New Album: Ex Machina

It was one year ago today I released my seven albums over on Bandcamp all at once. Or “rereleased” one could say, as they all had been floating around in highly obscure fashion as cassettes and/or compact discs since way back in the day.

The music contained on all seven was recorded from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. In other words, it’s safe to say even the newest tracks on the seventh one, Circular Logic, were all well over a decade old, with some of the earliest material dating back more than a quarter-century (sheesh).

Here they are (all available for free download, if you’re curious):

Daisy Hawkins (1987-1990)

Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose (1989-1991)

Perpetuum Mobile (1990-1991)

The Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator (1991-1995)

Imbroglio (1991-1993)

Welcome to Muscle Beach (1993-1999)

Circular Logic (2000-2003)

I describe each of the albums in a post here from last year. Clicking through to my Bandcamp page also gets you to more information about each album (and each track). Six of the seven albums are all instrumental, with my pop-rock opus Welcome to Muscle Beach the only one featuring songs with lyrics & my vocals. (It’s my Revolver, I joke.)

The music was played on various instruments (guitars, bass, keyboards, pianos, percussion, keyboards and synths, and a midi sequencer) and produced using an old Tascam 4-track cassette recorder which I still own although is hardly in working condition anymore.

These days with Garage Band and similar programs the work of producing such self-made music has become so much simpler to do. Indeed, the process of digitizing these old tracks and releasing it all on my own has become trivially easy today compared to what had to be done way back when in order to get your recorded music heard by even a small audience.

Among the dozens of unrealized ideas I have laying about currently, one of them has been to create some videos to go along with various songs. In fact, I’d like to put all of it up on YouTube at some point -- I even have a dedicated YouTube channel for it -- but just haven’t gotten around to it.

I’d also like to find a way to create new music, although again it’s a matter of reestablishing some sort of “home studio” in which to do some recording. Meanwhile, I have been experimenting with some of the older tracks (including some unreleased stuff), and from one of those experiments I came up with something interesting enough I’ve decided to release it as a new album today.

The album is called Ex Machina and can safely be described as my first wholly “ambient” LP -- a single, almost 37-minute track called “Ex Machina (Redux).”

For this one, I took the opening track of Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose -- a short loop of electric guitar and effects -- and slowed it down a lot (like 800 percent) which resulted in a much longer, still uncannily melodic piece. I then reversed that track and spliced the two segments together, added a few more treatments to it all, and the long piece is the result.

Unlike practically everything else from the earlier albums, this one works pretty well as “writing music” (I’d suggest), for those who like to have something to accompany their scribbling. Or if you’re still playing online poker, it might work as a soundtrack for that, too.

I’ve even made a video for this one, a very slow pan across a panorama photo of the farm capturing a fairly stunning sunset from a few months ago. Here it is:

It’s probably hard to believe, but every sound you hear was made with an electric guitar. No shinola.

Feedback plays a big role, of course. In fact that’s where the name of the track came from, as the primary melody was spontaneously generated from the feedback being manipuated by the effects rack I was using. In other words, while a human played the notes, a machine (or multiple machines, really) served as co-composers, to be sure.

Speaking of feedback, let me know what you think! And if you like it, go ahead and download the audio over on Bandcamp.

It’s Getting Better All the Time: 50 Years of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I was probably around 12 years old when I got my first copy of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, perhaps just a little earlier.

That’s the age -- 12 -- of the protagonist in my new novel Obsessica. Have had some more readers and a couple of very nice reviews over on Amazon since the last time I brought it up over here. I’m actually in the middle of getting the ebook version together, and also have some other plans to promote it a little more going forward -- more on that soon.

I was chatting with someone about the book and stumbled into an observation about 12-year-olds. It’s an idea that might well have come from the narrator of Obsessica, who is writing as an adult about something he experienced when he was that age.

“We’re all 12, really, or thereabouts,” I said. “That is, there’s a point in there somewhere before we’ve grown up when we become who we end up being, and no matter how much we change after that we can’t really leave behind that first-finished-draft of ourselves.”

If that’s true, it matters that I was around 12 when I first listened to and loved Sgt. Pepper.

Later I would learn more about the Beatles, reading books and like many engaging in a kind of protracted study of every little detail of their history, including all things Sgt. Pepper. But well before that more intellectual engagement took place came the deep impression caused by many, many listenings back when I was a kid -- back when the record, like other things I experienced, inevitably became part of who I am.

I love the songs. All of them. And the idea. During their first few years of recording and performing, the Beatles provided a kind of template for the whole concept of a “band” (at least in the realm of popular music). Then with Sgt. Pepper they invented a fictional version of themselves to enable even greater experimentation.

They were already larger than life by then. But Sgt. Pepper was an even greater revelation -- about what the Beatles could do, and about what could be done by others, too.

In the title song, Sgt. Pepper is a character described as having “taught the band to play.” Like a mentor or muse or something. Which, of course, is what the album has served as for countless bands and musicians and people who yearn to be creative in other ways.

People talk about it being a “concept album” which it is. To me the analogue is a short story collection like Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, Nine Stories, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Different episodes, different characters, different moods, all connected by common thematic threads relating a particular ethos and vision emanating from the artist.

Sgt. Pepper features a variety of characters and voices and perspectives, complemented by the many different styles -- rock, blues, music hall, psychedelic, vaudeville, classical, traditional Indian, avant-garde -- all made to fit inside so-called “pop” formats.

The variety was more than enough to stimulate my still forming brain, with the record almost feeling like one “novelty” song after another. It’s rocking and relaxing, moving and melodramatic, catchy and complex, funny and frightening.

I suppose it’s true that an impressionable 12-year-old probably experiences these things more deeply than a cynical adult. But there I was, listening to Sgt. Pepper over and again on the stereo console, ensuring that decades later I’d still be thinking these thoughts and feeling these feelings when listening again.

I’ve written here about the Beatles many times before, including telling the story of my father playing the Red and Blue albums on eight-track player that came with an old Plymouth Valiant, and going with Vera to see the Cirque du Soleil show Love, and going to see Cheap Trick perform the whole of Sgt. Pepper, also in Las Vegas.

And (I must not omit) describing the card game I invented last year called “Sgt. Pepper,” a Badugi variant. Here are the complete rules:

Pulling out my Sgt. Pepper LP today, I’m finding tucked inside a copy of the fan mag The Beatles Monthly, dated June 1987. Yes, I’m old enough to remember when it was twenty years ago today the Beatles released their album that begins with the lyric “it was twenty years ago today.”

And now it’s fifty years ago today, the LP being released in the U.K. on June 1, 1967 and in the U.S. the next day. And everyone is listening to and talking about Sgt. Pepper and acting like kids again.

And I’m setting the needle down to listen -- again -- knowing even before the orchestra starts warming up that it’s guaranteed to raise a smile.

Prague Rock

Back on the road today, heading to the airport in just a little while to hop a plane that will carry me over the Atlantic for the last ever European Poker Tour festival in Prague, Czech Republic. This’ll be a first visit to Prague for your humble scribbler, so I’m greatly looking forward to experiencing what everyone tells me is going to be a real winter wonderland.

Despite being to Europe many times and even living in France for a year, I never made it to the Czech Republic. Growing up, of course, it was Czechoslovakia, part of the Soviet bloc up until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Then came the Velvet Revolution and eventually in 1993 the split of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

I remember during the early-to-mid ’90s learning a bit about the writer Václav Havel who served as the republic’s first president. Aside from writing a lot of poetry and many plays, Havel was a big supporter of the arts and musicians, and had a famous friendship with Frank Zappa of whom he was a big fan (one reason why I was led to learn more about Havel).

