compact discs Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Cat caused chaos

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor

For about 15 minutes, there was bedlam in my house on Sunday, May 26. The cat caused chaos. Of course, it was Midnight.

My daughter was about to take a shower. Midnight had become fixated on the tub, trying to get water from the faucet. I will acknowledge that at least one person in our household, frequently finding him in the tub, would gently turn on the water. After all, he seemed to enjoy drinking the water that way. Moreover, it was a way to clean his grody feet, especially his rear paws.

But when she wanted to shower, she later said she couldn’t get him to leave. He CAN be onery. So he stayed. Afterward, she texted me, noting that he peed on the floor and a couple of pieces of her clothes.

At the time she was leaving the bathroom, my wife had come home from a visit to her mother’s. So, simultaneously, my daughter is asking me to clean the upstairs bathroom floor AND my wife is calling me, quite insistently, to come downstairs. Plus I was scheduled to talk to my sisters on ZOOM in about five minutes.

There was water in the downstairs bathroom, leaking from the ceiling. When my daughter washed her clothes in the upstairs sink, water got into the hole that stopped the sink from overflowing. The water, I discovered, didn’t have anywhere to go except into the cabinet below and, subsequently, the downstairs bathroom ceiling.

The ceiling dripped for a couple of days, but much of the water was absorbed by the now-sagging ceiling tiles above the downstairs toilet. Ah, another home repair to deal with. When you’re the homeowner, you can’t call the landlord.

Reciprocity

Here’s something dumb that the blogger did more recently (May 30). My CDs are in a library file cabinet I bought from the Albany Public Library when they were renovating a few years ago.

For no good reason, the lowest three drawers were open. There was clutter in front of them, but still. I opened the second drawer from the top and the file cabinet, with about 2,000 CDs, started tipping over.

I called to my wife, “Help me!” She thought it involved the cats; we’d been away for two days. Then I screamed, “HELP! ME!!” as I leaned into the cabinet. She closed the upper drawer, then one of the lower ones.

If it had crashed, I feared it would put a hole in the floor. That goes in the category of things I’ll never do again.

Systematically listening to the music

LOTS of Paul Simon gets played in October, so the S&G is played in November.

I have something north of 1400 compact discs. I haven’t actually counted them, but the Wife bought some furniture designed to hold 1200 CDs, which is what I guesstimated that I had, but I had CDs left over. Oops.

In order to justify having all those shiny discs, I need to actually PLAY them once in a while. So I have a system: movie soundtracks the month of the Oscars (February or March), Broadway music in time for the Tonys (June), TV soundtracks whenever the Emmys take place (August or September).

I own a number of compilation albums I play, dependent on genre. In February, Black History Month, it’s soul/r&b/et al, except for Motown, which is in November, for Berry Gordy’s birthday. April has jazz; September has folk, in honor of my late father; November is rock and roll, for Dick Clark.

Most of my music, though, is tied to artists. I tend to play them on the artists’ birthday week, and I have a blue binder to check out upcoming natal days.

What if it’s a duo or group? Often it’s the artist I most associate with the group, such as Peter Noone, a.k.a. Herman, of Herman’s Hermits. Or if there’s no single key person, it might be the artist whose birthday comes earlier in the year. Phil Everly’s birthday was January 19, and brother Don’s is February 1, so I play them in January.

Some specific arcane rules

ROLLING STONES:
Mick Jagger’s birthday is in July, so I play the commercial albums I bought. But someone gave me a disc of all their albums up through 1980, so all the albums I ripped are played in December, for Keith Richards’ birthday.

BEACH BOYS:
Brian Wilson’s birthday is in June, so I play the bulk of my BB albums then. But both Dennis and Carl Wilson were born in December, so I play the box set then.

POLICE:
I have a bit of Sting’s music, which I play in October. But the Police I play in July for Stewart Copeland’s birthday, earlier in the year than Andy Summers’ December birth.

SIMON & GARFUNKEL:
LOTS of Paul Simon gets played in October, so the S&G is played in November, for Art’s birthday.

THE WHO:
Since I have a few Pete Townsend solo albums, which I play in May, the group’s output I play in early March, for Roger Daltrey’s birthday.

