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MVC now has 238 posts: Here are the favorites and least favorites

Some of My Vinyl Countdown’s top posts.
As of today, here are songs taken from the most-clicked on and the ones that received the most reaction, some judgement calls here by me.

So we’ll have Top 12 music reviews from my 678 records.  This is followed by the Top-12 blog essays.

And we’ll also throw in the bottom 5 in both categories.

(Click on the names to go to the full blog post).
Top 12 Album reviews

Dave Davies  Kink’s guitarist solo albums are surprise here at No. 1

Dolly Parton Country music legend, and that’s without hyperbole.

The Allman Brothers Band  No surprise that this iconic Southern band is high on the list.

The Alarm  The Welsh rockers with their big hair and their big anthemic songs are apparently well loved.

Dickey Betts  Allman’s great guitarist.

King Sunny Ade He was making world music before it was cool.

Aerosmith Steven Tyler seems like he’s on TV all the time. But that was decades after this hard rocking album, arguably one of their best.

Bo Diddley  Underappreciated in his time, his record stands – on records.

Joe Cocker This man felt the music. It was like he plugged himself  in.

Joan Baez  Distinctive strong voice that was one of many voices of the 1960s and civil rights protests.

T Bone Burnett Major producer for others. Lesser known for his own excellent discography.

Big Audio Dynamite BAD, Clash remainders forge new sound and funny crazy video.

When Particles Collide      A husband-wife  rock duo from Maine. (with some local connections).
Top 12 Blog Essays
Gordon Hayward, broken bones and Lewy body dementia

Life lessons of adaptation from a serious injury.
I Have to Laugh (To Keep from Crying)

Title says it all.

Holy Zeus, God and Lightning 

Strange coincidences crop up in my life.

Is there time?

The billion dollar question.

Rules of ‘street’ ball

Tips from 35 years of playing pick-up basketball.

Peter Himmelman’s ‘Song for Catherine’

A wonderful tribute to my wife Catherine
 Some People are Mean

Yes, there are mean people and I describe one.
Porter and Me

Writing about the death of a child from  over the course of years prepared me to face my own prognosis.
Lewy Lewy. Come on, call it by its name!

It’s mysterious, baffling and wrong but for some reason Lewy body dementia has become the disease no one will name.
How the heck am I doing?

The word FINE may not mean what you think it means.
Today is Silent Saturday 

It’s a tradition I  did not know about.

Another hugging, this has got to stop

Beloved pastor retiresl.
Bottom 5 Album reviews
The Drifters
Kurtis Blow
Fleshtones
Focus

The Flying Lizards   

Bottom 5 Blog essay/posts

D-Party

History of Journalism Part 2: from ‘socialist rag’ to ‘tool of the man’ (blog version)

Seeking Miss Mamie, or Mike, Catherine and Mary’s fantastic road trip

Jerry Sloan, legendary NBA coach, still battling dementia (blog version)

Sugar Sugar’: Archies vs. Josie and the Pussycats’ Riverdale version

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They don’t seem to forget Alzheimer’s; Why don’ they remember Lewy body dementia?

This is one of an occasional series of opinion columns on Lewy body disease, other dementias, and end of life issues written by a writer who happens to have the brain degenerative disease. A previous version of this appeared on AL.com.

As I’ve pointed out before, we live in a world where Lewy body disease is virtually unknown. That’s not good for the more than a million folks that have the second leading cause of dementia after Alzheimer’s.

That’s not good for the uncounted others who have it but don’t know they have it, either because the doctor didn’t make the diagnosis, missed the diagnosis, or the individual is passing off early stages of the disease as something else.

“It is shocking how few doctors, even neurologists, recognize this condition,” said Dr. Samantha Holden, assistant professor of Neurology at the University of  Colorado School of Medicine. “Alzheimer’s gets most of the attention, even in the research community, and DLB is relegated to the category of “Related Dementias”, which is unacceptable.”

Holden is also the co-principal investigator in the Lewy Body Dementia & Neurology Center of Excellence at the university.

