I will never understand how these sensitive troubadours attract drunk and rowdy crowds (see also Jeff Tweedy). Lots of chatter in the audience for a solo acoustic show. Maybe 6 songs in, he decided to take an intermission. Things got better. It took me a good 30 seconds to realize that he was covering “Firehouse” by KISS and then did two more KISS songs. I thought it was hilarious and had a huge, shit-eating grin on my face the whole time.
Pro Move: He jumped off the stage and played Hank Williams’ “Love Sick Blues” in the audience.
On Sunday, April 23rd, I played an hour’s worth of Classic 70s Countrypolitan music as part of WVMO’s Vinylathon. Keeping with the theme, it was all 45 records with the crackles, pops, and scratches that let you know that you are listening to REAL vinyl.
Announcing the wrong artist even though it’s written down in front of me.DJ Shotski providing excellent engineering“Happily NEVER after…”What’s a Country Show without some tearjerkers??
My mom was nice enough to gift me a WORKING 1920’s era phonograph!
It is my Christmas/Birthday/Graduation present for the foreseeable future. 🙂
I can’t decide if it is a Style I or Style XIV.
According to the Indiana Historical Society, “Starr Piano Company was established in Richmond, Indiana in 1872. Around 1916, Starr began to manufacture phonographs and produce records.“
According to my mom, this was the exact same model that her Grandparents had when she was a kid.
The dial is the volume control. It moves the wood block in the speaker. It can be wide open or closed or in between.
It is an amazing piece of furniture/technology/history. The fact that everything still works after 100 years is kind of unbelievable.
The Starr Singing Throat is the key to its sound! (I guess?)
Cranking the phonograph
Starting the platter and putting the needle on
Cut Yourself a Piece of Cake and Make Yourself at Home
In my brief research I discovered that much like Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Xerox, Victrola is a brand name. Victrola and Starr are brands of phonographs. The more you know!!
On October 15th I moseyed on down to the Memorial Library on the UW Madison campus for the fall book sale. I purposely timed my arrival to coincide with the last hour of the sale AKA EVERYTHING IS FREE! I had just watched Miles Ahead, the Miles Davis biopic, and was keen to try to find some jazz records. If you were looking for recordings of High School Band Concerts from the 70’s and 80’s you would have hit the jackpot. There were a ton of records, but there was a reason that most of them had remained unsold for three days. I was able to pick up a handful of polka records for my friend DJ Shotski. (Check out her show on Sunday nights at 7pm on WVMO. I was able to get some jazz records and a few other things.
Here’s my haul
People love to see people flipping through records
Art Ford’s Party for Marty
Marty Holmes is primarily known for his relationship with Latin bandleader Tito Puente, with whom he served as both a sideman and a composer. In the latter category there are several evocative titles and musical questions, perhaps related to each other in the case of “The Floozie” and “What Are You Doing, Honey?” respectively. Singer Bobby Darin cut Holmes’ “Was There a Call for Me?” some eons before the invention of the cell phone. A Brooklyn boy, Holmes dabbled with violin and got into the reed family as a teenager. He picked up piano on his own and by the late ’40s had found employment in a series of dance bands. The Holmes surname was a stage name, probably changed from the original Hausman due to public distaste for all things German in this time period. The Puente connection, resulting in at least a dozen albums, came about following Holmes’ stints with Neal Hefti and Tommy Reynolds, among others. Much of the Puente catalog featuring this artist was reissued in the ’90s. The sole Holmes solo effort was the festive Art Ford’s Party for Marty, originally released in 1959.-Wikipedia
‘Sounds like the party on the album cover‘ -my notes
Arthur Prysock and Count Basie
This is a 1965 studio album by Arthur Prysock and Count Basie and his orchestra. My notes read Baby Making Voice!!
Original Hootenanny 1963 LP
Includes “New” Performers Judy Collins & Judy Henske, Also Josh White, The Dillards. The Replacements Hootenanny album cover is an homage to this one.
Very, Very Villegas by Enrique Villegas
Enrique “Mono” Villegas (3 August 1913 – 11 July 1986) was an Argentine jazz pianist and composer.
