If you have read that article you know that I sold three records at a recent record show in Gardendale: Nick Drake’s ‘Five Leaves Left;’ ‘Buckingham Nicks’; and Electric Light Orchestra’s ‘OLE with yellow/gold vinyl.
I feel like I could have stayed and sold more but I felt drained. Here’s what I didn’t sell:
Led Zeppelin ‘Houses of the Holy’ (original pressing, Broadway address, Robert Ludwig initials in dead wax). I was asking $200 and was pretty firm about that price. Several expressed interest but no offers on that.
Jimmy Buffett
‘High Cumberland Jubilee’ (an early, early Buffett album). I was asking $20 but
would’ve taken $15.
Keith Whitley
‘A Hard Act to Follow.’ Near mint EP with press release and 8X10 photo. Asking
$50 but would have taken $30.
Scorpions
‘Virgin Killer’ and ‘Best of Scorpions’ (I was asking $15 each but would have
taken $10 each.)
Dion ‘Runaround Sue’. Cover was frayed but Laurie label record pristine. I was asking $30. Probably would have taken $20.
Well, I’m not going to be the one to give Mozart anything less than a 5. And the sound is good, digitally remastered from newly remixed original master tapes.
So I was on the front row in ’83 and he came out impeccably dressed, running around the stage with a wig and make-up. Wait a minute that’s David Bowie.
But. I never saw Bowie live here. Must have been Roger Daltry of the Who. His long curly blond hair seemed like a wig anyway.
And of course I never saw Mozart alive. It was 1762 when this prodigy was 6-years-old and leaving people talking about the Next Big Thing. The liner notes say this kid from Austria could play any instrument, violin, piano, harpsichord and vocals. Vocals? Never knew that.
He could hear a song he didn’t know and could play it back note-for-note. At 17, he had already written 150 works of ‘incredible variety,’ the liner notes say. After that came 500 compositions, many considered masterpieces.
. But i think I may have to change the wording of my Motown post where I called Michael Jackson’s early work as the best music ever by an 11-year-old performer.
This album was actually played by me many times. And it’s not just easy listening music with its orchestral presentations of grandeur and pomp.
Picking this record up was part of my record buying strategy of getting a sample platter before ordering the entree. After this I joined a Classical music record club and actually have a nice collection of about 30 classical CD’s, wherever they may be.
If you have nothing on the Motown label, this is a great record to get a taste of Motor City’s hit factory. These days, I don’t listen to this much. It was a good primer for me and led me to explore artists. But I’m more likely to pull out an album by Marvin Gaye or my Smokey Robinson two-record set then listen to this hits compilation.
Although if I suddenly have a hankering to hear ‘Keep on Truckin’ –– which does happen sometimes — I’ll grab this one because I don’t think I have that great bit of 70s dance music on anything else.
The ABC album by the Jackson 5 was one of my first full length LPs. And the Jackson 5 song ‘I Want You Back ‘ is the world’s best song led by an 11-year-old lead singer.
You cannot not dance to ‘I Want You Back.’
This two record specially priced set (when it came out anyway) hit some key figures but is hardly definitive.
Of the 20 songs on here Diana Ross (with and without the Supremes) has four slots; Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson have four slots; and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye have three slots each. The Temptations, Eddie Kendricks, the Commodores and Smokey Robinson and his Miracles round out the list of very familiar (and mostly great) songs.
I think their hits, many from the Boyce/Hart songwriting tandom, sound pretty good. I especially like (I’m not) Your Steppin’ Stone’..
In a 2012 interview, Dolenz described The Monkees as being “a TV show about an imaginary band… that wanted to be the Beatles that was never successful.”
Looking back I find it kind of weird — the show I mean. It was almost like pre-psychedelia TV effects (sped-up action, filming in reverse, the in and out camera lens thing. I’m sure there was some backmaskinggoing on. “Mom, what’s in those Fruit Loops?”
I was about 9 and 10 years old, and a big fan. I remember it coming on about 11:30 and it usually capped off a full morning of cartoon watching. (Superceded sometimes by chores my mother would give us). So end of the Monkees or Johnny Quest would be a signal to the beginning of a long afternoon outdoors. Had to be home by sundown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
