Since it’s my birthday I just had to go with Bee Thousand.  Admittedly I was not one of the cool kids when it came to Guided By Voices.  God how I wish I was.  You know, one of those guys that just knew a band was awesome from the start, even though no one else knew of them or someone who would go to the record store for sole purpose of scoring a self-printed 7-inch.  Unfortunately when Guided By Voices hit the indy music scene, I was busy with raising little kids and fixing up an old house in SW Minneapolis.

I’m pretty sure I’ve related this story before but it bears repeating because I think it’s common with GbV fans. I didn’t hear Bee Thousand until 2006 and for that I have to blame/thank Mary Lucia (DJ 89.3-The Current) for turning me on to Guided by Voices. Sometime in the summer of 2006 Mary Lucia played the song Motor Away and made some quip that GbV was her one of her favorites. Now of course I’ve probably heard Motor Away and I Am A Scientist over 100 times but I thought to myself “now there’s a band that I really don’t know very well.” So I downloaded a couple of songs, liked them; started reading up on the band, and pretty much decided that Bee Thousand was the album to take the plunge. It took a few listens but six years later I am a total GbV geek with over five hundreds of songs on my I-pod and GbV-related CD's, DVD’s and books scattered around my house like a tossed-aside Robert Pollard lyric.  I regularly check the GbV websites, and am waiting for the day when I can actually buy one of those hand printed 7-inchers.

Call it lo-fi, indy rock, DIY, or just plain weird, Bee Thousand (rhymes with Pete Townsend?) is all that but so much more. Guitars drop in and out in the middle of solos, songs break off after one chorus, and the album sounds like it was recorded in someone’s basement on a four-track machine – which of course it was. Arcane lyrics, fuzzy guitars, and off-key harmonies predominate. Even though there are 20 songs…with the longest song only 3:09, and many more under 2:30... it clocks in at a lean and sublime 37 minutes.

But oh what a glorious 37 minutes! If you can imagine infectious little songs with a Midwest twist on British Invasion-era pop you kind of get the idea of what you’re in for with Bee Thousand. If there was any justice in the pop music world, songs like Hardcore UFO’s, Tractor Rape Chain, Echos Myron, Queen of Cans and Jars, and I Am a Scientist would be as familiar as any song by the 60s/70s-era Kinks, Raspberries, Bad Finger, or from any Brill Building song writer. Alas, Bee Thousand will have to conquer the world one unsuspecting listener at a time. The good thing is that it is doing just that. A virtual cult has grown up around this album with books, blogs, listening parties, and groupies all dedicated to any and everything Bee Thousand.

Now I’m part of the cult and proselytizing on its behalf. If you want your music so slickly-produced that it can sell accounting services on TV with lyrics that are poll-tested and easily deciphered, well then Bee Thousand probably is not for you. However if you want to hear something that was written and sung for the love of music, that is both quirky and familiar, momentous yet fun, I implore you to check out Bee Thousand. Careful though, you might end up like me. I'll give the last word to Robert Pollard (from Echos Myron):

Most of us are quite pleased
With the same old song
And all of a sudden I’m relatively sane
With everything to lose and nothing to gain
Or something like that

After spending the previous decade releasing spare country and folk albums, Lucinda Williams spent most of the 1990’s recording and re-recording one of the greatest country albums released by a female artist. Gone was the lone voice and guitar of her previous albums and in its place was a lush mixture of guitar, mandolin, accordion, dobro, piano, and electric guitar. The album is a showcase of Williams’ fine song-writing skills and emotive voice that can go from a growl to a purr in the blink of a song. It is an album that takes its sensibility not only from Nashville (country), but also from New Orleans (Zydeco), Chicago (Blues), and Los Angeles (Rock and Roll).

The album covers your typical country fare of love gained, hearts broken, and a  life that is not smooth like a highway but instead bumpy and worn down like a gravel road. From the album’s first line - "Not a day goes by I don’t think about you" - we are introduced to Williams’ reminisces about love lost. Highlights for me include the opening song, Right in Time, which is about a woman who literally aches carnally for her man; Drunken Angel, a song about/for Gram Parsons; Lake Charles, (love lost); Greenville (saying goodbye to a lover who is a drunken lout); and Jackson (thinking about a lover as she drives across the south).

I Lost It standouts as a country-rocker about falling in love but worried about getting ones heart broke. The second verse is classic:

I just wanna live the life I please
I don't want no enemies
I don't want nuthin' if I have to fake it.
Never take nuthin' don't belong to me
Everything's paid for nothing’s free
If I give you my heart
Will you promise not to break it?

Sweet.  If we could all have standards like that.

This album is southern, but Williams isn’t getting her Lynyrd Skynyrd on. It’s the south of cotton picking, humid nights, rutted roads, and beer guzzlin’ good ol’ boys who done their woman wrong. Lucinda Williams imbibes these songs with her voice, making them real -- your heart literally goes out to her and you curse the men who have burned her in the past. Top to bottom there isn’t a fill-in song or throw away line on the entire album and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road should be considered a classic alongside your Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Jayhawks collections.