The Touch Of Gold (Charlie Byrd Plays Today’s Great Hits)
Charlie Byrd Trio – Travellin’ Man
Charlie Lee Byrd (September 16, 1925 – December 2, 1999) was an American jazz guitarist. Byrd was best known for his association with Brazilian music, especially bossa nova. In 1962, he collaborated with Stan Getz on the album Jazz Samba, a recording that brought bossa nova into the mainstream of North American music.
Added to my “records to listen to while working bc there aren’t any distracting words”. The Touch of Gold album had a completely unrelated sleeve inside.
Cheryl Lynn’s big hit was “Got to be real” I still want to know who the Butterfly gong is….
Don Gibson With Spanish Guitars
“Oh Lonesome Me” is the hit I know (from the Neil Young cover on Harvest, and the Johnny Cash version from one of his million different American Recordings) There is also a version of Merle Haggard’s “All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers” which doesn’t seem very Spanish guitar-y
I would be remiss if I did not include an excerpt of the My Ding A Ling Polka
I don’t care anymore who was right And who was wrong and who was left and who was leaving I’ll overlook everything if you can overlook everything I know you’re worn out but you know I’m worn out too
If everyone screws up and I know that we both do Doesn’t it make sense me with you? If you and me if we blow it when it’s The last thing we should do
Don’t you think we should stick together? Don’t you think we should be the ones who go Post to wire months to years Days to nights and minutes to hours?
Mercury will be in retrograde from September 9th to October 2nd, 2022. This is a phrase that I have been repeating to myself for weeks. I don’t know if I necessarily buy into it, but it is a good reminder to pause when agitated and look around.
I actually printed out this Mercury Retrograde Survival Guide and taped it up at my cubicle:
The green algorithm reminded me that I liked this song enough to save it and presented it to me on a Saturday morning. My heart rate was accelerated from coffee and laps at the dog park. My first instinct was to get on the phone and create a cryptic tweet or even worse a direct message “See what I found! it’s a sign!”.
“The heat of the moment rarely has your future well-being in mind. ”
Instead, I had some quiet reflection and enjoyed the twang and melancholy that is my preferred method of musical expression and accepted that some things just aren’t meant to be.
Woman, I love your chest Baby, I’m crazy ’bout your breasts
-Marc Bolan
Upon further reflection, I probably shouldn’t have put this on that mix tape. T.Rex’s Electric Warrior entered my life in 1985 when The Power Station covered the song Get It On (Bang A Gong). And then left for a good dozen years. Although I would say the phrase “hub cap diamond star halo” because it is just such beautiful nonsense.
Eventually, I bought a “deluxe reissue” and could not believe how many congas and acoustic guitars were on a record called ‘Electric Warrior’. The cover is still a classic.
How could you not think that this would be the heaviest album ever??
Raw Ramp is full of congas and acoustic guitars, but it is also catchy and maybe a putdown? I’m not familiar with Early 70’s British Slang.
The good version that cuts out the extra 2 minutes about “my old high school”
The first album that I can remember “owning” was a tattered copy of The Beach Boys Greatest Hits that was handed down from my parents’ record collection. I distinctly remember the dog eared red and yellow cover with masking tape holding it together.Family folklore states that in order to calm me and my sister and our three cousins, my mom would put on The BeachBoys and make us have dance contests to tire us out.
I do remember listening to that album over and over again with my cousin David years later on a record player that I bought at a garage sale. It was suitcase-style and had speeds of 16,33,45 and 78rpm. So you could play albums super slow for evil sounds or super fast for the ‘Chipmunk Effect’
The first album I remember buying with my own money was Styx ‘Kilroy Was Here’. This was the band’s science-fiction rock opera, although I had no idea what any of those words meant at 8 years old. All I knew was that it had the song “Mr. Roboto’. on it. I must’ve used birthday money to get it or more likely asked my parents to get it. I definitely remember being worried that my parents would accidentally buy the Journey album “Frontiers” (which had a very similiar robot on the cover) by mistake.
Kilroy Was Here was pure shlock but to an elementary school brain, these were some heavy, heavy concepts. The backstory is an undetermined future Rock and Roll is outlawed and a ragtag group of rebels tries to bring it back (aka Styx?). Also, each of the band members is also a character according to the credits on the back of the album.