In fact, in 1990 Havel even designated Zappa Czechoslovakia’s “Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture, and Tourism.” I vaguely remember that causing a ruckus over here when then-president George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker got upset over a civilian being made a liaison with with a foreign country.

Baker told Havel “you can do business with the United States or you can do business with Frank Zappa.” (All of this reads interestingly against growing turmoil regarding our current president-elect’s unorthodox -- and frightening-to-some -- approach to international diplomacy.)

Zappa was a huge underground favorite in Czechoslovakia, despite his music being officially blacklisted by the authorities right up until the revolution. He influenced a number of bands, including several from Prague. The most famous example was a group called The Plastic People of the Universe, named after the Mothers of Invention’s song “Plastic People” opening their second album, Absolutely Free.

By the mid-seventies The Plastic People of the Universe had become quite popular and politically active, getting involved in numerous protests against the Communist regime. In fact, following one of these protests came disturbance of the peace charges and harsh prison terms for the band’s members.

Those punishments (and others) prompted still more protests, including the important Charter 77 manifesto co-written by Havel that prompted still more attempts at cracking down on dissent with arrests of those signing the document. Charter 77 would become a hub of sorts around which gathered the forces leading to the subsequent revolution.

I only know one of The Plastic People of the Universe’s albums, one from 1974 called Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned, which unmistakably demonstrates the influence of early Zappa/Mothers. Apparently the album wasn’t allowed to be released and so bootleg tapes of it were circulated by fans for a few years before it came out on vinyl in France a few years later.

I know of a couple of bands of this same era from Czechoslovakia, my acquaintance with these “Prague Rock” outfits an offshoot of my ongoing interest in Krautrock being produced at the same time right across the border in Germany.

I especially like a band called Fermata, or at least their groovy 1977 album Huascarán (the only one of theirs I know) which reminds me a lot of later Soft Machine. They’re actually Slovakian (i.e., not from Prague). But from the Czech side there’s another group called Modry Efekt -- or Blue Effect -- from Prague that a lot of people like. They often get compared to Yes, with their 1977 album Svitanie (or “Dawning”) usually highlighted as their best (like with these other bands, it’s the only record of theirs I’ve heard).

Been spinning all three of these the last few days. The Plastic People record is clearly accomplished and a fun listen, although not being able to follow the lyrics -- mostly drawn from the works of Czech poet Egon Bondy (another “underground” artist whose writings were censored) -- makes it hard for me to appreciate it fully. Modry Efekt also features some occasional vocals, although they are more part of an instrumental mix and do make you think of Yes (whose lyrics I’ve always found opaque, anyway). Meanwhile the all-instrumental Fermata disc is probably my favorite of the three -- super spacey and pleasurably complex (and great writing music).

Talk soon, once I’ve rock-and-rolled my way over to Europe.

Photo: EPT.

Krautrockin’

Wanted to share a note today about another bit of writing I’ve been doing lately. Actually I have kind of a big announcement regarding a long-time-in-the-works writing project that is just about to arrive at the “ready to order” stage. But meanwhile, here’s something else you can read right now.

Of course, I imagine it’ll only be a small percentage of you who’ll be that curious. You’ll need to be a music fan, and also a fan of music from the late ’60s through early ’80s -- in particular progressive rock, jazz and fusion, and/or ambient or electronic music. Those are some of the categories that overlap with so-called “Krautrock” music, about which I’ve been writing over on the Phish Coventry blog for the last several weeks. I’ve long been a fan of Krautrock, that somewhat hard-to-define subgenre that includes a lot of German prog starting around ’68 or so and lasting up through the early ’80s and after.

After many years of listening to bands like Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, and Popol Vuh, I came across Julian Cope’s history-slash-love-letter to Krautrock titled Krautrocksampler (first published in the mid-’90s). I like some of Cope’s albums, too, especially Fried and World Shut Your Mouth, and enjoyed his book a lot as well even if it is kind of over-the-top sometimes as he gushes over the bands he discusses.

When Cope wrote the book, many of the albums he talked about were relatively hard to pick up, only available as expensive imports. Nowadays just about all of them are easy to find online, which made it possible for me to fill in a lot of gaps as I tracked down records included in Cope’s overview of Krautrock.

A highlight of the book is Cope’s list of “50 Kosmische Classics,” records he designates as “essential” to those wishing to learn more about Krautrock. It’s a good list, even if I’d probably switch out several if I were to make my own top 50.

In any case, I decided to use Cope’s list as an excuse to try my hand at writing about Krautrock, and so have begun doing my own reviews of his “50 Kosmische Classics,” a list that’s arranged in alphabetical order. Here are the 10 I’ve written up so far:

AMON DÜÜL I - Paradieswarts Düül

AMON DÜÜL II - Phallus Dei

AMON DÜÜL II - Yeti

AMON DÜÜL II - Carnival in Babylon

AMON DÜÜL II - Wolf City

ASH RA TEMPEL - Ash Ra Tempel

ASH RA TEMPEL - Schwingungen

ASH RA TEMPEL & TIMOTHY LEARY - Seven Up

ASH RA TEMPEL - Join Inn

CAN - Monster Movie

Still to come are Krautrock titans like Cluster, The Cosmic Jokers, Faust, Harmonia, Kraftwerk, Neu!, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and others.

Writing about music isn’t as easy as it looks. It’s a bit like writing about poker, for me at least. In both cases I know how to play a little bit, and even feel like I’ve managed to enjoy some occasional “success” (relatively speaking). But it can be humbling sometimes to try to describe and evaluate what those who are obviously more agile and adept are doing.

If this sort of thing interests you at all, take a look at some of the reviews and let me know what you think.

Poker on the Radio

A quick one today just to point you to a new “Poker & Pop Culture” column that went up yesterday on PokerNews, this one concentrating on popular poker songs over the decades.

The column is titled “Top 10 Most Popular Poker Songs,” although that’s a little misleading as I didn’t necessarily try to present a definitive ranking, but rather just highlight 10 poker-themed songs that were inarguably popular among contemporary audiences.

The list is chronological, starting with Bert Williams’s “The Darktown Poker Club” (1914) and ending with Lady GaGa’s “Poker Face” (2008).

Nearly all of the songs included are poker-centric, you could say, with only T. Texas Tyler’s “The Deck of Cards” (1948) and Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” (1964) perhaps being less specifically about poker. (Tyler’s could refer to any card game, while Presley’s is of course about gambling and Vegas, generally speaking).

It’s mainly meant to inspire some debate and perhaps some suggestions regarding other songs not mentioned in the article that ought to be part of such a list. Take a look and let me know if you have any thoughts.

Image: “Vintage Westinghouse Wood Table Radio,” Joe Haupt. CC BY-SA 2.0.

In Memoriam

News of a few deaths sadly coming over the wires here in recent days. Doesn’t matter how much a person has done or how long that person has lived, always feels like things are unfinished when the end arrives -- for the individual and for those of us left behind.

Leonard Cohen’s passing on the eve of the election last Monday cast a pall over the past week for many (and added further to the pall caused by the election results for a decent percentage of that group).

Have to confess that I never quite connected with Cohen’s music although always appreciated his important place in the singer-songwriter story. I knew “Suzanne” and a few other tracks, and over this last week have been listening to more and realizing how huge the gaps are in my knowledge.