Like me, Holden has been scratching her head over LBD’s anonymity. Part of it, we both agree is the complicated nature of the disease itself and its wide ranging symptoms, which leads to an alphabet soup of disorder names.

Holden says this chart is a great way to start understanding.

As you can see by the chart the broad category is Lewy body disease. That’s describing a brain disorder that creates the proteins believed to be the culprit of damage through brain cell loss. That includes Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia. (Guess which one people have actually heard of.)

Both Parkinson’s and Lewy body, as you  can see, are sisters under Lewy body disease.

Alzheimer’s is not on this particular chart because it is not a Lewy body brain malfunction. With Lewy body disease, the proliferation of a protein, which when clumped together are called Lewy bodies. They are named after their founder, Dr. Friederich Lewy, a German neurologist.

And please understand I am not an expert in the science by any means.

What’s in a Name

So to recap and offer questions I have for further exploring.

Lewy Body Dementia (LBD) is an umbrella term taking in both Parkinson’s Disease with Dementia (PDD) and Dementia with Lewy Body (LDB). Are the proteins the killer here or are  they just what have been left at the crime scene and another unperceived entity is the triggerman?

Alzeimer’s does not fall under that LBD spectrum because it is a different type of malfunction in the brain. However, sometimes people get both — (Really? As if we don’t have enough to worry about.) What is the relationship between Alzheimer’s and Lewy body? If any?

I know this is confusing. But in many cases whether you have LBD or whether it’s PDD, eventually you will see the same (bad symptoms),  physical impairment and cognitive impairment. Although some diagnosed Parkinson’s may never get dementia, correct?

That’s because every Lewy is his own person and afflicts different folks in different ways. Which leaves wide paths for optimism that the symptoms may be slow and mild. That’s the hope for those with the disease but, of course, those hopes can also be dashed.

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The Four Tops — 467

ALBUM: The Four Tops

For me with the Four Tops it starts with ‘Reach Out I’ll  Be There,’ which is one of the top soul/rock songs of the 1960’s,  and likely beyond. On top of that  they dish out such timeless Motown  winners as ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love.’

They had many many more charting songs which all but ignored the era’s trend toward the psychedelic sound in favor of straight rock ‘n soul.

The vocal group, spanning four decades, worked with the successful writing team Holland-Dozier-Holland in the early part of their career.

Singer Billy Bragg wrote a song about the baritone lead singer called  Levi Stubb’s Tears.

Fraternities and sororities across the nation applaud the Four Tops for providing their soundtrack to the big parties that comes with higher education (at least these were the songs popular at frats and sororities in my college-going day): Songs like “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch); ‘It’s the Same Old Song;’ and ‘Baby I Need Your Loving.” Be careful readers. Just reading the song titles out load will load that song on a loop in your brains.

Baby I need your loving, got …. to have all your loving .   

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Focus — 470

ALBUM: Moving Waves (1971)

This was an album I purchased on the virtue of one song: Hocus Pocus, a much peculiar song that actually charted high in the early 1970s.

The six-minute ‘album’ version will be sure to get  you a speeding ticket if driving, as the crunchy riffs bang out a head bobbing heavy metal hook. Kind of like ‘Radar Love’ only harder.

And weirder. Almost weird enough to call it a novelty song.

Why? Because sprinkled in between the wall of metal come pit stops in which the instruments quiet down (except drums) and somebody yodels, I mean full out yodeling like Dutch mountain music, if there was such a thing. That yodeling rondo-ing back and  forth with the guitar riff happens a couple of pit stops. Then at the next (third?) pit stop there’s a Jethro Tull-like flute solo followed by scat singing, and finally what I can only describe as helium-laced nonsense vocals and blazing guitars. There you go.

If you don’t think  you know this song, give it a listen, you might have heard it. Since buying it in a bargain bin for the song, I almost never much listened to the entire album.

