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Perfect Albums!

With the exception of the obvious album, I’m gonna try and mention a few that don’t normally come up when this list is contemplated.

Interestingly enough, my first pick goes in a direction that most who know me wouldn’t suspect… Perfect album?

Time Out – Dave Brubeck

Set a standard of what a great jazz album should be, and marked a generation of jazz artists. Sticking with jazz-ish type stuff…..

World Gone Strange – Andy Summers

If the first song, title track, doesn’t bring a huge smile to your face opon first listen… Yer dead to me! Fine collection of songs.

And now to the more conventional.

Dark Side Of The Moon –

Well, you know who. If I were to pick only one album to demonstrate the “perfect album”, this is THE perfect album. Song composition and selection? Musicianship? Production? This isn’t even a favorite album of mine… don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it’s not one of my all time favorites… but it is perfect in every way.

Now on to more standard fare:

Breakfast In America – Supertramp.

Breakfast never sounded so good! Yum!

Crowded House

I would have picked “Together Alone” as it’s a fine album, but the song “Black And White Boy” is the chink in the armor on that one.

Since I’m going on about a Finn, I might as well include the other one.

Everyone Is Here – The Finn Brothers

If you love harmonies, and song that talk about real life stuff, like, oh, the jealousies and healing of the relationship that happens between two incredibly talented brothers, here is the perfect album.

Candy-O – The Cars.

Their debut is stellar. This follow up probably doesn’t get the accolades it deserves because of the stunning debut. Both albums are quirky, but equally as stunning.

Triage – David Baerwald

You’ll not find a darker, politically charge and perfect rant of an album than this. And, at the end of the slow-burn rant, this thing ends with one of the most beautifully expressed songs about loving someone that I’ve ever heard.

And, finally

Bellybutton – Jellyfish

This is PERFECT pop! Yes, it might rot your teeth with its sweetness, but the musicianship is SOOOOOOOOO good, you’ll not mind the multiple trips to the dentist to have those cavities filled! Trust me on this one!

More Dialect Quiz Action

Here.

Reluctant GAS – Gear Acquisition Syndrome!

I’ve been trying to sell my big bass rig for over a month, and it wasn’t moving at all. If all the components were new, it would have gone for $800 at least. I was trying to sell it for $400, but I had no takers. Then, out of the blue, a guy offered trade that, in the end, I couldn’t refuse!

I am now the owner of this Cort B4FL fresless bass guitar!

Oh! It’s sweet! I already played it at a gig. For never having played a fretless before, I did pretty well. I screwed up a couple of time when I tried to do more on the fretless than I should have… The techniques between a fretted and fretless bass are a but different, but, when I wasn’t getting myself into trouble, my intonation was pretty good.

PS. This is the bass that belonged to Jerry Margosian. The guy was a monster player, and I hope I can learn to play the thing at least an N’th as well as he could!

PPS. I didn’t spend any money getting this thing, but I could use an extra few hundred $$$. Also, i made a promise that if i got more equipment, I’d move something else out the door. So it looks like it’s time to sell my black Peavey 5 string DynaBass.

What Azzent Do I Have?

I’m neutral! Which is interesting considering I was born in New Yak, and raised in Daaallaaas Teexaas.

To be fair though, I did want to be an actor when I was a kid, and did pay very close attention to the way I talked. Somewhere, there is a cassette tape of my brothers and sisters talking, and I had the least detectable drawl of any of us.

Clint Eastwood Chose The Wrong Words.

Soooo many people are indignant that Eastwood would suggest that President Obama might tell someone something to the equivalent of “F*&% You”….

Um….

I should point out he’s come close to doing just that. More than once.

Raise your hand if you think a President who would go on national television and proudly tell the world he’s going to “kick ass” would easily go a little further and tell someone to “f*&% Off”.

Yeah. Both my hands are high in the air.

PS. I wonder if “take-backs” are allowed in the “Chicagoland” Presidential rulebook? I smell an inverse beer summit in the works!

Oh look! There! It happened!!!!

PSS. Yeah. I just had to post this.

Hat Tip: Beer Summit Image.

A Blast From My Past!

A diving score card, circa 1980-ish. My best score was on dive 5111, which is a from drive with a half twist. On twisty dives, I used to throw the very unusual reverse dive in layout with a half twist, dive 5311. In all my years of diving, I was as far as I know the only one who did that dive.

The back 1 1/2 summy with a 1/2 twist was one of my favorite dives to throw. My two regrets in diving was that I never got to states – missed that by 2/10’s of a point (my fault as I muffed two dives in regionals) – and I never got the chance to learn and throw a back 1 1/2 with a 1 1/2 twist. The last year I dove, the guy who was going to coach had a family emergency and had to quit, which left me without a coach for much of the season. When I finally go a coach, it was so close to the beginning of conference competition, he was reluctant to start working on new dives. I should have insisted that I learn the dive anyway, but i didn’t have the self confidence to issue that challenge in those days.

Oh well.