Unfairly I’d had Cohen lodged in a little-visited part of my memory occupied as well by Rod McKuen, another poet-slash-songwriter who achieved a similarly huge following although without the consistent critical acclaim of Cohen. Rolling Stone offers a decent overview of Cohen’s oeuvre and significance.

Leon Russell passed away yesterday, and like Cohen he had been mostly performing on the edges of my awareness previously. I suppose I knew him mostly through Joe Cocker (who covered both Russell and Cohen on his Joe Cocker! breakthrough), though that was obviously just the very tip of a vast catalogue.

“Tight Rope” is the Russell song permanently part of the classic rock rotation, although as a songwriter he’s a bigger part of our collective consciousness than most of us realize, penning an early version of the Stones’ “Shine a Light,” “Superstar” (made famous by the Carpenters), “This Masquerade” (a hit for George Benson), and dozens of other familiar titles. Check The New York Times obit for the full story.

Finally I was sorry to hear of the passing the poker writer and historian Johnny Hughes last week. I never interacted directly with Hughes, although certainly read with interest his many contributions to poker forums where he could be found sharing various poker-related tales and sometimes arguing with other posters over their veracity.

Hughes wrote both fiction and nonfiction. When working on my own “Poker & Pop Culture” series I’ve frequently encountered Hughes’s explorations of similar ground, in particular when dealing with the Old West and its colorful cast of characters, some of whom he covered in Famous Gamblers: Poker History, and Texas Stories.

My buddy Dr. Pauly knew Hughes much better, and he penned a thoughtful tribute for Club Poker over the weekend that’s worth a look.

Each of these three deserve better remembrances than I can provide, so follow those links for more.

(The photo up top is one of several so-so shots I took inside St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Malta a few weeks ago, which as an elaborate memorial to those who have passed seemed suitable to use here.)

Talking Versus Listening

I’m a social person. I generally enjoy meeting new people and love having conversations, sharing stories, and joking around. I’ve also been correctly pegged by others as “laid back” or hard to get upset. A “Type B” personality, some say. I suppose I’d have to accept that as a label, and don’t mind it a bit.

I remember once teaching an especially challenging summer school college course, one for which the students had all been admitted for the fall but on a contingency basis. It was a program for which this particular population of students -- ones who were on the margins for having the qualifications to be accepted -- had to pass three courses that were essentially meant to be preparatory for college work, and mine was one of them.

The idea was both to get them ready for the real thing and to see if they could handle the daily demands and responsibilities of being college students. It was a weird “college-but-not-quite-college” kind of situation -- I suppose the closest I’ve come to teaching high school.

I thankfully never had to deal too greatly with unruly students during my full-time teaching days. But this class was probably the nuttiest in terms of in-class behavior, and I often had to exert a lot of extra energy to keep everyone focused and prevent the sucker going off the rails.

We were several weeks into the course when a student called out over the mild roar to say something I still remember. I guess I regard it as an unwitting compliment about my teaching style, although it also said something about my personality as well.

“I wish just once you would get reeeeally mad!” she said.

Everyone suddenly grew strangely quiet to hear what I’d say in response. I just smiled and shook my head, and everyone laughed. I had already well established that my getting upset or angry just wasn’t going to happen -- that no matter how crazy and loud they became, they weren’t getting me riled up enough to yell and scream in response. For better or worse, that just wasn’t my style.

When playing poker, I tend to keep quiet, too, particularly when involved in hands. I’ll speak up and be social, but mostly stay out of the way of “table talk,” finding it easier to reveal less myself than to try to get others to spill more.

On Monday of this week I had surgery on my vocal cords, which if I remember correctly is the first time I’ve had any kind of surgery since I was a child. Had some kind of bothersome growth appear over on one side that for much of the summer actually made it hard for me to talk at all. I was always hoarse-sounding, and sometimes I’d open up my trap and nothing would come out whatsoever.

The surgery went very well. I don’t remember a thing, of course, having been knocked out well before and only waking up after being wheeled back out of the OR. Still have to sweat a biopsy of what got clipped out of there, but the chances are very high it isn’t anything to fret.

Anyhow, as part of the post-op instructions I’m now on what they call “voice rest,” which means I’m not allowed to talk for five days. I found a cool free text-to-speech app for the phone I’ve used some, and I’ve also found out how to do the same on my laptop, so with Vera I’ve been conversing that way.

Otherwise, since I work at home I’m not having to speak much anyway, and so I haven’t missed being able to talk. Weirdly, I’ve discovered it hardest to keep quiet when with our cats and horses. I’m realizing I constantly talk to them when I’m around them, usually just saying their names over and over. But I’m having to stifle that urge this week.

Another thing I’ve realized this week is how much more I value being able to hear over being able to speak. It would be a devastating choice to have to make -- whether to give up talking or listening -- but for me it would be a trivially easy decision. Perhaps most would choose the same way, I don’t know.

Anyhow, no talking for now. And no singing for four weeks (say the instructions)! I’m not much of a singer, but if you want to hear me singing you can on my newly-released album, Welcome to Muscle Beach (one of seven albums I’ve released and the only one with vocals.)

Wish me well as I quietly wait out my five days here. Meanwhile, talk among yourselves.

Image: AskLisaAnne.com.

Releasing My Seven Albums

I mentioned on Tuesday a “creative project” I planned to “publish” this week. Today’s the day -- I’ve made live my Bandcamp page where I’m sharing a bunch of music I recorded over many years.

As a youngster I learned guitar, and during college and grad school played a lot with others while also doing a lot of home recording on a four-track cassette recorder. Over the course of nearly a couple of decades I amassed a ton of material -- mostly instrumental songs although some include vocals with original lyrics.

I would compile these into “albums” and share them with friends and others via cassette. Some of it got played on college radio stations and in other contexts, but it was mainly just a very small, mostly private thing done for fun. And once the poker thing started in earnest during the early 2000s (along with my full-time teaching career), the music-making slowed down considerably. I still play guitar, but haven’t recorded anything of note since, well, this blog started back in 2006.

The Bandcamp site enables DIY-types (or former DIY-types) like me to share music easily, and so after a lot of archival work I’ve reconstructed seven “albums” and am releasing all of them today. Streaming is free and I’ve set it up to allow folks to download the albums for free, too, only paying if you’d like. I’m obviously not looking to start a career or make any cabbage from this, but rather just want to share.

The number of hours I put into these recordings is kind of staggering to think about -- it really is the product of years of creative activity. All the songs are original, and there’s a decent mix of styles throughout. Six of the seven albums are entirely instrumental, the exception being Welcome to Muscle Beach which I’m calling my “pop album” containing vocals and original lyrics.

Here is a little bit about each of the seven albums:

Daisy Hawkins

These are the earliest 4-track experiments -- 10 tracks, eight of which are (mostly) guitar-based with the other two centered around keyboards. The initial, title song multi-tracks lots of guitars playing an arpeggio melody that kind of signals the thematical style of most of the music throughout the seven albums, with percussion done by hammering away on a manual typewriter.




Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Eleven more instrumentals, kicked off with a short one featuring a melody spit out by an effects rack following minimal input by me on an electric guitar. Mostly guitars with some keyboard here (plus a toy piano cameo), this might be the “quietest” or most ambient of the seven LPs.