All this stuff went way over my head. But it did have “Mr Roboto” which was great because it was a catchy song AND it had a section with laser sounds where you could stage your Star Wars figures to have little battles during the song. There was also a song called “Heavy Metal Poisoning “that was sung by a televangelist-type character named Dr. Righteous, who was there to warn the world about how heavy metal music is ruining the kids. This was a common theme of the 1980s and of course, I ate it up. Finally, I do remember liking the syrupy ballad “Don’t Let it End” which reminded me of when my cousins would have to go back home to their house after staying with us for the weekend. I’m guessing Dennis DeYoung and the rest of Styx were probably talking about a relationship gone sour and not the end of a playdate. But who’s to say?
Don’t let the wood paneling fool you, we came here to rock!!
My introduction to Judas priest was probably on some sort of K-tel “heavy metal memories” cassette tape that I got at Pamida. I don’t remember what the rest of the tracks were but I’m 98% sure ‘You’ve Got Another Thing Coming‘ was on this tape. Upon further inspection, I have been saying the lyrics incorrectly for over 30 years. What I always thought was :
Out there is a fortune waitin’ to be had If you think I’ll let it go young man You’ve got another thing comin’.
is actually
Out there is a fortune waitin’ to be had If you think I’ll let it go you’re mad You’ve got another thing comin’.
I think you can see how pre-teen me could make that mistake.
I did not have an older brother to turn me on to music. I just had the kids at the back of the bus with their boomboxes and Judas Priest just was not in the rotation. My enlightened twelve-year-old tastes skewed toward more contemporary music like Iron Maiden and also Iron Maiden. Judas Priest with their leather and spikes seemed dated to me in 1986, which is odd because they were basically the blueprint for my beloved Iron Maiden (twin lead guitars, operatic lead singer, fantastical subject matter- although Judas Priest in the 80s wrote more about rockin’ than dragons).
Judas Priest remained off my radar for almost a decade. A minor blip occurred when Slayer covered ‘Dissident Aggressor‘ on South of Heaven.
I remember reading a Rolling Stone article about the Smashing Pumpkins when alt-rock was breaking ,that made a big deal that “Judas Priest was mentioned, incidentally, by band members 11 times in a three-day period” https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/inside-the-smashing-pumpkins-double-platinum-soap-opera-82390/ Another quote from the same article “I know the mentality. I used to sit around and argue about who was a better guitar player in Judas Priest, K.K. or Glenn. That’s where I come from”-Billy Corgan
I rediscovered Judas Priest in college right around the time this Rolling Stone article came out. My interest in them was probably equally a reaction to all the Hippie-Phish-Jam-Band music that I was listening to at the time and my heavy metal childhood that had just been acknowledged as cool by the cool band of the time. Plus I was working at Goodwill so I could pick up records for a buck including Judas Priest classics like British Steel and Priest Live, the live album I would bust out after bar time much to my roommates and hangers-on chagrin but come on who doesn’t need to hear “We don’t need no parental guidance!!” at 4:00 in the morning??
I also scored a sweet Sad Wings of Destiny picture disc that eventually I had to sell to pay the phone bill or something. I STILL prefer the slower version of Tyrant on this album over the Unleashed in the East live version.
The most heterosexual album cover of all time
In the early 90s, Rob Halford left the band and was replaced by the singer of a Judas Priest tribute band. The Mark Wahlberg movie Rock Star is loosely based on this story.
The ’90s were hard for hard-rockin’ bands that were big in the ’80s. Thanks to grunge, the leather and studs uniform just wasn’t cool anymore. This flannel shirt with a backward hat outfit just screams ‘I’m down with the kids ‘.
Rob Halford came out in 1998. I vaguely remember some backlash from his former bandmates but for the most part, people just said “Yep. That makes sense”.
How do you do fellow kids?
The 1980s were an odd time. The word Gay was an insult and a punchline for so many movies and tv shows. At the same time, bands of dudes who dressed like chicks (Poison, Britney Fox, Cinderella, Motley Crue) were seen as totally heterosexual. The idea of the lipstick-wearing Bret Micheals would be interested in chasing anything other than teenage girls was absurd at the time.
