As ladymisskirroyale suspected, our latest Mystery Date, a song entitled “4jg,” was by early Human League, or maybe The Human League under their original name, The Future. I downloaded this track from a collection of early demos, The Golden Hour of The Future, and didn’t pay attention to which band name this track was recorded under.
There’s no doubting the band name for this track, from the same collection:
The Human League, “Dance Like a Star”
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Do you remember your first music-playing device, be it a record player, 8-track, cassette player, Walkman, CD player, or for our youngest Townspeople, mp3 player? Care to describe it? Does anything stand out in your memory about it?
I had a record player that was plastic, olive-green, and textured on the outside. Flip up the top and the plastic was off-white – also textured, to better pick up smudges from my dirty hands. The turntable itself was brown. I can’t remember for sure if the arm was brown or off-white, but I remember my shakey hands were always challenged by lifting the arm onto a specific track. The cord was a 2-pronged brown affair. I experienced my first electric shock on that cord, leaving one of my fingers between the prongs as I plugged it in. Ouch!
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Have you heard of Lala.com? It’s sort of a one-stop online music shopping/listening site. You can buy legal MP3s and the like. You can make playlists. I believe you can load your home MP3 library virtually, so you can listen to it on another computer without having to actually transfer all those gigabytes from one machine to another. Most enticingly for me, you can stream entire albums completely free, one time. It’s a great way to sample an album you’re thinking of buying. You can avoid a lot of unnecessary purchases this way.
Unfortunately, Apple bought Lala, and they’re shutting it down. The site will cease to be on May 31, 2010. So I’ve been streaming a lot of music on there while I can, trying to plug in some of the gaps in my rock knowledge and just generally having some fun. Some of the things I’ve played:
Also, earlier in the year, I was listening to as much ’80s Neil Young as I could find on the site: Re-ac-tor, Everybody’s Rockin’, Life, This Note’s For You, etc. I want to pick up this project at some point this month and listen to a few more “weird Neil” albums, like the all-feedback Arc and that one about his electric car.
So suggest other albums/artists I should listen to on this site, Townsfolks. If it’s any help, lately my tastes have veered towards dirty, noisy, smart indie rock with guitars. Have at it.
Minor news – and the kind of personal report I would surely mock if one of you posted this first – but my iPod, which I’m running on shuffle, just spat out a segue of “All You Need Is Love,” with the “She loves you…” coda, right into “She Loves You” itself. All Beatles on my iPod is burned from vinyl, so there can’t be some “Genius” software at work.
I know some of you have long taken great pride in your mp3 player’s random shuffle powers. Let this space be the place where you commemorate your player’s most historic shuffles.
Last year, the Whos of Rock Town Hall’s Whoville put together what was only, probably, the GREATEST CHRISTMAS RECORD OF ALL TIME!. There are still a ton of great Christmas songs out there, but beating 2008 will be hard to do. Here is the record, which was sequenced by The Great 48
1. “Santa Claus is Back In Town” — Elvis Presley
2. “Run Rudolph Run” –Chuck Berry
3. “Little Saint Nick” — The Beach Boys
4. “Christmas In Suburbia” — Martin Newell
5. “Father Christmas” — The Kinks
6. “Christmas Wrapping” — The Waitresses
7. “Sleigh Ride” — The Ventures
8. “Blue Christmas” — Elvis Presley
9. “Fairytale of New York” — The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl
10. “Please Come Home For Christmas” — Charles Brown
11. “2000 Miles” — Pretenders
12. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” — The Plastic Ono Band
13. “Jesus Christ” — Big Star
14. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” — Darlene Love
15. “Christmas Time Is Here” — Vince Guaraldi Trio
You know the rules by now. You nominate a song for inclusion. The moment another villager seconds your vote, it’s in. We keep going until we have 15.
I was looking through a boxes of burned CDs looking for something (can’t even remember WHAT I was looking for) and found the CD of Martin Newell‘s Greatest Living Englishman. It’s been easily 10+ years since I listened to this disc (maybe because it was in with my “junk” cds and not in it’s proper case…and also then did not make the great migration to the iPod in 2005).
I played it this moring and thought “How Did This LP Get Away?”
Do any Townspeople have a CD/LP/cassette that you totally forgot about, found, and wondered how you let it get away?
You may recall my unexpected gift of 50 bonus downloads from eMusic a couple of weeks ago. I was 9 selections into my bonus downloads when I realized that I couldn’t figure out what to download next.
I’m constantly unimpressed with the indie rock selections eMusic suggests that I try, like all those bands with album covers featuring a folk-art painting of a sparrow perched on a branch. Man, that thumb-sucking, hushed-tones crap really needs to be banished to the same eternal $1 bins alongside discarded copies of Asylum Choir II.
Thanks for your suggestions. A couple of Townsmen suggested I add to my scant Sun Ra collection. Geo, I believe, recommended “Disco 3000,” a long, swirling track that he thought would satisfy my late-blooming enjoyment of Krautrock. I downloaded it, and it’s pretty good, but it started to lose me when it got into a ’60s jazz trick that really turns me off: the “A Love Supreme”-style jazz chant! Some of the more concise tracks suggested by Geo and BigSteve, however, are very cool. Here’s a cool Sun Ra track from Jazz In Silhouette. It reminds me of the fully arranged yet loose qualities I like in the music of Charles Mingus.
More goodies…after the jump!
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