Perpetuum Mobile

Just two tracks, both of which involved me collaborating with my friend Ash Bowie of Polvo fame. The first is a two-and-a-half-minute piece with Ash on guitars and me on fretless bass. The second is a nearly 26-minute opus I spent months putting together, with Ash coming in for a ripping three-minute solo during the second half -- a crazily ambitious experiment in layering guitars, keyboards, and piano that I’m kind of dumbfounded looking back ever got completed.


The Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator

The first seven songs comprise “Side 1” with more guitars, keyboards, some synth and drum machine, ukulele on a couple of tracks, and one song with sampled vocals (that sound like an alien children’s choir). The last 21 songs (“Side 2”) comprise a long suite that was called “Dominoes” when it was released on cassette. Here I get into a lot of midi sequencer stuff, which continues through the rest of the albums.



Imbroglio

Kind of follows the same style of OBR with guitars, keyboards, and more sequencing, as well as some samples and sound effects. One track called “Repeating Then Is In Everyone” samples Gertrude Stein reading from The Making of Americans, kind of delivering a kind of oblique summary of the musical style both of that track and a lot of others.




Welcome to Muscle Beach

Features 13 “pop songs” with lyrics, plus one instrumental (the title track). I’m jokingly referring to this one as my Revolver or Another Green World, and in fact the Beatles and Brian Eno are probably obvious influences. There’s a Stevie Wonder/Earth, Wind & Fire homage (or spoof, depending on how you look at it). There’s a song about a customer comment card, another about Thomas Edison, and another evoking Robert’s Rules of Order and parliamentary procedure. Toward the end comes a three-song suite describing an illness (“Medicine”) then a doctor’s visit (“Waiting Room,” then “The Physician”). The cover features a picture of me aged 10 (I’m on the right). (You can click on all of these covers to view larger sizes, btw.)

Circular Logic

Ten more instrumentals, almost entirely done on a midi sequencer. Most are relatively short, although the last one, titled “Infinity,” goes on for more than 12 minutes and represents an earnest attempt at something like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, though probably veers into a different, less minimalist kind of composition.





Like I say, I’m sharing all of these “albums” mainly for fun and with the hopes that someone might enjoy them. Would love any feedback anyone has, obviously.

Also, while I’m at it, let me throw this out there. If you’re someone who enjoys shooting and editing videos for fun -- say, abstract ones of nature scenes, time-lapse stuff, or anything at all, really -- and would like to match any of my music with a video, let me know as I’d love to do it. I will eventually do some of that myself, I think, if only to have a few short vids on YouTube that I could point people to in order to hear some of the tracks. But if you have something and would like some music to match with it, get in touch.

Like I say, it’s all free, so go get the whole seven-album box set, if you like! And if you do listen to any of it and have any thoughts about it at all, let me know.

Another Reason to Not to Hate the Eagles

There’s a point somewhere during the first half of The Big Lebowski when the title character stops for a moment to lay down on his coveted rug -- the one that “really pulls the room together” -- and while getting high listen to some tunes on his headphones.

The song playing on his stereo is by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. As a devotee of all things Beefheart, I perked up the first time I saw the film in a theater nearly 20 years ago. I think by that point in the film we’d already been introduced to Lebowski’s love of CCR (whom he refers to simply as “Creedence”), but hearing the Beefheart helped shape his character in a slightly different way for me.

Later in the movie comes the much remembered scene in the taxi when after getting kicked out of the Malibu the driver is playing the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” There’s a pause in the dialogue and you can see Jeff Bridges starting to exhale loudly, acting a little petulant.

I knew what was coming.

“Jesus, man. Could you change the channel?” he whines, and the driver refuses to do so with surprising ferocity. But Lebowski can’t sit still. “I had a rough night and I hate the fuck!ng Eagles, man,” he says. The driver immediately pulls over and hilariously jettisons his complaining customer to the curb.

The Beefheart tune earlier had been a cue for me, helping me anticipate that even though with most things the dude abides, he wasn’t going to abide the Eagles’ warmed over, soft country rock. I knew this because I also like Beefheart, and I also don’t very much like the Eagles.

That said, even though I don’t own a single Eagles LP, I’m still kind of fascinated by the band’s story. I listened to FM radio a lot as a child of the ‘70s, pored over Rolling Stone and other rock mags, and still today find popular culture from that era endlessly fascinating.

I thoroughly enjoyed the sprawling 2013 documentary The History of the Eagles, which I found compelling all of the way through its three-plus hours. I even appreciate the talent and craft demonstrated by their six studio records from the ’70s, and kinda-sorta have to give props to the weird, spooky narrative and dueling guitars of “Hotel California,” an undeniably inspired slice of rock art.

But for whatever reason, there’s always been something about the Eagles flavor that has never been satisfying for me. Like Lebowski, whenever they come on I’m instinctively reaching to change the channel.

Like I say, though, I find the band’s story interesting, and since I’m also a sucker for any stories about poker turning up in contexts other than the usual ones, I comfortably stuck with Dr. Pauly’s new article “Life in the Fast Lane: Poker and the Eagles” all of the way to the end. The piece is over on the PokerStars blog, and is fun stuff for fans of ’70s music, interesting tales of home games, odd poker variants, analyses of poker-themed lyrics, and movie trivia.

And yeah, well, if you like the Eagles, it’s pretty cool, too. Not that I do... but now there’s one more reason why I can’t quite hate ’em with Lebowski-like intensity.

The invented game of “Eagle Poker” described in the article struck me as a little symbolic of the band itself -- a three-card game in which you bet on whether the third card’s value landed in between the other two. I say that because of the way the band always had multiple songwriters and candidates for “leader,” with Glenn Frey and Don Henley permanently occupying two of the top spots and various third men (Randy Meisner, Don Felder, Joe Walsh) kind of standing in between them as fellow front men-slash-rivals.

(The game also made me think of my still-in-development Beatles-themed poker variant, Sgt. Pepper.)

When you get a few minutes, go read the article, which you can check out any time you like.

(Trivia question: A five-suited, 65-card deck was produced during the first half of the 20th century. What was the fifth suit called? Click here to find out.)

Image: Eagles (1972), Eagles, Amazon.

Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here Today

In a bit of a funk at the moment, not the good kind. Very similar to the one I was in back in January after David Bowie’s passing. Like you, I first started seeing the tweets about Prince earlier today, and after a few uncertain minutes saw it confirmed that he’d passed away at 57.

Like Bowie, Prince was one of those genre-blending artists that managed to capture just about all of us at some point or another. And in a similar fashion, once he did capture us we were destined to remain under his spell thereafter.

1999 would have been the first Prince record I heard, way back in 1982 when 1999 was the hard-to-imagine distant future. Soon after that I’d collected the earlier LPs, with Dirty Mind always getting the most plays, a record I once wrote about over on 33 and 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute.

Then came Purple Rain. Kind of like what happened a dozen years ago when everyone suddenly was playing poker, everyone suddenly liked Prince. It is simply a perfect pop/rock record, already cinematic in scope even without the accompanying film. I think at one time or another each of the nine tracks has had a turn standing out as a “favorite” for me on that particular disc, and each for different reasons.

Was writing recently about old concerts I’d seen, and in fact among those I did happen to see Prince and the Revolution during the Purple Rain tour in November 1984. I remember the white “cloud” guitar with the handle and (of course) his culminating a solo once with a stream of something flying out the top and out over the crowd as though it were a sexual climax. (There are certain things you just don’t forget.)

Vera Valmore happened to have seen Prince at that same show -- or one of them, anyway, during the three-performance run in Greensboro -- back before she and I had ever met. We were just talking about that concert last weekend when in Asheville, in fact.