Here is the back 1 1/2 with a 1 1/2 twist. This is on the 1 meter board. Mine would have been from the 3 meter.

PS. This was written on the back. Have no idea why, except it was probably referring to my car. The writing on top is not mine. I have no idea.

The First Song I Ever Wrote.

It’s called “Insanity”.

As I said, it was the first song I ever wrote. My song writing journey started when I was about thirteen. So, I’m 47 now. That means it took some 34 years to complete this song! Many if not most of the songs I’ve written over the years are incomplete. In the event that the lyrics come out whole and complete at the initial point when I put pencil to paper, the tune that would go with it usually came later… Sometimes MUCH later. This first song was different. It just all came out.

Well, almost.

I knew how it was going to go music and form wise, where things went up and down and paused and what-not, but I had no idea what key it would be in. The thing is, I never really thought about what key it would be in. It never crossed my mind. I wasn’t playing an instrument, or even thinking about performing the song for that matter at the time I wrote it, so there isn’t any reason why I would think of that.

Fast forward nine months ago. I spent a decent part of an evening rifling through my entire song catalog – thirty four years and three binders full of songs or unfinished scribblings that might show promise – looking for something, anything resembling a decent song I might be able to bring in to my acoustic guitar / vocal duo Taylor Martin. I didn’t find anything that had the makings of a good Taylor-Martin song, but I did realize that I have a lot more decent songs written over the years than I had ever realized. The stuff that I had once thought was horrible or just plain dumb, now that there is some distance between the creation of the thing and the immediate revulsion of the work many artists experience – kind of a creators remorse* – didn’t look so bad in retrospect. In fact, some of my songs are probably pretty good.

“Insanity”, that first song, was one of those that looks better with age. I’m not going to say it is the best song in my collection. At least I wouldn’t say it is. But it is one of the most honest songs about the depression and withdrawn state I was in. It is about the aftermath of the move from huge metropolis of Dallas Texas to the tiny berg of Lemoore California, a town that had no movie theater, no bowling alley, and not even a single stop light! I was already alone, depressed, and isolated as a kid, but moving to Lemoore… Man, that hit me HARD!

How hard?

This hard! Here is a taste of the song “Insanity”:

Fortune, fame and friends
It never seems to end
But then I took a fall
And it seems I lost them all
But Now I see
It’s not them
It’s me.

My fantasies and dreams
For all of them it seems
They’ve all gone down the drain
Cause of all the hurt and pain
I can’t go on
The dream, is gone.

[chorus]

Hello’s
Why bother
Why try
You always have to say good-bye
And it’s driving me insane

The verses are a bit of an exaggeration. It’s not to say I felt like I had much of anything to begin with, as I was not a happy kid in Dallas. But when I moved to Lemoore there was a brutal reality of being truly alone, as I lost everything that was familiar, including contact with my best friend, a relationship of the type I would not again have for a number of years. As I had written before in a previous post, many of those early screeds were my way of deal with being alone and isolated, while the rest of the world seemed to be having a good time.

Now it’s my turn to have a good time. Doing the solo album and performing those songs live will in some ways make all that hurt not worth it, but at least make it worth something.

More Solo Album stuff here.

PS. * I think most artists experience “creators remorse” from time to time. I’ve written so many songs that at the time I though were just fantastic, and then a day later, I look at them and go “Jeez, this SUCKS!”. But I rarely throw anything I’ve written away. So they get a second chance for evaluation somewhere down the line.  Also, when I wrote “Insanity” I was listening to ELO when I wrote it, so I always thought it would have a familiar  ELO vie to it. As it turns out, that isn’t the case. This thing has a life of its own.

NEIL ARMSTRONG, August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012

I am crying right now.

He meant so much to this nation, so much to the world.

There are so few people in this world who can say they were the very first to do something. Neil? Armstrong certainly could. So precious few have been able to bring the world together, if only for a little bit. For that one supreme “giant leap” of a moment, Neil Armstrong did. I hope future generations can understand what he meant to this world.

HooRay! Sonicfrog.Net Is “Safe” For Consumption!!

Though I was hoping my site value would be more than $1,796. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Alienating Voters, One Demographic At A Time.

Yes, I’m not thrilled with the way the Obama administration has gone behind Congresses back and implemented part of the “Dream Act” via executive order. But Arizona Gov Jan Brewer’s response to it, denying drivers licenses to those young adults to be covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Process is mind numbingly dumb. I was going to write “It might be politically sound at the present moment“, but, unlike gays, who are mostly not going to vote for Republicans ever, the GOP has a chance to court and win a good portion of the Latino vote. Silly defensive actions such as the type Brewer is pulling will not bring any Latinos who are on the fence to the GOP side, and will only alienate a generation of both Latino and non-Latino voters for generations to come.

Then there is this.

Evelyn Cruz, an Arizona State University clinical law professor and director of the Immigration Law & Policy Clinic notes:

“that the REAL ID Act of 2005, a federal law that modified requirements for state driver’s licenses and ID cards, specifically listed immigrants who have been granted “deferred action” as among groups of people eligible for a license.”