the reality that the record collection has grown with some gifts and additional pick-ups. But as I have said earlier the 678 is the number I’m using for nowl. When we get to Zevon and Zappa I’ll look around and see records I bought after this blog started, gifts of vinyyl for me and for the cause. I estimate I’ll have 150 album left over. 678+150= 828. That leftover bunch will likely be added as an addendum? Or maybe just a list of what’s let over on this blog site.
Remember we should not fear the end. The end of the countdown, that is. This is not a O’Henry novel.
Those of you following this blog know I am a big Kinks fan, since my teen years.
They were a genre-defying band that were described in many ways: quirky, satirical, whimsical, a garage band , uber British, and so on. They got kicked out of the U.S. during the British invasion for bad behavior so they missed out on big fame for a while. Ray and Dave fought a lot and I mean physical brawls, tearing hotel rooms apart. Although Dave’s pioneering heavy metal guitar in early to mid-1960s with You Really Got Me and All Day and All Night brought attention, there came a lull. They went through a period where they were experimenting with concept album, mini-musicals if you will.
Most people, during that 1970s period turned away. The albums such as A Soap Opera, a splendid little story piece, or the Preservation albums, wound up in bargain bins or, worse, garbage. Many thought they were a lightweight band. They should have known better from the 1960s heavy metal riffs, although even back then lead Kink Ray Davies wrote catchy little love songs (see Tired of Waiting, Stop Your Sobbing, etc.)
One of their biggest songs ‘Lola’ was about a transvestite.
So when my buddy Michael Ludden, former boss, novelist and all around music lover turned me on to a video blues number by the Kinks, it was not only a further validation of arguments I’ve had with folks who think the Kinks never earned their rootsy stripes like the Beatles, Stones and the Who. It was somewhat of a revelation seeing the early Kinks performing a damn good Slim Harpo blues rendition, ‘Got Love if You Want It,’ worthy of the best of the Yardbirds or the Animals, at least. From deep cuts, I knew they did this kind of stuff now and then but to see the performance is eye-opening:
He’s a guy from Indiana. Small town Indiana. I lived in Indiana in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades in the early to mid-1970s. That age, 12-15, is arguably one of the pivotal periods in one’s life.
In Indiana, everyone was Jack and Diane.
We were in West Lafayette. My family lived in an area where I was not zoned for the West Lafayette schools, the ‘city’ schools with professors’ kids in the shadow of Purdue University where my father worked.
I took a bus to a more rural school, farmers’ kids, families in trailer parks, where 13-year-olds smoked cigarettes in the laundromat at the Service Center, inside, playing pinball.
If you knew how to trick the machine into giving you countless extra games you play on a quarter for hours. Or some of us were just that good to hold a machine without tricks.
“Hey ‘rook’ go get me a pack of smokes,” Owens snapped at me as I walked by. Rook meant I was a 7th grader at Klondike Junior High School. Owens was a bully in 8th grade. He and his crew terrorized us through that rookie year.
Owens handed me a dollar and told me to hurry.
“But will they sell me cigarettes?” I asked.
Owens, dirty blond hair touching his shoulders dressed in an Army jacket, laughed and said ‘Rook go get ’em.’ I made the purchase successfully, brought them back with a quarter in change. Owens said ‘You’re all right. Maybe I won’t beat your ass so much.”
I could go on and on with stories from Indiana. And it’s weird because there wasn’t much to do there. Corn fields. In the hot summers some of us would get paid piece work de-tasseling corn. In the fall, especially on Halloween, we’d go into the cornfields and pick up the hard corn kernels and put them in bags. We’d lie in wait in the darkness until headlights approached from a distance. Scooping a handful of hard kernels, you had to time it just perfectly letting loose at the front grill of the car as it passed by. It sounded like your engine just fell apart, clankety clankety, as the kernels bounced around in the radiator fan or other moving belts and such. Harmless we told ourselves but then there was the chase.
It’s an Indiana past-time: Corning cars. At least where I was hanging. One of my buddies said he’d been shot at doing this before. Great, another added touch of cornfed bravado.
But the thrill of corning was not in the actual corning but the chase after the driver pulled over. That’s because most folks were from around there and instantly knew they’d been corned.Sometimes the cars would drive right into the cornfield. We were sprinting through the rows, laughing. Crazy Indiana kids.
I’d love to ask Mellencamp of Seymour, Indiana, if he ever corned a car.
Mellencamp has put together quite a career. I have two of more than a dozen albums he has released. Possibly two of his best and most impactul:
Uh huh! and Scarecrow. I saw him in Birmingham, I believe in 1982, and thought he was fantastic. One of my all time favorite concerts actually. The drums! Kenny Aronoff.
I haven’t listened to these records in years and I thought they may sound dated, but they hold up. Mellencamp is a good if not great songwriter. Straightforward, his words mean what they say. Even when he uses symbolism, it is in-you-face: Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.
The crops we grew last summer weren’t enough to pay the loans Couldn’t buy the seed to plant this spring and the farmers bank foreclosed Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land He said john it’s just my job and I hope you understand Hey calling it your job ol hoss sure don/t make it right
But if you want me to, I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight
‘ol hoss.’ Yep that line sounds like exactly how someone from Indiana would say it.
He astutely captures the cycle of rural Indiana laugh in ‘Small Town:
Well I was born in a small town And I can breathe in a small town Gonna die in this small town And that’s probably where they’ll bury me
And Jack and DIane’s anthemic, drum-slapping chorus:
Let it rock. Let it roll. Let the Bible belt come and save your soul. Hold on to 16 as long as you can. Changes coming real soon make us women and men.
Don’t know if this would be surprising but the big town Lafayette — the twin town of West Lafayette was home town of Axl Rose, lead singer for Guns N Roses. I knew many Axl Roses as well. sIt’s only two hours from Seymour to West Lafayette/Lafayette, straight through Indianapolis.