During that conversation I mentioned how I probably wouldn’t be able to find online any audio files of those shows as I had with the Springsteen one from ’85. If you’ve ever looked for Prince stuff online or on YouTube, you’ve discovered it to be relatively scarce thanks to his considerable efforts to protect his product -- to have some measure of control over his art and how it was made available and received.

An exception is this performance at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame from 2004, where Prince joined Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, and George Harrison’s son Dhani in a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the performance occasioned by Harrison’s induction. Prince takes over the song’s latter half, and you gotta love his wry whaddya-think-of-that look near the end after his preeminence has been well established.

Stuck close with Prince all of the way through the mid-’90s where (as with Bowie) I lost the thread for a while before picking it back up again more recently (with Musicology and 3121). Then went back even before the beginning for those ultra-funky, impossible-to-sit-still-through Loring Park Sessions 1977, recorded just a year out of high school.

As with Bowie, Prince has had a permanent spot for me in the ongoing life soundtrack, and will continue to do so. Many will spend the next few days describing his combining and reimagining rock, pop, jazz, fusion, funk, R&B, and other styles, as well as other elements of his many cultural contributions. I think the thing we connected with most, though, is the effort and production of a genuine artist, someone who (relentlessly) created and inspired.

And as a result added considerably to this thing called life, helping many to get through it.

Photo: “Prince playing MadCat, Coachella 2008,” Scott Penner. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Robyn Hitchcock at the Grey Eagle

Took a nice, leisurely trip up to Asheville this past weekend with Vera Valmore, kind of a mini-vacation inspired by Robyn Hitchcock -- a longtime fave of mine -- having come to play a gig at the Grey Eagle on Saturday.

Hitchcock is someone I’ve been listening to for more than three decades, which means I started picking up his records not that long after he started making them. I wore out the Soft Boys albums, his solo LPs, and those he made fronting the Egyptians, picking up and studying just about everything right through the ’90s and after. And I have continued checking in on the more recent stuff as well, including his latest, The Man Upstairs, released a couple of summers ago.

I saw him play a couple of times way back when -- once during late ’80s, then another time around ’91 -- and in fact I even dragged Vera to the second of those shows. Since then he’s slowed down somewhat, having evolved from a loud, electrified rocker with psychedelic tendencies into a softer, acoustic-based act that strikes newcomers as a kind of weird neo-folk, although the inspired, surreal lyricism remains the most conspicuous common thread tying together the different eras.

Seeing him again kind of paralleled the experience I was describing last week when I located and listened to a boot of a Bruce Springsteen show I’d attended over thirty years ago. I say that because of the uncanny deja-voodoo I experienced as Hitchcock happened to play some of the same songs I’d heard him perform before all those years ago.

One I know he played at the earlier shows was the meditative “Raymond Chandler Evening,” a kind of homage to the hard-boiled writer filled with dark, gritty imagery that contrasts with the sweet arpeggios carrying its catchy melody. (Was delighted when he tossed in an extra verse I’d never heard before, introducing another crime scene into the proceedings.) He followed that Saturday with another one from the same 1986 album Element of Light -- “Bass” -- a song I’m also pretty sure he played when back when I last saw him.

Vera and I had to laugh when he began “Bass.” Earlier in the evening we’d enjoyed a very fun dinner with our poker-playing friends PokerGrump and CardGrrl, and Vera and I both happened to have ordered bass for our entrees. I joked then Hitchcock had a song by that name, though I doubted he’d play it... and then he did.

Someone’s already uploaded that particular track to YouTube, if you’re curious. In fact, I'm noticing other songs from the show on there, too, and have linked to each from the titles in this post. During one of Hitchcock’s many extemporaneous acts of word association used to introduce songs (a signature trait), he joked about skipping ahead in the YouTube video, fully conscious of the fact that many artists’ performances get instantly memorialized in this way.

Hitchcock actually split the bill with the comedian, Eugene Mirman. Hitchcock came on first, playing about 10 or 11 songs, with other highlights including “I'm Only You” and the Dylan cover “Not Dark Yet” with which he opened.

After that Mirman made us laugh for about 45 minutes, then the pair both carried on a suitably absurd conversation onstage for a while before Hitchcock closed the night with “My Wife and My Dead Wife” (another ’80s-era track I’d seen him play in the past). A great time, start to finish.

My only bit of chronicling during the show was to snap that poor-looking pic up above, one showing Hitchcock squinting out into the crowd in a fashion that seems to suit the photo’s lack of clarity. As I was telling PokerGrump and Cardgrrl after our dinner, I’ve lately found myself actively opposing the whole take-a-picture-of-everything urge that so often possesses us these days. (Not to mention the subsequent feeling of being obliged to broadcast those pictures via one’s preferred form of social media.)

I guess I archive plenty enough here on the blog, although that exercise is a little different. Here I force myself to translate experience into words, that act alone being enough to make whatever it is much more memorable than tends to happen when snapping a pic or shooting a short vid.

The whole weekend was like that, really, spent mostly unplugged -- like Hitchcock.

The Time I Saw Springsteen in Greensboro

You might have heard about this “transgender bill” the governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, signed into law about three weeks ago. The part of the legislation getting the most attention prohibits transgender individuals from using public bathrooms for the sex they identify as. The other less regarded part gives the state power to override cities’ attempts to pass their own nondiscrimination laws (as Charlotte had done, thereby prompting the legislation’s last push).

At the time, McCrory -- who as governor so far has made his mark by cutting education spending and joining other governors in taking an abhorrent (and impotent) stand against the state accepting Syrian refugees -- described the bill as “bipartisan,” although it was mostly Republicans voting for it in the House and, in fact, the Senate Democrats (a minority) walked out on the vote entirely, a highly unusual move.

You might’ve also heard about certain businesses either threatening to avoid NC going forward or having already made such moves. For example, PayPal announced it has halted its plans to create a global operations center in NC in response to the new law. A handful of other events have been canceled, and the NBA is starting to talk about moving the 2017 All-Star Game somewhere other than Charlotte.

There’s also a lot of negative vitriol being directed the state’s way. For example, in a humorous short piece yesterday, Charles P. Pierce of Esquire reported how a porn site is now blocking IP addresses from NC, a development he jokingly suggested would be the final straw to force NC to change the new law. Coincidentally or no, McCrory did, in fact, announce yesterday an intention to try to modify the law.

I normally enjoy Pierce’s political musings, although I have to say I’m getting a little tired of blanket statements about the state being mostly populated with crazed bigots such as the one he uses to begin his porn piece: “We all know that Bruce Springsteen has declined to play in the now almost entirely insane state of North Carolina due to the enactment of its Urinal Cooties Protection Act of 2016,” Pierce begins.

Okay, it’s a funny line. But the state is not “now almost entirely insane,” okay? I’m reminded of some of the response three years ago to Greg Raymer’s bust for soliciting a prostitute in Wake Forest, when support for the 2004 WSOP Main Event champion quickly bled over into damning acid-spewing aimed at the entire state.

Pierce mentions Springsteen skipping NC, deciding to cancel with just a couple days’ notice his Greensboro show that had been scheduled on this past Sunday. I don’t begrudge the Boss in the least, and in fact I’d suggest his decision likely had a lot to do with McCrory’s attempt to start backtracking a bit yesterday.

