Tag: Moby

The return of Sunday Stealing

FBH

I welcome the return of  Sunday Stealing. It returned this past weekend, but I had stopped looking for it, so I didn’t notice it until today. I was going to dash through those Questions and then start on the new ones this weekend. My dashing, alas, failed. So here it is. 

1. Where were you three hours ago? Eating breakfast with my wife, which is almost always oatmeal, mostly because it’s quick and dependable in terms of my diet.

2. Make a confession. I recorded the Grammys and the Oscars. Since it was filling up my DVR, I thought maybe I should watch some of this, so I finally watched the Grammys. So that’s who Chappell Roan and Teddy Swims are.

3. Bad habits? Staying up too late. The trick is that when I go to bed and am not tired, I toss and turn for a while; that seems inefficient.

4. Favorite color? Green probably or some variation thereof

5. Can you drive? No, I’ve had seven driver’s permits in my life, 6 in New York State, and one from North Carolina

6. 3 pet peeves: People who block sidewalk access. They park their cars to block part of the sidewalk, or they don’t clean the sidewalk after it snows. Loud music on the bus. Stuff left on the steps that I’m likely to trip over.

7. Last person you hugged: My wife. This was institutionalized in terms of an FBH, once in the morning and once in the evening. The Full-Body Hugs were partly derived because my wife usually goes to bed before I do. Sometimes, I didn’t even know that she had gone to bed, and she didn’t say good night or anything. I felt discombobulated by that.

8. Something you miss. My 401K is melting because of some stupid tariff that someone thinks is going to make America a lot of money.

Alto Knights

9. What song is stuck in your head at the moment? I went to the movies several times in the past couple of months. There’s a tease about a film called The Alto Knights coming out later in March, which I have no intention of seeing. But the trailer uses a song called Natural Blues by Moby from Play, an album I own. Then I discovered that it’s a remix of a Vera Hall song called Trouble So Hard.

10. Favorite quote. I don’t have one, so I Googled one: “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.” Benjamin Franklin. This is how I learn.

11. Favorite band. I’m going to pick the last group I played, which was the Supremes. Going Down For The Third Time

12. Something you’re excited for. Working on the Project.

13. Favorite movie. IDK. Possibly my favorite recent movie is Conclave. Certainly my favorite short film is The Only Girl in the Orchestra. I recommended the former to my wife and the latter to a blogger buddy, and they both loved the choices.

14. What type of phone do you have? I have an AT&T landline with three locations, one downstairs and two upstairs,  and an iPhone 8 (which I had to look up).

15. Favorite animal: Probably cats. By the way, I liked the movie FLOW very much. I was waiting inside the Spectrum, and some folks talked about it. One woman said it should have had a narrator or subtitles, which would have defeated the film’s purpose.

Never heard of that band – oh, THEM!

Lonely People was used as the sign off song for a Washington, DC TV station for a time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, back when TV stations actually signed off.

I was reminded that back in the early 1970s, the student government at the State University College of New York at New Paltz put on a bunch of concerts, many of which I attended. But I remember reading about one in the Fall of 1971 by some group I had never heard of. The show cost only 50 cents, but I passed.

That group was America, whose A Horse With No Name went to #1 the very next year. In penance, I bought that first album and played it regularly. They’d later have hits such as Ventura Highway, Tin Man, and Lonely People, which I wrote about here.

In 1995, my girlfriend at the time, Carol – now my wife – and I were meeting my old (as in since kindergarten ) friend Karen and this guy from a local (Albany area) radio station named Johnny. As it turned out, Carol and Johnny were acquainted because they’d lived in the same area. After dinner, Karen and the radio guy invited Carol and me to see this musical act which I had never heard of. I might have gone, but Carol was tired so we opted out.

The artist turned out to be Moby, a descendant of Herman Melville, BTW, who had a massively successful album at the end of the decade called Play. What put me in mind about this story was Pantheon Songs’ tribute to a Moby tune that had come out a few years before that dinner, but I had not heard at the time.

Throwback Music Saturday: Run On

‘Run On’ is a traditional folk song which has been recorded by numerous artists.

Bill LankfordAt some point in the 1990s, I bought a box set called Roots ‘N Blues: The Retrospective 1925-1950, “a four-CD box set released on Columbia Records in 1992. The set features five hours worth of early blues, folk/country, and gospel recordings from a variety of American artists. Many of these recordings had never previously been issued in any medium.”

Eventually, I got Moby’s 1999 album Play and stopped short when I heard the song Run On. BOY, that sounded familiar. As it turns out Moby sampled Bill Landford And The Landfordaires’ 1949 version of Run On For A Long Time, which appears on disc 4 of Roots ‘N Blues.

From Wikipedia: “‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’, also known as ‘Run On’ and ‘Run On for a Long Time’, is a traditional folk song which has been recorded by numerous artists… modified to fit the boundaries of diverse genres like country, folk, gospel and techno.”

Subsequently, I got versions of the song by Johnny Cash, on a 2006 posthumous album, and Tom Jones, from his 2010 album. But I had never owned the great 1956 version by Odetta, though my father had possessed several of her albums.

Listen:

Run On For A Long Time – Bill Landford And The Landfordaires here or here or here

God’s Gonna Cut You Down – Odetta here or here (a slightly different version)

Run On – Moby here or here (official)

God’s Gonna Cut You Down – Johnny Cash here or here (official)

Run On – Tom Jones here

Ramblin' with Roger
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