My one allowed phone-it-in FMD. Hey are you checking out Beau's ranking of all 211 Beatles songs? You should, it's pretty damn impressive. Only a couple of egregious errors thus far.
Drop your lists.
Category Archives: Friday Music Day
FMD — Cool Show Bro
Bootsy regaled us with some stories last week of cool ass shows he saw back in the day: U2 and Radiohead at First Avenue. Got me thinking are there shows you saw that were classic? Me, I saw Replacements at their 5 night 7th Street Entry gigs to promote Tim. Also the Replacements at Riot Fest was pretty special and Lydia Loveless shows April and November 2014 was pretty epic. But what other famous concerts or shows do you wish you had seen live? I have a couple.
Beatles at the Cavern Club – Seeing one of those shows, especially right before they became huge, would have been so cool. The atmosphere, the fact that no one was doing what they were doing. Saying you saw The Beatle at the Cavern would be instant cool cred.
Alan Ginsberg reciting Howl for the first time at Six Gallery. Here’s the backstory. If I could go back in time, this is one place I would go.
Sex Pistols in Manchester – A hundred people saw them and all started bands we all know: The Clash, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Fall, Buzzcocks.
Elvis at Overland Park Memphis. Just 25 days after That's All Right Mama was recorded, this generally considered Elvis's first concert and just maybe the one place you could say Rock and Roll was born.
Dylan Goes Electric at the Newport Jazz Fest. Did people boo or not?
Guided By Voices in Dayton, Ohio early 1990s. Oh to be at one of those shows when only a few knew.
How about you?, What show/concert/performance do you wish you could say “I was there maaaaaan?”
Friday Music Day
What is your attitude on deleting songs from an album on your song library? With I-tunes, it’s so simple to eliminate the songs you don’t like that you can basically re-create any album to your liking. Don’t think Yellow Submarine belongs on Revolver? One key stroke and it’s gone. Me? I’m an album guy and for the most part I don’t eliminate songs from albums. If I want to listen to an album, then I have to listen to the way the artist/producer envisioned it (doesn’t mean I don’t use the skip button if I want to). If an album only has one or two songs I like and the rest has no interest I will take those good songs and put them on some “greatest hits” collection. I will admit that in a few cases I have found a song so odious that I’ve had to delete it; but that’s very rare.
This, of course, brings me to Guided By Voices. Robert Pollard has penned, recorded, and released thousands of songs. Even if he batted a phenomenal .600, that’s literally hundreds of songs that are crap. And believe me, even a freak like me will admit there’s a lot of crap GBV songs out there -- dude could seriously use an editor. But then who knows? One person’s garbage song is another’s treasure.
The album Propeller is a great example of this. Released on 1992, this was the album that finally caught the eye of some record company swell from NYC and Guided By Voices got invited to play in the big City with a resulting record contract. It’s the record that propelled (my pun) GBV from obscure Dayton, OH band to at least a cultish indie-darling band. The album is pretty damn good, but as I mentioned above, there’s some just awful songs on it too. I’ve kept all the GBV songs on I-tunes by album but I’ve also created playlists of their best songs (still way into the multi-hundreds) and sometimes created albums that are all killer, no filler. Propeller is one album that is a go to. If interested below is a playlist for Propeller that in my opinion is much more listenable. Perhaps create it on Spotify and give it a listen.
So drop your lists, and share your attitude about changing albums on your personal song library, do you create albums based on how they should have been released?
| Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox |
| Weedking |
| Quality of Armor |
| Metal Mothers |
| Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy |
| Red Gas Circle |
| Exit Flagger |
| 14 Cheerleader Coldfront |
| Ergo Space Pig |
| Circus World |
| On the Tundra |
Friday Music Day — Bowie
Of course I had a GBV related post all ready for my first FMD and then David Bowie surprisingly died, meaning I had to switch things up to recognize his role in my love of music while writing the first post-Bowie FMD in WGOM history.
There’s probably only a few of us citizens old enough to grow up on albums. I’ve told my son many times that when I hung out with friends, we didn’t play video games, we played albums. We would bring our records over to a friend’s house and just listen to music. Not only did we listen to music, but we would spend hours looking at the album covers and reading liner notes. I was lucky in that I had a friend who’s parents weren’t home a whole lot and had older siblings, meaning access to lots of music and hours of unsupervised pot smoking and album cover gazing. David Bowie took up a lot of those hours.