Judas Priest still tours and puts out albums but most people would agree that they peaked in popularity (if not creativity) around 1986. Coincidentally, the exact time that the wonderful Heavy Metal Parking Lot documentary was shot.
What would you say if you saw Rob Halford? I’d jump his bones!This dude in a DC 101 Tshirt best explains the virtues of Judas Priest
I went down to Chicago late on a Friday night. I got to stay at my friend Andrew’s Airbnb in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. I kind of felt like a fell off the turnip truck in the big city; lots of traffic and crazy parking and a feeling that I was out of my element. got up the next morning drank some coffee and went to the Men’s Fireside Meeting that was recommended to me by a couple people. It was a classic church basement and folding chairs set up, which was awesome. I ran into a few faces from the zoom meetings over the last 2 years. I went out to breakfast at Janik’s with a bunch of people afterward. I got biscuits and gravy and talked with a lot of dudes which was nice. a guy named Jim gave me the history of the Auditorium which was where I was going to see the Wilco band that night. If I remember correctly it was built in 1899 it levitates off the ground because of the clay soil . (this will come into the story later).
I headed back to the apartment and took a nice post-high-calorie-intake nap. Now well-rested, I reserved a spot near the theater to park and decided to walk around Grant Park for a while. it was a beautiful 70-plus-degree day. The sun was shining and there were millions of people out. it was great to be out in civilization again. on the river, it seemed like everyone was on a first date or just out and about. I had to smile when I saw the kids that were taking selfies in front of Trump Tower across the river while they were flipping the bird. took my obligatory pictures of the marina towers aka the cover of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album that I was going to see played in its entirety. I had my heart set on finding some Chicago hot dog stand but had no luck.
I made it to the theater on time and walked all the stairs until there were no stairs anymore and then was pointed up to where my seat was. it was literally the last seat in the last row at the tippy top of the auditorium I did the Matterhorn up to the top and sat down next to some high school or maybe college-aged girls as I peered down the six stories to the postage stamp that was the stage. what I am calling vertigo kicked in and I quickly realized that there was no way I was going to be able to sit there for 2 hours white-knuckled and trying to convince my brain that I was not going to fall to my death. I ended up sitting in the lobby area just outside and listened to most of the concert. I had thought about just going home but I’m glad I stayed. eventually, around encore time I was able to stand in the back of the lower upper balcony and see the show so I ended up probably seeing a good half an hour of the 90-minute show. Jeff tweedy saved all his banter for the encore which is nice band introductions and some nice words about Jay Bennett, the band member who left before the album was released (see the whole story in the movie ‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart‘) and subsequently sued them right before he died ( probably an overdose.) They played some outtakes that I really enjoyed like get to the good part and then closed with some bangers including out of sight out of mind.
The view from the nose bleeds
The next day I headed to Libertyville to see the Bill Sienkiewicz exhibit at the Bess Bower Dunn Museum of Lake County. This was something I just stumbled upon randomly on the internet and I realized I could drive to on my way home. The museum itself was in a tiny town (maybe a suburb of Chicago ?)I’m not sure where I was exactly, but there were only two cars in the parking lot and I was one of them so that was good. I had a feeling that it was going to be a dinosaur museum and it was totally a dinosaur museum. The lady behind the counter was nice enough to say “You started at the dinosaur and then you wind around and you’ll end up at the Bill what’s his name exhibit that you’re probably here for” and that was true.
Start at the dinosaur
So the exhibit itself was really cool. There were sketchbooks from 1985 and 1986 that you could just flip through. I was able to stand inches away from original art and look at the lines and how he put pages together which is very interesting to me.
Sienkiewicz cut his teeth on Moon Knight in the early 1980s where his style transformed from Neal Adams copycat to a more expressive, angular look that incorporated painting and mixed media. It definitely stood out on comic racks when I was a kid.
I remember I got a copy of New Mutants #19 when I was 11 years old and it blew my mind. It just did not look like anything else I had ever seen. There is a quote that I attribute to Roger Ebert that says in effect ” The Golden Age for whatever is when you were 12 years old”. I think that applies to movies, music, and art.
My introduction to Bill SienkiewiczHaving the time of my life. for realz.
Oldman Schuck 