untitled playlist vol. 1

it's been a while. i got nothin'. life is great, for the most part.

since i got nothin', i'll just review my own stupid little ipod playlists... the first will be from a couple of cds that i burned off for my good pal rich.

oh, damn. first up is "companion" by dennis wilson. among the last few of his "finished" songs... this hints at how good he could be, even when he was at his drunkiest. a sort of loose brazilian percussion thing around it... ever since i heard "pacific ocean blue", i've been trying to almost single-handedly promote dennis among friends to the same sorta hindsight-acclaim brian's been basking in for the last 10 years, and i'm not sure it's working. everyone i try and spring him upon describes him as either untalented or depressed (or both), but i would disagree on both counts. i think the 70's were gonna be remembered as the dennis years, iffn' only he'd clean up. well, that and a little bit more help (and a lot less sandbagging) from the rest of the beach boys organization would have been good as well, instead of regular fights with world-class asshole mike love. but, i'm now guilty of crediting someone in the imaginary "bonus round". i've always quick to call bullpuckey on that: being dead does not excuse you from the potential of truly horrible work. jimi could have ended up joining mike and the mechanics, janis could've co-written "we built this city" with grace slick. we'll just never know, now will we?

lord, how i wish i was around when "in the light of the miracle" by arthur russell was created. it's hard to pinpoint when it was made, but i'd guess sometime in the mid-to-late 80's. i'm a particularly big fan of the looseass agogo bells that dance around in the stereo field. and it's so long. i love it's odd lyric, like all arthur's songs, it speaks of uncomplicated pleasures and innocent intentions. i wish i had known about this when it came out, i would have played this nightly. dubby, meandering... true trance music. and to think that had things just been a little different, he would have had ended up in the talking heads. or so i've read. alan ginsberg described russell's music as "buddist bubblegum-pop". arthur was a real new york artist, and like many of them, he died of the big disease in 1992. "miracle" sounds to me what arthur must have felt growing up camping in iowa cornfields on late september evenings.

"kilimanjaro" i thought this kind of carried the "companion" vibe along. i didn't know shit about giants, and for the most part i still don't, other than this is sly stone's old drummer. he teams up on a couple of records in the 70's with herbie hancock and carlos santana, among others. i've never actually seen these records, they could be rare as rocking horse shit, or i could drop by jive time tomorrow and see a mint copy for eight bucks.

if you know shit about nazareth, you know either "love hurts" or "hair of the dog", the only two nazareth songs fm radio will ever play. both of those songs suck. i'm pretty sure that this is a non-debatable point. not many people know this shit, it's hot fucking leather slimey scotch leather disco shit. yeah, i'm talking about "waiting for the man", one of the few songs i actually have a hankerin' for performing. ain't no possible way i could imitate the nasty bon scott-howl of dan mccafferty, i just think i could take it to a different place, that's all. and you'd think it was hot.

rinder and lewis were almost-faceless disco producers. actually, i'm sure they were a lot of things to a lot of people, but for the sake of today's song they were st. tropez, and on this here track, they performed "belle du jour". i don't know french for squat. so, the vocalists could be reading the manual to the studer two-inch tape console, for all i can decipher. i'm sure it's damn-near-medical sex talk, but only the french would know. i'm just all about the strings. any day, it's going to get sampled by chingy or jadakiss or some other corncob, and i'm a-gonna be pissed. this is the sound of beautiful cinematic disco inspired by coke rails the size of dog turds.

ooh, "why can't we live together" by timmy thomas! it's a classic! hell yes! apparantly, there's a million covers of this, but i'm really only familiar with two, the original, and a likeable but hilarious cover i heard by a guy who i'd bet money was a black american serviceman in germany in the 80's, not unlike the milli vanilli guys, or that schmuck from snap! that story is neither here nor there, cause this one's the original. awesome drum sounds, it reminds me of the presets on grandma's organ (ooh, er). hm. i wonder how they did all those drum roll sounds at the end of it?

girly-girl doesn't like "oriental nightfish". i've spoken often and at length about the value of linda mccartney, and this is a good example of why she's the shit; everything about this song speaks to the clever songwriting skills of ol' pretty boy paul, and linda... well, she mighta came up with the concept, or maybe she wrote some words, or maybe she picked out the chords, or for all i know, she played every note, the point is that for some song that probably was just a forgotten b-side, it's catchy and enjoyable even if it sounds like it was hammered out in 8 minutes. cool little flute thing, too.

beefheart! this is about the most pop that captain beefheart and his magic band got; "my head is my only house unless it rains". it's got a nice groove and a sappy lyric. and marimba. you can't lose!

i don't know how we got over here into krautville, but "seeland" by neu! ain't a bad place to be. produced by conny plank, this one can be found on the "neu! '75" record, as good of a krautrock record as can be found. i had a neighbor friend who was into this type of stuff, and being that he was also deep into d&d and boris vallejo art, i assumed that kraut and prog stuff was essentially pussy repellant. it may still be, but as a man in a committed relationship, i can now explore beyond the wizard's sleeve without locking the door and drawing the curtains. and it's pretty good. i find i'm partial to songs with rainstorms in them, they remind me of a bad david gates record my dad used to listen to when i was a kid.

"sail on sailor" comes from holland, one of the beach boys uneven mid-70's recordings. like "up" by r.e.m., or "bloodflowers" by the cure, holland is forgotten or at least ignored. it's also unfocused, out of touch with the majority of the fan base, and a last indulgence of unfettered creative freedom by the bands before the butt-ass ugly truth is faced: "nobody cares what you have to say anymore, now shuddup and play the hits". all the big bands get to face this moment some more readily than others. when the stones tour, they know you don't want to hear 10 songs off of their new album, it's time to drag out "satisfaction" again, and they seem cool with it. rem fought it, the cure fought it... but guess what boys, your time is up. now get out there and play your 1985 classics, and we'll close our eyes and remember a time of skinnier bodies and tighter skin.

damn. every mixtape's got something stupid that you wish you could take off, and in this instance, it's "nao vou fugir" by ive mendes. i love this song... but it doesn't really fit the mood i had going there and it sticks out like a stubbed toe. the "brazilian sade", or whatever. i do find myself playing this often, or at least not skipping past it when it pops up on the ol' ipod. again, it's pretty, but i imagine that plenty of white schmucks in tailored shirts keep this one in the changer in hopes that girls will be impressed with "world music".

and this ministry song ain't really right for this moment either, but it's still a good song. "the angel" is from "twitch", a oft-overlooked ministry classic. keith leblanc behind the midi wrangling, and that's good help right there. leblanc might be the most overlooked drummer/programmer of the 80's. sugarhill, and tackhead, and then even his own records. i like that guy, i'd like to slap him five. i always tried to copy his patterns when programming those crappy mid-80's japanese drum modules and it drove me nuts when i couldn't get it right. there were some big ministry fans around where i grew up, but i never really heard anyone rock this one.

if you are my age, then you undoubtedly heard "mammagamma" in yours or your friend's parent's cars. in the fancypants suburb that i hail from, this was the test album for every blaupunkt in the volvos and audis and porsches for miles around. the alan parsons project's biggest album was "eye in the sky" and this was found over on the b-side, right in the meaty middle of it. of course, most of the album was polished stalker-divorcee fm radio fare (a preview to that whole "every breath you take" thing) , but hey admit it: if this shit came on a nightclub soundsystem whilst you were all twisted up, you know you'd have to go out and do a bit of a head-nodder boogie groove to it. it's got that going for it, undoubtedly.