The news of Springsteen’s canceling his show caused me to think back to the one time I saw him and the E Street Band perform -- in Greensboro, in fact, way back during the Born in the U.S.A. tour (no shinola). I admit I wasn’t a big fan of his then. I was in high school and had a friend who went to Elon who had an extra ticket, and I tagged along. Over the ensuing decades I have remained only a casual fan, having just a couple of titles on my iPod that I only occasionally dial up.

I was curious to remember details of the show I’d seen, though, and so did some searching online. With only a few clicks was able to pinpoint the performance -- January 19, 1985. It was a typically monstrous show, lasting three-and-a-half or four hours, I recalled, and the setlist confirmed for me how it had gone on for 28 songs.

Clicked around a little bit more and was surprised to find audio of the actual performance on a site full of Springsteen shows. I downloaded and listened, and was kind of floored by how fantastic the show was. There’s just something about Springsteen playing live. I suppose it has to do with the stories he tells between songs and how they draw the listener’s attention more specifically to the songs’ messages. Or maybe there’s something else there that energizes the performances, something less simple to describe. In any case, hearing Springsteen live is always much more affecting (to me, anyway) than happens with the studio versions of the same tunes.

There’s a theme that runs through just about all of Springsteen’s songs -- call it a chase, a search, a journey, what have you. The songs’ protagonists are often on the move, trying to figure out where they’ve been, make sense of where they are, or get some idea of where they’re going. They’re all looking for something -- meaning, love, self-identity, self-worth -- with the thread connecting them being the quest. And, it goes without saying, “Born to Run” stands as the wholly appropriate anthem for the whole cast of characters Springsteen creates.

Kind of a weird, nostalgic trip listening to the show. During a long, funny intro to “Glory Days” he mentions getting a note from the assistant manager of the Greensboro Hornets (then the minor league baseball team), which then leads into a story about his failed baseball career (abandoned as a teen in order to “devote my life to rock and roll!”).

Then comes the song, which is, of course, all about being nostalgic. I couldn’t help but think back to being a teen myself, there at the show, with a whole life ahead of me and every possibility still open. It goes on and on and on, with the whole track (including the intro) lasting nearly 12 minutes, prompting this surprising feeling in me that I never wanted it to end.

There are many other great moments. Perhaps the one bringing me most quickly back to the present was the intro to “My Hometown” in which he delivers a short soliloquy about how tangled things like patriotism or pride in one’s state or place can be. He describes how as a teen he often wanted to leave his home and never go back, not wanting to be identified with the small town and its many seemingly “narrow-minded” folks populating it.

But as he got older, he realized just taking off and running away wasn’t such a simple matter.

“I guess one of the things when I was a kid that I was afraid of was... belonging somewhere,” he explains. “When you belong somewhere, that means you have some responsibility to that place, whether it’s your family, or your town, or your country. You know, if you stand up and say ‘I’m an American,’ that means you got some responsibility to America.”

Predictably, they (we?) cheered at that line. But just as “Born in the U.S.A.” is hardly the patriotic paean some occasionally mistake it to be, Springsteen wasn’t delivering an uncomplicated invitation to dance a jingoistic jig.

“Here in this country, you know we’ve got so many things to be proud of, and we’ve got a lot of things to be ashamed of. And it’s the things that we ought to be ashamed of that need some taking care of by all of us.”

Listening to that three decades later -- reliving it, in a way -- it’s no great surprise that Springsteen would skip Greensboro this time around. Obviously he viewed the decision as a way perhaps to help take care of something that needed taking care of.

North Carolina is where I’m from, and no matter how far I travel away from NC it’ll always be where I belong. I want others -- all others -- to feel like they can belong here, too.

It sounds like a simple desire, but in truth it’s pretty complicated.

Photo: “Bruce Springsteen,” Thomas Uhlemann. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

For Historical Purposes

Was scrolling through the music on my iPod today, thinking about that funny line by Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation when marveling at how such a small portable device can hold thousands of tunes.

“The songs just play one after another. This is an excellent rectangle!”

I found myself searching a little longer than usual for something to play, experiencing something I imagine a lot of others carrying around rectangles sometimes do. Among this large catalogue of .mp3s -- distilled from decades’ worth of cassettes, LPs, CDs, and music more recently acquired in various formats, all more or less representing my personal preferences -- nothing was really standing out as an attractive choice.

As I was scrolling, I realized there were a few titles in there I am essentially never inclined to click. Why are those titles on there? At some point along the way, I must have deemed them worth having, but after years of passing them over I still am hanging on to them like some sort of digital hoarder.

I enjoy reading reviews of music. I’ve even tried to write a few myself over on a blog that one day I’ll start contributing to more often.

On many occasions have found leafing through old record guides or poring over another “top 100” (or “top 500” or top “1,000”) list online an enjoyable pastime. I realize that a few of the titles on my rectangle turned up there after I had been convinced by someone arguing for their historical importance. Some I took to, others I didn’t, but all remain on there undeleted as yet.

I suppose with any category dealing with that which cannot be quantified like the “best” albums ever made -- or the best poker players, for that matter, as we were talking about yesterday with the new Poker Hall of Fame nominees -- even the “consensus” constituting what a majority of those making subjective judgments have determined is going to be hit-or-miss for the individual.

The real reason why I keep those titles on the rectangle is that I want to remain open to the possibility of learning something new -- namely, what it was that made others like this or that record so dadgum much. Kind of like the way certain books stubbornly remain on my bookshelf that I’ve always meant to read but never quite got around to doing so.

One day I’ll get to them. For now, though, they sit there like so many rectangles. All excellent, or so I’ve been told.

Still the Same

Since moving to the farm a little over a year-and-a-half ago, Vera Valmore and I have finally gotten ourselves settled (more or less), having established various routines to help maintain everything while constantly dealing with new challenges, most having to do with repairs to the barn and/or frequently used equipment. I’ve never in my life spent so much time with hammers, wrenches, pliers, and screwdrivers.

It is no longer the case that everything is new to us. The routines are becoming more and more familiar, and while repetition can induce tedium, there is also a kind of pleasure that can come from it, too.

One practice we established early on was to keep a radio playing in the barn day and night. Don’t know if the horses care one way or the other about the music, but after dealing with a skunk who tried to take up residence in there we read that the noise helps keep them away. We still see skunks about now and then -- in fact, about a month ago we saw a troupe of five of them slinking across the back yard, closely bunched as though they formed a single, frightening-looking mega-skunk. But we’ve seen no Pepé le Pews in the barn, thankfully.

We started out playing a classical station, then at some point early on switched it over to the local classic rock one -- you know, the one that plays a rotation of a few hundred songs we’ve all been hearing for years and years. Some tunes I like, some I don’t, and quite a few I’m ambivalent about even if they manage to enliven in a dim way that nostalgic part of the brain that makes things that are familiar seem pleasurable.

I mean, I own exactly zero Bob Seger LPs. I feel like once I might have had a cassette of Against the Wind, but that was very long ago. If we were to apply the “VP$IP” stat from poker to him and his oeuvre, I voluntarily play Bob Seger -- my current VPBS -- exactly 0.0% of the time. Yet I know every note and lyric of at least a dozen of his songs, thanks to their inclusion on that endless loop of tunes I heard in my childhood and have continued to hear over the decades since.

If you ever listen to the “classic rock” station where you live -- probably in the car, I’d imagine, which for many of us the only place we are exposed to FM radio anymore -- you’ve probably heard some of the same drops my station includes in between songs touting their playlist as “timeless” and “the best music ever made.”

