Friday, May 13, 2011

Crabb Bits: Russian Inflated Ratings On Out Outdated Blog.

Observations From The Forefront:

Update:  Well Fuck, I write a new Singles Going Steady blog and this gets 200  more views than that?  What is the fucking deal with this blog after three years people are either reading this from afar, or is this yet another puff up the ratings attempt by some unknowns?  So the next big step: rewrite the blog and replace the original.  Take that Russian spam sites!

Friday Night Chat:  After seven months of being away I returned to the Yardbird's Roost to the company of Tom and Harvey, the two diehards who kept the place going despite it being dead most of the time and we chatted for about a half hour or so.  Although I won't be so much of a regular or hosting it I am sure that it will not be another seven months before coming back.  I do miss talking to them.

The new Warren Haynes album:  Warren Haynes has been the MVP of the music biz of the new millennium or not so new.  He's has given renewed interest in The Allman Brothers Band, made Phil Lesh's Columbia album a thing of beauty to listen to and of course you all know about Gov't Mule his other band.  It took him 18 years to follow up his first solo album with Man In Motion (Stax/Concord) and he has gone for more of a soulful jam than the usual avant garde that is associated with Gov't Mule.  But I think Warren has never made an album that wasn't under the hour mark (unless you count the dub Mighty High fiasco a few years ago) and Man In Motion clocks at over 75 minutes long for 12 songs (I got the Best Buy version with two bonus tracks).  Like the Leon/Elton Union album one song gets shot down by an overzealous soul sister, another track features some avant garde sax player sounding like he's underwater and when Warren slows it down on A Real Lonely Night, it drags insteads of jamming.  But then again that's always been the M.O. of Haynes be it solo or Gov't Mule he's a better rocker than balladeer.  But on the River's Gonna Rise he sounds like a Stax natural with that Booker T. type organ groove.  I can never get too down on Haynes he can jam boogie blues like the best of them.  Seek the Best Buy version to which the last track, the gospel tinged Save Me and the acoustic River's Gonna Rise and Frozen Fear to which it's just Warren and his guitar, stripped of the overdone, giving you the updated Memphis sound.  The album goes on too long but then again Haynes does give you your money's worth of tunes and southern fried soul.

Vinyl:  The Grassroots Their 16 Greatest Hits (MCA)  I used to like them a lot on AM radio and some of their singles still sound great today as they did yesterday (Where Were You When I Needed You, Let's Live For Today). With PF Sloan co producing them, they sounded right for the times but when Steve Barri took over full time, he turned them into The Spiral Staircase.  Some of it worked (Midnight Confessions, I'd Wait A Million Years,Heaven Knows) some it didn't (Sooner Or Later, The River Is Wide, Two Divided By Love which somehow isn't on this best of).  And sometimes they threw a curve in there (Bella Linda, the Neil Diamond influenced Things I Should Have Said). This compilation is uneven and incomplete (the best overall Grassroots best of was the Rhino 2 CD set long deleted) and reminds me that it's too bad that PF Sloan didn't stay on.  With Sloan they were more a harder rocking band, with Steve Barri, they were bubblegum, and like bubblegum good at times, stale in others.

 My Space was the happening place five years ago, but their site is so un user friendly that I don't go there anymore.  They even made it impossible to search out the archives so I may have to freaking start at the end and delete everything till I reached the beginning.  My Space isn't your time, nor mine so that's why I don't tout it here.  But you can Google it and I'm sure you'll get there eventually.  Till I delete the account.  Update: I haven't been on My Space in three years, not after Justin Timberlake bought it out and deleted my blogs there.  Lotta good stuff is now in the great black hole in internet land. I haven't been there in three years and since my blogs were deleted and were the reason why I went back there to archive them, I haven't returned back to My Space.  A waste of time.

The wonderful advantages of having a 10 year old computer is to retype things that crashed upon researching the Russian sites that have seem to reference Record World without comments.  2Kata has something to do with games and play stations, how they tie themselves with a cranky record collector is beyond me.  Kinda like that blog of Peter Frampton years ago that they potted the ratings up higher.  Perhaps there's a secret code that they use using the first letter of each sentence, just like they're doing with this one. Coldfilm.ru has an IP address coming out of the British Virgin Islands but they seem to be safe. Bolshe is Netherlands based but all of these come from the Russian federation.   I'm sure the Record World Ru site might have something to do with that.  Since I get no comments from over there they could be plotting world domination from sites nobody reads about, or throwing secret codes to solve puzzles on how to play Farm Animals. But I see no real value in prompting up a almost 4 year old entry that has nothing to do with Russian or PS3 game stations. And at the same time, nobody commenting on why this entry is worthy of 114 views the past week.  For fun and giggles I'm tempted to put up a NSFW picture and see what happens.  But for the meantime I'm just simply going to bitch about this and ignore it for the time being.  Unless I decide to enlist the help of Little Miss Toot to combat the Ruskies.   In the meantime, read on and if you Russians read this far.  Putin would be a Republican from Texas here.

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