Johnny Cash has been one of my musical influences since I was a wee lad, basically because my dad was a big fan of Johnny Cash and the first albums I was exposed to were Johnny Cash recordings. My favorite was Live at San Quentin and I would listen to that album over and over. As a smartass teenager, my friends and I would goof on the fact that Johnny played the song San Quentin two times in a row on that album and how much it would suck if a band like Kiss would play a song like Beth two times in a row at a concert.  With his TV show and old hits, Johhny Cash was a big star in the 1970s.

However by the time American Recordings came out in 1994, Johnny’s career was pretty much tapped out. Of course he could’ve always just played the casino circuit, singing his hits and Cashing in on the nostalgia but a bearded rap producer named Ric Rubin would have none of that.  Rubin convinced Johnny to just play songs in his living room, accompanied by nothing but his own acoustic guitar. The result was not only stunning but resurrected Johnny’s career and brought a whole new legion of fans to his music.

On the surface, American Recordings was surprising more for its sparseness and “folky” tenor than for its subject matter. It was Johnny Cash stripped down to the bare necessities: that clear, deep voice and an acoustic guitar. Peeking underneath that surface, however, brought about another image – that of a man acknowledging his own mortality; worried about sins both past and present with the understanding that those sins have called into question his standing in the afterlife. Songs like Delia’s Gone, The Beast in Me, 13, and Down There by the Train tell the tale of a man who has grievously sinned. Cash is not proud of these sins – he doesn’t boast or shrug them off. Instead there is the sad recognition that sin is the price man pays for its humanity.

American Recordings kicked of a certain format that we would see throughout the American Recordings sessions. A few originals, one or two old standards, and a couple of offbeat covers that Johnny makes his own. The latter in American Recordings is a cover of the Danzig song 13. In the end the album is about sin and redemption. Johnny is telling us that we are all sinners but that there is a way out, we can seek redemption. Cash ends the album with The Man Who Wouldn’t Cry, a song that addresses the need for humility as it describes a hard-scrabbled man who lives a life of unsentimentalized failures and only finally through his tears is able to enter into heaven and gain all he lost on earth. Johnny would mine these fields even deeper in his next American Recordings Albums.

One can listen to American Recordings and dwell on the themes of sin and redemption or one can just listen to Johnny sing a bunch of old timey songs in a way that only Johnny Cash could do. It’s why these albums are so popular and why, when Johnny Cash dies nearly 10 years later, hipsters and old folks alike lament his passing and his preacher-like image graces the cover of Time Magazine.

Going to the University of Minnesota in the early- to mid-1980’s meant that I had a front row seat to the “Golden Age” of the local music scene. Any day of the week you could easily see the Suburbs, Soul Asylum, Husker Du, The Phones, The Wallets, heck sometimes even Prince, and a host of other great bands that have slipped into the mists of time. However my personal favorite was by far The Replacements, a band that I easily saw more than 50 times. The album that put the Replacements head and shoulders above all the rest was Let it Be.

From the iconoclastic Beatles-esque title, to the cover of Paul, Bob, Tommy, and Chris sitting on the roof of a porch of a typical SW Minneapolis home, to the snarky song about MTV, the album perfectly captures the feel and sense of 1984. What is great about this album, however, is its timelessness. Even though I couldn’t imagine this album being recorded at any time other than 1984, the album doesn’t feel dated some 27 years later.

The album kicks off with I Will Dare which was easily the Replacements biggest hit and most accessible song. Through this song, a lot more people were brought into the Replacement’s fold and, like Pretenders, helped with the ladies as you could play this Replacements song and not clear the dance floor (important when you are in college!).

The following three songs, Favorite Thing, We’re Coming Out, and Tommy Got His Tonsils Out were classic Replacements rockers full of Bob’s furious guitar work and Paul’s smart assy lyrics. Androgynous is a switch as a piano-led, slower tempo song. It was right before Let It Be came out that Paul was hanging out with Peter Buck of REM (That’s Buck's mandolin playing on I Will Dare) and we saw them once running around at First Avenue with eye liner. Needless to say that my friend Pete and I used eyeliner a lot that summer when we went out.

Black Diamond was the first cover recorded by the Replacements and it was perfect as they played the song straight but in an “ironic”way so that anyone in the know would get the joke. Seen Your Video, with its three lines (Seen your video/it’s phony rock and roll/we don’t want to know) was also spot-on as by this time MTV had been taken over by slick, expensively-produced videos usually from fey English bands that didn’t have room for guitars. Finally I think Gary’s Got a Boner would be considered a classic rock and roll song if it wasn’t for its goofy subject matter.

The songs Unsatisfied and 16 Blue were probably the most lauded songs and really shone a spotlight on Paul’s song maturing writing skills. Even though I was 21 at the time, I wasn’t that too far removed from 16 and understood 16 Blue's significance completely. The Replacements were playing these songs live for a few months prior to the release of the album and at that time we knew that their next album was going to be something special.

Let It Be really demonstrated what the Replacements were and could be. It was an exciting time as it appeared that they were on their way to superstardom. Unfortunately they were about 10 years too early. If this album had been released in 1994, they would have been bigger than Nirvana. This album some kicked off what some consider the Holy Trinity of Replacements’ albums: Let It Be, Tim, and Pleased to Meet Me. Many consider Tim the definitive album, and I respect that opinion but for meaning and musical enjoyment, Let It Be will always be one of my fave’ things.