I suppose just by the evidence of playing music first written and recorded 40 years ago or more, the “timeless” claim is being aggressively proven by the mere fact of these stations’ existence. However, the argument about it being “the best music ever made” is obviously one with which many people -- especially those outside of the (now aging) target demographic -- would take issue.

(Speaking of, search online about “classic rock” and you soon learn the term “demographic cliff,” used in concert with the idea that the first audience for such music is dying out. As Mick Jagger -- who turned 72 over the weekend -- once sang, what a drag it is getting old.)

Something occurred to me this morning while feeding the horses to the accompaniment of Leon Russell’s “Tight Rope” and Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” though -- something that might help explain from where this “best ever” claim might be coming. Those of us who grew up listening to just a few radio stations or watching three television networks or going to the same few movies that played for weeks at a time in the local theater shared a lot of the same cultural experiences, with these various artifacts helping provide odd little touchstones that significantly shaped the way we learned how to relate to others, for better or worse.

Meanwhile now people experience popular culture much differently, in more fragmented ways that among other things can involve a lot more consumer direction (if the consumer desires such freedom of choice, that is). The phenomenon is more complicated than that, of course, but it starts to explain at least one difference between the present and the past, and also the source for that insistence by some that what came before represented the “best” cultural products “ever made.”

I guess the Seger song that best emblematizes the mass psychological experiment of “classic rock” is about has to be “Still the Same.” You know it, the one addressed to a gambler -- a poker player, presumably -- who “always won every time you placed a bet.” Of the gambler, Seger sings “you always said the cards would never do you wrong.” And like the old card player in “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers, Seger’s understands the importance of knowing when to walk away: “The trick, you said, was never play the game too long.”

But while he never plays a particular game too long, he’s more or less stuck in his role, not unlike a song being played over and over and over again. As the chorus explains, the gambler is a lot like those poker “lifers,” destined (doomed?) to keep “moving game to game.”

Because (the song concludes) -- like that playlist of “Dream On” and “More Than a Feeling” and “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Magic Man” and “The Joker” I can count on hearing every time I go back into the barn -- “some things never change.”

On the Farm

Have been feeling under the weather for the last several days, and so haven’t too much energy to give to this end-of-week post. Also distracted a little because Vera and I are gearing up for a quick trip up Tobacco Road to Raleigh to watch Farm Aid tomorrow where we might find ourselves under some bad weather there.

The concert will be happening all day and night at the Walnut Creek Amphitheatre, an outdoor facility where all of the seats are uncovered. We aren’t planning to take in the full 11-12 hours or so, but we may end up having to set aside going at all should the heavens open up tomorrow as predicted, especially if I’m still fighting off whatever it is that’s given me this sore throat and the sniffles.

The headliners will be playing during the evening -- Jack White, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Willie Nelson. Each performer has an hour blocked off to play. The sucker will be streaming live at FarmAid.org, too, in case you want to look in on it. I mentioned our going to the concert a couple of weeks back when sharing that video of the nifty card trick performed by Willie Nelson (who is known to enjoy a poker game now and then).

Kind of randomly, I was just reading about the original Live Aid from 1985, as well as watching a lengthy BBC documentary about it. I remember watching a lot of that on MTV as a teen. The event exists as a weird, complicated time capsule today, with lots of footage on YouTube and elsewhere.

It was at Live Aid -- which raised funds to help with famine relief in Ethiopa -- that Bob Dylan controversially brought up the subject of American farmers needing help, too, during his set. The Farm Aid website misquotes Dylan saying “Wouldn't it be great if we did something for our own farmers right here in America?” when in fact he actually only spoke of giving some of the money being raised -- “one or two million, maybe” -- to help with farmers’ mortgages.

Stirred things up a little at the time, but that’s what Dylan does. Anyhow, the origins of Farm Aid (which first came together later that same year) are traced back to the comment.

I imagine we’ll probably go for at least some of the show, no matter what the weather is like. Even if we don’t get there, though, we’re not at all sorry about contributing some dollars to the cause. Now that we own some land ourselves and in fact live right next door to some actual farmers, we’re thinking a little more concretely these days about what it takes to run a farm.

No, rain or shine, the work never ends on the farm. One of our horses is named Maggie, but she’s a lot more fun to work for than that other Maggie.

(Click the pic to see a bigger rainbow.)

Singles Remind Me of Kisses, Albums Remind Me of Plans

Last night Vera Valmore and I went to see Cyndi Lauper perform in Charlotte. The show was part of her “She’s So Unusual 30th Anniversary” tour and featured her and her band playing her entire 1983 debut LP start to finish in order.

Ton of hits on that record, as anyone who was alive and listening to the radio or watching MTV back then well remember. In fact it wasn’t until the seventh song of the show that a tune came up that wasn’t immediately recognizable, and I never owned the LP.

I think my favorite performances of the night both came early. “Money Changes Everything,” the Brains cover with which the album opens, provided a great, loud, rocking start. I also dug the performance of her Prince cover, “When You Were Mine” (originally on Dirty Mind, a record I once wrote about on another blog), which ended with a nifty psychedelic swirl of overlapping melodic vamps.

Was definitely interesting to hear the entire album performed in sequence and thus necessarily be made to think about the old LP format as used to exist as a medium for popular music. Made me think a little of the Cheap Trick show in Las Vegas from a few years back Vera and I saw, the one where they played the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper from beginning to end.

Has become a trend lately for a lot of acts who initially made their mark during the era of the long player, this idea to build live shows out of performances of entire albums. I like it. I think the first time I ever saw a band do such a thing was in the late 1980s when I saw Hüsker Dü on their very last tour when they played every song from what would turn out to be their last release, the double-LP Warehouse: Songs and Stories.

I remember hanging around after that show with a buddy and being surprised when Grant Hart came out to chat with those of us still there. I asked him why they’d decided to play all 20 tracks of Warehouse straight through, and he just said something about the songs being new and how they’d wanted to play them all. The band would break up for good about 10 months later.

A woman at the show last night came wearing a Lauper-styled red-and-orange wig and carrying a copy of the LP, which really did look like a relic of sorts and again reminded me of the fun of collecting vinyl (something I’ve written about here before).

I still like the full-length albums. Still have almost nothing but albums on the iPod, with just a couple of odd, orphaned tracks on there that don’t come as part of a collection of songs by the same artist presented in a deliberate order. I suppose I was mostly conditioned to listen to -- and to collect -- music that way, regardless of the genre. Sort of like preferring a certain game variant or tourney type, perhaps, within which to play.

Got home late and then was up following last night’s Super Tuesday into the wee hours. Had the teevee on with the sound down and at one point settled on a music channel airing a marathon of Lady Gaga vids. Wasn’t listening, but the visuals recalled how once upon a time Lauper’s image and sound seemed unusual, though today that’s hardly so.

(Trivia challenge for 1980s pop music fans to identify the title source.)

Lou Reed’s Poker Face

Like many was sad to hear of the passing of Lou Reed yesterday.

I was probably around 10 the first time I ever heard a Lou Reed song. As a kid I loved to tune in AM radio at night before going to sleep, picking up channels as far away as the Cincinnati (WLW) and Chicago (WLS), in many cases hearing early examples of talk radio or baseball games. WLS would play music, I recall, and that was how I first heard “Walk on the Wild Side.”

I thought it was a novelty song, like something off of Dr. Demento. Reed’s deadpan delivery didn’t resemble anything I recognized from the FM stations my parents played in the car. I thought it had to be some sort of joke, all this stuff about Sugar Plum Fairy, Little Joe, and Holly.

