Month: October 2006

But before that, I’ve been thinking about musical storage, as a result of a question from GayProf. Back when I had a few dozen LPs, they were on a shelf in my room on the floor. In college, I used milk cartons, orange crates, and the traditional cinder blocks and planks.

Then I got hold of used metal racks from somewhere. They had a slight lean to them, so they could only be used in certain parts of the room. I remember once (or more) when a girlfriend thought it would look better somewhere not in a corner, and over my objections, I moved off all my LPs, moved the racks, then loaded the LPs. They stood for about 10 minutes, then collapsed, LPs and all. (“See, I TOLD you it wouldn’t work!”)

Finally, I bought a nice bookcase where my LPs would reside until I got married, when my wife “appropriated” it for the kitchen. My LPs are now in the entertainment center in the first floor, and in an old bookcase of hers on the third. Since the stereo is on the first, this is not what one would call…convenient.

Meanwhile, my CDs were in bookcases as well. When we first moved into this house, I put my CDs in one large bookcase, put some CDs in, then watched helplessly as it fell on top of me, because of the slope of the house. The bookcase was then braced to the wall, and that worked fine until some small person started removing the CDs.

So now my CDs are in four pieces of furniture especially designed for CDs, VCR tapes and the like. They were so hard to put together – they had arms that swing open – that I spent something like six hours putting together the first one, with help from my father-in-law, no less. So for my birthday last year, Carol hired someone to put the other three together. Item 1 contains the CDs A-Harris, item 2 Harrison-Sh, item 3 Si-Z, plus the TV, movie, and Broadway discs, then the compilation disc A-H, and item 4, compilation I-Z, plus the tribute albums, and the Christmas music.

And now, let the coveting/Christmas wish list begin. These are in order by release date:

The River in Reverse- Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint
Released: June 6, 2006
My first album by this artist: Get Happy!, 1980 (Costello). Oh, yeah, he’s only 49.
While I have songs on compilations, and certainly songs that he wrote for other artists, I have no Allen Toussaint albums.

Highway Companion-Tom Petty
Released: July 25, 2006
My first album by this artist: Damn the Torpedoes, 1979

Modern Times-Bob Dylan
Released: August 29, 2006
My first album by this artist: Blonde on Blonde, 1966
Covet. Covet.

Overnight Sensational-Sam Moore
Released: August 29, 2006
My first album by this artist: Best of Sam and Dave, 1969, though my sister had some earlier albums.

Duets: An-American-Classic-Tony-Bennett and a whole bunch of folks
Released: September 26, 2006
My first album by this artist: Basie Swings, Bennett Sings, originally released 1958

Ray Sings, Basie Swings- Ray Charles and Count Basie
Released: October 3, 2006
My first album by this artist: Early Ray Charles, don’t know the date, but it was an LP of his 1940s music, when he was still trying to sound like Nat “King” Cole. (Basie previously cited.)

Songs from the Labyrinth-Sting
Released: October 10, 2006
My first album by this artist: Outlandos d’Amour-the Police, 1979

Also, a good friend of mine recommended that I should get some Howard Tate, and I’m going to add Rediscovered to my list.

Finally, there is the Cirque du Soleil mashup of Beatles tunes for ‘LOVE’, which is supposed to be out next month, and which I will HAVE to get.

The priority list is probably, excluding ‘LOVE’: Dylan, Petty, Costello/Toussaint, Sting, Moore, Bennett, Tate, and Charles/Basie.

But what I did mostly was read newspapers and watch TV. And not just any TV. I watched about a week’s worth of the evening news. I think I was depressed.

Of course, there’s the shootings at the Amish school in Lancaster County, PA, the county adjacent to where Carol and Lydia were going, actually, so I’ve seen those horse and buggies coexisting on the roadway with the cars of “the English”, which is what the Amish call the non-Amish. I was interested to note that the strongest reaction to this event by my wife, more than sadness, more than the initial shock, was anger. This is a woman who just doesn’t get all that angry, but I would define her reaction as really ticked off. I’m sure it was the victimization of girls, and that following the victimization of girls in the Colorado school shooting. For me, the Amish shootings were such shock, I had little reaction until I saw the deputy coroner describe how her job was to count the number of bullets in each of the dead girls’ bodies, at which point, I actually cried about the incident for the first time.

Then there is the war in Iraq. It’s easy to get inured to the death toll of American soldiers, not to mention the Iraqi body count. One friend of mine suggested that the “mainstream media” were underplaying the American deaths; I don’t think so. I think it’s that TWO SOLDIERS DEAD IN A ROADSIDE BOMB happens so often that it’s, I’m afraid, NOT NEWS anymore. It’s only when the number of American deaths spike, as they did during the first week in October, that it becomes particularly noteworthy. (Chris Black, from across the pond, gives excerpts from a Time magazine article about the war.

Of course, there’s former congressman Mark Foley, who bugged lots of people not just because of his inappropriate e-mails, but because he was such a hypocrite, pushing legislation to protect children from Internet predators. Ben Stein complained on CBS Sunday Morning that there are more important issues, such as civil war in the Congo, genocide in Darfur, and the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. True, but I think policy wonk Stein is being disingenuous; the issue has largely ceased to be about Foley and children, and more about power, and who’ll control Congress come January. Should Hastert resign his post? Don’t think it matters terribly much; he’ll be gone as Speaker by January one way or another.