There is a shorter version radio single of Hocus Pocus, which besides being shorter, opens with a funky riff, turns into the guitar solo and then it’s yodel time again.)(

The rest of the album is sometimes good in a progressive rock sort of way (such as the obligatory 20-minute album side length song.) Kind of like ELP or Genesis. Not my particular cup of tea. But Hocus Pocus is pretty cool on a listen many years later.  That songs takes the ELP and puts a little Grand Funk Railroad and Beat Farmers silliness into it. (The Farmers’ semi-famously had a song, ‘Happy  Boy,’ featuring gargling, kazoos and ‘hubba hubba hubba’ in it.

Some critics liked it, others didn’t.

Benjamin Ray at Daily Vault Reviews  gave it a C- and said: You know how sometimes you hear a hit song and then pick up the album, hoping the rest of it is just as good? This is not one of the times where that happened.

Meanwhile, AllMusic gave ‘The Best of Focus’ four-and-a-half stars and said it could have used a little more “Moving Ways.”

Go figure, one person’s ‘more cowbell’ is another’s ‘less cowbell.’

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Funky Kings –475

ALBUM: The Funky Kings (1976)

First off, the Funky Kings aren’t.

Sorry but if  you are going to put funk in your name, you better  be Funkadelic. Otherwise, it’s like leading with your chin. This is nice folky, poppy, singer-songwriter-y music. But no funk in sight.

The Funky Kings were a super group of sorts. Too often they seemed under the influence of Kryptonite.

They started in 1976,  a bunch of guys for whom there were high expectations. But the album — the one album — was like a feather in a gust of wind., spinning, floating, oops where did it go?

They don’t even have a Wikipedia page for chrissakes.

There was Jack Tempchin, Jules Shear, Richard Stekol, Bill Bodine, Frank Cotinol and Greg Leisz. It was SoCal  easy swinging soft rock.

Tempchin  was a prolific songwriter with the Eagles’  ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’  and ‘Already Gone’ under his songwriting belt. Jules Shear went on to form Jules and Polar Bears which met with minor success.

The biggest hit  on this  Funky Kings album was “Slow Dancing’ a piece written byTempchin that is so soft and catchy, it made the Easy Listening charts. It took Johnny Rivers to cover it with a little more ooomph to put it high on the Billboard charts.

Don’t get me wrong there are nice songs on this,  just not enough apparently  to fuel a Wikipedia page 40 years later. Check out ‘My Old Pals.’

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How am I doing? Come, as we enter the Twilight Zone (BLOG VERSION)

How am I?

For an update I offer up Henry Bemis. He was the put-upon, bespectacled  bank clerk who accidentally locked himself in a bank vault. While inside, a nuclear war destroyed the world and  apparently all the people in it.

Except for Bemis.

Bemis was  in the Twilight Zone.

Henry Bemis

Bear with me if you know this 1959 black-and-white classic TV episode. I ‘m going to go over the story which has many levels and layers.

After all, we are talking about “a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity,” Rod Serling sedately states. “It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

I’ve been there as a person living with Lewy body dementia. Between science and superstition. Shadows and light.

Before being locked in a vault  and before the bombs and before the endless stacks of  books, Bemis was a man who viewed the world as encroaching upon his precious time. Time to read the books he loved.

At home, his wife Helen Bemis put constant demands on him, wouldn’t even let him read  the  newspaper, for goodness sakes.

At work, his boss, Mr. Carsvile, also demeaned and belittled  him.  One day Bemis steals away to the bank vault to catch some valuable reading time, out of view of the boss.

Reading takes time. Do people read  like they used to? I’d say per word consumption has gone up but it’s consumed like a patient with attention deficit disorder.

I know I battle with my disease over my attention span.

I believe the reading public feels, like me, ADD-addled.

Technology pushes 300 channels through a skinny cable from pole to house, every house. The torrent of bits and bytes pours into laptops and phones held in the hands of billions. 24/7.

Bemis had his book and sturdy hiding place. Secured in the vault, Bemis was disoriented after the bombs did their work, the blasts blew the vault door open.