A few years later I began collecting records, and a few years after that began to develop some semblance of taste about what I liked and what I didn’t. I was reintroduced to Reed’s solo stuff, and thought still wasn’t old enough to understand it realized I liked certain elements.

Then came the whole Velvet Underground revival and all of those records found their way into my growing collection. And onto my turntable for hundreds and hundreds of spins. In the end I never did quite delve that deeply into the Reed solo oeuvre, although I do have Transformer and (strangely) Metal Machine Music on the iPod, the latter one of those I’m-gonna-really-sit-down-and-listen-to-this-one-day titles that exists almost entirely as a theoretical set of unlistened-to tracks.

But the Velvets have remained on permanent play for me, with the first LP with Nico and Warhol’s banana cover and the second with “White Light/White Heat,” “Sister Ray,” and John Cale reading a story about a doomed man who mailed himself to his girlfriend in a box the two I dial up most often.

To me those two records suggested much broader possibilities for what was possible when it came to rock and pop, eschewing pretty much all of the usual genre-defining restraints to do something new at every turn. The third self-titled LP without Cale was also innovative, though in a less obvious way, and while Loaded never quite worked for me as a coherent album -- almost more like a compilation of greatest hits, which it kind of is -- I still listen to it a lot, just like I do the live albums, as well as VU and Another View.

I preferred Reed in the band context, though appreciated his iconoclasm and experimental tangents when outside of it. Might have been because I felt more comfortable dealing with him when surrounded by others than when he was on his own.

Reading through some of the obits and remembrances today, I keep running into references to Reed’s “poker face,” such as this CNN encomium referring to his “poker-faced demeanor” in Honda ads during the 1980s, or this Village Voice piece about his once visiting a record store and buying a copy of Exile’s “Kiss You All Over” and when asked why he wanted a copy replied without a hint of any evident sarcasm “Because I like it.”

Clicking around on the Rolling Stone site, there are more similar references, such as one calling him “Ol’ Poker Face” in a review of his Magic and Loss LP, or a reference in a 1989 interview to the “poker-faced humanity with which he depicted drug addiction in ‘Heroin,’ errant sexual behavior in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and, in the epic ‘Street Hassle,’ the fragility of hope and love among the ruins.”

Again I think back to that first, static-filled listen to a Lou Reed song as a child in bed and the confusion it inspired. I gradually became more comfortable with listening to his music, although I’ll admit it always continued to challenge. Even after I had finally made up my mind to be able to say -- like he once did to that record store clerk -- I like it.

Exploring Obsessions in Alan Zweig’s Vinyl

Took a break yesterday afternoon to watch this 2000 documentary about record collectors I’d been hearing about lately called Vinyl.

Made by Toronto filmmaker Alan Zweig, the movie delves deeply into the obsessive and/or compulsive tendencies of the several collectors interviewed by Zweig in an effort to reveal something about their motives and behaviors. Intertwined throughout are numerous short monologues delivered by Zweig into a mirror in which he tries to address similar questions about himself, ultimately performing a kind of lengthy self-diagnosis regarding his own record collecting and its possible connection to an inability to form meaningful social connections or find a romantic partner.

After hearing about it, I dialed up the film primarily because of my interest in music and records. I grew up on LPs and still have the three or four hundred or so I mostly accumulated as a teen and young adult, all stacked neatly in plastic sleeves and sitting in alphabetical order on some shelves in a medium-sized closet also dedicated to housing cassettes, CDs, videocassettes, and some DVDs.

Have a record player, too, right on my desk next to the computer, although in truth I probably only pop a disc on there once or twice a month at most.

The set up was originally designed to accommodate my making digital copies of what I had on vinyl, although like I say I’ve only been pulling out records to play on an infrequent basis, and even though I have everything hooked up to do so I haven’t even bothered much with capturing the LPs and converting them to .mp3s.

Music is so easy to come by these days, also making it hard for me to be moved to go back and bother with the LPs. And while I do have a kind of nostalgic fondness for the 12-by-12 cardboard sleeves, cover art, and groovy grooves, I don’t come close to sharing the extreme fetishism toward the objects themselves of those featured in Vinyl. For me the tunes are really all that matter. I could easily imagine jettisoning the whole lot without much anxiety at all, as long as I had copies to which to listen if I so desired.

That said, I will admit to sharing some of the same obsessive tendencies on display in the film. I would imagine most others probably do as well, which might even work as a way to recommend Vinyl to those who aren’t particularly interested in records or the stories of a bunch of lonely dudes who collect them.

In fact, if I were to sit down and think about it earnestly, I’d probably have to conclude that one of the attractions of poker (for me) is the fact that the game probably satisfies some of those same tendencies, most of which amount to a desire for order. Or ordering.

I suppose I’m partly talking about the constant counting and keeping track that can go on during a session (we’re constantly stacking and restacking our chips) and for some of us continues afterwards (with record-keeping). And the highly ritualistic component to game play certainly provides all sorts of opportunities for one’s obsessions to manifest themselves as certain behaviors, too.

My buddy the Poker Grump recently passed along the news that he’s soon moving from Las Vegas and thus will likely slow down or stop posting on his excellent, inspiring blog. While I’m sorry not to have the posts to read, I’m also quite glad about the fact that his move will land him closer to Cardgrrl and to me, too (just a couple of hours up the road, actually).

When I think about Poker Grump’s blog, I realize that some of my favorite posts from him over the years have been about poker chips, including (but not limited to) posts about stacking them, counting them, collecting them, manufacturing them, and now selling them.

Those posts perhaps partly help illustrate what I’m getting at here regarding poker being a game that provides lots of opportunities for humans to turn their minds upon material stuff, exploring it in numerous ways including how we can arrange and manipulate our stuff into arrangements that please us.

(Incidentally, with regarding to collecting, my sense is that Poker Grump’s relationship to chips is also a far cry from the obvious extremism on display in Vinyl. He’s mentioned many times his casual approach to collecting, including a self-imposed regulation not to go too far out of his way -- generally speaking -- when it comes to obtaining new, different chips.)

Like I say, I liked those posts by the Grump, probably because I found myself identifying a lot with his desire for order. And with his wanting to chronicle that desire, too. Hell, we might step back and look at these lengthy, dedicated poker blogs the two of us have been creating all of these years and talk about another example of obsessive behavior the two of us obviously share.

Getting back to Vinyl, even though those featured in the documentary might strike most of us as being more than a little off-the-deep-end with their collecting -- e.g., one guy sincerely lists as a goal to collect every record ever made (no shinola) -- I think it’s still possible to recognize a lot of their impulses and behaviors in ourselves.

The film that Vinyl reminded me of most frequently was Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 doc Crumb that intensely delved into the life and personality of the cartoonist Robert Crumb (who also happens to be a pretty serious collector of records). Both adopt a similarly invasive approach to their subjects, at times almost uncomfortably so. Both feature some bleak moments, too, although on the whole Vinyl is much less grim than Crumb.

There’s another connection of sorts, too, in that Harvey Pekar pops up (with zero fanfare) as an interview subject in Vinyl. Pekar, of course, authored the autobiographical comic book series American Splendor illustrated by Crumb.

Anyhow, like I say, I recommend the movie to those for whom any of this sounds interesting. (It is available in its entirety over on YouTube.) I see there are also a couple of sequels and some sort of “alternate take” version of Vinyl out there which I might seek out at some point. But I’m in no hurry to do so.

I mean, I enjoyed the movie, sure. But it’s not like I’m obsessed about it.