THE BEE GEES:
Barry, the oldest, is born in September. But the late twins, Maurice and Robin, were born in December; that wins out.

THE MONKEES:
Both Michael Nesmith (1942) and the late Davy Jones (1945) were born on December 30.

CROSBY, STILLS, NASH, AND YOUNG
I have the least solo work by Graham Nash, so the group gets played in February.

THE SUPREMES:
I play the group in early March in honor of longest-tenured member, Mary Wilson, listening to Diana Ross later in that month on her birthday.

THE TEMPTATIONS:
Though it’s untrue, I think of the group with two primary singers in its prime years, David Ruffin (b. January 18), lead singer on most of the early hits, and Dennis Edwards (b. February 3), the prominent vocal on most of the psychedelic soul albums.

THE BEATLES:
Since John Lennon started the group, I play the core British albums, plus the Past Masters, which has the singles and EPs, in October. I also play the collection of Tony Sheridan and the Beatles collection which contains Ain’t She Sweet and Cry for a Shadow.
George was the first Beatle to visit the United States, visiting his sister Louise and her husband. I play the American albums in February.
Paul is one of the two survivors, so in June, I listen to the post-breakup stuff, such as the Anthology, BBC, and LOVE albums.
I don’t play Beatles albums in July for Ringo’s birthday, but I DO play Beatles COVER albums, which almost outnumber my Beatles collection.

There are even more rules, but I’d better stop now!

The Compact Disc and me

I had these shiny objects, and nothing on which to play them.

brothers in arms.dire straits — One of my first CDs

While listening to the Coverville podcast about legendary music producer Phil Ramone, who died a while back – I wrote about him, briefly – host Brian Ibbott noted that Ramone produced the first album, Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, “to be commercially released on CD when it went on sale in Japan” in the fall of 1978.

This got me thinking about my love/hate relationship with compact discs. I had 1200 LPs in the early 1980s, and I was quite resistant to this new technology. The music industry was working hard to get consumers to embrace the CD.

The Police’s Synchronicity album had an extra song, Murder by Numbers; ditto, Peter Gabriel’s So with This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds). But I had the LPs and wasn’t going to buy the music again. More odd was the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which had extended versions of some of the songs; I finally DID buy that on CD this century.

The first four CDs I owned were given to me by my friend Broome in 1987; they were the first four British Beatles albums, which, not incidentally, did NOT have extra material, and ran about 35 minutes each. There was much talk at the time about how they SHOULD put extra material on them, the singles of that period, just because the CD had a capacity of more than twice that. Heck, I wouldn’t have objected to “From Me to You” added to an early compilation. But it was not to be; I mean, they ARE the Beatles and people were going to buy them.

So now I had these shiny objects, and nothing on which to play them, and Broome knew that. Reluctantly, I bought a simple CD player. But I couldn’t justify having the hardware without more software, so I went out and spent $50 on CDs. I didn’t want to buy what I already owned, so I bought greatest hits by Billy Joel (the 2-disc set) and Elton John. I also got Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and some others.

Eventually, I had lots of CDs, some fortunately provided to me gratis, and a five-CD player, which became my music player of choice, before it broke down; I tried to get it repaired, unsuccessfully.

One of the things I’ve realized is that because the artist, or the record company, CAN put more music on a CD, they DO. And some 14-song, 70-minute albums are just TOO LONG. It’s even more true on rereleases. I was listening to Who’s Next one morning – my family was obviously away – and I LOVE that album, but the rest of the “Lighthouse” project, save for “Pure and Easy” I could have done without. Lots of albums have alternative versions, which are historically interesting but do not enhance the listening enjoyment of the album; the second The Band album, which I also love, falls in that category.

Still, the library file cabinet, which I bought when the local branch was renovating a few seasons ago, was a cool place to store them, I thought, although, even getting a few more occasionally means a laborious shifting around. The Wife, though, decided that we needed furniture to store them in, or maybe she didn’t think having a file cabinet in the hallway was as much fun as I do, or, did. But the two pieces of furniture hold no more music. I made it clear we were doing this, not out of some need of mine but of hers. When I first had LPs, I used orange crates.

I’m likely to keep the discs I have, if only because I LOVE reading the liner notes. New acquisitions, though, will be few and far between.