Bemis wanders out through the rubble, even contemplates suicide all the way to the point of putting a gun to his head. Then he sees. Hundreds upon hundreds of books lie in piles outside, blast-blown from a library. Bemis can hardly believe his eyes.  What’s bad for everybody, death by incineration, turns out to be good for Bemis. As screwed up as that is, it makes some sense as we watch.

He grins broadly at his good fortune.

“And the very best thing  of all is there is time now,” he says, picking up a large clock, amid the  books strewn about. “There is all the time I need and all the time I want. Time. Time. Time. There is time enough at last.”

A reader commented on one of my recent articles  involving oddball random sayings  about  life and death. The reader posted this offering: “Life sucks and then it ends.”

Cynical, yes, but enough of a truism to resonate with a lot of people. Bemis’ life did suck. It was mundane and tedious, always spent wanting more time to do the thing  he loves, too scared to take control of his life.

Then the bomb.

<GO HERE FOR FULL STORY>

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Rub your dog behind his ears while you still can (blog version)

This appeared originally on AL.com and much on  Facebook, But  I’m posting here for those who missed. Coming soon: a How-Am- I column and Top 10 (20?) of my blog post AND more music. Gotta keep  the countdown going.

My dog is getting old.

You know what I am going to say next, right?

I’m getting old too.

And you know what I don’t want to say, don’t you?

That I’m sad he is going to die.

Gus the psychodoodle. Photo by Rachel Vissers.

My worried thought came after my wife Catherine said it sounded like our  dog’s’ breathing was becoming more labored. And he wasn’t running the stairs with the same wild abandon.

Gus is his name.  He’s a small, rust-colored, curly mop of a dog, a poodle mix of unknown origin. I call him a psychodoodle. He’s about 12 or 13 agewise best we can guess. We rescued him from a shelter in California. He loves to be rubbed behind the ears.

I love him.

I know most pet owners can relate to that. Still sounds silly that a grown man can care for and love a dog that has complicated life with added expense for vet bills, food, poodle haircuts and just plain worry.

At great physiological expense to us, Gus likes to play a game we call  ‘shootig the gap, or doorway.’

Any space he sees at the front door when it is opened he tries to sprint through. If he makes it before a foot holds him back, he is off to a wild, run-through-the-neighborhood spree, oblivious to the speeding two-ton cars.

Before I was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia at 56, our other dog died. Well, we, my wife, Catherine and I, had to take Molly in to be ‘put down.’ How else do you say it. Put to sleep?

Molly, a yellow Lab who was as kind as she was dumb, had a nice friendship with Gus. Gus would bark at and relentlessly attack, in a playful way, Molly. And Molly  would just let him.

We knew when Molly was dying. The breathing became labored, overtime, suggesting the onset of heart failure. She increasingly didn’t like stairs and quit sleeping in our upstairs bedroom.  Given the age and symptoms, I knew as the son of a veterinarian, she needed to be euthanized. But we  just couldn’t do it, we made up excuses. “She sounds better today, I think,” we’d tell each other.

Molly’s last night with us, I slept beside her on the floor.

By some amazing strength she stayed alive through the night. She looked in our eyes.

At the veterinary hospital we carried Molly, in a blanket because she could no longer walk.

With tears flowing freely we watch the doctor inject Molly.

I’ll never forget the sight of Molly’s eyes. One minute I was looking into her soul, and then the pupils became fixed. She wasn’t there.

Our children, now all grown, learned about death  through these experiences with their pets. And they learned about love.

Gus is lying on a rug right now in front of me.

I  bend down and rub behind his ears.

Maybe Gus, you have some good time left.

Maybe I do too.

Read more about Oliver and his push to raise awareness of Lewy body dementia at his blog, www.myvinylcountdown.com 

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MVC by the numbers: How far to go? I’ll be finished in 30 months

With the Flash and the Pan post this morning, I am at number 485.

That’s how far I have to go (484 more actually.)

That’s the number of posts I have left to fulfill the vow of reviewing or writing about the 678 vinyl records I  collected, mostly in my teens or 20s (1970s, 1980’s). Although I do have some newer vinyl, which sounds very good I must say. And I have a little bit from the ’50s and ’60s.