My two favorite Bowie albums were David Live and Ziggy Stardust. Bowie looked so cool on that live album cover and the songs were great live. Ziggy Stardust was mindblowing of course and to this day remains one of my favorite albums. We spent hours trying to figure out that album cover and contemplating the songs. It was heady and it rocked. I’ve always been a Bowie song guy, not so much an album guy, but Ziggy Stardust is something else.
When we were doing college visits with my son, I played a bunch of Bowie in the car and then we had dinner with some of my college friends in Chicago. Charlie was both blown away by the songs and our in-depth discussion of the different Bowie personas. How freaky he was and how damn cool he was. Boys and girls both wanted to sleep with Bowie and who could blame them? Charlie became a fan that weekend.
Charlie is now in Norway for Study Abroad and this past Monday morning, I wake up and before I turn on the radio, I notice I had gotten a text in the middle of the night. It was Charlie texting from Bergen telling me Bowie was dead. Even though he knew I was sleeping, he had to reach out to experience our shared grief. Thanks Bowie you freaky handsome musical genius. The stars do look very different today.
Drop your lists.
FMD: Best of 2015
Oh yeah, I was supposed to put up a "Best of 2015" post. I forgot.
Appropriately, though, that pretty much sums up my new-in-2015 listening experiences. I just never quite got around to listening to lots of new stuff I intended to, and... that's about it.
I do love me some Nathaniel Rateliff though.
How about you all tell us your bests of, and maybe I can get caught up someday, AMR's rambling comment about how getting caught up isn't possible notwithstanding.
FMD: Forward Looking
We'll do best-of 2015 lists next week. This week, let's talk about what you're looking forward to, musically, in 2016. That is, if anyone is around. These holiday FMD's generally seem like a bust, right?
FMD: Christmas Gifts
Remember the 90's? In the 90's I was, with some frequency, gifted CD's as Christmas presents.
The best one I ever got was TMBG's Flood, which helped me start to discover music that had been made in the same decade I was living in.
The worst one I ever got was Shania Twain's Come On Over, which... was not what I was listening to at the time. It wasn't as offensive as it sounds in retrospect, but it wasn't particularly good either.
So what's the best musical gift you were ever given? And the worst?
Merry Christmas all!
FMD: Sweet Emotion
Lately it seems like people in the nation have been mentioning songs that serve a specific emotional purpose. “Songs for a breakup” and “get drunk and sing along,” etc. I once put together a mix for the songs to play when I was feeling melancholy. It seems we’ve all got them. Songs for hitting a precise emotional state.
So I’d love to hear what songs you love to hear when you’re feeling happy? Sad? Wistful? Angry? Like you keep falling short? Like you’ve worked hard and succeeded? So on, and so forth. If there’s a specific mood that a song has helped you identify, toss that out there too.
And we might as well drop our lists while we’re at it, right?
FMD: The Best Laid Plans
I had some plans to put together a couple discussion topics - and hopefully I'll get to them at some point (recognizing that I'm covering both Christmas and New Year's... discussion might not be exactly happening on those days)(Can I get added for another month's rotation at the back end of the schedule?). But my kid puked all over the house last night, so I was addressing other things than planning this post. So I'm just gonna shoot from the gut and spew some words in this space so there's something going up for y'all to hurl your random 10 at.
Anyway, for today, how about we talk "non-standard" Christmas songs. I had a couple more to mention, but for now I'll just nominate this one as one everyone should add to their regular Christmas listening:
httpv://youtu.be/1wS-k66MKgs
What holiday songs do you know that others should be adding?
Also, drop your lists!
FMD: Concerts
I'm always struggling to go to more concerts, but more than anything the price of tickets get to me. Like right now, I'm loving Jason Isbell's album from this summer, but $40 a piece plus fees puts it at nearly $100 for both of us to attend. With all the adulting I've had to do lately - saving for a wedding, eventual down payment on a house, and way out there children - $100 seems like a lot more than it used to, even though I have the most income I've ever had. I guess something's got to give, and it looks like it's live music. But that's OK, bigger things are in the works.
ALSO: Sign up for 2015 in Review and 2016 Guest DJ spots if you haven't yet and still want to.