Morbid Reminders 2017

Walter Becker, 67
   yeah, genius

Chuck Berry, 90
   no one talks about his lyrics but wow

Glen Campbell, 81
   I was a kid, my parents had this album, it was beautiful

Fred Cole, 69
   long live Dead Moon


Chris Cornell, 52
   the best voice?

Holger Czukay, 79
   Can, sampling, and Movies (1979)

Jonathan Demme, 73
   Stop Making Sense

Fats Domino, 89
   "Detroit City Blues," also wow what a discography

Gordon Downie, 53
   Tragically Hip

Al Jarreau, 76
   a forgotten song by him, "All"

Grant Hart, 56
   what to say, Hart > Mould

Allan Holdsworth, 70
   jazz fusion on I.O.U.

Tommy Keene, 59
   Boston power pop

Jaki Liebezeit, 78
   another Can casualty, and the 4th best drummer who ever lived?

David Peel, 73
   yes, I know him through Lennon

Tom Petty, 66
   the only song you need to know from him; ok, maybe not the only song

Maggie Roche, 65
   The Roches!

Clyde Stubblefield, 73
   the 3rd best drummer who ever lived, sampled forever????

A A Bondy - I'm On Fire

Early one morning, he was laying in bed....

From the heartland....

John [Cougar] Mellencamp - "Between A Laugh And A Tear"

From the album Scarecrow (1985), the transition album between John Cougar and John Mellencamp. An effective and sometimes moving slice of Springsteenesque classic rock, stripped down to guitars, bass, and drum. Backing vocals by Rickie Lee Jones



A bonus track: "On Saturday Afternoons in 1963" by Rickie Lee Jones from her self-titled debut (1979).

Four Tet - Turtle Turtle Up (Extended Version)

This track was on the Everything Ecstatic Part 2 (2005) release.

kara-Lis coverdale - Grafts EP

This is kara-Lis coverdale with her recent EP Grafts.

Someone described her prior album (Aftertouches) as an "acrylic portrait of a Cronenberg-esque organism, morphing, half human, half machine."

John Cale - The Sleeper

From the album Artificial Intelligence (1985)

"I was the moth stuck on your pin..."

Beach House

We saw Beach House in San Pedro on April 20, 2016. Fantastic show. I'll never forget it.

The best song at the show?

Here:

Abba - Medley (Pick a Bale of Cotton, etc.)

I can't tell if this 'song'--an Abba single b-side that was basically a medley of three different standards--was considered thoroughly inappropriate for all manner of historically troubling reasons... BUT when it came out (September 1978), I found it strangely more alluring/disturbing than the a-side ("Summer Night City").

The three songs spliced together on the b-side are:

"Pick a Bale of Cotton" (an old spiritual originally recorded as early as 1933 by James "Iron Head" Baker and then later by the more famous Lead Belly in the 1940s and the song which makes this reproduction by Abba the most troubling)
"On Top of Old Smokey" (a traditional folk song originally recorded by The Weavers in 1951)
"Midnight Special" (a traditional folk song from the American South whose first recording dates back to 1926, and was also recorded by Lead Belly in 1934)

For an interesting history of "Pick a Bale of Cotton" and its dubious place in the history of racism in the U.S., see here.

The Abba version was originally recorded in 1975 (!) but released as the b-side of "Summer Night City" in September 1978.

How to even unpack how wrong this is? And yet, yet, amazing to think that Abba had a strangely outside-the-box aesthetic, way back, before The Album (their clear magnum opus), before Arrival...?

Cockney Rebel - Mirror Freak

Is there one track that you think of (maybe "Tomorrow Never Knows"?) that seems soooo far ahead of its time that you feel completely dislocated (distempered?) when you find out when it was actually released/recorded? (A list of those songs would undoubtedly also include any song from the Modern Lovers debut ["She Cracked" anyone?], anything by Kraftwerk, 1970s Eno, Tangerine Dream, Doctors of Madness, stuff from Revolver and the White Album, James Brown, Death [not the metal band], and yes, the Velvets entire goddamn canon).

But here, my friends is the final track on Side One of Cockney Rebel's album The Glass Menagerie. From 1973! Yes, yes, they were a sub-second-rate glam outfit overshadowed by Bowie, Roxy, Slade, etc. But as Simon Reynolds notes, weren't the second raters really pumping the reddest most bloody blood into the heart of glam?

You hear this song (and indeed the album) and you wonder if young John Lydon wasn't internalizing some vocal affectations that would come in handy later....

And so sexy.