Top Ten Of The Week-The Good The Bad And Me

Sorting through all the things found at Dubuque and Iowa City and coming to the conclusion that most of it I could have lived without. Oh well, the life of a bargain hunter. Sometimes you find the deals, sometimes you don't.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/07/06/princes-nonsense/

So Prince thinks the internet is over and everybody is going back to landlines and 8 tracks? Personally I haven't found anything from Prince worth listening to since the infamous Black Album and even though I still have the CD, I don't think I ever played it. Perhaps Wal Mart will stock it in the five dollar section along with Parade or Around The World In A Day?

Witty Twitter exchange between me and my other half.

ME: I didn't know that The Outlaws are still around, I thought they disbanded after Hughie Thomassen's death. Well, upon further review Henry Paul is back and fronting it. I wonder if they going to be playing here anytime soon.

GF: Are the outlaws bringing the inlaws?
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The Linn County Country Fair is this weekend up in Central City. And we welcome The Bellamy Brothers who will play Friday Night. The Bellamy Brothers have been around for over 35 years and are best known for Let Your Love Flow, which was the top selling 45 in 1976. They had other hits like Lovin On, I Need More Of You, For All The Wrong Reasons and most recently resigned with Curb Records for a forth time.

I don't have a problem with the Made In Mexico CDs that the majors are now shoving down our throats but I do have with those Made In China crap jewel cases to which the tray isn't full secured and pops out with along with the cd. The consumer is getting mighty tired of subpar made shit from China and poorly recorded Mexican CDs. The labels have been going in the toilet ever since the Rootkit Copy Protect pieces of shit they gave us five years ago. But then again what is made in the USA anymore? Besides Lesko Fans?

The Top Ten Of The Week

1. Kites Are Fun-The Free Design 1967 Soft rock produced by Enoch Light and the only song that they ever recorded that made the top 200. Sounds more like muzak to me or a more laid back Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66. What made this stood out was that Light recorded this band on 35mm magentic film which sounded great on vinyl but okay on CD. Enoch Light was head of Project 3 Records to which he had his own projects such as the Enoch Light and The Light Brigade and you can still find those album at Goodwill or Salvation Army. Varase Vintage put together a Best of The Free Design if you're into soft pop muzak.

2. The Fourth Of July-Dave Alvin 1987 Probably the best known song from Dave after he left The Blasters for a solo career that still goes to this day and it has been covered by Robert Earl Keen and Alejandro Escovedo (more about him later). Off Romeo's Escape which Epic put out in 1987, then reissued via Razor & Tie and then re reissued on Lucky Dog (a division of Epic and Sony Nashville).

3. All That You Dream-Little Feat 1977 For all intent purposes Warner Brothers screwed up Waiting For Columbus when they issued this on CD, they left two songs off that album and it was one of the most crappy sounding CDs ever made. The songs left off would be tacked on as bonus cuts on selected Feat albums. However, Rhino Records returned the album to a 2 CD format and not only return the songs as on the 2 record set, they added more stuff and songs from Hoy Hoy, the career span 2 record set released in 1981. Found the record for 2 bucks at CDs 4 Change and then found an still sealed CD copy at Half Priced Books for 8 bucks the next day. Best Buy had it for 25 bucks. On a side note: when I went to Iowa City, it was the first time in five visits that I didn't run into Tim, one of my friends who used to hang at Relics back in the 1990s. I'm surprised I never run into him at HP Books.

4. It's Only A Paper Moon-Miles Davis 1951 Featuring a mighty steller lineup with Sonny Rollins on saxophone and Art Blakey on drums. I do play jazz when I feel the need to wind down after a day of dealing with crappy printers and driving home and not trying to get run off the road by soccer moms driving SUVs and yakking on cellphones. Nevertheless, hard to believe this song is just about 60 years old and sounds just as great back then. Taken off The Jazz Giants Play Harold Arlen: Blues In The Night, a 1998 compliation on Prestige/Fantasy and found at Mister. Money Pawnshop around that time. Used to be that Mister Money had lots and lots of CDs stacked up to the roof and it was fun to discover things that I wouldn't bought for 12.99 or 8 bucks used. Alas, Mister Money quit taking CDs around 2004 and outside of a bunch of shitty forgotten rappers or pop tarts nobody wants, there's no reason to go up there again although I do make a tri-monthly appearance just in case somebody pawned their collection off for beer money.

5. Telegram-Nazareth 1976 They were never a critics band and would have been a footnote in music history had Hair Of The Dog and Love Hurts didn't hit the top ten. Don McCaffery had a voice either you could tolerate or hated but somebody must have enjoyed their music judging that they were at A & M Records for 12 years. The followup Close Enough For Rock And Roll had this little ode to the road and playing live and this gets played on classic rock radio as that closet classic but its a rare occasion.

6. Faith-Alejandro Escovedo 2010 To which he moves from a EMI/Manhattan to Fantasy/Concord and makes a hard rocking album. His most hard rocking since the days of The True Believers. Gets help from Ian Hunter and the Boss. Street Songs Of Love is the name of the album and it just might make the top 5 of the year.

7. The Last DJ-Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers 2002 Critics call The Last DJ his worst album but I disagree. I think this album is dead on when Tom sings about the lament of the DJ and the radio station that had a open playlist and the DJ would play something off the wall that people would like. That would be around the late 60s and early 70s for FM radio for those who care and even up till 1993 when we lost our last freeform FM station. KFMH 99 Plus it was called before it got bought out and became KBOB, a crappy country station and later a top forty crappy station. I like Tom Petty not only of the fact that he's a great musician but also a big fan of music enough to go out and buy it. I also like him when he played Lucky Klineschmidt on the late, great King Of The Hill.

8. Wolf Creek Pass-C W McCall 1974 This gets weird folks and the guilty pleasure of the week. C.W. McCall sang trucker songs and had a big assed number one hit with Convoy which gave us the B movie of the same name. Before Convoy, he had trucker hits such as this song, Crispy Critters and Old Home Filler-Up An' Keep On Trucker Cafe and There'll Be No Country Music (There'll Be No Rock n Roll) which Al Gore got for inspiration of global warming. Side note: Chip Davis, who composed the music would later start up a little something called Manheim Steamroller to which you would know best as their Christmas In The Aire series. But before that we had C.W and the Country Corn, to which C.W. would recite a story line and then we would get some backing singers who would sing the chorus. Hasn't dated very well but this does put a smile on my face when I do hear it (and then want to donate the CD back to Goodwill and disavow any knowledge of it).

9. Levee Song-Darden Smith 2000 He was one of these up and coming singer songwriters of the late 80s that was supposed to be the start of a new neo country movement (even got Ray Benson of Asleep At The Wheel to produce his S/T Epic album) but Sony Nashville had no clue of promoting him and after three albums gave up and he was set free. In 2000, he signed with Valley Records out of Santa Fe New Mexico and made a acoustic album of some of his favorite songs of the Epic/Columbia years. However, Santa Fe New Mexico wasn't the hotbed of music entertainment, Valley closed up shop and Darden moved on to a couple records for Nashville's Dualtone Records.

10. Dear Mr. Fantasy-Traffic 1968 For all that jazz rock they were famous for, their first album was mostly hippie dippy in the manor of Sgt Pepper or Moody Blues aka In Search Of The Lost Chord but when they put their mind to it, they could rock out with the best of them. Came out on United Artists and called Heaven Is In Your Mind then later renamed Mr. Fantasy and later reissued on Island. Then Universal Island in 2000 reissued this in two versions. The stereo version was called Heaven Is In Your Mind whereas the mono version is Mr. Fantasy.

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