I’m doing it with diminishing brain function. I  have Lewy body dementia and am trying to raise awareness to this misunderstood and little known disease which affects more than a million people. Please read up on this by going back through my blog, and reading about my thoughts and experience. Also go to the Lewy Body Dementia Association website at LBDA.org

So let’s do the math on My Vinyl Countdown. From 678. Counting backwards I am on 485. (This is the number that appears at the top of each blog spot next to the artists’ name I am reviewing.)

So 678-485 = 193.  I have reviewed and written about 193 albums right now.

That is 193/11 (months) = 17.5. That’s how many I have been doing per month.

So 485/17.5 = 28. That’s how many more months I have if I keep at this pace. Two years and four months.

I have vowed to live long enough to do this, but I am compelled to chug through this to complete the task. I was diagnosed two years ago. On the high end, survival after diagnosis averages 7 years. I’ve done 2 so that gives me 5 years left of life.

PREDICTION:

I’ll complete this in 30 months, with 30 months to spare on my life span.

 

 

 

 

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Fire Town — 486

ALBUM: Fire Town In the Heart  of the Heart Country (1986)

MVC  Rating: 4.0/$$$

For some reason, I have great clarity on how or at least why I bought this.

Critic Steve Simels, then of Stereo Review magazine, said it was one of the best records he had heard. Ordinarily I’d take that with a grain of salt. But Simels was the guy who said Tonio K.’s ‘Life in the Food Chain’ was the best album he had ever heard.

So I bought that Tonio album sight unseen  (or unheard. Remember no samples online in those days, about 1978). And Simels was right, more or less.

Foodchain is a helluva an album. And to this day, I consider Tonio K. to be one of the underappreciated artists of all time.

This Fire Town album? Not so much.  Now this is a very good album, very catchy songs that make you want to hum. But they aren’t plowing new ground here or showing  us  anything we haven’t heard. Very midwestern sounding, country rock or pre-Americana. BoDeans would be a touchstone. They are like the anti-Wilco, with bright cheery tunes and optimistic outlooks. Like John Denver with more electric rock guitar.

The singer’s voice is too generic for me, not bad, but doesn’t quite have that quality of making the listener believe he’s meaning what he’s saying. The songs are actually excellent and  one can see where Simels might of thought he was seeing the NBT, a new Eagles or a new Crosy, Stills & Nash. But  not quite. However this, like Tonio K., is an underappreciated gem.

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Flamin’ Groovies — 487

ALBUMS: Now (1978)

MVC Rating: 4.0/$$$

I was graduating from high school when this came out. Talk about retro.. This group was like something out of 1966. They cover ‘Paint it Black’ on this album like it was a new song.

‘There’s a Place’ cover sounds like the 1960’s prom band checking in on the Beatles.

All this came to me in the early 1980s.

I discovered this Flamin’ Groovies in a strange way. I was at the Birmingham public library doing some research and they had vinyl records that you could check out, like a book, and return later. This would have been mid-1980s.

I picked up a Flamin’ Groovies album called Groovies Greatest Grooves. It had the song ‘Shake Some Action,’which blew me away. It’s the sense of discovery that you live for as a record collector. Again I was looking for tunes not rare artifacts and that song was one good song. Cracker later recorded it and it was featured in a movie, all much later.

I made a cassette tape out of it that I have no idea whether I have or not.

The  thing that made the Groovies groove work was that they played essentially covers or originals that sounded so close to their heroes, early Beatles, Stones, and Who. — with no irony. That’s what makes it great. Just a few guys from San Francisco playing songs they love from another era.

So, it wasn’t surprising to see that this 1978 album, a comeback of sorts, was produced by retro-man Dave Edmunds. “Yeah My Baby” written by Edmunds, and band members Cyril Jordan and Chris Wilson sounds like a long lost classic. Or long lost classic B-side.

The sound seems  like it was coming through a B&W TV set.