And there are lots of stories people care about, such as the state of Matt Lauer’s marriage, and other celebrity gossip that I don’t care a whit about.

A real Page 3 story is about these unexploded explosives, about a million of them the size of soda cans, that Israel dumped on Lebanon during the 34-day war with Hezbollah. The munitions, mostly American-made, have been injuring three people per day, and killing a few, since the Lebanese have returned to the towns they had evacuated during the fighting.

Which leads me to the story I thought was most inspiring this past week. It’s about a number of white South African mothers who are providing breast milk for black South African babies whose mothers have died from AIDS and are in orphanages. It was such an inspiring story that a woman in the Midwest with a 10-month old heard about it, and she and her friends are sending frozen breast milk to the orphanage, shipped for free by DHL. I’m so glad for some of these upbeat stories to leaven the melancholy that 22 minutes of the news would otherwise cause me.

BTW, I tried to find the story on the ABC News website, searching for “breast milk” and I got: “You’ve entered a Search search term that is likely to contain adult content.” This SO cracked me up that it didn’t bother me that I couldn’t find the story until I Googled it. There’s a link here that does link to the ABC News story.

So, I always chuckle inside when Columbus Day and John Lennon’s birthday coincide. Columbus Day as the second Monday in October took effect in 1971. The two events coincided in 1972, 1978, 1989 – thus missing my entire tenure (1980-1988) at the store – 1995, and 2000, and will happen again in 2017, 2023, 2028, 2034, 2045, 2051, 2056, 2062, 2073, and 2079.

Ironically, I suppose, I was inspired to get a CD version of this album by the release of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions by Bruce Springsteen – now available in the American Land Edition that people either love or feel gouged by. (I’ll probably just download the extra tunes.)

Anyway, when I got We Shall Overcome: Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, it totally confounded me. A piece of music I knew note-for-note, I didn’t know at all. All the things on the LP are there, but in radically different order, in a different context. Many of the LP cuts were truncated.

Here’s the playlist of the 2 CD set. The numbers in parentheses are the cut numbers of the original album (8 songs on one side, 5 on the other)

Disc: 1
1. Audience
2. Banjo Medley: Cripple Creek/Old Joe Clark/Leather Britches
3. Lady Margaret
4. Mrs. McGrath
5. Mail Myself to You (10)
6. My Rambling Boy
7. A Little Brand New Baby
8. What Did You Learn in School Today? (5)
9. Little Boxes (6)
10. Mrs. Clara Sullivan’s Letter
11. Who Killed Norma Jean? (7)
12. Who Killed Davey Moore? (8)
13. Farewell
14. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (9)
15. Didn’t He Ramble (Fragment)
16. Keep Your Eyes On The Prize (2)
17. If You Miss Me At The Back Of The Bus (1)
18. I Ain’t Scared Of Your Jail (3)
19. Oh Freedom (4)
Disc: 2
1. Audience
2. Skip To My Lou
3. Sweet Potatoes
4. Deep Blue Sea
5. Sea Of Mercy (Fragment)
6. Oh Louisiana
7. (The Ring on My Finger Is) Johnny Give Me
8. Oh What A Beautiful City
9. Lua Do Sertao (Moon Of The Backland)
10. The Miserlou
11. Polyushke Polye (Meadowlands)
12. Genbaku O Yurusumagi (Never Again The A-Bomb)
13. Schtille Di Nacht (Quiet Is The Night)
14. Viva La Quince Brigada (Long Live The Fifteenth Brigade)
15. Tshotsholosa (Road Song) (12)
16. This Land Is Your Land
17. From Way Up Here
18. We Shall Overcome (13)
19. Mister Tom Hughes’s Town
20. Bring Me Li’l’ Water Silvy
21. Guantanamera (11)

The concert as performed had a series of themes. After a couple introductory tunes, disc one has a group of new tunes by songwriters such as Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan, mentioned by name on the CD, but not the LP. On “Who Killed Davey Moore?” Pete says, “This is a different kind of elegy,” then misfingers his guitar before starting, which gives it a greater power; this is all missing on the LP. In fact, a couple other little gaffes are edited out, unnecessarily, I think.

The four songs from the Southern section are there, albeit in a different order. I suppose I understand removing references to upcoming concerts, but it was only on the CD that I realized that members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were present on stage.

The next segment, the first half of the second CD, is comprised of familiar songs, missing entirely from the LP; perhaps they had appeared on then-recent Seeger albums. Then there was the “world” segment, represented only by “Tshotsholosa”. Out of context -i.e., on the album, you miss the fact that Pete had gotten people to actually rehearse the stirring response, which is still a highlight of the album.

About two minutes of dialogue is removed from the final song before the encore, “We Shall Overcome”. Again, some announcement of a coming concert is gone, but other conversation had been unnecessarily cut out.

Then the CD concludes with three encore songs, the last of which, “Guantanamera”, was stuck in the middle of the second side of the LP.

Which is only peripherally related to my weekly queries:

1. What famous people have you met for long enough to actually have a decent conversation?
Earl Warren, Rod Serling, Anita Baker. (Is Alex Trebek famous?)

2. What famous people have you had an unexpected brief encounter?
Randy Newman, Stanley Tucci, Pete Seeger, Mark Lane (Dick Gregory’s VP candidate in 1968, who was in some legal trouble mentioned on the front page of the NY Times on the very day I saw him).

3. What famous people have you had an expected brief encounter with?
Nelson Rockefeller.